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When I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, summer was all about quasi-anarchic, unsupervised free-range child roaming. It was decidedly not about homework, so you may not recall those reading lists teachers used to assign us all that fondly. But I do! (I even once assigned myself a book report for the fun of itdont ask.) As a book hound who grew up to be a journalist who covers books and authors, I get pitched a lot of them, and more often than not theres a precarious tower of tomes on my desk. So as summer kicks off, its time to once again get lost in a reading list. Whether youre beach bound or holed up at home, these eight books offer myriad lenses through which to view the past, present, and future of design and the artsno book report required. [Cover Image: Phaidon] Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US compiled by Andrew Satake Blauvelt (out July 3) Cranbrook alum Charles Eames once said, Eventually everything connects: people, ideas, objects. This book explores those intersections at the school that was essentially ground zero for the mid-century modern movement. Curated by Andrew Blauvelt (director of the Cranbrook Art Museum, which is hosting an exhibition of the same title through September 21), this 464-page tome explores work by the likes of Eero Saarinen and Florence Knoll, as well as women and designers of color who are often overlooked in the history books. Like Dominic Bradburys Mid-Century Modern Designers, Blauvelts examination offers a spotlight and reappraisal of these unsung heroes alongside the usual names, and it does so with a great editorial design system notable for its use of color, which extends to the cover, spine, and even those painted edges. [Cover Image: Penguin Random House] Exhibitionist: 1 Journal, 1 Depression, 100 Paintings by Peter Mendelsund Peter Mendelsund is the definition of a polymath: classical pianist turned book cover design extraordinaire, turned author, turned Atlantic creative director . . . But the one thing he never did was paintuntil he experienced a severe depression that nearly claimed his life. Exhibitionist is a memoir that might not be the lightest summer read, but it is a testament to the sheer restorative nature of art, and the work that just might have saved one of the best working artists today. [Cover Image: Princeton Architectural Press] 100 Logos: A to Z by Louise Fili (out August 26) This tiny treat features lettering icon Louise Fili’s favorite marks from throughout her career, from Ecco Press and Tiffany & Co. to more obscure regional clientswhere the work truly surprises and delights, perhaps the result of being untethered from boardrooms and committees. You could flip through the book in about 5 or 10 minutesbut you could also look at this collection of ornate logos for hours, given the artistry and attention to scrupulous detail that went into each one. [Cover Image: Yale University Press] Ruth Asawa: Retrospective edited by Janet Bishop and Cara Manes If youre only familiar with Ruth Asawas iconic wire sculptures, youre in for a treatbecause for a half-century-plus, the trailblazer was busy making paintings, casts, prints, and more, and it can all be found in this book. In 2020, Cronicle published the insightful biography Everything She Touched, and this volume is a robust, essential companion that goes further down the rabbit hole of Asawas brilliance. (Moreover, between the recently published Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury and the forthcoming Ruth Asawa: The Tamarind Prints, its a big year for fresh insights into the modernist whose work we might have thought we knew well.) [Cover Image: Tune and Fairweather] Process by Matthew Seiji Burns, featuring design by Mark Wynne The plot of this novel is straightforward enough (and likely uncomfortably familiar to many who work in Silicon Valley): Lucas Adderson is a young man driven by an almost animalistic need to find outsized success creating the next unicorn tech juggernaut. His days are riddled with surreal meetings and strange characters, anxiety, and self-torture. Finally, after years of trying, his goal is within his grasp, but its consummation occurs at a great cost to his humanity, and perhaps everyone elses too. What is wholly unfamiliar is the design by Wynne and publisher Tune & Fairweather, best known for its gorgeous books exploring the worlds of FromSoftware video games like Elden Ring and Bloodborne. Among Wynnes inspirations were visually interwoven reads like House of Leaves and The Medium is the Massage, and here he immerses readers in the story through experimental typography. The type shape-shifts; it expands and contracts; it fragments; as the main characters mental state breaks down, it does, too. It can be demanding at timesbut with that challenge comes immersion, and a curious new reading experience. [Cover Image: Assouline] Self-Portraits: From 1800 to the Present curated by Philippe Ségalot and Morgane Guillet Were accustomed to seeing self-portraits as curious one-off moments in an artists show or museumbut to see a collection of some 60 in one place is as obvious as it is remarkable. From Pablo Picasso to Paul Gauguin and Cindy Sherman, this intimate journey across art history ultimately fascinates in not just seeing how an artist distills themselves through their own filter, but in questioning and probing what self-portraiture means at large. While I wouldnt shove this book into a beach bagit is, after all, a luxe Assouline volumeit very much invites a place for pondering on your coffee table. [Cover Image: Skyhorse] The Education of a Design Writer by Steven Heller