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A root vegetable for every season
August 10, 2022
I live in Chicago, land of too many root vegetables. A turnip the size of a softball landed on my doorstep the other day, thanks to my farm. It joined,...
Baseball day
$ · August 8, 2022
The most off-brand thing about me is that I am extremely into baseball. I promise to not talk about baseball a whole lot here, unless the Cubs win the World...
Light form
August 5, 2022
We’ve talked about flashlight people, and now we will talk about the flashlight. There is truly a flashlight for every season, but in another, more accurate...
The trial & grim error of our zero waste rumspringa
$ · August 3, 2022
There is a genre of objects that falls under the genre of zero waste. It is made without plastic, reusable, reused, compostable. There are bamboo...
Pete
August 1, 2022
“I really have no idea what it is I sell,” a Chartreuse Diffusion president told The New Yorker in 1984. “I am very scared always. Only three of the brothers...
Want to not want
$ · July 29, 2022
One of the nicer lessons of the Bad Times® is that I don’t really need anything. I lived in Portugal for a month with two bags; I lived in Mexico & Costa...
Notes on the third worst date that I have ever had in my life
July 27, 2022
In 2012, I threw my 30th birthday party, and over 250 people showed up. I say over, of course, because I lost count sometime around when the police first...
Show right
$ · July 25, 2022
I went to a fancy college where, between bits of studying, integenerational wealth likes to show off its materialism and reify structures of power. If you...
Second city chance
July 22, 2022
I like second cities. I grew up in one. I live in one. Second cities try to punch above their weight. Second cities have something to prove. There is a...
Fewer, better hoodies
$ · July 20, 2022
Here are the fashion rules: Buy socks that will last. Darn Tough, Farm to Feet, etc. Mend your socks. Wear them multiple times between washes. Get merino...
The zine as trial balloon
July 18, 2022
The slow roll is important. There is risk. Printers don’t have undo buttons. You can’t take years of your life back. This is why zines exist. The premise At...
Earth's only remaining holiday
$ · July 15, 2022
There is your perception of Basil Day, there is my perception of Basil Day, and then there is Basil’s perception of Basil Day, which is the only holiday...
How to museum
July 13, 2022
The first thing you have to do is go to a lot of museums. If you go to a lot of museums, you learn how to skip stuff, and skipping stuff is how to museum....
Night to day
$ · July 11, 2022
I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she told me that I do the best job with creative work when I oscillate between periods of public exposure and...
Anarchy roar
July 8, 2022
In 2008, on the fourth of July at sundown, I posted up with a few friends on the seawall facing Lake Michigan, and watched some fireworks. The city would...
Community work is repair work
$ · July 6, 2022
In my recent text about community matters, a couple of people remarked on our code of conduct, asking: how do you deal with bad actors? This is not a short...
Community-supported marathon
July 4, 2022
For the past 11 years, I have participated in one form or another of community-supported agriculture, where every week I either go to a farm and pick up a...
How we relate
$ · July 1, 2022
In order to see more text you like, you need to reply to it. And a lot of you replied to the text I wrote a few weeks back about the barbeque. I think people...
New pour, old practice
June 29, 2022
The pour is a habit; the pour is a practice. For about a decade, the pour went like this: Grind to the consistency of sand, approximately. Boil your water to...
Hipster church
$ · June 27, 2022
I almost have compassion for Rey Colón. He picked a fight, as aldermen do; it was, very profoundly, the wrong fight. A political rival campaigned against him...
How to pick a serviceberry tree
June 24, 2022
You’ve heard of other berries, but not serviceberries. In June, they speak to abundance. They are small, sugary, in season for only a few weeks, and kind of...
The sandwich we deserve
$ · June 22, 2022
Time changes a place. We never want to admit this. Our favorite stores should stay open forever. Our favorite restaurants must serve the exact same food...
We have reached this point with respect to the soap bag, and there is no turning back
June 20, 2022
Travel toiletries are one of the weirdest things to me. They are a ritual that could only exist based on the essential tension between international law,...
Clear tonic
$ · June 17, 2022
Your city can tell me a lot based on its relationship to gin. London kind of tucks gin under the rug, not wanting to admit its colonialist history,...
The barbeque is not medicinal, despite appearances
June 15, 2022
I threw a barbeque over Memorial Day weekend. It was the usual sort of thing: a garage sale, a grill, lots of seltzer and beer. People rolled through on...
Drawn line
$ · June 13, 2022
All stitching, on everything you own, is drawn, manually, with two hands. On every t-shirt you own, the cuffs are drawn with two hands, the seams are drawn...
Hate right
June 8, 2022
I have come up with a new rule, and it is related to a topic nobody wants to talk about, for which I am already profoundly sorry. I promise the rest of this...
The tiny tool tote
$ · June 6, 2022
You have a bag with 5 pockets, MOLLE webbing, ten sleeves. It opens like a pointy accordion. Knife, pen, leather-sleeved AirPods (it is always AirPods), and...
Precisely like BBC Planet Earth, but lower stakes and far less interesting
June 3, 2022
So we need to talk about a misfortune that happened to me that is uniquely American for a variety of reasons, and in order to do that we need to go on a...
Three boring, easy recipes
$ · June 1, 2022
All three of my most famous recipes are extremely simple. They don’t involve much; you can do them yourself. Two of them involve small pantry upgrades that...
Brief notes on garlic & incompetence
May 30, 2022
I’ve lived in a grocery-poor, food-mad neighborhood for the past 11 years, once filled with eco-hippies who, at one point, started one of Chicago’s only co-...
Ritual Practice
$ · May 27, 2022
Here are some things that I do that are conceptually related, I swear: I don’t ship unfinished work. This means you’re never going to see a public work in...
Canon Flex
May 25, 2022
There is rarely a better option at a cocktail bar than dealer’s own, where you list a base spirit and some flavors, and the bartender does some clairvoyance....
The Glorious Dirt Trench of the Kilbourn Park Plant Sale
$ · May 23, 2022
I moved into this house in 2016, and in 2017 I found myself with a raised bed in full sun, some really good soil, and a desire to grow food for my chosen...
Alinea is overrated and you know this, but I'm writing text about it anyway
May 20, 2022
One of the final things to return in my life is tech conferences. I keynoted one a few weeks ago. It went well. I missed the people, the conversations, the...
Tropical fruit
$ · May 18, 2022
In planning this past winter’s snowbirding, I lamented to my friend Theresa, long experienced with all of the yogic parts of Costa Rica, that I was having a...
Spread text
May 17, 2022
It is time once again to write a brief update on the state of text. If you are here for regular text and not metatext, you may ignore it. This doesn’t count...
Bad Shovel
May 16, 2022
There comes a point where one has to acknowledge that they’re working with software that has become very old. Workflows stay fixed for years, coming to...
Some notes on flashlight people
$ · May 13, 2022
One of my favorite things about the internet is that rare moment when I stumble upon a community that has gone so deep down a rabbit hole of gentle...
Kaikado
May 11, 2022
I know, I know: I have a fondness for a designed object. Bear with me and there’ll be a payoff. Kaikado are special. They sell, predominantly, tea canisters....
The grammar
$ · May 9, 2022
Two years ago, a bunch of stuff happened in the world and I found myself stuck inside all spring, at the beginning of the harvest, with access to a lot of...
Only optimize for pandemics
May 6, 2022
I am generally against what Jia Tolentino has called “optimization culture”. I do not wear the best underwear; I do not own the best desk lamp; I have never,...
A bad calculator that calls people
$ · May 4, 2022
When I need to quit life, I have the phone. The phone does two things: it places & receives phone calls, and it sends & receives text messages. It does not...
Unrecommendable
May 2, 2022
I follow a handful of humans who probably make most of their money on recommending stuff. I’ve already written about Blackbird Spyplane, which has a huge...
One Week
$ · April 29, 2022
The hedonic treadmill is real, you own too many things, you accumulate too many things, and you can work with what you already have, most of the time. New...
One tote
$ · April 27, 2022
Tote bags meant well, didn’t they? Positioned as an eco-friendly alternative to one-time-use bags, we all grabbed one and headed to the market. Then we...
The flying car of a tiny dog
April 25, 2022
I got into cooking in 2003 when a 1st-generation Hong Konger taught me how to make Sichuan stirfries in my tiny college apartment. I bought three things: a...
Two Faces
April 21, 2022
For the past 15 years, I’ve used two typefaces in most of my work: a serif for text, and a sans for headers & interface. Here is the chronology, for those...
Malibu Stacy has a new hat
$ · April 18, 2022
Probably half because I bike, half because I travel, and half because I exist during apocalypse, I am into what could broadly be called “everyday carry.” In...
nickd.org's Redesign: A Postmortem
April 15, 2022
Over here at Draft, we recently unveiled a new, revolutionary, ground-up rewrite of our personal site, nickd.org. This is our first rewrite in a few years....
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