In the NYT, "‘Snow Fall’ at 10." I can clearly remember when this immersive multimedia piece came out — discussing it with my agency colleagues, trying to figure out how we could get clients on board.
Speaking of year-end traditions, I enjoyed this 2022 retrospective episode of the “Conversations with Tyler” podcast. A lot of podcasts have a year-end episode of curated guest segments, but here Cowen and one of his producers have an entertaining chat about surprising or memorable conversational moments, underrated shows, guests they tried in vain to secure, and more. Per tradition, Cowen is also asked to return to the books and movies he heralded a decade ago and weigh in on how he feels those evaluations have fared.
Since 2000, I’ve been publishing a kind of year in review — mainly cultural highlights from the prior 12 months, along with a few personal notes. Here’s my post for 2022.
Julie Blackmon and Convergences
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
In the mid–2000s, I was completely taken by the book “Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences,” written by Lawrence Weschler and beautifully published by McSweeney’s. Weschler surfaced “strange connections” between images and wrote about them intriguingly. I still think of the book when I come across an image — a photograph, a painting, a movie moment — that brings to mind another one. I spent part of this evening with Julie Blackmon’s absorbing book of photographs, “Midwest Materials.
“The Power Broker”
Monday, December 26, 2022
Book-wise, I will remember 2022 as the year I read (and listened to) Robert Caro’s massive and magisterial (and long-lauded) biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” first published in 1974. It’s not just the scale and depth of the research, but the skill with which Caro builds sentences and paragraphs that build his argument. For example: To compare the works of Robert Moses to the works of man, one has to compare them not to the works of individual men but to the combined total work of an era.
Franklin Foer writing after today’s incredible World Cup final: “The Lionel Messi Guide to Living”. Sharp contrast drawn vs. Ronaldo.
Astute, probing, and personal: A recent Sally Rooney address on “Ulysses,” published on The Paris Review’s website.
Rewatched Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror,” a dozen years after first seeing it. Some unforgettable moments, meditative and life-enriching.
“The E-Mail Newsletter for the Mogul Set”: Fascinating NewYorker.com piece on Puck, the new digital media brand that impressed me enough — strong brand out of the gate, intriguing framework — to count me among its paying subscribers.
Wednesday, November 30, 2022 →
Elegant and welcoming: Picnic, a new piece of office furniture inviting collaboration, designed by +Halle.
Nice detail from Emily Heyward’s “Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One”, which I enjoyed: When her Red Antler agency helped develop a brand for home essentials company Snowe, the team photographed the line of pillows — soft, medium, and firm — with a potted plant atop each one, to demonstrate the amount of give. Clever and useful.
Learned today in the NYT that there is an active “unofficial Tumblr historian” who is no longer on Tumblr, and who is also 22.
It took several days — and a few sections floated past me without comprehension — but what a treat it was to take in Matt Levine’s 40,000-word feature “The Crypto Story”, which took up an entire recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. Liked this bit:
Crypto, in its origins, was about abandoning the system of social trust that’s been built up over centuries and replacing it with cryptographic proof. And then it got going and rebuilt systems of trust all over again. What a nice vote of confidence in the idea of trust.
Levine’s “Money Stuff” newsletter is one of my favorite finds of 2022. Consistently entertaining, informed, and in-depth. Not sure how he does it, and so frequently.
Everything is brand now, and everything is storytelling now…. People want to know more about these things [that a company is doing]… There’s more interest about the story behind things than ever. And brands have the means to be able to connect that to audiences directly, both in their consumer business and with their storytelling.
— Sam Grawe, speaking to Jarrett Fuller on Fuller’s Scratching the Surface podcast about the convergence of editorial and brand work. Grawe, the former EIC of Dwell and Global Brand and Editorial Director at Herman Miller, is the Chief Brand & Marketing Officer at The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. Cool gigs. Good conversation.
Thanksgiving with the Incandenzas
Thursday, November 24, 2022
Revisiting an oldie from David Foster Wallace’s magnificent novel “Infinite Jest”: At Joelle’s first interface with the whole sad family unit – Thanksgiving, Headmaster’s House, E.T.A., straight up Comm. Ave in Enfield – Orin’s Moms Mrs. Incandenza (‘Please do call me Avril, Joelle’) had been gracious and warm and attentive without obtruding, and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate communication, and to make Joelle feel like a welcomed and esteemed part of the family gathering – and something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle’s body pucker and distend.
Knoll: Our Work’s Worth Waiting For
Sunday, November 20, 2022
Charming and savvy detail from Ana Araujo’s new book on the work of Florence Knoll, “No Compromise”: In 1964, the company Knoll released this letter it says it received from one of its textile suppliers, running it as a print ad (one assumes full-page): Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of the 6th of October which we have received today. Please be assured that we have not forgotten about you.
Since Michael Bierut stepped away from co-hosting the DBBD podcast, I’ve been missing audio access to his insights and opinions. I was excited to learn tonight of a new 90-minute+ interview with Bierut on the Time Sensitive Podcast. Eager to dig in.
(Relatedly, I was bummed to have juuust missed the chance to purchase one of only 1,000 copies of Unit Edition’s special two-volume book on Pentagram’s first 50 years. It sold out in 72 hours — good for them. The folks there had told me a few weeks ago there were no plans to reprint, but the page today makes it seem like they might be rethinking that, based on interest. I really enjoyed their “Studio Culture Now” and have my fingers crossed they’ll print some more of the Pentagram book.)
Nice detail from the recent WSJ profile on Jony Ive, about his move from Apple to the creative collective LoveFrom:
One of the first employees hired by Ive was a full-time writer. (There are now more than 30 employees, many of whom worked with him at Apple.) Ive says LoveFrom is the only creative practice he knows of to have an on-staff scribe whose job is, in part, to help conjure into words the ideas that his team of graphic designers, architects, sound engineers and industrial designers come up with for its collaborations with Airbnb, Ferrari and others.
In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot explores the “melancholy grandeur” of Weyes Blood, my favorite new find of last year.
A 1975 entry from Anne Truitt’s “Daybook: The Journal of an Artist”:
For years and years I was baffled by Cézanne’s work. I grasped his principles and pored over the way he constructed his paintings and thought and thought about what he must have experienced to be able to put color down so that it expressed formal values in accord with his vision. But nothing did any good. I remained baffled. The paintings would swim into focus and then out before I could catch them whole. Until one afternoon at Long Lake in Michigan when, walking with Sam toddling along beside me In his little red-and-white seersucker shorts and red T-shirt, I glanced off to my right and saw a Cézanne—exactly as he would have painted it—in a curve of woods.