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Regifting
Arranging the Meal with Jean-Louis Flandrin
Finding My Match
Outliers (by Malcolm Gladwell)
Kurve, Kone, or Krone?
Ron Carlson Writes A Story
M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans
It's a place card! It's a menu!
Welcome to the Phatocracy
At home with Hannah Woolley
Inappropriate
Support a small press near you this season
Facebook Fictions
Close Reading: Obama
Are you a recessionista?
Countertop Oven
Oprah Nation
A Palin Halloween
Seeking Mrs. Polonius
The Vanguard Party
The Year We Walked to School
Comic Craft
Design Observance
Sarah Boone's Ironing Board
Beth Lipman, Still Lives in Glass
Next American City wins redesign award
Design is Communication. Duh.
File Tabs: The Tip of the Iceberg
Collage Professor

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Regifting

Target Gift Card

The Times didn’t miss a New York minute; they posted a story on Regifting before the wrapping paper even hit the floor this morning. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Arranging the Meal with Jean-Louis Flandrin

Jean-Louis Flandrin, Arranging the Meal

Food historian Jean-Louis Flandrin may have been catholic in his culinary tastes, but his scholarship was single-minded: the proper ordering of dishes into courses in the classic French meal (with a glance at “English menu sequences” and “Polish Banquets”). …read more…

Julia Lupton



Finding My Match

match box, painting by Ellen Lupton

Last Thursday, dazed by the crushing realism of Christmas shopping in New York, I found myself standing in front of a glass case stocked with dozens of stainless steel objects in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Shop—salt shakers, letter openers, garlic crushers, and an amazing tray made by “rumpling” a single flat sheet of gleaming metal into a cratered surface for displaying tapas. …read more…

Ellen Lupton



Outliers (by Malcolm Gladwell)

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers

I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers at an airport bookshop while flying cross country this weekend. I’m teaching bits of Gladwell on cool-hunting in my freshman humanities class this winter, and wanted to taste his latest. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Kurve, Kone, or Krone?

Kone by Karim Rashid
Ellen Lupton



Ron Carlson Writes A Story

Ron Carlson Writes a Story

I am reading a short book by my colleague, fiction writer Ron Carlson. The book is called Ron Carlson Writes a Story, and it’s directed at aspiring fiction writers. Since I don’t write fiction, maybe I should be reading one of Ron’s novels instead. But I press on anyway.
…read more…

Julia Lupton



M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans

watercolor by Avram Dumitrescu

In exchange for reviewing a Shakespeare manuscript, the University of California Press sent me a box of recent books. On the top of the stack was Joan Reardon’s M. F. K. Fisher Among the Pots and Pans, a biographical tribute to America’s greatest food writer.
…read more…

Julia Lupton



It's a place card! It's a menu!

Thanksgiving menu-placecards

These place cards are also tiny menus. The graphic is a baked-to-order pie painting by my daughter Hannah.
…read more…

Julia Lupton



Welcome to the Phatocracy

JuliaLupton Facebook page

On Facebook, phatic is king. This is the place for pithy “status updates,” not lengthy confessions or intellectual posing. If writing on your friend’s wall is too big a commitment of verbal resources, try “poking” her.
…read more…

Julia Lupton



At home with Hannah Woolley

From Hannah Woolley, The Queen's Closet

I spent the morning consuming the cook books and conduct manuals of Hannah Woolley 1623-1677). You could call her the Renaissance Martha Stewart — unless, like me, you’re in an historical mood, in which case she’s the Renaissance Mrs. Beeton or the Renaissance Catharine Beecher.
…read more…

Julia Lupton



Inappropriate

Laurie Rosenwald, All the Wrong People Have Self-Esteem

My kids often tsk-tsk when Mom says something “inappropriate,” such as praising the physical attractiveness of Johnny Depp or Barack Obama. “Inappropriate” is the bland, seemingly non-judgmental term they learn at school for demarcating untidy language, behavior, or even thoughts. My friend Laurie Rosenwald has published a new book that will ruffle their neat little feathers. …read more…

Ellen Lupton



Support a small press near you this season

The Boy from Lam Kien by Miranda July; published by Cloverfield Press; designed by Elinor Nissley

Today a young woman named Laurence Dumortier stopped by my office. A recent graduate in English from Loyola Marymount College, she was seeking advice about Ph.D. programs. But she also runs Cloverfield Press in Los Angeles, where she and a tiny team of book lovers publish small volumes. (Think of it as a microbindery.) …read more…

Julia Lupton



Facebook Fictions

Mrs. Polonius on Facebook

I joined Facebook a year ago, but I’ve been a reactive user — accepting the occasional random friend request, and simply ignoring all the features I didn’t understand. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Close Reading: Obama

James Wood on the power of the novel and the language of our time. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Are you a recessionista?

