David W. Orr on the Inextricable Links Between Climate and Democracy
David W. Orr could be considered at once an educator’s educator, a political scientist’s political scientist, and an ecologist’s ecologist. Through his non-self-serious, aw-shucks attitude; wry wit; raw oratorical talent (he’s the son of a preacher); and vast knowledge, Orr has continuously delivered conversation- and curricula-shifting books (nine so far, including, most recently, Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, from M.I.T. Press, which he edited), articles (more than 250 to date), and lectures (hundreds around the world) with an impressive consistency and cadence. While he could be considered a generalist, through his long-view understanding of both democracy and the climate crisis, Orr’s also a specialist, someone deeply focused on the repair and strengthening of American democracy. The Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics emeritus at Oberlin College and currently a professor at Arizona State University, he is by turns an erudite academic and a political-science wonk, but also a cool-headed intellect and the kind of laid-back funnyman you’d want to grab a beer with.
On the latest episode of our At a Distance podcast, we talk with Orr about his latest book; the herculean leap required to reach what he calls “Democracy 4.0”; and why, in our “long emergency” that is the climate crisis, we must “stretch our hearts to reach out to other species and future generations.”
Click here to listen to the full interview on our At a Distance podcast.
First, I should say outright that I could not think of a more timely subject or title for your book: Democracy in a Hotter Time. This is something that’s been on my mind for years now, and I can’t really understand why it’s been so overlooked. It’s nice to see a book about the subject finally come out. Could you lay out for the listeners how you view these dual crises—democracy under threat and the climate crisis—and the ways in which they’re linked and intertwined? Neither is as stable, I think, as we’ve all thought.
Well, sure. The book started several years ago. I was teaching at Oberlin College, and in 2017, we did a conference on the state of American democracy. The acronym is SAD. [Laughter] The point of the gathering—it was three days, started off with Jane Mayer from The New Yorker and ended with William Barber, the great preacher, three days later. We were trying to get at: How did we get to the election of 2016? What happened? Then we published, out of that, a book called Democracy Unchained from New Press, and we had planned fourteen events across the country, starting at the National Cathedral on March 20, 2020. Cathedral staff told us in our weekly call, about two weeks from the event, “Hey, we’ve got great news, and we’ve got bad news. The great news is, we’re going to have a standing-room-only crowd. The nave and both wings will be filled. The bad news is, we’ll have to cancel.” We set about to do online events. We did eleven online events, drew an audience, I think, of about a million people, maybe a bit more. It included David Brooks, Jill Lepore from Harvard. It was an all-star crowd.
The next phase of the work, we decided to focus on democracy and climate. Our assumptions started off as, basically, that democracy is worth fighting for. For all of its flaws, it’s the only system of governance that ought to—and can—protect human dignity and all the things that we really value. Churchill, in that famous and overused comment, said it was the worst form of government, except for all the others that have ever been tried. I don’t quite subscribe to that. But that starts off the [argument that] democracy, what we have now, came down over years of history; it’s a gift. A lot of people died for it and sacrificed for it. So here we are.
Is it easy to do? No. Democracy is really tough. It requires the hardest of all things: forbearance, a capacity to listen, and a bit of humility along the way, to listen to other people and hear other viewpoints. The climate comes at us with a lot of warnings. Svante Arrhenius, the great Swedish scientist, predicted where we’d be if we burned as much carbon as we have. He was ballpark accurate. As a Swede, he thought it was a good thing to warm up a bit. [Laughs] But we now have a series of warnings. Like pixels accumulating in a picture, the view gets sharper and sharper with every scientific report.
So our first assumption is that democracy, for all of its worth, won’t survive climate change. Climate change, sooner or later, will accumulate so many problems. Rising sea levels and droughts and all of those things end up with social stresses and economic traumas and so forth. Democracy won’t survive that. Governance generally may not survive it. The second assumption we make is that, if we’re going to solve the climate or manage the climate crisis, it has to be through democracy. We have to engage the public and tap into this reservoir of creativity and ingenuity, and, I think, even patriotism exists in the public realm.
