Month One
January has been Month One of something unknown. “All human beings are invited to have a friendship with the unknown,” shared poet and author David Whyte. This is my formal acceptance of that...
View ArticleThe city as something else
“Are you alright?” It was Hanna calling my mobile phone in the middle of July. I had left my Brooklyn neighborhood for upstate New York that summer month “to write” and Hanna, my neighborhood dry...
View ArticleCrayon collisions
We used to make these crayon mashups as kids. They were combinations of all of our favorite crayons in the box. Choose a couple of most-loved Crayolas, bake them together in a cupcake tin, let them...
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Expanding home
Empathy is traveling. Traveling from yourself to expand and meet another in their place and context. Travel I did this past week along with nine others to walk alongside Craig Mod, Kevin Kelly, and...
View ArticleCity book club
On stage at Radio City Music Hall, I hid The Power Broker. All 1,200+ pages of it. I clutched the paperback close, under my academic regalia. On stage, helping deliver diplomas to eager graduating...
View ArticleThe grammar of home
I returned home to visit with my Mom last weekend. “Home” is how I’d referred to the place for years. Yet slowly there becomes a tension between the place you lived and the place you live, the “were”...
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Onward to the future
Pre-iPhone, pre-Twitter, pre-Instagram, pre-Slack. Pre-rideshare, pre-blockchain, pre-crypto, pre-Zoom. Pre-Hurricane Sandy, Pre-Women’s Marches, Pre-Covid, Pre-X. It was before any of these...
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Foreword motion with The Design Loft
Designers don’t respond to culture; they anticipate it, question it, and are responsible for shaping its direction. And at this moment, that role feels more urgent than ever. In his new book, The...
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It is a sentence already
It is a sentence already. That’s advice from The Education of a Design Writer, a new book edited by Molly Heintz and Steven Heller, designers, writers, and longtime co-conspirators at SVA. Steve has...
View ArticleThe sound of making
Click, silence, clack, silence, silence… is the sound the keyboard makes when a ten-year-old is learning how to code her own game for the first time. My Dad showed how ASCII, typed line by line,...
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