Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
an attempt to see time as something other than money
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
an articulation of the right to do nothing in the age of everything
other writing
- Choose Hope or Despair
The Paris Review, 2024
shortened version of my foreword to Near-Earth Object, a poetry book by my friend and mentor John Shoptaw - Reading the Rocks
Emergence Magazine, 2024
on learning the language of my local topography - 13 Ways of Looking: on collage and the practice of searching, finding, and filing
Pioneer Works, 2023
an essay on the collage artist Jess Collins and his influence on my writing - Dear future, here’s the one lesson I want to pass on to you
Sydney Morning Herald, 2023
a letter to the unimaginable - What Twitter Does to Our Sense of Time
New York Times, 2022
an op-ed on the temporality of commercial social media - "Topographies of Attention"
The Quarantine Atlas: Mapping Global Life Under COVID-19, ed. Laura Bliss, 2022
an essay about my pandemic walks in Oakland - Inhabiting the Negative Space
MIT Press, 2021
my 2020 commencement address to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, as a book - letter in Dear McSweeney's: Twenty-Two Years of Letters from McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, 2021
an elegy to a KFC logo that was once visible from outer space - Why Birds Do What They Do
The Atlantic, 2020
my 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
my 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 - Excavating Calabazas Creek: An Inefficient Route Through Silicon Valley
Medium, 2019
an archive-assisted tour of Cupertino via a faintly remembered waterway - Homeland security: facial recognition in machines and crows
SFMOMA, 2019
the DHS vs. Corvidae, for 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
Topic, 2017
a deep dive on the origins of the notorious "free watch" ads on Instagram (original zine version here) - Designing for the In-Between
Medium, 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
Medium, 2017
transcript of a talk at EYEO 2017 (roughly Chapter 1 of How To Do Nothing) - How to Internet
Medium, 2016
bittersweet essay version of a talk I gave at Internet! The Retrospective - I mined San Francisco's trash for art
Fusion/Splinter, 2015
a reflection on running the Bureau of Suspended Objects from Recology SF - A Trip to Pez-land
Food for Fashion, 2013
visiting the world's largest PEZ-dispenser collection, right in my own backyard - Living a Designed Life
grad school paper, 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
grad school paper, 2009
utopian art and its relationship to fascism and capitalism (readers of How to Do Nothing will recognize some precursors in this essay)