Archive (Page 6) • text

Second city chance

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

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...

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....

$ · 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...

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

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...

$ · 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

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...

$ · 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

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

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,...

$ · 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

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...

$ · 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...

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

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

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...

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

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...

$ · 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...

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...

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...

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....

$ · 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

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

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...

$ · 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...

$ · 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

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...

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

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....

Donella Meadows was a systems professor who worked at MIT & Dartmouth. Her work, especially her posthumous book Thinking in Systems, has been wildly...

$ · April 8, 2022

There was a request for more cocktails, and so now we have this. The ritual involves popping the top off a bottle of Angostura in defiance of god. It’s the...

Three ingredients, thirty minutes

We need to discuss butter sauce. I have ripped it off wholesale: first from Salt & Fat, who I later learned ripped it off from Marcella Hazan. Still, people...

Make it plug, make it work, make it nice

$ · April 4, 2022

On the one hand, tools don’t matter. On the other, there is USB-C. In text, I try to seek the wonder in elegance. So I will say some nice things about USB-C...

The Sacred Ritual of the International Home & Housewares Show

$ · March 31, 2022

Do you like design? (You probably do, since you are reading this.) Are you a victim of the horrors of late capitalism? Do you pay attention to trends in...

Overcompensatory image capture

It is time for photography text. I have been taking pictures since 1994. I have posted a bunch of recent work here. I have owned cameras from pretty much...

"They don't need my help"

$ · March 28, 2022

Like every millennial in a big city, I was into craft beer for a while. Who knew that there was a class of beer that looked like tar, tasted like chocolate,...

A non-comprehensive overview of soy sauce

There’s a certain sort of face that people make that conveys, approximately, are you utterly kidding me, crossed with of course you do, crossed with this...