Health

Over the past few months, I’ve had several unexpected encounters with William Morris.   Flipping through a magazine or perusing a website, I’ll notice something familiar in the background, usually unnoted in the article, that looks like a Morris design.   It is a bit like seeing an old friend in an unfamiliar place—you’re not sure it is them, but then, on closer inspection, you wonder how you could have ever doubted it.   The diversity of these contexts—in a travel article, in a review of contemporary art, and in a fashion magazine—suggest the ongoing power and importance of Morris’s work.    Yet it also reminds that the meaning of a pattern is malleable and that in our current moment, it can take on specific—and sometimes contradictory—meanings.    The New York Times Style Magazine recently had an article on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. As author Neel Mukherjee chronicles the difficulties in reaching the remote archipelago of St. Kilda on a pilgrimage to landscapes that inspired t