The third assumption is that democracy isn’t what we have now. Thinking about the history of this and collapsing this into a short description, Democracy 1.0 was all the kinds of governance that had never been tried—tribal systems and so forth around the world, up through the Iroquois or Shoshone. Democracy 2.0 starts in Greece. Greek democracy, was it perfect? No, not at all. There was slavery and so forth, all kinds of problems. What you might call 3.0 begins in Philadelphia, the culmination of the Enlightenment, with Thomas Jefferson sitting in that Philadelphia hotel room and beginning to pen the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln drew on that as the core principle of American democracy. 4.0 has yet to be invented. But each of the preceding kinds of democracy required an extension of the constituency, from a tribal level, to the Greek level, to the Democracy 3.0. Every time we improved democracy, we widened that thing called “We the People,” the constituency for democracy. So in the beginning, a document written by slave owners had to reckon with slavery. And then Democracy 4.0 has to reckon with all these people, and let me put the word beings out there, left out. So other species, natural systems, and future generations.
This is going to be a tough extension, because Democracy 4.0 has to reckon with the sins of 3.0. We built this enormous capitalist enterprise globally. But we did it on the backs of a lot of people. Colonialism was an artifact of that era, and we extracted resources and exploited people mercilessly. Democracy 4.0 is going to have to be global. To a great extent, it will vary from culture to culture; it’s not going to be a copycat kind of thing. But the basic principle is to allow people to have a say in how they’re governed by whom and to what purpose.
And so, Democracy 4.0 is in the process of invention. But having said that, I’ve got to say that all the pieces are there. You don’t have to sort through many recent books, or books written in the last fifty years, that lay out what has to be done. But it would be a leap to get to 4.0. The working assumption is that if we’re going to manage the climate crisis in any humanly decent and ecologically solvent way, we have got to widen the constituency of people. In practical terms, I think this means several things right off the bat. It means all the reforms that John Lewis proposed—that he proposed for a long time: the franchise right to vote has got to be guaranteed; it is not guaranteed in the Constitution. Gerrymandering—the right to vote in a fair electoral district has got to be guaranteed. And it’s hard to run a smart country with dumb people, so the constituency has got to be educated.
So the work ahead is hard. I think the good news is that a good bit of the intellectual work has been done. We’re now down to organizing. If you get the questions right and ask any number of people—even people on the, quote, “political right”—do you want to breathe dirty air? The answer is no. Do you want to drink dirty water? No. The answer comes back to the same. Do you want to live in climate chaos? The answer is going to be no. Do you want your children to have a decent life on the planet? The answer is yes. So a good bit of the work has already been done. We’ve won a lot of battles. Now it’s an organizing battle. As Frederick Douglass once said, “Power never gives up.” Never has, never will.
And so, a good bit of the fight—and it will be a fight; there will be casualties—will entail overcoming the powers of money, fossil fuels, entrenched interests, just the sense that this is what we do. This is the fight of our lives. This is the fight. The younger generation, if they’re looking for something to do, in Tom Berry’s words, this is the great work ahead.
You describe, in the book, our current situation as a “long emergency,” and I wanted to ask about that. Do you view democracy and its ability to endure in certain terms? Or, I guess phrased differently, how can democracy exist—and even thrive—in this long emergency?
Well, that’s a complicated answer. Let me say this with required humility: I don’t know the answer. But I think that if I start with, first of all, the word “long emergency,” that’s simply baked into the biophysical reality. Once carbon is in the atmosphere, it stays there for a long time. We haven’t seen the worst of global warming yet. We’re just seeing the opening chapter of the book.
The long emergency means that carbon will be in the atmosphere for a long time. This past summer has been a real primer in how the Earth works physically under provocation. The build-up of greenhouse gasses—we worry mostly about carbon dioxide, but if you add the other greenhouse gasses to trap all heat-trapping gasses, we’re really closer to five hundred parts per million than we are to four hundred twenty-two. This won’t change quickly. Ninety-seven percent of the heat generated [by greenhouse gasses] has gone into the oceans. The amount of heat is staggering. Bill McKibben had an article several years ago saying that the amount of heat released every day is roughly equivalent to four Hiroshima-sized bombs going off every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week. All the combustion and the fires in our cars and industrial processes add roughly to a calculation of that much heat. Even if he’s wrong by one or two bombs, it’s still a lot.
So the long emergency is largely an artifact of what we’ve done to the planet. It will take a long time for them to recoup and fall back to the level of…. when I was born, a million years ago, I think the carbon level was around three hundred fifteen parts per million. And that’s the long emergency part. The “everybody” part of democracy: I think we have to begin to understand that governments can’t solve all of this. That’s a right-wing notion. But I think governments are going to be overwhelmed with multiple disasters. If you imagine a scenario—which is not at all far-fetched—we have a nuclear accident, a massive drought, three hurricanes hit, and a terrorist act all at one time. I don’t think there’s a government anywhere that could handle all of that. FEMA’s not big enough. If you simply look at the things that we have to do to provision ourselves—food, energy, water, materials, healthcare and all the rest—I think we have to tap into that ingenuity of the public. W.E.B. Du Bois, in a kind of famous essay in 1919, spoke in those terms, about tapping into the public ability to do things. People are smart, and given a cause and a reason to do something, they can do a lot of things.
