Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand|Audio

Episode 131: Word by Word

With Hrishikesh Hirway: games and puzzles, The West Wing Weekly, soap operas, Home Cooking

Jessica Helfand|Audio

Episode 130: Tackling History

With Bobby C. Martin, Jr.: rebranding Champions Design; football in Washington; demands for change at design schools; cooking during quarantine.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Remembering Ralph Caplan

"If it were a religious denomination", Caplan once wrote, "design would be Unitarianism"

Jessica Helfand|The Self-Reliance Project

Remembering

Visual memories sear themselves into the unconscious, bearing down and not letting go.

Jessica Helfand|The Self-Reliance Project

Storytelling

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Michael Bierut|Audio

Episode 126: Screens and Dreams

Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration; Unorthodox; My Brilliant Friend; The Affair; Anil Dash on the dangers of social media; Anna Wiener on Silicon Valley; quarantine dreams

Jessica Helfand|The Self-Reliance Project

Discerning

Sometimes you have to unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

Jessica Helfand|The Self-Reliance Project

Making

Real makers produce against all odds: ever evolving, all of it work in progress

Jessica Helfand|The Self-Reliance Project

Observing

Observing is truth-telling. It’s not a picture postcard, or a gilded lily.

Jessica Helfand|The Self-Reliance Project

Pretending

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

Jessica Helfand|The Self-Reliance Project

Missing

Ambiguous loss is the loss we can not see, just as it lingers in the closure we can not find.

Jessica Helfand|The Self-Reliance Project

Tracing

Tracing is a way to think in stages, and seeing those stages pulls you along in your thinking.