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…

A bizarre public demo exhibited on Essex Street.

From the archives: a silly gift I made for my dad.

I am ridiculously excited to be attending Andy Baio and Andy MacMillan’s upcoming XOXO Festival in Portland. XOXO is billed as a “celebration of disruptive creativity.” And, jeez, it looks to be about as lovingly handcrafted as a festival can get. Conference tickets sold out on Kickstarter in two days. XOXO and Kickstarter are upending…

In honor of the fifth season of Mad Men, here’s George Segal’s unforgettable graveyard soliloquy from Bye Bye Braverman. Segal waxes rhapsodic about life in New York in the late ’60s — and it’s a pretty good primer. If you aren’t familiar with Sidney Lumet’s masterful 1968 flop about four Jews who squeeze into a Beetle and…

I learned something fascinating from this video of Chuck Jones drawing Bugs Bunny: the studio’s budget for each film sometimes caused Bugs Bunny to wear two whiskers on each side of his face, instead of three. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=374229400189484 (via kottke)

I know it’s been a while, but I’ve been utterly consumed with Block Factory since Thanksgiving. (We’re hiring!) As thanks for your patience, I’m super excited to introduce you to a thing we’ve made. Say hello to your new best friend, Considerating! Considerating is a quick, simple and effective way to get some peer review…

Inspired by Gothamist’s recent visit to the secret railway platform beneath the Waldorf Astoria, I thought it might be a good time for a bit of a follow-up to my last post. New York has always enjoyed a unique fascination with the underground. There’s a lot of infrastructure down there, and over time more and…

The Times peeked behind the curtain of a hidden New York institution this weekend, publishing a great essay about the firm of Day & Meyer, Murray & Young, which has spent about eighty years storing the weighty ephemera of urban socialites using an ingenious 11′-long steel container known as the Portovault: An unassuming tower on…

William Gibson knows it. “Good interface design is as transparent as possible, because I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.” —William Gibson, describing his gadget choices on The Setup. Dieter Rams knows…

This weekend was the 9th annual Open House New York, where scores of unusual sites across the city which are typically off-limits to the public throw their doors open for curious and nosy architecture fans who are too mild-mannered for trespassing. So my sister and I took a trip out to JFK to check out…

I am squinting into my SE/30, trying to perfect my HyperCard stack. I am excelling at Brøderbund’s aptly-named “Type!” program even though I can’t master the home row. It is December 17, 1995, and I am gleefully reporting back to my diary (in Word 5.1, of course) that I’ve finally received an AppleDesign Keyboard and…