What we have to understand is how to calibrate the political needs, and the public needs, with that individual capacity. For example, in World War II, Americans grew something like forty percent of their own vegetables in backyard gardens—victory gardens—and the ingenuity that resides at that public level, to solve things. Rebecca Solnit’s book some years back, A Paradise Built in Hell, was about the Katrina disaster and how people came out to help each other—and for all the things that went wrong with that. I think we have to understand how to publicly build a channel for those things to occur—a platform for that to occur. The internet can help a lot by connecting people locally, but this is a face-to-face thing as much as anything else.
I think a part of what has fueled the right wing distemper has been, in fact, we don’t do things together much anymore. We sit and complain and argue with each other. We don’t do things much anymore. We don’t have what the Amish, in this part of the world, call “barnraising,” where everybody comes down to build a barn for somebody whose barn was burned down. It wouldn’t be that simple. But local food systems, local farmers markets, volunteers in schools, volunteer firefighters, first responders—coming together builds a bond that we have to restore. But it’s a face-to-face kind of bond. The long emergency is just baked into the way the earth works, its physical system. The democracy part is, I think, to begin to reinvent what John Dewey, years ago, described as: “Local democracy” begins at the grassroots and then moves up. It’s not foreordained at the top and passed down.
I happen to believe that people are mostly good. There are some exceptions that we all can name, but I think people are mostly good. Very few people wake up in the morning and say, “I want to endanger another species” or “I want to add another degree to the climate.” We just go about our daily work. Part of the job of deducing or drawing forth goodness in us is partly by example—seeing people do things—and partly by opportunity, and partly by connectedness.
Anyway, that sounds like a sermon in a Presbyterian church. Take up the offering. [Laughter]
Well, to bring it back to your book, one of the essays begins, simply, “The planet is burning.” Another starts with, “Burning hills and glowing red skies, stone-dry riverbeds, expanses of brown water engulfing tiny human rooftops. This is the setting for the twenty-first century.” There’s a bluntness and a bleakness to some of these texts. But at the same time, there are all of these solutions presented. I like that you just referenced Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, because that’s really what that book is all about. For you, what are some of the more compelling or realizable solutions that you yourself know about or that are presented in the book?
I have to start with education, because that’s where I’ve run my flag for a half century in the educational world. My dad was a college president. So from the time I was 5, until the current time, I’ve been in and around higher education. I don’t see it as a panacea. It’s one of those things that’s a necessary but not sufficient change. But education has also been implicated in the crisis. We’ve done a lot of things that were shortsighted, as it turned out, and compromised the human prospect. But I think education, and particularly the kind of education that engages young people in actually doing things…. So to supplement a college or university curriculum, years ago, or in the last twenty-five years, I’ve participated in an educational program at Schumacher College in Devon, England. And it’s just a great, little two-week place where you get together and talk. You begin to connect with human beings, and you do things together, take walks together or work together. In between teaching at University of North Carolina and Oberlin, I took eleven years out to build an educational center, where the goal was to connect head, hand, and heart. And it was just a lot of fun. Every event we did there, we had music, everybody did something physical and learned to do something or make something that they didn’t know how to before they arrived. Education can be a lot more proactive in calling out the better angels of our nature. I think it’s kind of the bedrock for all of this.
To go over to the political agenda, I think the most important thing is to get money out of politics. I don’t think you can run…. This is nothing new. Aristotle and Plato basically said the same thing. I think that money, in our society, has created an oligarchy, where the wealthiest five people own more or are wealthier than the bottom, whatever it is, fifty percent or eighty percent. You can’t keep a democracy going with that kind of economic imbalance. That’s nothing new.
I think, in terms of politics, I think we just have to end the Electoral College. There was a reason for it back in James Madison’s day. That reason’s long gone. But you can’t have New York State or California with two senators, and Wyoming with three hundred people and four million cows, with two senators. There’s some hard political reforming that has got to be done.
Going back a bit, it’s now been more than three decades since you wrote your first book, Ecological Literacy, in 1992. How do you think about these past three decades from an ecological literacy perspective? How does today’s conversation around ecological matters compare to the one in the early nineties?
