Nathaniel Popkin

If you stop outside the antiquarian’s stall in the book market near the main gates of Istanbul University, Tosun Andakoç will turn the lights on for you. Andakoç, a slight and gentle-seeming man, sells pages taken from illuminated Ottoman textbooks, classic hand-painted scenes of the old city, of sultans, sword …

On Medina Street in South Philly you aren’t likely to find a tanner or a basket weaver or a potter or a rug maker or soup ladler, a knife sharpener or stone cutter. On this hidden cutout between Seventh and Eighth, Wharton and Reed, its name derived from the Arabic …

Stephen Hague stands on the open back porch of Stenton, the modest English estate built in 1730 by James Logan. Logan, a polyglot Quaker, managed William Penn’s colony, negotiated with Native American leaders, and grew Pennsylvania’s first substantial library. Hague has been Stenton’s executive director for seven years. He has …

“Man, I love this city. I love it and I hate it,” says Mica, the lead character in Barry Jenkins’ mellifluous Medicine for Melancholy, which screened Sunday and Monday at the Philadelphia Film Festival. Mica, played by standup comic Wyatt Cenac, is San Francisco born and raised; his bitter ambivalence …

The architect Winka Dubbeldam (by way of The Illadelph by way of Men’s Health) says that her firm Archi-techtonics, isn’t “into stylistic things, but deriving form from performance.” This manifesto is a sign that in architecture Modernism — form follows function, remember — remains gravity. Performance, after all, is …