After months of lockdowns due to the coronavirus, museums and cultural sites across Italy are cautiously reopening to the delight of locals, who have long avoided them due to overcrowding. The effects are most pronounced at Italy’s headlining destinations, such as the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican, which are often besieged by tourists. One local likened the relatively empty Colosseum, which is permitting 14 people to enter every 15 minutes (compared to a pre-Covid daily cap of 20,000), to “being in a surrealist painting.”

While the current model of “relaxed tourism” appeals to locals who are discovering newfound appreciation for their home country, the cash-strapped museums, restaurants, and hotels are reeling from the lack of revenue from tourists. Venetians, however, don’t seem to mind. Even though Venice’s tourism industry brings in an annual $3.3 billion in revenue, locals have long lamented the giant cruise ships, clusters of Airbnb apartments, souvenir shops, and high rents that have gradually transformed the artistic hub into an unaffordable tourist city. The canceled Venice Biennale will stave off more visitors for now, meaning the city’s newly crystal-clear waters will have more time to shine.

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Amplifying black voices has become critically important as protests against systemic racism and police brutality have swept the nation. Revisit our cover story of Kerby Jean-Raymond, a fashion designer who has transformed his independent label, Pyer Moss, into a cultural powerhouse. The brand has teamed with Fear of God to drop a t-shirt collab at 12:00 PM EST today to benefit the family of George Floyd.

Like so many millennials, a generation that came of age in the throes of a series of shadow wars—on drugs, on terror, on public goods—Kerby Jean-Raymond speaks in a vocabulary punctuated by expletives: “Fuck Barneys,” “fuck the Grammys,” “fuck stupid motherfuckers on Twitter.” In a country dominated by corporate interests, the only available rejoinder is often a four-letter word. Jean-Raymond, the Haitian-American designer behind the multimillion-dollar fashion label Pyer Moss, has dressed Usher, Alicia Keys, and Colin Kaepernick, and he has only had health insurance since last year.

Jean-Raymond launched Pyer Moss in 2013, and has since shown five collections, all but one of which he claims to hate. His designs are often referred to as monumental, and his runway shows have been called revolutionary. He has received accolades from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Vogue, Footwear News, Time, and the Business of Fashion, the last of which he renounced in a Medium post with characteristic flair: “[F]uck that list and fuck that publication.” The rest of his awards are kept in a pile on the floor of his Brooklyn apartment, right underneath his bicycle, which functions more as an awkward furnishing than a means of transportation. It was a gift, and Jean-Raymond hates to bike.

Pyer Moss is now a marquee name in American fashion, but Jean-Raymond has “mentally closed” the brand five times. After the spring 2016 runway show, during which the designer debuted a collection inspired by Black Lives Matter, Pyer Moss reportedly lost more than $120,000 in business. The families of victims of police brutality supplanted editors in the first row. The next day, six of Pyer Moss’s biggest accounts dropped the line. Although the show was an economic failure, it launched the brand and its designer into the mercurial arena of public discourse. The Fader named Jean-Raymond one of fashion’s “most promising pioneers.”

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s annual Wheelwright Prize awards $100,000 to a promising early-career architect who’s pursuing travel-based research that may leave a wide-ranging impact on the field. Previous winners have circled the globe to unpack a wide range of social, cultural, environmental, and technological issues, such as Aleksandra Jaeschke’s study of greenhouse architecture and Aude-Line Dulière’s investigation of material flows in set design. This year, the college selected Cooking Sections co-founder Daniel Fernández Pascual, who works closely with the intertidal zone—coastal territories exposed to air at low tide, and covered with seawater at high tide.

Brook Landscape is a New York design-build studio that transforms outdoor living spaces into natural settings. It creates lasting design through cohesive plant-scapes and thoughtful architectural features.

Surface Says: At once quiet and captivating, founder Brook Klausing’s approach to landscape design celebrates nature’s timeless beauty. The environments his studio creates are remarkable places of elegance and repose.

This rare golden possum bears an uncanny resemblance to Pikachu.

Stefano Boeri Architetti plans a “vertical forest city” in Huanggang, China.

New York’s wi-fi kiosks honor black people who died in police custody.

Archaeologists uncover Australian rock art that may be made of beeswax.