Boy, that’s such an interesting question, thanks for asking. That’s the subject of a book I’m working on right now. That’ll be probably two years in the making, but to revisit those years, some of those issues: One way to see this is that we won. All that ferment won. It won in a cultural sense. Even hardcore “conservatives” support core principles that we fought over in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties.
In a second sense, and in a more ominous way, I think every problem that we thought we had, or we knew we had in those years, has gotten worse. Almost everything. And some new ones have come on. Artificial Intelligence is another one. In the 1980s, I invited Joe Weizenbaum, who was a computer scientist, refugee from Nazi Germany as a kid, came to the United States, taught at M.I.T., and was one of the great computer scientists in his day. He helped to found the internet. We had him for a week on campus. A wonderful man. He had written a book called Computer Power and Human Reason ten years before. Still in print; it still is a very good read. I think what’s happened is that we’ve allowed this conversation about A.I. to get way too far without corrective action. Joe Weizenbaum said we really don’t need it, shouldn’t do it. That came up in these long conversations we had over the course of that week. It’s dangerous. He saw the dangers. But so did Norbert Wiener, the great M.I.T. mathematician. In 1948, in an article The New York Times reprinted seven or eight years ago, he said, these systems arrive at sentience, which eventually they will—self-awareness. We have no good reason to believe they’ll be kindly disposed to us. Those were his words. And so, you and I are “carbon-based intelligence.” We’ve had stubbed toes and broken hearts and wondered at the night sky and had pet doggies. A.I. is “silicon intelligence,” and has never had these experiences. That’s taken by some people as something good, because it means it’ll be decisions without emotion. But intelligence—raw intelligence—without emotion is like a car with no governor. There’s nothing to direct all that energy and all that smartness.
So, to answer your question, I think some things have gotten better. And I would not want to downplay that. If we decided to solarize the planet and end fossil fuels globally, I think a determined effort could do that by the year 2050 or shortly thereafter. The technology is mostly there. The economic case for doing it is mostly there. The other issues—of nuclear war and artificial intelligence—are different issues. The horse left the barn a long time ago.
I think we need to rethink science and technology, these prosthetic devices that extend our capabilities and our hatreds and affections. That has yet to be done. Again, I despair a little bit about the way technology has gotten a free ride. There was a time in which Lewis Mumford and other people were critiquing that, and it goes way back into Mary Shelley and before Mary Shelley, but it was a time when it was easier to critique these prosthetic devices. They always arrive with—benefits come first, and then the fine print is read later. We mostly see what they do to us through the rearview mirror; what they’re going to do for us is through the windshield. That’s the prospect.
I remain what—Loren Eiseley, the anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, once said he’s a “midnight optimist.” He’s late, but he’s still alive. I’m getting off topic here, but I don’t find the words optimist and pessimist very helpful. I think our language needs an overhaul. We’re “liberal” or “conservative”—I don’t think these say anything very important about what we actually believe. Optimism and pessimism, I think, ought to be put aside. Let’s just buckle down, do what we can, what’s before us. Everybody has something to offer in this process.
But I’ve strayed—you’ve been very patient as I’ve gone far out on a limb.
Well, it’s amazing to hear you speak in this way, because I think it just shows how dynamic and interconnected all these things are. They’re not simple; you can’t talk about them in simple terms. It requires time and deep thought. I was curious, was there an “aha” moment for you, or a moment as you were growing up, where you knew that ecological matters would be your path, in a way? Was there a particular event or thing that shifted for you?
No, I don’t think so. I wish there was a road-to-Damascus conversion, some lightning bolt, “Aha! Wow!” There was no such thing. I think my great passion is not so much “ecological” in a neuroscientific sense as the desire to connect, or just a curiosity of what’s related to what.
My dad was both a college president and a Presbyterian preacher. And the root of the word religion means “to bind together,” and the root word of ecology, going back into the Greek etymology, is much the same; it’s the interrelatedness of these things. So the interrelatedness of all of these issues, you can’t—is it “pull a thread without troubling the stars”? Somebody once put it better than that. I think that that is both portentous, and just damn interesting. The things that flourish intellectually, I think, for the most part, are making those kinds of connections.
The same thing ought to pervade our thinking about the human future: How do we connect to all that ever was and all that ever will be, and all that is right now? I’ve traveled enough to know that it’s hard to find or talk to anybody, anywhere on the planet, that you don’t share something in common with, and from whom you can’t learn something. We’re just all variations on a theme. We’re all human.
To finish this conversation, what’s giving you the most hope as you look forward? Do you sense that there is indeed a long-overdue change happening? What makes you wake up in the morning with some sense of—you don’t want to use the word optimism, so I’ll use hope?
