I was knocked out by Teju Cole’s Blind Spot in 2017. Just finished Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time, and it’ll surely be a highlight of 2022. Sensitive, probing essays about humanity and the humanities. Such a privilege to be in his close-looking company. 📚
books
Year in Review: 2021
Friday, December 31, 2021
Since 2000, I’ve had a year-end tradition of sharing my cultural highlights of the past 12 months. For this year’s post, I’ll first note the major life change I had in 2021. After eight years leading comms and marketing for the nonprofit conservancy Forest Park Forever, I re-entered the agency world …Wednesday, December 29, 2021 →
Enjoyable read — indie design studio heads talking shop in “Studio Culture Now”. A few common themes: There’s freedom in staying small; having a nice workspace is a plus, but too much overhead’s a crusher; your design output matters, but so do process, leadership & owning your POV; social posts and basic PDFs can aid biz development more than a high-maintenance, glacially updated website; you can find success based anywhere, but be engaged w/ the field and your community. 📚
From my Christmas wish list to under the tree: Self-Reliance. That “I” is just perfection. Designed by Jessica Helfand and Jarrett Fuller. 📚
Enjoyed The Chancellor by Kati Marton. Qualities vital to Merkel’s rise and 16-year tenure: endurance, humility, steeliness, patience, calm. (She once described herself, as she stood next to the high-energy, publicity-seeking Sarkozy, as an “energy-conserving lamp.”) 📚
Year in Review: 2020
Thursday, December 31, 2020
*Sylvie, sipping through a backyard quarantine concert by a friend and SLSO musician* Year 20 of my annual cultural-recap tradition was quite something. Thus far my family’s had good fortune amid the global pandemic, so we’re spending most of our time feeling grateful, yet exhausted, then grateful, …Latest rave: the new Aleksandar Hemon book, "My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You." Moving, funny. You get the sense Hemon has thought deeply about the moments he puts to paper.
Toni Morrison's Exquisite Nonfiction
Friday, March 6, 2020
I just finished Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), and every few pages or so, I thought to myself: it’s rare I’m taking in prose this rhythmically perfect, this deeply intelligent. From “Peril” (2008): How bleak, unlivable, insufferable …Charles and Ray, Designers From the Near Future
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Loved this passage from Sam Jacob’s essay “Context as Destiny: The Eameses from Californian Dreams to the Californiafication of Everywhere,” published in the satisfyingly chunky The World of Charles and Ray Eames (2016): For architects and designers like [Peter and Alison Smithson, who were …Tweedy + The Beasties
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Two relatively new music books I enjoyed this summer: Jeff Tweedy’s Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back:) A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. (honest, often funny; really enjoyed the sections about his sons) and the bluntly titled Beastie Boys Book (their mischief has been carried over to …I was impressed and moved by Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Poetic, searching, deeply affecting. Highly recommended. Related reading/listening: Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker; Kat Chow in The Atlantic; and this Politics & Prose conversation with the author (genuine, exacting, deeply intelligent).
From the novel:
Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?
Teju Cole on Embedding Hesitation
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Really enjoyed this substantive recent conversation on Krista Tippett’s “On Being” podcast. At one point, Tippett quotes Cole’s Blind Spot, one of my favorite books from the last few years: “To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind …Craig Mod on the Future of Books
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Thoughtful piece at Wired from someone who’s been thinking and writing about this subject for quite some time: “We have arrived to the once imagined Future Book in piecemeal truths.”Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Essential Role of Great Editors
Sunday, December 9, 2018
At the close of Coates’ recent interview with Chris Hayes, the host asks him if he’s working on a new book. The dodge Coates gives, not wanting to discuss a project-in-process, ends up being a terrific toast to the necessity of sharp, tough early readers and editors: I do, I do have a writing …New Knausgaard Interview @ NewYorker.com
Monday, November 12, 2018
From a substantive new interview with Joshua Rothman: I had felt for many, many years that the form of the novel, as I used it, created a distance from life. When I started to write about myself, that distance disappeared. If you write about your life, as it is to yourself, every mundane detail is …More Great Listening: Batuman & Sow
Friday, June 8, 2018
The Longform Podcast's new episode with Elif Batuman is fantastic. I've enjoyed her writing for a few years, and in this interview you can just feel her thinking deeply about literature and writing and gender and observing in cities around the world and much more. As interviewer Max Linsky tweeted …Cultural Notes: February 2018
Monday, March 5, 2018
Continuing for month two of this recent effort to note the cultural intake of the prior month: Read Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form, Pulitzer Arts Foundation — (Disclosure: Married to a contributor) (A)Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Noah J. …Cultural Notes: January 2018
Sunday, February 4, 2018
With a nod to Kottke's monthly "Media Diet" posts, I'm experimenting this year with short monthly recaps of interesting things I've read, watched or listened to. (This is as much for myself, as noting what I took in can help me better recall it.) Read Paula Scher: Works — Terrific, from …Year in Review: 2017
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Continuing a 17-year tradition, I’m happy to share my Annual Favorites list for the year 2017: Family Let’s start with the best thing that happened to my family this year, which is the arrival of Sylvia Huremović Schenkenberg in late April. We’re still smiling at her the way Leo …George Saunders on Monocle 24: A does-the-heart-and-mind-good interview with Georgina Godwin.
Teju Cole in Words & Pictures
Sunday, August 6, 2017
I loved every minute I spent with this beautiful, poetic, searching, confident book.Lethem on Knausgaard: "My Hero"
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
After discovering this short appreciation in a Jonathan Lethem essay collection on bookish things, I just read it aloud to my wife, who'd been curious about why I've been so utterly taken by this series and increasingly hungry for each subsequent volume. Lethem nailed it ("Knausgaard's approach is …An inspiring New Yoker profile of Steidl by Rebecca Mead.
Exit West
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
What a time for this deeply affecting Mohsin Hamid novel to appear. Here’s Jia Tolentino on The New Yorker’s website: The novel feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing questions. Whom are we prepared to leave behind in …"Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game"
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
I've really been missing new Knausgaard material, as I've been waiting for the next translation... and suddenly I saw this new book being reviewed. Grabbed it from the library and gobbled it up in a few nights. Knausgaard and fellow writer Fredrik Ekelund exchange emails during the most recent …Loved this World Book Club episode, with informed and curious readers asking Karl Ove Knausgaard about one of my favorite works of literature in several years. We shouldn’t be surprised that he’s a thoughtful and candid interviewee.
Roz Chast's Deeply Poignant Memoir
Saturday, August 20, 2016
I’ve long chuckled at Roz Chast’s cartoons in The New Yorker. This graphic memoir, the first such book I’ve read, was so much more than a chuckle: funny, yes — but direct, deeply poignant, sharply observant. It’s hard to think about someone more perfectly born and raised to write (and draw) one …Max Porter's "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers"
Sunday, July 10, 2016
"> <figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:540px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:56.296295166016%;" class=" image-block-wrapper has-aspect-ratio "> <img …“The Monocle Guide to Cozy Homes”
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Really enjoyed this book, which eschews icy, spacious luxury and celebrates lived-in warmth and often modest SQF. The choices on the first few pages (shown below) are representative of the book’s distinct point of view. (That kitchen towel is telling.) <div class=" image-block-outer-wrapper …Paul Kalanithi Writes To His Daughter
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
From his extraordinary book, When Breath Becomes Air: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated …