Archive (Page 4) • text

No part of the bike share system in Chicago is confusing at all, fortunately

September 7, 2023

We’ve written text before about Divvy, the bike sharing network in Chicago, mostly about the time when they had a single red bike in a sea of blue ones and...

How to own your data

September 5, 2023

The internet was once pitched as an archive, a total codex of human knowledge. But in reality, nothing is really trustworthy on the internet. The whole thing...

Find the hits with this one cool trick

August 30, 2023

I’ve talked a lot on the professional side about Aesop, the skincare brand that makes you smell like a hotel while feeling like a design-forward cool girl,...

August 24, 2023

It was a sunny, beautiful day, and I made brunch for 12 people, like I do, and they rewarded me with an intervention. You know I got a dog in April. The dog...

You can never pack a Porter again

August 22, 2023

In one sense, the form creates a framework. In another, the framework mutates and composts. Enter Yoshida Porter, a bag company that you have maybe never...

Don't talk about whether the bathrooms are clean

August 17, 2023

It’s August, which means I have thrown 487 picnics this summer. You know, enough to have this down to a science. It is time for picnic pro text. Look, one...

Paragons of carry normalcy

August 15, 2023

Look at this. Stare, like it is wreckage. They are abominations, yet not. They are luxury, yet not. They are the product, maybe, of an AI prompt to graft...

The base of pretty much everything

August 11, 2023

I had a friend over for dinner the other week. He worked as a cook for a decade; his father is a regionally famous chef. He knows food, and cooks all the...

Too much light, too little time

There’s a certain genre of internet that gives generously, provides clear outcomes, and doesn’t really ask for more, but more is there, and you can pay for...

Send only text, forever

In our previous text, I talked about how I have mostly disengaged from the merest concept of technology, an idea that is both universally correct and...

Live, log off, love

The internet is slowly failing for me, personally, and I kind of love it. This began on several fronts at once, it seemed. A major newspaper changed some...

The treatment of one pepper

It’s that time in Chicago where every farmers market vendor has shishito peppers, and you have no idea what to do with them. I have spent five years...

Potatoes weren’t expecting this to happen to them

On the one extreme, you have the farmers market. The produce is abundant and unprepared. You are handed a zucchini; you have absolutely no idea what to do...

1,000 strawberries in the shape of a strawberry

Strawberries are in season and everybody is just going about their business as if nothing happened. They look the same but are not. Each looks different but...

The quadrapartite ratio

The ratio changes, the ratio always stays the same. Dashi, soy sauce, mirin, and sake. You can read this and get the gist, but you’re also reading text, so...

Go do stuff you like

So you have this glowy rectangle in your pocket, and you can do pretty much anything with it. Anything! Anything. You ask the rectangle for one job: you want...

How to promote a party

First, you announce that you are throwing a party, and then two months later you throw a party. That’s the skeleton. Now you have to fill in the skeleton....

Every instance of repair I have done on clothes in the past two years, in no order

A knolled clown car for your brain

The whole goal of good carry is to fit as much as possible in as small of space while taking up as little bulk and weight as possible. There are many...

Some tea you can steep a few times before it becomes something you don’t want to put in your face. Some you can’t. Don’t steep malty assam multiple times....

Sometimes you remember that you have an amazing ingredient that you have not used in a while, and you avail it upon yourself to attempt something with it....

> The same discipline, if not creativity, has helped make Budweiser the most popular beer in the world. Its sheer consistency, across tens of billions of...

Late spring, three ways

There is so much I could talk about right now. Draft just reached its earliest ever break-even point on the year. I feel like I’m back at full strength in my...

Laying siege to Dongletown

When I first bought a bad laptop in 2014, it had some USB-C ports and nothing else, and so I had to buy some dongles. I eventually spent $500 on dongles. I...

Basil’s rule of innovation

New developments appear to have occurred in technology. Most people have viewed them with grim skepticism, saying that the new thing is gross, weird,...

What is wonder now?

I’m writing this a couple of days before Apple’s big conference, and it should go out shortly after. This is deliberate. I want to be proven wrong here. I...

What should you ignore in an airport?

Almost everything. Airports are malls for the liminal damned. There are exceptions, which is why this text is longer than two sentences. Food 95% of airport...

If you had to pick a favorite baseball play of the past 5 years, you could go the “storied dinger” route with the most important swing of the entire...

Two years ago, I went on a bit of a failure of a first date. She was really cool, had a fascinating job, was lovely to talk to. But she was freshly out of a...

To know Japan is to crap there.‌ You are aware of smart toilets, yes, but you are perhaps not aware of their omnipresence there. Japan tracks sales of smart...

I ran an errand last week and flew to Los Angeles to get a tattoo that is actually two tattoos. No, they don’t have any meaning, just vibes. Found the guy’s...

Building Block makes sculptural forms that double as handbags. They are geometric, postmodern-architectural, prioritizing geometric formalism over any strict...

Yelling at teapots

The more museums you go to, the more you get bored of big museums. This happens. The crowds are too much, the collection is too vast, you get fatigue within...

Next Saturday, May 20, I’ll be exhibiting at Chicago Zine Fest alongside my pal Rachel’s Bitza Press. This is probably a big deal. People have been waiting...

Every April it is ramps season, and every April there is ramps backlash. They are overhyped, one hears. Stop obsessing over them. Ramp dunk pieces always...

In America, we dread and avoid lines. If there is a line for food, the food is almost always overrated, and we should never get in it. Airport security has a...

We are all desperate. New product categories are never enough. Technology must distend, blob-like, across all of civilization. In our frantic desire to find...

You know, vaguely, the dinner party line: did you know 7-Eleven is amazing in Japan? And yes it is, of course it is. Japanese 7-Eleven, which I beseech you...

When I first got Basil, I would speak vaguely of the sort of dog I wanted: black, around 50 pounds, a shelter mutt goofball. Nobody could visualize this....

Of course this happened at a conference. Of course. You are provided several community-building activities, told to choose one, and it is going to be Meow...

How much fruit juice can you get away with? Is 5% an ABV you can find yourself agreeing with? What is the purpose of using spirits at all if they’re not even...

Clothing rules for 2023

On the plane to Tokyo, I threw together some rules for clothes I buy, because I knew that Japan is both the best country for retail on the planet and they...

Won the travel lottery, here’s a whole city

One of the things I’m really good at, and probably one of the reasons that text works as well as it does, is recommending stuff. Nothing really lights me up...

Soft power, minimal form

The tl;dr: there was a streak of design-y minimalism in clothing in the Western world for a couple of decades, thanks largely to Apple and tech. Then we...

Hachi selfie, take four

Hachi was an extremely loyal dog, owned by a professor in Tokyo. Every day the professor would go to Shibuya Station, and Hachi would wait until the...

I’d like to expand on a post that I saw recently & wrote about in last week’s letter, because I think it’s important, and it seems to have resonated with at...

You have eight seconds to step into the batter’s box and start reading this text

“Baseball is boring.” “It’s slow.” “You just drink beer and barely pay attention to the game.” I know. I suppose this makes it different from other sports,...

Casual dress for formal weather

A text reader recently asked me what one uses to bike in the winter. If you live in a warm climate, you may allow this text to wash over you, smug in the...

I got curious one day about soccer. I know Marseille’s team is a big deal; I know they play during winter. So I looked up their schedule, and found that they...

It gives me no pleasure to report that the men are arguing about JavaScript again

Lately, there has been a debate about, god help us, JavaScript. (This summarizes it.) This happens every so often. In this text, I’ll be writing a little bit...