Well, I once defined in an article, I wrote that “hope” is a verb, but with its sleeves rolled up. I think you get hope—and this certainly applies to me—by being engaged with people doing the work that needs to be done. I’ll tell you, honestly, the best people I’ve known in life have been people involved in this “movement,” whatever it is, but it’s a movement about life. It’s got kids’ lunch programs, saving redwood forests, and swimming and dolphins—the people who want to engage life and are passionately worried about its future, the ones that have taken care of it. So what gives me hope are the people—the colleagues—around the world that are engaged in this work and there are millions of us doing it. The rescue work now going on in Morocco, and the fight in Ukraine. People are doing heroic things. Depression is kind of an indulgence at that point. E.F. Schumacher, the great British writer and economist, years back, ended the book by saying, “If you ask the question ‘Can humankind survive?’ and the answer comes back no, then it’s just depression. If it comes back yes, then it’s eat, drink, and be merry. His advice was, ‘Don’t even ask the question. Just get down to work. Do what you have to right in front of you. And stay close to each other, build alliances, and friendships.’”
Robert Fulghum wrote a little book years ago called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It’s a charming little book. I suppose it’s still in print. He has things like, hold hands when you’re crossing the street, share your cookies, and clean up your mess. [Laughter] All those things you teach little kids. But there are lessons in that that apply—you can scale those, up to the global scale. You don’t leave messes behind. You don’t hold hands if you’re infected, but….
I think what we’re aiming to do is just really interesting stuff. Are we gonna make it? Who can tell? But it’s really interesting to understand how we take human purposes and meld it into national goals and purposes, and how we stretch our hearts to reach out to other species and future generations. What could be more interesting than trying to do what we have never been very good at doing as humans?
The last thing I’d say is this: I think there are lessons all around us. We have lessons from Ed Yong’s book [An Immense World] on how animals communicate. The world is much more complicated and interesting and interlocked than we ever thought. I don’t know if that ends up giving me hope, but it always gives me an agenda. To do this, I wake up in the morning, “Oh, my God, it’s six o’clock, and I’m not up. I’ve got stuff to do.” But I think the best people I’ve known are people in this movement, and in your business. Communicating is so critical, beginning to help build this nervous system that wires this all together into common purpose and make sure that we live up to our potential to be what we are—or could be—at our best. Lincoln’s comment “angels of our better nature,” I think, captured it as well as it can be captured. “With malice toward none and charity for all,” including future generations and other species.
And then, the other side of this: I think if a movement works in this regard, we’ll learn to party, and party regularly and have fun in this. It can’t be a bunch of Presbyterian elders sitting around, gloom and doom. Anyway, enough on that. But thanks for that question.
Party on, David.
[Laughter]
Well, thank you. It was really great to sit down with you today and appreciate you taking the time.
Spencer, thank you. Thanks for having me.
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“All too often, we humans push papers, ideas, or money around at a monotonous pace with no time for rest and even less tLook: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World (Riverhead Books). The result of decades of research and time spent thinking and writing about the subject of observatiLook spans a vast range of theories—from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception, to psychologist M
Designing a truly great building is no easy feat. Among many things, it must be cognizant of history, responsive to the Tate Modern—a former power station transformed into an art gallery in 2000, then extended in 2016 by the Basel, Switzerland–based a
As head of curatorial at the Design Museum in London, Priya Khanchandani sees her role as that of a “cultural observer.”
For the past 15 years, the architect, curator, and writer Pedro Gadanho has been raising alarm bells about the urgency tEco-Visionaries,” a 2018 exhibition he co-curated at the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon, Gadanho is at the forefClimax Change: How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency (Actar Publishers, 2022), brings together his most recent research and thinking to profound and potent effect.
“I have collected lines (and they have collected me).”
Ever since the Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye and I first met, in 2011, in large part because of our many interIn Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorials (Phaidon, 2020).
As we head into the summer, we scouted the globe—from London to Dallas to Miami to New York—to select what we feel are tArt Basel Miami Beach in December): “Joan Didion: What She Means” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
As far as architecture career paths go, Lina Ghotmeh’s is a bit of an anomaly. In 2005, at age 25, while working in Londreceived the Grand Prix Afex, a prestigious French architecture prize. Around that time—project complete—Dorell, Tane, and Ghotmeh shuttered DGT and
The astronomer Chris Impey’s latest book, Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity, explores the implications of the fact that there are, by his rough count, a mind-boggling four billion Earth-like planthe latest episode of our At a Distance podcast, adding that, “We’re not gonna go there; the energy cost is insane. We have to look after this planet.”
