I gave a presentation on contracts of adhesion last night, as the final project for my Introduction to Cybernetics and the Foundations of Systems Design course at SVA IxD. Here it is! So… what’s a contract of adhesion? In brief, it’s a contract in which one party dictates all the terms, and the other party…
Fall’s vogue flavor seems to be the pumpkin spice latte. This limited-edition Starbucks concoction comes around every year, but things have finally gone viral. As a result, about a third of all pumpkin spice latte tweets are nice and earnest, and the rest are mostly trolling misogynistic comments about white women in yoga pants. So…
I recently gave a mini PechaKucha-style talk at SVA IxD about habits and cowpaths and such, which I’ve reproduced here: One day, when I was about thirteen years old, I decided to bike from my house to Brooklyn Heights for the first time. All was going fine… until I nearly merged onto the highway. (Don’t…
Today, I helped bury my dear friend Chloe Weil. I first met Chloe thirteen years ago, in an elective high school health ed course called “Death & Dying.” Remembering that makes me laugh now, darkly. There was something dreadfully apropos about it then, and it’s even more devastatingly perfect now. We rolled our own social…
I turned 29 last week. I entered my thirtieth year. It wasn’t the easiest of birthdays, but the invisible countdown has actually been extremely helpful for me. I’ve been more productive since January 1st than I had been in perhaps all of 2013. The nagging call of my thirties haunts my every lazy impulse. I…
I found this post-apocalyptic calendar from the future in an old, dusty, ambiguously-ethnic gift shop down a back alley that was mysteriously bricked over the very next day. Conveniently, it appears that the 2127 calendar is backwards-compatible with 2014, in case you’re ready to swap out your Twelve Months Of Doge calendar for some bleak…
I needed some peaceful, distraction-free time this month. To that end, I edited my hosts file to filter out unwanted sites. I deleted social media apps and enabled parental restrictions on my phone. I even created a small Safari extension to block access to certain sites unless I accessed them via a Google search (I…
We made it to the middle of nowhere over New Years. Then we drove another twenty miles east. The Noah Purifoy Foundation, in Joshua Tree. Decades of sunbleached desert art. Though I can’t imagine two more dissimilar environs, it sort of reminds me of Opus 40 in Saugerties, NY. Both examples of a person with…
New York City’s mayoral primaries were held last week, and I was apparently the only person in my electoral district to get on board for the great populist uprising… but, no matter. The rest of the city took care of everything for me. For this primary (and only this primary), The Board of Elections wisely…
I visited Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Voice Tunnel, a site-specific installation created as part of the NYC DOT’s annual Summer Streets program, which closes off Lafayette Street and Park Avenue to vehicular traffic from the Brooklyn Bridge up to 72nd Street for three consecutive Saturday mornings each August. Voice Tunnel consists of 300 theatrical profile lights and…