2018 recommendations

November 11, 2018: Seen and Unseen

I’m going to acknowledge up front that my theme this time may be a little bit tenuous. I’m talking broadly about awareness as much as literal sight, but a number of the things I’ve been thinking about do have to do directly with the visual realm. “On the Nose”, by Chris Ip, describes the work …

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2018 recommendations

October 10, 2018: Keeping It Real

Like, I think, most of us, I’ve found the news from the last several weeks…troubling. I thought writing about some things I’ve enjoyed recently might lighten my mood a bit. I don’t have a real theme this time around; there’s no particular connection among these things, so this is more like the recommendations posts as …

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2018 recommendations

May 26, 2018: Plastic Fantastic Ekphrastic

In “We Made Plastic. Now We’re Drowning in It”, Laura Parker’s recent cover story for National Geographic, the fundamental point— we make and throw away a lot of plastic, and this very bad— is not surprising; what she (and the photos, by Randy Olson) does most effectively is convey the scale. Because plastic wasn’t invented …

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2018 recommendations

March 31, 2018: Behind the Scenes

I’ve just finished teaching a new class about cities, and one of the things that the experience made me think about was how the built environment of urban spaces is the outcome of a long process (or series of processes) that is itself basically invisible. That is to say, you can see what the city …

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