Norman Teague has a global outlook, but the artist, designer, furniture-maker, and educator keeps his work close to homeAfricana” furniture and homeware collection from 2021 incorporates hand-carved details that reference African tribal carvings, a
In the ebb and flow of history, civilizations have long endured through sculpture, the distillation of a society’s valueBeyond Measure,” an exhibition of new and early works by the British artist Thomas J Price (on view through Aug. 20), presents monuments of a subject almost wholly excluded from the sculptural canon: the casual
If there’s one book I’m going to be shoving into peoples’ hands for years to come, it’s the recently released collectionNot Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (Haymarket Books)—which is why it’s our pick for The Slowdown’s debut Book of the Month column.
The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, the curator of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, was on hand last week for the debut of the Biennale’s 17Davos Baukultur Alliance, a new global initiative from the organization that aims to advance eight core principles it deems essential to a prosphis celebrated half-built house developments, Aravena’s words were as stirring as ever—only now, their impact felt strangely, eerily different.
Three weeks have passed since our Milan Design Week exhibition “Take It or Leave It,” in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, during which she gave away hundreds of items she had collected or designed over the years, from Indian metal spoons an
As the design and interiors director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Tom Delavan adheres to a schedule of nonstop, high-intensity days that consist of writing, overseeing photoshoots, porDomino, Delavan also operates his own interior design practice, drawing on three decades of immersion in the worlds of fine anBeni Rugs called Archival, which launches next week.
Across his 40-year career, the British architect John Pawson has realized a vast portfolio of impeccably refined projectMaking Life Simpler (Phaidon), one by his longtime friend the design writer and critic Deyan Sudjic, a book not only about his work and visi
Everywhere I went during this year’s Milan Design Week, there seemed to be a palpable feeling that the Salone del Mobile design and furniture fair, now in its 61st year, is sputtering, or, at the very least, puttering. While it unquestionabAlcova, which this year took place at a former slaughterhouse, and spaces in and around the city’s Brera neighborhood, long a GUBI presented its latest collections this year, or the Bonacossa Tennis Club, where the Milan-based designer Cristina Celestino created a pop-up restaurant with the food collective We Are Ona. Many architects, designers, and journalists I spoke wi
One thousand numbered objects, 623 lottery drawings, 591 “Take Its,” 32 “Leave Its,” and a smattering of trades therein,Take It or Leave It,” in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, and it was no placid affair. But of course it to give away hundreds of items she had collected or designed over the years, from Indian metal spoons to indigo textiles to ceramic
Daniel Rozensztroch has a rare knack for subtly telling stories through objects. The world of the Paris- and Nice-based
The Slowdown’s first-ever public event, the exhibition “Take It or Leave It,” made its debut yesterday at Milan Design Week. Organized in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paol
Radical by nature and a rule-breaker at heart, Paola Navone has been on an endless self-described “treasure hunt” for thArchitettura Radicale, and then went on to join the Italian radical design groups Alchimia and Memphis. From the early 1980s to 2000, she liv
Entering “The Yanomami Struggle” exhibition at The Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, I find myself standing before a vast arrangement of photographs, s
Nearly 150 years ago, on April 14, 1876—the eleventh anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death—Frederick Douglass spoke befDouglass said, “I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spi
For Lesley Lokko, plurality comes naturally. Born in Scotland to a Ghanaian father and a Scottish mother, and moving freThe Laboratory of the Future,” she’s bringing exactly this outlook to the main exhibition. On view from May 20 through Nov. 26, the six-part presentAfrican Futures Institute in Accra, a new architecture school and research institute that, as with her Biennale show, positions Africa as a labor
Jonah Takagi comes across as laid-back and casual, but the truth is, he keeps pretty busy. The bulk of his time is splithis namesake design studio, and Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches a Herman Miller–inspired furniture design course at the Rhode Island Sc
For the past 20 years, Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been teaAwe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin Press).
Few people in history have managed to maintain an image as precise and immutable as that of the late fashion designer Ka
From its classic swoosh logo, to its signature Air Jordan silhouette, to its legendary “Just Do It” tagline, to its recent 50th anniversary video short by Spike Lee, Nike knows how to expertly engineer and craft its brand down to the tiniest detail, and how to subtly zoom out and in
Marina Koren, who covers science and space exploration as a staff writer for The Atlantic, realizes her job doesn’t sound real. “But I promise it is,” she says. “When I tell people I’m a ‘space reporter,’ they
When Janet Malcolm first wrote for The New Yorker in 1963, her debut wasn’t in the form of the piercing prose she became known for, but instead a slim poem titled “Thoughts on Living in a Shaker House.” On the surface, it may seem an odd starting point for Malcolm, who would become one of the foremost writers about—andNew Yorker staff writer until her death, on June 16, 2021, at age 86. But the poem’s lines are indeed pure Malcolm: plainspoken, cu
Anne Helen Petersen resides on Lummi Island, a small land mass in the Puget Sound seven minutes off the coast of WashingThe Tome, the island’s newsletter, which arrives in their (physical) mailboxes once a month.
When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, and with it, the lockdowns of March 2020, I sat at home in Brooklyn Heights, alone,
The old’s been rung out, the new’s been rung in. We’re now all looking out on the year ahead, thinking about what it migthe tide turning on travel restrictions and peace of mind slowly being restored to the masses. 2023 is forecast to be the year when, for better or worse, travel will make a full return to its pre-pandemic patterns.
It’s a late afternoon in early November, nearing dusk, and I’m sitting with Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, inside the West Village outpost of Daily Provisions, a café from the New York City restaurateur Dawrote about another Meyer establishment, Union Square Cafe, unpacking the implications of the then-new location and layout of the l
That the first work of art I saw during this year’s Miami Art Week was a newscast seems somehow appropriate in our precaage of misinformation and sped-up media ecosystem?” the artists behind it, from the civic-engagement coalition For Freedoms, appeared to be asking. “And really, what’s t
What’s the purpose of a museum—and who decides which objects are worthy of value, attention, and care? These two questioYoung Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum, the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates’s first-ever museum survey exhibition to be staged in New Y
Home is unequivocally where the heart is. But in a world that far too often embraces soulless or downright bland furnituSight Unseen, comes in.
In February 2009, some 500 miles above the Siberian tundra, a defunct Russian satellite and a U.S. communication satelli
While the Danish design firm HAY is just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it has achieved a rarefied place in
It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designerSculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert
Ever Heard of Noh Theater? Our Primer to Three Major Productions Arriving in New York City This Fall
Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketi
As changes in weather patterns, economic realities, and public perception have triggered a wave of climate consciousness over the past few years, renewable energy sources have enjoyed a newfound level of attention, no longer relegated to thlong-sputtering industry of solar power. Factoids like how an hour and half worth of sunlight hitting the earth could provide the world’s total energy consumption in a year have been employed to tease out the industry’s transformative power for decades. Now, with technological advances makincheaper and more efficient than ever, it seems better poised than ever to take on a greater role in weaning humanity off of its fossil fuel and coal depende
Since 1997, when she founded her eponymous (now shuttered) gallery, Elizabeth Dee has been a fixture of the New York artIndependent Art Fair. An elegant, tightly curated event that remains an outlier in its efforts to elevate overlooked, underrepresented, and
What does it mean to revisit a photograph? When a camera shutters, it locks a moment in time, forever trapping the imageGathered Leaves, the latest book by the Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth, whose work has long documented lonely souls and fractured dreams in spaces across the United States. In Gathered Leaves, Soth revisits five of his previous books, including in its pages new notes, annotations, text excerpts, and even photo
In 2016, a stampede of people flooded the streets of Taipei, stopping garbage trucks and buses in the wake of their single-minded pursuit. What unifi
Kate Berry’s glowing personality transmits what she seems to desire most: a breath of fresh air, and time to care for her myriad plants; raise her 9-year-old daughter, Quinn; or host intimate dinner parties for friends on the garden-covered terrace of her Domino and of the food, wine, and travel magazine Saveur, Berry has interactions with media that, due to her demanding schedule, tend to be brief and light—and meaningful. She lives her work, which leaves plenty of time for creating media, but not so much for taking it in. As she puts it, “You don’t
Consider the flower. What image blossoms to mind? What emotion does it elicit? For centuries, flowers have persisted as Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography (Thames & Hudson), out August 30, editors William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud compose a selection of vibrant modern floral
Lush fruit trees bursting over a roof. A canopy of plants covering a facade. Intricate bamboo constructions spiraling frVõ Trọng Nghĩa: Building Nature (Thames & Hudson), readers get an inside look into how the celebrated architect has embraced two core themes throughout
As the director of archives and brand heritage at the Michigan-based furniture powerhouse Herman Miller—now known as MilIni Archibong.
