The New Yorker casts a jaded eye on Amazon’s new bookstore in University Village, mashing up the Restoration Hardware look, big-box technology, and indie bookstore informality. Thomas De Monchaux writes: “In our global moment of high-tech fabrication and doorstep delivery, we are gradually becoming more aware of distant factories and warehouses, from urban China to exurban America, and of the dispossessed lives of the faraway people who make and move our possessions. Can it be a coincidence that this awareness parallels the emergence of an aesthetic that seems, somehow, to remind us of warehouses and factories—but, with all that burnished wood and polished metal, of warehouses and factories at rest, from another time, at their most impossibly beautiful?”
