writing

Why Birds Do What They Do (Atlantic, 2020)
a review of What It's Like to Be a Bird by David Sibley and The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman

How Rebecca Solnit Found Her Voice (New York Times, 2020)
a review of Rebecca Solnit's memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence

The Myth of Self Reliance (Paris Review, 2020)
an encounter with Emerson's essays

What Earthrise Can Tell Us About Earth Day (Sierra Magazine, 2020)
an Earth Day op-ed about temporality

Can We Slow Down Time in the Age of Tiktok? (New York Times, 2019)
a back to school op-ed

The Magic of Swimming Holes (New York Times, 2019)
an essay to accompany photographs by Angalis Field

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House, 2019)
a book about the right to do nothing in the age of everything

Homeland security: facial recognition in machines and crows (SFMOMA, 2019)
written while a columnist-in-residence at SFMOMA's Open Space

A Business with No End (New York Times, 2018)
an internet rabbit hole involving Amazon storefronts, a Christian university, and one very strange bookstore

On how to grow an idea (Creative Independent, 2018)
do-nothing farming as a model for thinking

Living in the Archives (SFMOMA, 2018)
a reflection on my artist residency at the SF Planning Department

There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch (self published for the Museum of Capitalism, 2017)
a deep dive on the origins of the notorious "free watch" ads on Instagram

Designing for the In-Between (2018)
transcript of a talk at KIKK Festival about hybrids, 1990s net art, and a giant floating worm

The Colonels (Sierra Magazine, 2018)
a paean to the night herons that hang out at the local KFC

Notes of a Bioregional Interloper (SFMOMA, 2017)
a Californian visits Cascadia for SFMOMA's Open Space

How to Do Nothing (2017)
transcript of a talk at EYEO 2017 (roughly Chapter 1 of How To Do Nothing)

How to Internet (2016)
bittersweet essay version of a talk I gave at Internet! The Retrospective

I mined San Francisco's trash for art (Fusion, 2015)
a reflection on running the Bureau of Suspended Objects from Recology SF

The Satellite Collections (2013)
an essay about shifts in perspective

A Trip to Pez-land (2013)
visiting the world's largest PEZ-dispenser collection, right in my own backyard

Living a Designed Life (2009)
a cultural analysis of virtual tours used to sell San Francisco high rise condos, written during my MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute

The Uncomfortable Space between Thought and Outcome: Absolving Utopian Images in the Exhibition Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk (2009)
idea vs. form in Harald Szeeman's 1983 exhibition, written during my MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute