Arts + Culture

Michael Erard|Essays

Babel's Nobel

Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel, 1563In an excerpt from her new book published in The Forward last month, Harvard literature professor Ruth Wisse notes that Jews have received 12 of the 105 Nobel Prizes in Literature, writing in seven …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Science and Design: The Next Wave

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Stan Brakhage: Caught on Tape

For Stan Brakhage, that concentration resulted in extraordinary explorations of many things, including the life cycle of a moth, caught on adhesive strips of tape, and subsequently captured on film where it regained — however briefly …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Designers and Dilettantes

Still from The Sarany Motel, a film by Elliott Earls, 2007This fall, Elliott Earls, head of the 2-D Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, will release his second feature-length film The Sarany Motel, which he produced, directed, …

David Stairs|Essays

Why Design Won't Save the World

Design for the Other 90%, catalog cover. Photograph by Vestergaard Frandsen; design by Tsang Seymour Design.The well-documented efforts of other professions to assist impoverished nations is already a part of the legend and legacy of …

Michael Bierut|Slideshows

Flat, Simple and Funny: The World of Charley Harper

Charley Harper, "Mystery of the Missing Migrants," from Beguiled by the Wild: The Art of Charley Harper, Flower Valley Press, 1994A few years ago, we bought a little house at the southernmost tip of the Jersey Shore in a town called Cape …

Peter Good|Essays

Remembering Sol Lewitt (1928-2007)

Sol Lewitt, "Bands in Four Directions," 1980, used as a family coat of arms. Courtesy The Lewitt Collection, Chester, CT.Many speak of Sol Lewitt's artistic genius and his profound effect on generations of artists and art lovers, but to …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Shepard Fairey

Designer and illustrator Shepard Fairey is the author of Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey and Shepard Fairey: Post No Bills.

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

On the Squareness of Milk Containers

99 Cent, Andreas Gursky, 1999Do you know, or have you ever wanted to know, why milk containers are square and soft drink containers are round?

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

The 2012 Olympic Logo Ate My Hamster

Designers often bemoan the lack of coverage given to graphic design in mainstream media. Yet when design catches the attention of journalists and commentators it usually results in a vicious mugging rather than hearty praise.

William Drenttel|Essays

Al Gore for President

In Al Gore's just-released book, Assault on Reason, he argues that the Bush Administration has used "the language and politics of fear" to "drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest." The key …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Dirty Little Secret

Photograph from "Beginner Gardening." Happy News Vol. 1 No. 1, 2007.I have become an obsessive gardener. Not that I am any good at it — in fact, quite the opposite. Yet I persist in what's become an endless struggle to tame our …