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Eichmann in Jerusalem: Netanyahu in New York
David Stairs In 1961 Hannah Arendt was hired by the New Yorker to travel to Jerusalem and report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been apprehended by the Israeli intelligence service the previous year in Argentina and abducted to Israel to stand trial for war crimes…. Continue Reading →
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The Plague is Now
David Stairs Transmission electron micrograph of an Ebola virus virion. Image credit: Frederick Murphy / CDC. I recently finished Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague (1995). Thirty years ago I read it for the first time,… Continue Reading →
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The Athlete’s Mantra
David Stairs The games of the 33rd Olympiad are in the books, or, awaiting the outcome of Jordan Chiles’ bronze, nearly so. The bump in world airline travel, television ad revenue, and croissant sales has ended, with the geographic center shifting to the Western hemisphere and yet another L.A…. Continue Reading →
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A Hysteria for Death
David Stairs When the scientists of the Manhattan Project solved the technical challenges for the first atomic bomb, they were under the impression they were in a race to the death with evil forces, their Nazi counterparts in occupied Europe…. Continue Reading →
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This Umwelt is Worth Fighting For
David Stairs With each passing year, as the realization is brought home to us just how misdirected industrial capitalism is, the names of certain visionaries come to mind as exemplars of how we need to think in order to design the survival of humanity…. Continue Reading →
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Children of a Vengeful God
David Stairs Gaza, before…… With pro-Palestinian sit-ins criss-crossing the nations’ campuses at the end of the ’23-’24 academic year, it seemed like maybe the message about Israel’s ongoing genocidal assaults in Gaza was finally sinking in. But a naive and myopic Congress still approved billions in military aid to the Israelis in spite of their…
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The Covert AI Kluge
David Stairs Rube Goldberg at work © Heirs of Rube Goldberg I’ve been hearing about the advantages of utilizing AI in design for about 5 years now. I attended a conference where the keynote was delivered by a woman who was working on a book about it…. Continue Reading →
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Do(ugh)nut Preferences and Design Dissonance
David Stairs Subway foot long churro “Sidekick” I wonder what makes people want to read about anything? I mean, if you look casually you can find people holding forth about the most inane topics. There is no lack of fother about Taylor Swift,… Continue Reading →
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Annals of Design: Mac & Cheese Nation
David Stairs You know how they say a people is defined by what they drink? The British have their stout, Russians vodka, and the French wine. But what about what a people eats? Of course, Americans would be on pretty thin ice with this one,… Continue Reading →
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Design Research
David Stairs Research is a well-established human activity. We see examples in science and social science, of course, and have the Nobels and MacArthurs to award it. Research advances medicine and communication, history and jurisprudence. It is even a project for literature in all its various manifestations…. Continue Reading →
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Painting By Numbers
David Stairs: I had an inauspicious beginning as a painter. When I was 10 or 11 years old, I received a paint-by-numbers kit. I set about dutifully filling in the pre-designated spaces with the provided colors, used directly from the bottle— no color mixing— and when I was finished I had something that approximated a…
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Ethnic Cleansing Jewish Style
David Stairs In June of 1967 I was a freshman in high school. My family was staunchly Republican and, in those days, I didn’t know any better. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, precipitating the Six Day War, I made a cartoon of Gamal Abdel Nasser that I thought was pretty clever…. Continue Reading →
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The Reliable Freezer is Failing
David Stairs Taking daily ice core samples on Antarctica. Courtesy BBC Just this week the BBC reports that sea ice surrounding Antarctica is “mind-blowingly” low. This probably does not concern you too much. After all, you’ve never been to Antarctica,… Continue Reading →
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Why Cataclysmic Wildfires are the New Norm
David Stairs Summer 2023 may be remembered as the year Americans finally awoke to climate change. While choking smoke from Canadian wildfires enveloped cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York, places in the southwest suffered record high temps…. Continue Reading →
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The Myth of Expertism
David Stairs In the Land of Celebrity, the Expert is King. It would be difficult to argue that our society is not obsessed with celebrities. From film stars to athletes, politicians to the Pope— and let’s not forget the British Royal Family— in America the Cult of Personality reigns supreme…. Continue Reading →
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Designing Apartheid
David Stairs Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning “segregated by race” that entered the general vocabulary during white control of South Africa and Namibia from 1948 to 1994. Its usefulness has expanded in the years since until nowadays it has become a universal term denoting enforced segregation…. Continue Reading →
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On Self-Publishing
David Stairs Chris Stairs, age 5 I’ve never been shy about self-publishing. I published my first small book in 1980. In those days there was a sort of pioneering enthusiasm about what has come to be known as artist’s books…. Continue Reading →
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Alternative Posh
David Stairs Malian terra cotta beads Bling. When you start seeing it on Nike sneakers you’ve got to know it’s everywhere. But there are alternatives to manufactured bling if you know where to look for them. When I lived in India and Africa I used to hang out at the open air markets…. Continue Reading…
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The Power of Speculation
David Stairs Designers are such pragmatists. Look at any form of commercial online instruction platform and you will be underwhelmed by volume of courses meant to help people improve their marketability. Whether you are obsessing over the need to improve your design skills through LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com,… Continue Reading →
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Annals of Design: To Light the Darkness
David Stairs Recently I was working on an article for a design periodical when I hit on the idea to compare an American brand icon to an African DIY counterpart. It was not a fair comparison. The American product was the Coleman pressurized lantern,… Continue Reading →
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Why Is Superintelligence So Dumb?
David Stairs “I think that it’s fairly likely that it will not take too long of a time for the entire surface of the Earth to become covered with data centers and power stations. Once you have one data center,… Continue Reading →
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Master of All He Surveys
David Stairs Early Bell System ad In the 1920s, before such things developed a predatory sheen, the advertising world promoted the theme of the man who was on top of the world. Modern, accomplished, wealthy, this contemporary Babbitt looked out the window of his 40th floor office at the world as it lay at his…
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Hell on Wheels
David Stairs I was in Detroit last weekend. Of all the cities in the realm, Detroit has the best claim of “first in freeways.” The first mile of paved road was laid in Detroit in 1909, just in time for the revolution in transport Henry Ford was planning to visit on the nation…. Continue Reading…
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Annals of Design: A Better Lunch
David Stairs Did you ever have to “brown bag” your lunch? If so, you know about the things that can go wrong, from torn bag to sogged-out paper from a leaky drink container…. Continue Reading →
