I’ve spent the last few years fascinated by the Chernobyl disaster. This fascination partly grew out of my interest in the Flint Water Crisis, which was directly compared to Chernobyl in a story I wrote about it. (One of the things people forget is that Chernobyl poisoned the water table for a huge region.)

“Looking Again At Chernobyl” reviews two books: Midnight In Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham, and Manual For Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, by Kate Brown.

The similarities with Flint start in the opening paragraph:

Catastrophes happen when a large system gets so out of sync with its environment that a tiny tweak can crash it to the ground. It’s happened to oil rigs, spacecraft and mines. Afterward, committees blame the people who did the tweaking. But what matters is how the system became unstable and crashed, the atmosphere that caused it and the aftereffects. In these two books about the April 1986 explosion of the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, “Midnight in Chernobyl” focuses on the first and second, “Manual for Survival” on the third.

It’s probably fair to say that we’ve spent the last thirty years acting as if we don’t live in a post-Chernobyl world.

Robert P. Crease, the reviewer, seems most taken with Higginbotham’s book:

Adam Higginbotham’s “Midnight in Chernobyl” is a gripping, miss-your-subway-stop read. The details of the disaster pile up inexorably. They include worn control rod switches, the 2,000-ton reactor lid nicknamed Elena, a core so huge that understanding its behavior was impossible. Politicians lacked the technical knowledge to take action, while scientists who had the knowledge feared to provide it lest they lose their jobs or lives…

The explosion occurs less than 100 pages into this 366-page book (plus more than 100 pages of notes, glossary, cast of characters and explanation of radiation units). But what follows is equally gripping. Radio-controlled repair bulldozers became stuck in the rubble. Exposure to radiation made voices grow high and squeaky. A dying man whispered to his nurse to step back because he was too radioactive. A workman’s radioactive shoe was the first sign in Sweden of a nuclear accident 1,000 miles upwind. Soviet bigwigs entered the area with high-tech dosimeters they didn’t know how to turn on. Investigations blamed the accident on six tweakers, portrayed them as “hooligans” and convicted them. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear), which is to radiation studies something like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) is to assessing human-induced climate effects, struggled to make sense of changing and confusing information.

Brown’s book is trying to do something very different, and Crease finds it correspondingly more complicated to evaluate:

Kate Brown’s “Manual for Survival” has a different style and emphasis. Its aim is to be an exposé of the attempts to minimize the impact of Chernobyl. The disaster was less an accident, says Brown, a historian at M.I.T., than “an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that restructured the landscape, bodies and politics.” Unscear’s publications were cover-ups, and radiation-related maladies are “a dark horseman riding wild across the Chernobyl territories.” Brown undertook the book so as not to become “one of those duped comrades who found out too late that the survival manual contained a pack of lies.”

Around 2014, Brown began interviewing people in the affected areas, and sought measurements of radioactivity in such things as wool, livestock and swamps. Her stories are affecting, yet it is hard to evaluate memories and anecdotes. It is also hard to evaluate measurements. These are meaningful only within the tangled web of factors that radiation epidemiologists consider — including type and time-span of dose, pathways through the body, susceptibility of individual tissues and background radiation — as well as health issues like alcohol, obesity and stress.

Brown deserves credit, though, for wading into these murkier waters, because the murky waters is where we are. Part of reckoning with Chernobyl means admitting everything we don’t know. We don’t know the full health effects of the disaster. We don’t know how many people died. We don’t know how many lives were lost to neglect and cover-up. We don’t know how many could have been saved.

Part of what it means to actually live in a post-Chernobyl world is to accept that our most vital infrastructure is always threatened; that the threats it poses are always disproportionately affecting a society’s most vulnerable citizens; and that its threats are always downplayed by a society’s most powerful and directly responsible members, out of ignorance and fear.

That’s the lesson of Chernobyl. That’s the lesson of Flint. That’s the lesson of the future, which it never seems to hesitate to teach.

• Chernobyl
• infrastructure
• nuclear power
• the systemic sublime

Even colors have histories, and what vibrant histories they are. French historian Michel Pasteureau’s Blue: The History of A Color (he’s also done histories of red, green, and black) is capably reviewed by Jesse Russell in the Claremont Review of Books in an essay called “The Colors of Our Dreams.” Russell offers the following luminous details.

Blue was once little-known in the Western palette. Homer’s sea was “wine dark”; blue would not be used as water’s color until the seventeenth century. It has evolved from its original association with warmth, heat, barbarism, and the creatures of the underworld, to its current association with calm, peace, and reverie. Like the unruly green, the Romans associated blue with the savage Celtae and Germani, who used the woad herb’s rich leaves for their blue pigments. These northern barbarians also painted themselves blue before war and religious rituals. The ancient Germans, according to Ovid, even dyed their whitening hair blue.

The Romans, in contrast, preferred the color red—the Latin word, “coloratus” was synonymous with that for red, ruber. The Romans and Greeks did import lapis lazuli, the exquisite blue rock, from exotic locals such as China, Iran, and Afghanistan. But neither used the barbaric blue for important figures or images, saving it for the backgrounds for white and red figures. Even the Greek words for blue, like the names of colors in the Bible, largely were meant to evoke certain states or feelings as opposed to exact visual colors. Blue, like green, was the color of death and barbarism. The nobler colors—white, red, and black—were preferred.

Blue’s fortunes changed in the Middle Ages when it became associated with both the heavens and heaven, and particularly an association with the Virgin Mary. French royalty adopted blue as their official color; and in modernity, the introduction of indigo from the Americas and the invention of Prussian blue in the early 18th century helped cement blue (along with white and red) as part of a tripartite color scheme that gave us the flags of Great Britain, the United States, and France.

And then along came Goethe:

By the mid-nineteenth century, blue became a Romantic symbol of melancholy. Among those guilty of luring the moody young to dress in blue was Wolfgang von Goethe who, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, depicted his title character in a blue coat. This, coupled with Werther’s untimely death, inspired a craze for blue coats and a mania for suicide among melancholy European youth. Werther’s blue jacket was matched by the blue flower in Novalis’s unfinished posthumous piece Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which narrates the tale of a medieval troubadour who seeks out the flower as a symbol of the authentic life of beauty and art. Young, melancholic Frenchmen were doubly encouraged in their swooning by the closeness shared by the French word for blue flower, “ancolie,” and the ending of “mélancholie.”

From Romanticism’s murky forest a host of verbal expressions bloomed, linking blue with odd, melancholic reverie. Fairy tales were known as “blue tales”; to be terribly drunk in German became known as “being blue” or “Blau sein”; and the “blue devils,” from which we get the great American expression (and musical genre) “the blues,” meant to be afflicted with a lingering sadness.

Blue has a curious oscillation between conservativism and rebellion, perhaps especially in France, but throughout the world:

The navy blazer, a sign of conservativism and preppy formality in the twentieth century, was once a mark of the avant garde Westerner, adorned in what became known as “sportswear.” Aspiring radicals wore blue jeans, made from denim dyed with indigo, but ultimately derived by Levi Strauss from the pants made from tent canvas for California prospectors. Eventually, jeans became leisurewear for Americans from the East Coast who wanted to dress like the cowboys of the increasingly tame “wild west.” As the tides of early twentieth-century fashionable rebellion swelled, blue jeans were given the stamp of haute couture in a famous 1935 edition of Vogue, and, after World War II, were a symbol of rebellion and nonconformity—especially in newly liberated Europe. But in the West, jeans eventually became blasé (but comfortable) everyday wear when everyone—even conservative squares—started wearing them. This did not stop blue jeans from becoming symbols of rebellion in Communist countries during the heady days of glasnost and perestroika, and later in the Muslim world a symbol of youthful rebellion.

Taken together, the genealogy of blue is a history of finding meaning in difference, whether it was the Germanic blue facing off against the Roman red, the vibrant blue jacket against the staid black coat, or the heavenly Marian apparition set off against the profane, multicolored world below.

(Via The Browser.)

• blue
• clothing
• color
• France
• history

I don’t know the author or typographer behind The Temporary State. There’s a contact address that reads “B. Tulskaya ul. 2-571, Moscow, Russia, 115191.” But Mx. Tulskaya (if that’s indeed the author) has made an outstanding pocket history of the use of italics in type, partly to defend against the fact that The Temporary State’s fonts do not use an italic typeface.

I knew, for instance, that Venetian printer Aldus Manutius is generally credited with introducing italics into European print (partly, the histories say, to imitate Latin handwriting, and partly as a space-saving device). I did not know that after other printers began to copy Manutius’s use of italics, the Venetian Senate granted Aldus exclusive right to use them.

I knew that Italian futurist poet and manifesto-writer Filippo Marinetti championed a wide range of typographic innovations; I did not know (or had forgotten) that he wished to reserve italic type for “a series of similar and swift sensations,” while bold would be used for the imitation of heavy tones, and so on. A kind of emotional functionalism in type.

It is strange, how Marinetti in his call for revolution against “the Poetry Book” doesn’t see any problem with italics. Somehow, Roman numerals are an issue, but the use of highly decorative imitation of a 16th century pretty handwriting is a futuristic expression, not part of the “typographic harmony” ensemble. It is even stranger, that he doesn’t address the application of italic itself, as his idea of highlighting the page with «3-4 colors and 20 different typefaces» is very close to how the use of italic is regulated in the Chicago Manual. The only difference is: where Marinetti suggests «20 different typefaces», Chicago suggests only one — italic. So, seemingly to achieve Marinetti’s idea all that is needed is to diversify the means of text highlighting. And it’s not like there are no alternative typographic traditions, which could be used to substitute the italic.

Much of the article is devoted to this; how you can achieve the typographic effect of italics (emphasis, foreign words, titles, etc.) without using italic type. Here the examples are legion. In German blackletter, foreign words (especially in Roman languages) would be put in Roman type, while emphasized words or phrases would be in boldface. In Cyrillic printing, especially in the Soviet period, you see “sperrsatz,” or wide spacing, to denote emphasis.

Bauhaus, following the German blackletter tradition, forsook italic typesetting altogether, opting for a combination of boldface, sperrsatz, and fonts of different sizes, all of which achieve the effect of italics without the pretense of adopting an old Latin handwriting style.

Since few social media networks support bold and italic typesetting, it’s interesting to think about the range of ways users still suggest italics or the effect of italics.

There’s pseudo-Markdown, in the form of

*italics*
or
_italics_

Of course, there’s
ALL CAPS

There are also memes and GIFs, which are a way of both drawing emphasis to text and giving it an emotional characterization that go far beyond what Marinetti could dream of with his really quite limited notion of “3 or 4 different colours and 20 different typefaces on the same page. That text itself would and could be animated, that it could be superimposed on a miniature movie that would explode into mostly-text networks, is a future Marinetti might have embraced, but one he couldn’t quite fully see.

(Via Robin Sloan)

• Bauhaus
• fonts
• letters
• typography

This article reminded me of the powerful story Rebecca Solnit told at Pop-Up Magazine a couple years ago. She presented photos taken by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe at Lake Powell over several years, along with unfolding a compelling narrative expression of climate change as told through one geological place.

She also tells a cautionary tale of The West, in her companion piece later published in California Sunday magazine.

Glen Canyon Dam is a monument to overconfidence 710 feet high, an engineering marvel and an ecological mistake. The American West is full of these follies: decommissioned nuclear power plants surrounded by the spent radioactive waste that will remain dangerous for 100,000 years; the bomb-torn land of military testing and training sites; the Nevada Test Site itself, cratered and contaminated by the explosion of a thousand nuclear devices. Las Vegas and Phoenix, two cities that have grown furiously in recent decades, are monuments to the conviction that stable temperatures and fossil fuel and water could be counted upon to persist indefinitely.

You can regard the enormous projects of this era as a continuation of the Second World War. In the West, this kind of development resembled a war against nature, an attempt to conquer heat, dryness, remoteness, the variability of rainfall and river flow — to triumph over the way water limits growth. As the environmental writer Bill deBuys put it: “Thanks to reservoirs large and small, scores of dams including colossi like Hoover and Glen Canyon, more than 1,000 miles of aqueducts and countless pumps, siphons, tunnels and diversions, the West had been thoroughly re-rivered and re-engineered. It had acquired the plumbing system of a giant water-delivery machine. … Today the Colorado River, the most fully harnessed of the West’s great waterways, provides water to about 40 million people and irrigates nearly 5.5 million acres of farmland.” Along the way, so many parties sip and gulp from the Colorado that little water reaches Mexico.

It’s a longread so I recommend finding someone with a voice as soothing and clear as Solnit’s to read aloud to you (and then hold you when you realize what it all means).

N.B. Pop-Up’s spring tour tickets go on sale on April 9. It’s always an interesting show. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always poignant and well-produced. And never recorded so you must be there in person!

• climate science
• history

Knock Down The House follows four grassroots female candidates through their mission-driven campaigns to unseat incumbents during the 2018 midterm elections. The documentary, which won Festival Favorite at Sundance this January, will be released by Netflix on May 1. New Yorkers will be able to see it in an advance screening (including a Q&A with director Rachel Lears) at IFC Center on April 23.

Audrey Gelman takes us into the NY Times photo archives to tell the story of the women who brought power and voice to representative democracy long before AOC was a glimmer of hope for New Yorkers.

Time and again, women candidates have been met with derision or dismissed as “long shots” — in many cases, both. Take Elizabeth Holtzman: In 1972, the then-31-year-old stunned the whole of Washington when she upset a powerful 50-year male incumbent in the Democratic primary, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. (Sound familiar?)

And, of course, you can’t talk about women in politics without talking about Shirley Chisholm, a once-in-a-generation force for change who represented her Brooklyn district from 1969 to 1983. As she put it, “My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn’t always discuss for reasons of political expediency.” Despite her fearlessness — or, more aptly, because of it — opponents dismissed her, she said, as just a “little schoolteacher.” (She had been an educator before taking office.)

The photos alone are worth the click, but don’t miss Gelman’s sharp born-and-bred New Yorker observations.

• politics

I am blown away by the story of Luchita Hurtado, an artist whose work since the 40s has remained largely out of public view. She has her first two major solo exhibitions this year (at the age of 98!): Dark Years, drawings from the 40s and 50s at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown location (closes April 6), and a seven-decade retrospective at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery later in May. She lived and worked in New York (where she immigrated with her family from Venezuela at the age of 8), Marin County, Mexico City, Santa Monica, and Taos, New Mexico. Her work has evolved, as you can imagine, over the decades. Her life and work have brought her in contact with Isamu Noguchi, Judy Chicago, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Frida Kahlo. Her third husband was painter Lee Mullican. You just get the sense that she’s lived a true 20th century life, and is now getting to break out of that in a proper 21st century way.

The New York Times on Luchita Hurtado in January:

In her expansive oil paintings, ink-based drawings, fabric collages and patterned garments, Hurtado explores what she sees as the interconnectedness of all beings. Her paintings from the ’70s — sinuous bodies that morph into mountains, bare nipples that juxtapose spiky leaves, bulbous fruits that echo curving belly shapes — represent women as sacred beings, powerful subjects of their own lives. Hurtado also incorporated womb imagery into her work before the feminist art movement made popular the same subject matter in the late ’70s.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, is curating her retrospective at the Serpentine, has this to say:

“Women artists have not had the visibility they should have and we need to protest, systematically, against forgetting — through books and exhibitions,” Obrist says. The exhibition at the Serpentine will be animated by what he calls “decisive moments or epiphanies” throughout Hurtado’s life.

Related: You can see the stunning retrospective of Hilma af Klint, another female artist long overlooked, at the Guggenheim until April 23. I’m intrigued by HILMA inspired by the af Klint show, playing for two nights as part of the very special Works & Process series. The chamber opera stars a relative of Hilma’s as Rudolf Steiner, and his wife as Hilma herself (who produced and created the piece).

I must have been reading the wrong magazines as a teen, because I only recently found out that Tori Amos has been quite open in interviews about being into psychedelics in the 80s and 90s (and I was VERY into both Tori and magazines in the mid-90s). Most of these mentions only live on via old websites where fans painstakingly transcribed the interviews, so to preserve that fanzine quality I’ve left the typos intact. But first, a little primer on Tori, in case you weren’t an alt kid in the 90s.

The flame-haired daughter of a Methodist minister who grew up in Maryland, Tori was a piano prodigy from the age of 2 who left the church behind for music. She moved to Los Angeles in 1984 at the age of 21 and by 1986 was frontwoman to the synthpop group Y Kant Tori Read. The band was a flop by 1989, so in order to fulfill her contract with Atlantic Records she went out on her own. The resulting solo debut, Little Earthquakes, included a song honestly portraying her rape, alongside many solid, singalong-worthy tracks. She was a bit more raw, confessional, and vulnerable than the other female singer/songwriters who came up in the 90s, and thusly became a goddess among alternative rock-listening girls of my post gen-X cohort. You may just want to cue up Boys for Pele now (the third track off her 1996 album, Father Lucifer, was said to be written after an ayahuasca journey) . Ok, onto the drugs.

From a Q magazine article in 1998:

“Yeah, there was a period in the late ’80s where I was working with different shaman,” she says. “Myself and a friend Beene would take Iowaska - but it wouldn’t be in the liquid form, it would be a freeze-dried pill - and mushrooms. Some of those trips were eighteen hours long and I’ll never forget, once I ended up sitting by the bush trying to ask the flowers why they didn’t like me. It’s like, Why can’t I be your friend? I was crawling out of my skin at that time. In my twenties I was really…I was just losing my mind.”

In Esquire UK in 1999, when asked if she’d done hallucinogens lately:

Not very recently. I have Datura in my garden, but my gardener told me that some people oversteep it in water and then it’s poison and you die. I did a few 18-hour trips with a Shaman in the canyons in LA in the 80s. I’m glad I did it. And I’d do extasy journeys with women friends, Things are said that I couldn’t have heard or have said over a cup of coffee.

Q magazine, September 2001:

“It’s not like I’ve never done cocaine but, on the whole, if I can’t see dancing elephants I’m not interested,” she said.

“The drug which had a big effect on me was ayahuasca. It comes from a vine in the Amazon and you ingest it. You know that stuff they take in The Emerald Forest? It’s like that. I was hanging around with some medicine women and they suggested I try it. I was very lucid but felt like I was walking around in Fantasia, having a conversation with myself.

“It isn’t like acid. It’s more emotional, more mental. But it can grab you by the balls and just shove you up against the wall. I’ve been in a room with a woman who was literally trying to bite her own arm off. And this lasted for 15 hours. I wasn’t scared — just scared that I’d make a fool of myself. The funny thing was, I kept laughing and laughing, rather than sitting in the corner being intense. Then, every so often, I’d say, I’m in a really rough patch. And one of the medicine women would come over and reassure me that everything was going to be alright…

“I haven’t taken it in a couple of years now. You can only really do it once in a blue moon. But the wild thing is that sometimes I only have to smell something and I’m right back there again, high as a kite.”

Apparently I just needed access to UK magazines, which were certainly hard to come by in mid-90s Vermont. Also, this feels like the right place to thank Becky G. for giving me a tape in calc class (fall 1995?), titled “Becky made a tape for you / and gave you Tori Amos.” I would love to close this post with a scan of the Polaroid of me, wearing a classic Ben & Jerry’s tee, posed with Tori on her summer 1998 tour when I won tickets to a soundcheck and meet-and-greet before the show. Still likely one of the most surreal moment of my life. She told me she liked my name. Thanks to my local radio station WEQX for the tickets and the memory.

• drugs
• music

On the topic of death (a natural part of life we don’t often talk about), the website Modern Loss has extensive resources for many types of loss. Some places to start:

How To: Write a Sympathy Note

Don’t Talk About How “It Gets Better”

How To: Be A Good Listener

Modern Loss’ Grief Reads

On Grief and Social Media/Technology

Related: How Do You Help a Grieving Friend?

• death

Architect, curator, surfer, knight of the French government, partner, father, son, brother, and dear friend to many, Francois Perrin died on Monday in Ventura County, close to a favorite wave. He was from Paris but had been in Los Angeles for decades so was simultaneously both French and Californian. I really have no words sufficient for this so will let Alissa Walker’s tribute on Curbed LA stand. It deserves a full read but I’ve included some excerpts and quotes below.

‘He was a center of gravity’: Architect Francois Perrin dies at 50

On a breezy April evening in 2013, hundreds of partygoers were shuttled up Benedict Canyon to the Sheats-Goldstein Residence. The iconic Los Angeles home designed by John Lautner was familiar to every guest, but on that night, it would appear utterly transformed.

Tucked into the house’s concrete corners were a half-dozen site-specific pieces by French artist Xavier Veilhan, one of which was a surprise musical performance with Nicolas Godin, of the French electronic band Air. Guests sipped cocktails on a deck laced with nylon cording that knit the triangular roofline to the legendary pool. In the cantilevered window of the master bedroom, a facet-cut emerald sculpture of Lautner gazed out at the city below.

It was another ambitious installation from Francois Perrin, the type that LA’s design community had come to expect from the architect and curator who defied boundaries in his field and connected artists and designers across a wide orbit.

“He managed to create this really remarkable web of people and ideas and projects,” says LA architect Frank Escher. “It drew not just on his encyclopedic knowledge of recent architecture and art history, it also drew on on his ability to connect with people. That’s the thing that made him so interesting, the ease with which he built bridges and drew connections and made introductions. He was a center of gravity.”

Perrin’s concept-driven architecture made a splash, like the Skatehouse he designed for the owner of a skateboard shoe company in 2011. Although the home, which was supposed to be built in Malibu, was never realized, a full-scale model where every surface is skateable was produced, including curved ramp-like walls and a built-in headboard above the bed for grinding.

Goodbye friend. We’ll remember you, your expansive ideas, and your navy.

• architecture

I occasionally fantasize about ditching my iPhone and all related apps for a flip phone and fewer distractions. In this dream life, I have no notifications blinking at me, I don’t care about exes liking old Instagram photos of mine after months of not talking, I have no inbox anxiety, and I never experience a phantom buzz (currently listed on WebMD as Phantom Vibration Syndrome). I sit with a contented smile cross-legged pose overlooking a cliff. I go on long walks, surrounded by exotic flora and fauna, with big, open skies overhead. Gazing at cloud formations becomes a meditation in itself.

Please consider this my formal pitch to The New Yorker: recovering tech worker of almost a decade and a half leaves the modern world behind to look at the sky, be with nature, and attend talks amongst other cloud enthusiasts. For several blissful days on a mostly-uninhabited island (unless you count the puffins) off the North Devon coast, she exists with only a notebook, disposable camera, and her conscious awareness.

Read more about the upcoming sky gathering of the Cloud Appreciation Society on the isle of Lundy and see my earlier post on this very website from the fall. There’s a lot more cloud content on kottke.org if that’s your thing.

(First image via AMC, second via CAS)

• clouds
• travel

It was a long winter in New York, my first back east in years, so many of my posts this week will likely revolve around my (indoor) media consumption.

Even if you who don’t regularly listen to podcasts, I highly recommend this episode by The Nod: Can MDMA Treat Racial Trauma?

Horizons has good resource list on therapeutic uses of psychedelics if you’re curious about current research. You can also search clinicaltrials.gov for current trials accepting new patients.

• podcasts
• psychedelics
• racism

Ben Burtt was the sound designer for the original Star Wars trilogy and was responsible for coming up with many of the movies’ iconic sounds, including the lightsaber and Darth Vader’s breathing.¹ In this video, Burtt talks at length about how two dozens sounds from Star Wars were developed.

The base sound for the blaster shots came from a piece of metal hitting the guy-wire of a radio tower — I have always loved the noise that high-tension cables make. And I never noticed that Vader’s use of the force was accompanied by a rumbling sound. Anyway, this is a 45-minute masterclass in scrappy sound design.

See also: how the Millennium Falcon hyperdrive malfunction noise was made, exploring the sound design of Star Wars, and This Happy Dog Sounds Like a TIE Fighter.

1. Burtt was the sound designer for the Indiana Jones trilogy, E.T. (he got the voice from an old woman he met who smoked Kool cigarettes), and did the voice for Wall-E. He’s also a big reason why you hear the Wilhelm scream in lots of movies.↩

• audio
• Ben Burtt
• film school
• movies
• Star Wars
• video

Buster Keaton: Anarchitect is a lovely piece of analysis by Will Jennings about how the legendary silent film actor used architectural space in his movies.

Keaton’s comedy derives largely from the positioning — and constant, unexpected repositioning — of his body in space, and in architectural space particularly. Unlike other slapstick performers who relished in the close-up and detailed attention to the protagonist, Keaton frequently directed the camera to film with a wide far-shot that could contain the whole of a building’s facade or urban span within the frame. Proud of always carrying out his own (often extremely dangerous) stunts, this enabled him to show the audience that his actions were performed in real-time — and real-place — rather than simply being tricks of the camera or editing process. It also allowed him to visually explore the many ways in which his body could engage with the urban form.

• architecture
• Buster Keaton
• movies

The New Yorker asked five designers to design book covers for the Mueller Report in the event that it’s eventually published. Here are my two favorites, by Michael Bierut and Na Kim:

• books
• design
• Michael Bierut
• Na Kim
• Robert Mueller