A bit late

Thinking in Tumblr

Because it would be strange not to post it here…

I recently found myself discussing with a designer why I thought his industrial design client should not publish a commemorative book, but should start a commemorative Tumblr. (I couldn’t believe it when those words came out of my mouth.) Considering this history project, my mind reassembled its pieces as a blog, asynchronic, motley, sketchy. Rough rather than smooth. An archive of affinities rather than a resolved history. There’s a reason so many archives are using it.

More thoughts on how Tumblr has changed my thinking at Design Observer.

09/13/11

Announcing letsgetcritical.org

In April I wrote, in a Design Observer post on two funny, pointed reviews of recent design shows,

Fodder for my perhaps-never-to-happen shortform blog, Let’s Get Critical. Let’s Get Critical would pick choice reviews from the wide world of culture, so you (if you were like me) would always have a place to go when you needed to read something (constructively, eloquently) mean... Collecting reviews of different types in one place would allow some patterns to emerge, an anatomy of critique.

I thought I would never do it because I already have two blogs, surely someone else would beat me to it, and just trying to join Facebook gave me hives. But I kept thinking about it. So I emailed Longform’s Max Linsky with my idea, and he wrote me right back.

That was June, and here we are at September, ready to go. Let’s Get Critical launches today. You can follow @LGCritical or RSS. Please spread the word!

08/31/11

On Boring, On Throw Pillows

This week in the Observers Room, a satire of decor (see, even the coats are getting into the act) and an inquiry into the current state of boring.

Throw Pillows As Character: Most contemporary novels feint at design particularity with brand names, but Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand offers a series of lived-in living rooms, golf clubs, seaside promenades and estates.

On Boring: Editors keep telling me my architecture pitches are boring. But aren’t fermentation, translation, math equally so? Who decides what’s dull?

And for those who can’t get enough gift guides, as research for an essay on design and social shopping, I’m making treasuries, svpplies and lists of likes on various sites. Themes to date: yellow (inspired by a previous post), and designy things for kids that kids actually like. We’ve received way too many expensive, stylish, thoughtful toys that sit on the shelf while the $1 Hot Wheels race around.

12/16/10

Marimekko, Atlantic Yards, Critics: Common Ground?

Since I am still picking up followers over here, let me tell you what I have been up to over in Observers Room at Design Observer, my new blog. I’m doing major posting there, but some matters seem best maintained intra-Tumblr. And I miss Tumblr… Who knew I would feel warm and fuzzy about a blogging platform?

Apologies if you have seen/read/ignored all this already.

Criticism Kerfuffle 2010: I am torn about entering Criticism Kerfuffle 2010, entertained in Blueprint, BLDGBLOG, Words in Space and Urban Omnibus. There’s fair, if not universal, agreement that more thoughful architectural criticism would indeed be a good thing. But it isn’t just the writing that’s the problem.

Sidewalk Sale: How the Vanderbilt railyard became Atlantic Yards became downtown Brooklyn became the Barclays Center, lost and gained an architect and a developer, won an NBA franchise, and disappeared from Brooklyn in the process.

My Marimekko Uniform: When Marimekko came to America in 1959, the dresses freed women from girdles and garter belts and hose. Today wearing Marimekko is like being a walking work of art.

You Have to Pay for the Public Design: On the uncertain future of Harry Bertoia’s bronze screen on Fifth Avenue, Ada Louise Huxtable said it best. But I am still thinking about Bertoia, public modernism, and how we like our design. My conclusion: we like our chairs better than our museums, or hospitals, or public sculpture.

11/26/10

Moving Day

As of today, I am leaving A Bit Late and reincarnating as myself in the new Observers Room at Design Observer. I am very excited to be joining John Thackara, Rick Poynor and Mark Lamster as regular bloggers there, along with DO editors William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, Michael Beirut, Julie Lasky, Nancy Levinson, Jade-Snow Carroll, Chappell Ellison, and Josh Wallaert.

The Observers Room idea is a lively section of short posts, with new and newsy content every day. I hope not to have to change in my new burnt sienna surroundings, so if you like what I have been doing here, please follow me off the Dashboard to my new home.

First posts will be a three-part series on my trip to Scandinavia, covering some 1940s religious work by Klint and Asplund, a brand-new building by BIG in Orestad, and the architectural uses of the clock.

Read my new blog here. Those of you who RSS, please update your feeds. And check out my archives: I still love my 2005 essay Married with Tchotchkes, even if Moss might be on the rocks.

Read all Observers Room posts here.

And thanks for following and liking for the past 16 months.

11/8/10

"Does Longform Have a Woman Problem?"

longformorg:

Alexandra Lange from A Bit Late just wrote a thoughtful critique of our selections on longform.org.

abitlate:

Don’t get me wrong, Longform is great…

But. But. I couldn’t help but notice how few pieces by women are on the site.

Twelve pieces on the home page right now, one by a woman.

Twelve pieces on the second page right now, two by women.

Twelve Editor’s Picks right now, two by women.

The short answer to Lange’s question: yes, we do have a problem. There aren’t enough women writers on the site, we want there to be more, and we’re working on it.

The longer answer relates more to Lange’s last paragraph than the title. At the end of this post I’ll address her particular points, but here’s where she ended up:

I want to understand the filter, and we should all be asking for more transparency. If they are just taking suggestions from the Twitterverse, that should be clear. If the editors of these sites have a blind spot, they should fix it now. Or, as I am sure someone will suggest, I should start my own site with my own filter (which, in a sense, is what Twitter feeds are for). There is only a real problem if they succeed, as surely they hope they will, inclusion could become an imprimatur. If Longform starts to define digital longform, their current definition seems to include too many writers and topics out. If this is the way we archive now, we need not to redouble past biases.

Until now, longform.org’s filter has been pretty simple: we post four stories every day that we—two straight, white, male, child-less guys living in Brooklyn—wholeheartedly recommend. Our primary filter has been our taste. And our taste has some serious holes.

For example, we have posted 127 crime stories and just 20 about religion. Not sure I like what this discrepancy indicates, but we’ve recommended 26 stories about drugs and only 12 about food. Maybe the best way to understand where our natural interests lie is in a category Lange mentioned: parenting.

There are 16 stories tagged “parenting” currently on longform.org. (FWIW, seven were written by women.) Here’s a quick sample of the topics covered: a father and son lost at sea, a Q&A with Woody Allen in the midst of the Soon-Yi scandal, a profile of the Barefoot Bandit and his mom, coming out in middle school, and what happens to parents whose infants die after being forgotten about in the backseat of cars on hot days. Adventure! Tragedy! No matter what page you look at on longform.org, similar themes come back again and again. Those types of stories just catch our eye.

And when you’re reading as much as we do—we don’t post anything without reading it first—stories that catch your eye have a serious leg up. Lange brought up celebrity profiles—that’s a genre we’ve just never been too excited about. (We get pretty hyped about old Rolling Stone profiles, but the vast majority are paywalled.) One thing we do enjoy: profiles of athletes. Especially ones from Sports Illustrated. Turns out, longform.org has plenty of those.

Where are we light besides celebs? Food. Architecture. Fashion. Visual art. We’ve got a few stories on each of those topics, many of which have come via submissions. It’s not that we don’t like food stories—the ones we’ve posted are stellar—we’re just not engaged enough with the topic to wade through twenty articles in order to find one great read.

We want more of those stories on the site, however. For the past few weeks, we’ve been working on the next version of the site. One of the goals: expand the breadth of topics. To do that right, though, we can’t just make an effort to read more food stories. Instead, we’re bringing on new contributors, the first of whom starts next week, who have their own taste and areas of expertise.

Interested in contributing? editors@longform.org.

Hope that answers Lange’s transparency question. Here are quick responses to some of the individual points:

When I started thinking about this post Longform had subject areas at the top of the page, but these have now disappeared. (Too bad, since they helped me weed out the foreign policy pieces.) And they would have been helpful in identifying where more stories by women are hanging out. As I recall, there were only two stories filed under Architecture, as I recall, one submitted by me: Joe Morgenstern’s gripping engineering tale “The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis.” The other Elizabeth Kolbert’s reconsideration of Buckminster Fuller.

A new, improved navigational system is in the works, though. You’ll never have to see another foreign policy story again.

Why no long profiles of important thinkers by Larissa MacFarquhar (instead: David Chang)? Why so few celebrity profiles (many written by women) from the days when celebrities actually said something to Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair? I don’t see much parenting on there—Annie Murphy Paul, Jennifer Senior—an incredibly polarizing and popular topic. Does criticism count? Ada Louise Huxtable on the Ground Zero debacle. This is not an exhaustive list, these are writers I know and like and read regularly.

Larissa MacFarquhar: a victim of the New Yorker’s bizarre paywalling structure. Check out her archive. Most of the available (that is, non-abstract) stories are about politics and politicians, a type of profile that holds up particularly poorly. (A profile of Caroline Kennedy from ‘09, for example, doesn’t have much intrigue today. Even Vanessa Grigoriadis’ NY Mag profile of Nancy Pelosi is mostly useful for gallows humor after Tuesday.) But look at the subjects that you can’t read without a subscription, which therefore we can’t put on longform.org: kidney donation, Harley Lewin, Diane von Furstenberg, Edward Albee, Tarantino, Some Divorce Lawyer I’ve Never Heard Of. I’d rather read any of those than the ones that are available.

Longform responds! And in a gentlemanly manner! I look forward to the changes on the site, and to the diversification of their topics. This feels a little like a therapy session, in which the patient already knew what his problem was. I hope the new editors will also explicate their filters, and one will suit me. Indeed, when they describe their taste I think, Yup, that’s not what I want to read. Or write. We all have our blind spots (Blushing a little about the celebrity profiles. Nineties celebrity profiles!).

(via longform)

11/4/10

Is the Blogroll Over?

Ever since I started this blog, 16 months ago, I have regretted not being able to figure out how to have a blogroll. All those sites that tell you how to increase your traffic insist upon it.

But yesterday I had to put one together for this blog’s big move (news on that very soon) and it felt totally beside the point. Most of my choices were banal to the point of unnecessary, but on the other hand, including only quirky small-scale blogs I like (but only visit occasionally) felt overly revealing. I was conflicted, as I have been every time I adopt (very late) a new technology, about how best to present myself in this new form. Indeed, all my worries about the template for my Tumblog seem silly, now that me and everyone I follow reads Tumblr via the Dashboard.

It felt like the new reveal should be a rotating list of who I follow on Twitter. When I started Tweeting I went to the Following lists of friends and just copied, semi-wholesale, to get myself started. (There’s probably an application for that.) To say I read 15 blogs seemed strangely concentrated and reduced, since the beauty of Twitter is that cloud of information from everywhere and nowhere. To commit to 15 felt so old school.

11/2/10