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Observed|Essays

December 31, 2009

A Public Service Announcement: Collecting Air

“I MEAN, yeah, you can say it’s an unusual hobby,” says a man in his 20s wearing oversize glasses in a quirky new public service announcement from the American Lung Association. “I’ve had people laugh at me, but I don’t care. I just love collecting air.” The words “Alvin Grimes, Air Collector” appear on the screen, and the camera draws back to show him sitting before a wall of jelly jars. The jars are labeled with masking tape, where he has written in a marker such locations as “Corner Bodega, Chicago, Il, 2002” and “Makeup Counter, Rockville, MD, 2007.”
— “A Public Service Ad About Air, and an App” by Andrew Adam Newman, The New York Times, June 18, 2012.