Erika Weiner, Herkimer

A recessionista is a fashionista on a really tight budget. She shops the designer racks at Target, looks for deals through shopping clubs, and settles for accessories when the going gets tough. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Countertop Oven

Kitchen Aid Countertop Oven

My household goes through toasters the way Goldilocks went through bedroom furniture or Henry VIII went through wives. We’ve had toasters that are too big, too small, too fancy, too French, and almost, almost just right. …read more…

Ellen Lupton



Oprah Nation

Obama and Oprah

In the scenes from Grant Park on Tuesday night, I was most struck by the shots of Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey. …read more…

Julia Lupton



A Palin Halloween

Hannah Reinhard as Sarah Palin, Halloween 2008

My daughter Hannah announced weeks ago that she was going to be Sarah Palin for Halloween. She’s such a genius, I thought. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Seeking Mrs. Polonius

Judith and Holofernes, by Agostino Carracci, 1557-1602

… Mrs. Polonius is a politic housewife; she cultivates a few poisonous plants in her tidy English garden (“just in case”), and the margins of her tapestries are embroidered with inverted phalloi…

…read more…

Julia Lupton



The Vanguard Party

Vote No on Prop 8

How Project Runway is revolutionizing America’s children.
…read more…

Julia Lupton



The Year We Walked to School

The year we walked to school

This year, we’re walking to school with our kids. It’s only a mile away, a tiny trek through the remaining undeveloped land between our house and the kids’ school. Since our family has opted out of sports, the morning walk scripts some easy exercise into our day. But it’s also a time to talk. Mom and Dad hold court with the kids on the way to school; Mom and Dad actually get to talk to each other on the way back. Cheaper than couples’ counseling! …read more…

Julia Lupton



Comic Craft

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up

Writing and graphic design are not just parallel activities; they are parasites and hosts for one another. Both strive to eliminate clutter, focus attention, and manipulate structure. Both use words as social glue. …read more…

Ellen Lupton



Design Observance

David Schorr, Rigatoni

These paintings by David Schorr, faculty at The Wesleyan University, are careful observations of consumer goods cast out into a zero-gravity space. The intensity of the painting keeps them grounded.

Ellen Lupton



Sarah Boone's Ironing Board

Sarah Boone's patent for an ironing board

African American Sarah Boone patented an ironing board design in 1892. Her narrow, folding, padded board sported a thin curved shape that afforded the ironing of sleeves and other fitted clothing from the period. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Beth Lipman, Still Lives in Glass

Beth Lipman,

Entitled “After You’re Gone,” this still life by glass blower Beth Lipman is created almost completely out of glass objects, including transparent snails moving in on the leftovers. The installation refracts the opulent decay of Dutch still lives. In Lipman’s art, glass is both metaphor and material, a shimmering reflection of time’s passage. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Next American City wins redesign award

Next American City; cover photo by Michael Itkoff

As a subscriber to the urbanist zine, Next American City, I was pleased to learn that the journal has won an Ozzie Award from FOLIO for Best Redesign by a Nonprofit. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Design is Communication. Duh.

Design is Communication

There’s a common adage among graphic designers that goes, “My mother doesn’t understand what I do.” Some designers have a hard time explaining that when creating a magazine layout, for example, they don’t take the photograph, paint the picture, write the article, or draw the typeface. What they do is organize elements on the page, a lengthy process that largely involves choosing, scaling, cropping, and otherwise adjusting readymade elements. …read more…

Ellen Lupton



File Tabs: The Tip of the Iceberg

D.I.Y. press kit folder

I found a nice post by Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders on the history of tabs and index cards. Although medieval monks get some credit for using leather strips to mark manuscripts, page numbering proved more efficient for books. (The dog ear is a kind of DIY tab in reverse.) File cards were introduced by libraries in the nineteenth century. …read more…

Julia Lupton



Collage Professor

Ellen and Julia, c. 1970

In the first week of school, my daughter Hannah was asked to write about a childhood picture depicting one of her parents. She instantly chose the photo of Ellen and me that we used as our authors’ photo in DIY KIDS. …read more…

Julia Lupton