and Molly Heintz (out June 24) Im not recommending this book because I have an essay inside itIm doing so because of all the other people who do, too: Ken Carbone, Chappell Ellison, Jarrett Fuller, Rick Griffith, Karrie Jacobs, Mark Kingsley, Warren Lehrer, Ellen Lupton, Silas Munro, Virginia Postrel, Anne Quito, Angela Riechers, Adrian Shaughnessy, Veronique Vienne, Rob Walker . . . and the list goes on. With 200-plus books under his belt, Steven Heller (who Ive edited for a number of years) is perhaps the best-known design writer outside of Philip B. Meggs. So when he pulls together a book on the craft, as he did here with Molly Heintz, the rest of us are wise to listen (or, you know, readand then write). [Cover Image: Fuel Design] Ukrainian Modernism by Dmytro Soloviov Full disclosure: I know very little about Ukrainian modernist architecture. But Im apparently not alone Per Fuel Publishing, these ingenious buildings have not gotten their due for a variety of factorsincluding the stigma of belonging to the Soviet era, corruption, neglect, as well as the ongoing threat of destruction from both unscrupulous developers and war. So, Soloviov sought to give them their due, with their resilience perhaps a mirror to Ukraines people at large. Another full disclosure: I have not yet gotten my hands on a copy of this bookbut I cant wait to rectify my knowledge when I do. Homework: assigned. Extra Credit! The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram Draw by Kenya Hara Jason Polan: The Post Office edited by Jason Fulford (out September 23) Extraordinary Pools by Naina Gupta Good Movies as Old Books by Matt Stevens The War of Art: A History of Artists Protest in America by Lauren ONeill-Butler (out June 17) Gardens for Modern Houses by Beth Dunlop
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Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is ruthlessly optimized to reward results. Nonetheless, failure is a part of everyones lifeand an essential part of achievement in fields ranging from sports to science. In fact, high achievers are those who fail more oftennot lessthan the average person. They take more risks, go outside their comfort zone, set more challenging goals, and engage more frequently and vigorously in improving their performanceand this is how they succeed. You cant lose if you never playyou also cant win. Runner-up But what about coming in second? Is there value to the near missto being so close to a win, but falling short? In education, being salutatorian is impressive. But it still means you miss out on the valedictory speech and its attendant scholarship. A high spot on the university waitig list rarely becomes an enrollment offer. In careers, the runner-up performer might earn a congratulatory email but not the promotion or hefty salary increase; the second-best job interview candidate gets little consolation from knowing they almost received a job offer but are still unemployed. Salespeople who hit 99% of their quota still forfeit the Hawaiian-vacation incentive and bonus. In research, the lab that publishes second loses the patent, the grant, and the headlines. And if you are the runner-up in a presidential election, theres at best a slim chance you can run again in the future, and your popularity may actually decrease after losing (in politics, this loser effect leads to a dip in confidence from voters, and theres often no time for a second chance). Near misses as opportunity And yet, near misses are not as disastrous as the above thought experiments suggest. Indeed, finishing a hairs breadth behind the winner still means youve outperformed almost everyone elsebe they hundreds of classmates, thousands of job applicants, or an entire electorate. Moreover, the person who edges you out isnt necessarily better on merit alonefactors like political currents, privilege, or just plain luck can tip the scales. Perhaps most importantly, coming up just short can serve as a springboard for growth, offering the chance to learn, adapt, and come back strongerprovided you choose to seize it. Heres why: Lessons learned First, while everyone prefers success to failure, it is often easier to learn from failure than from success. Success tells you that you are great; it is the socially accepted way to provide you with positive feedback on your talents, reinforcing your self-belief, and inflating your ego. While this sounds greatand without much in the way of downsidesuccess is also likely to generate complacency, overconfidence, and arrogance (its much easier to stay humble in defeat). Conversely, failures are opportunities to learn, especially when you see them as learning experiments that provide you with critical feedback on your skills, choices, and behaviors. As Niels Bohr wisely noted, An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. In short, a near miss can act as an inherently, if brutally honest audit of your assumptions and strategiesuncovering blind spots that success tends to conceal. By forcing youor at least inviting youto diagnose exactly why you fell short, a near miss suggests you refine your mental models; rethink and tweak your tactics; and build new, better tested, decision-making muscles. Failing enthusiastically Second, failure increases the gap between your aspirational self (who you want to be) and your actual self (who you are, at least from a reputational standpoint). This uncomfortable psychological gap is only reduced through hard work, grit, and persistence, which together strengthen your chances of succeeding in the future. At the very least, they help you become a better version of yourself, even if you dont succeed in achieving a sought-after prize or goal. As Winston Churchill famously noted, Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. Importantly, near misses can be a powerful form of failure precisely because they hurt the most. Being so close to a success can reaffirm your determination and reignite your ambition. Every extraordinary achiever (across fields) differs from others in one important way: they are less likely to be satisfied with their achievements. Indeed, the most common reason people fail to learn from failure is that they are too wounded or hurt by their lack of success, to the point that it extinguishes their drive. In contrast, extraordinary achievers will not give up or let goeven when their failures are hard to digest. This ambitious mindset helps them seek to understand the factors leading to their near misses without getting deflated or depressed by them. Instead, it makes them even hungrier for victory, resilient, and focused on bouncing back stronger. Emotionally resilient Third, the way you respond to any form of defeat or failure, and especially the painful near misses, sends a powerful signal to everyone around youinvestors, bosses, or teammatesthat youre emotionally mature, resilient, and coachable. Humans have a general tendency to attribute their successes to their own talents and merit, while blaming others, or situations, for their failures and misses. Avoiding this tendency makes you an exception to the norm. This will be noticed and will impress others. While resilience is largely a function of your personality (the more emotionally stable, extroverted, curious, agreeable, and especially conscientious you are, the more resilience you will show), we can all work to increase our resilience if we truly care about achieving our end goal, by becoming grittier and harnessing whatever mental toughness we have. When you dissect a near miss with curiosity and humility, you demonstrate a growth mindset that invites collaboration and sparks confidence in your potential. Visible resilience often earns more credibility (and resources) than a flawless run, because it shows youre willing to learn in public. Over time, people who witness your thoughtful rebound become your strongest advocates, eager to back the next iteration of your vision. Life, despte how it feels in disappointing moments, is not a final exam but a continuous assessment; what matters most is not brilliant one-off successes but reliable, steady, determined excellence. As Aristotle pointed out, We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Greater legacies To be sure, theres no shortage of prominent historical figures who confirm how near misses and other kinds of failures in their early career stages were poor indicators of their actual talent and potential but instead unfortunate or unlucky episodes, uncharacteristic of their brilliance. Consider Roger Federer: after six runner-up finishes on tour, he finally lifted Wimbledons trophy in 2003 and would go on to amass 20 Grand Slam titles. The Netherlands of 1974, whose Total Football lost the final, rewrote soccers playbook. J.K. Rowling, turned down by 12 publishers, went on to sell over 600 million Harry Potter copies. Barbara McClintock, whose jumping genes work was ignored for decades, earned a 1983 Nobel Prize for the discovery. Meryl Streep, whose first Oscar nod in 1979 went unrewarded, has since racked up 21 nominations and 3 wins. The Beatles were rejected by Decca as yesterdays sound before selling some 1.6 billion records. And Alibaba, once dwarfed by eBay in China, now serves over a billion annual active consumers. Each of these (and many other) examples provide evidence that near misses can herald even greater legacies. Ultimately, the sting of almost is less a verdict on your potential than an invitation to hone it. Near misses arent life sentencestheyre signposts pointing to gaps in your strategy, fuel for your ambition, and a live demonstration of your character to the world. While it is tempting to ruminate about what could have or should have happened, the truth is we never know. We all indulge in counterfactual fantasiesthose what if spirals where we picture an alternate universe in which we married someone else, took the other job, or moved to that city. Psychologists call them sliding doors moments: innocuous-seeming forks in the road that, in hindsight, feel like cosmic turning points. But while its human to ruminate, its wiser to remember that were not omniscient authors of our own lives. The illusion of total control is just thatan illusion. More often than not, the best way to recover from regret or disappointment is not by obsessing over the road not taken, but by taking a different road. Que será, será. Life is less about scripting your destiny than adapting to its plot twists. In other words, how you react to failure matters, but failure is too brutal and negative a word for simply not getting what you think you preferred or wanted, especially when it may not even be what you actually needed or ought to have preferred. When we embrace each narrow defeat as data, not destiny, we are able to build the very habits and resilience that turn almost into subsequent undeniable success. As the saying goes, experience is what you get when you didnt get what you wanted. We add that experience can be more valuable than the objective success of getting what you wanted. In fact, enjoyment of objectives successes including of awards and victories, tends to be more short-lived than we expect. We need not define ourselves by our past and present achievements. Who we are also comprises our future self, including our possible selvesthe parts of our character and identity that are actually the only ones we can influence.
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A few weeks ago, I finally paid for ChatGPT Plus. It started with a simple goal: I wanted to create a personal archive of my published articles, but wasnt sure how to begin. That led to a long back-and-forth with ChatGPT, where we built a Python script to scrape my author pages, download the content, and format everything cleanly. By the time I hit the free usage limit, I was too invested to pause or switch to another chatbot. So I upgraded. In hindsight, the money ($20 per month) was well spent. For one, it worked: I now have a folder on my computer containing more than a decades worth of articles. More importantly, this was the moment that AI tools clicked for me. I’ve had little success using them to write, and often recoil at the images they churn out. When I ask ChatGPT and Google Gemini for factual information, they’re liable to get the details wrong on all but the most widely understood topics. But in this case, ChatGPT saved me days of tedious workand opened my eyes to what else might now be possible. (The idea of creating code without knowing how to code has even been coined vibecoding by Andrej Karpathy.) If I could use AI to build personal Python scripts, what other plugins or extensions could I try next? Web extensions, plug-ins, and more Unlike my colleague Harry McCracken, I’m not using AI to dream up entirely new apps. I already have too many apps from actual professionals on my phone and computer, and I don’t trust AI (or myself) enough to compete with them. What I’ve really gotten into, though, is using AI to extend and improve the software I use already. For instance, I take notes and draft stories in Obsidian, an app that’s endlessly extensible via user-created plug-ins. I’ve always dreamed of a quick note plug-in for Obsidian that matches the simplicity of Google Keep, but have yet to find anything that works. After a few hours of vibecoding, I finally built the plug-in myself. Now, through Obsidians right sidebar, I can view all the notes from any folder in a card-based layout and edit them directly from the sidebar. The plug-in also lets me pin notes to the top, create new notes with a single click, send notes to an archive folder, and search with real-time results. It even works in Obsidians mobile app, with the quick-notes view just a swipe away. I’ve also been tweaking some existing plug-ins for Flow Launcher, a free Windows app for executing quick actions from a command bar. I took a plug-in for window management and added some new sizing options, and I modified a browser history search plug-in to make it work with my current browser (Floorp). AI tools are also useful for creating browser bookmarklets, which are special kinds of bookmarks for doing things like decluttering web pages and speeding up videos. I already wrote an entire article about that, but now I’ve created an additional bookmarklet for downloading YouTube videos. This works by connecting to a local Python server that silently processes video links and sends them to my Downloads folder. In all cases, the process was the same: I would tell ChatGPT exactly what I was trying to make, and asked for clear, step-by-step instructions on how to make it. I’d follow the instructions, compile the code, and go back to ChatGPT for fixes or refinements. Some assembly required I dont want to oversell vibecoding as an effortless activity. Each of the above projects took hours to build, as I inevitably fall down a rabbit hole of tweaking, clarifying, and troubleshooting. Thats partly because AI can be as unreliable in coding as it is in other endeavors. ChatGPT has a habit of confidently declaring that its produced working code, only for errors to appear when compiling or running it. Ive spent hours feeding it error messages, trying to get it to recognize basic syntax issues or missing functions. On several occasions, Ive had to abandon a chat entirely and start a new one after the code modifications veered too far off track. Even when everything is working properly, its easy to fall prey to scope creep. You might think its simple to add a new feature or tweak the design, but those changes can easily turn into additional hours of refining and fixing. (In fairness, this happens in actual software development, too.) And while you can accomplish a lot without formal programming knowledge, youll still need a solid grasp of how file systems work and some basic sense of what code should look like. ChatGPT might ask you to replace one snippet with another, or mistakenly claim its providing full code when large portions are missing. Being able to spot when AI is about to screw up can go a long way. Take some control back One last disclaimer: I’m not nearly confident enough in what I’ve created to share it with the world, as I’m sure other folks would run into bugs or ask for features that I’m thoroughly unqualified to address. I also wouldn’t suggest vibecoding anything that handles sensitive data or important personal information. But for the things vibecoding is good atsmall, personal utilities that no one else would want to makeit’s immensely satisfying and even empowering. As Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick recently pointed out, lowering the barriers to software development is a great way to push back against enshittification by major tech companies, whose products inevitably get weighed down by the need to scale and extract more money from captive users. To that point, you don’t even need AI anymore once the vibe coding is done. Having built what I need for the foreseeable future, I cancelled my ChatGPT Plus subscription after a single month’s payment.
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