The phrase “Bright Young Things” was dreamed up by an unknown journalist almost a century ago. It conjured a social phenomenon: a collection of privileged youth, famed from the mid- to late 1920s for their tireless hedonism, who symbolized an almighty rupture with a world still fixated upon the Great War. Iconoclasts with Burke’s Peerage pedigrees, the Bright Young Things laid waste to the past with yah-boo-sucks heedlessness. They were frivolous, and thus should have been easy to dismiss, but frivolity was the point—for where had good behavior gotten the previous generation? It was a fair question. READ ON

In 1961, the married artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude traveled to an anonymous strip of dockside in Cologne to wrap several stacks of oil drums, some more than 15 feet high, with sheets of tarpaulin. It was part of Christo’s nearby gallery exhibition, an extension of his recent obsession with covering cans in fabric in order to explore their sculptural qualities. As the couple stood back to admire their handiwork—a strange act of artistic expression—something clicked. READ ON

Once upon a vanished time, in those boogie nights of yore when cocaine was queen, the nightlife of New York City shuddered under the heavy beat of an estimated 1,500 discos bursting with sweaty, protozoic dancing and mating. Pre-eminent among those clubs—supreme in its heyday, wreathed in lore and legend ever since—was Studio 54. “Studio,” as habitués called it, has become synonymous with the disco era, its parabolic rise and fall. READ ON