The climate writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells has a knack for translating the unimaginable into the painfully realarticle for New York magazine and subsequent book of the same name, The Uninhabitable Earth, played a critical role in jolting the conversation, detailing the varied plagues and, finally, apocalyptic conditions The New York Times, who added him to their Opinion section, where he has begun a weekly newsletter to reflect on the latest in our Anthropocene Age.
“A forest in Norway is growing.” So begins the cryptic text printed on a certificate for the Future Library, or Framtidsbiblioteket, an artwork by Scottish artist Katie Paterson that, over the span of a century, cumulatively builds a collection of wri
At New York’s Lisson Gallery, an unfettered approach to sculpture is the driving force behind a new group exhibition. OnThe Odds Are Good, The Goods Are Odd” presents the work of 11 groundbreaking New York City–based contemporary artists. In the exhibition, sculptures are a m
Earlier this year, Burkina Faso–born Diébédo Francis Kéré became the first African, and the first Black architect, ever
Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirliWindy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewilderi
“We think we invent things and create things and define ourselves by ourselves, but that’s not the whole story,” BaratunAmerica Outdoors, a six-part travel series that premiered last week on PBS. Thurston—a writer, comedian, and podcaster who has advised tThe Daily Show, and authored the best-selling memoir How To Be Black—has a knack for navigating nuanced conversations around race, culture, politics, and technology, framing these discussi
The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains is too beautiful to mar. Yet over the years, developers and builders have manageBuckminster Fuller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliot Noyes, and Eero Saarinen completed commissions in the Western United States, transforming it into a hub for architectural modRocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes (Monacelli Press).
A recurring theme in design critic Alexandra Lange’s work is unpacking how—and for whom—objects and spaces are designed.The Dot-Com City, and surveyed how kids’ toys and physical environments impact their development in her 2018 book, The Design of Childhood. The ways in which outdoor public spaces, with their basketball courts, playgrounds, and skate parks, fail teen girls wa story she wrote for Bloomberg CityLab—one of many publications she has contributed to over the past two-plus decades.
Time standards are one of the many seemingly invisible societal constructs we interact with every day but seldom ponder.Mountain / Time,” the show is a nod to both the local time zone in Aspen, Mountain Standard Time (MST)—which the writer and critic Kylehas hailed for its “apartness” and “sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation”—and the conceptual d
Detroit is a city of craft. Of carmakers and Carhartt. Of Motown Records and Eminem. Of iconic midcentury design (Isamu Noguchi’s Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain, buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Heidelberg Project. So it’s fitting that, following previous iterations in Copenhagen, last fall, and in Turin, Italy, last month, the Freits latest “Hermès in the Making” exhibition (through June 15). A playful, Willy Wonka factory–like presentation of the company’s know-how, the display offers “an o not to smile while walking through it. Divided into four sections—”A Culture of Traditional Craftsmanship,” “High-Quality Msecret!” Beyond, stations feature artisans in saddle-stitching, porcelain painting, gemstone setting, glove-making, leather wor
Emerging from the pandemic, the design industry, like most of us, has changed. The past two and a half years, which havean increasingly pressing climate crisis, have formed a solemn backdrop. In March 2020, almost at once, in the locked-down lives of many, the notion of “home” a
The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa
In her new book, Generation Dread, author and researcher Britt Wray delves into the psychological consequences of the climate crisis. Combining scientifi
May’s colors, textures, and sense of renewal seem to be essential ingredients in Paris-based artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet’s exuberant work. A self-described “spring and summer boy,” his expressive drawings—often made in watercolor or oil pas
How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences
In 1938, two years after completing one of his first realized public artworks, “History Mexico,” a sculptural, colored chis namesake museum in Long Island City, Queens, which he founded in 1985).
In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea
Think about the last time you felt a sense of awe about the world. Perhaps you were hiking among trees in a lush forest,
Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.
A sobering 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization laid out the striking impacts industrial animal agriculture has
At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of
For most of the 20th century, breaking a sweat was seen as unladylike. Popular opinion considered working out dangerous
One afternoon in February of 1966, Stewart Brand took half a tab of LSD, sat on a rooftop in San Francisco’s North Beach
Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.
Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an
Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)
Born in Grandin, North Dakota, in 1904, the artist Clyfford Still was among the first generation of Abstract Expressioni
In a single word, how does the future make you feel? A towering sculpture by architect Suchi Reddy, founder of the New Y
Darrin Alfred, the curator of architecture and design at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), has wrangled subjects as mesmerizi
Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.
With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs