So this story about the pay gap between women’s soccer players, gender discrimination, and unequal pay is interesting. Not, of course, because I care, but because the larger question – Why are we paying adults to play games in the first place? – really ought to be addressed first.

I recently discovered Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ The Skeleton Tree (2016). It’s sublime.

Scientific American on authenticity: “Once you take a closer scientific examination, it seems that what people refer to as their ‘true self’ really is just the aspects of themselves that make them feel the best about themselves.” Wow. Thank God for science, amirite?

I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s latest – Fall; or, Dodge in Hell – and it’s pretty damn good so far.

“[S]uccess and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average,” writes Arthur Brooks. “So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that.” I reckon I’ve already peaked, then. Let’s, um…keep this between you and me, mkay?

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

To see just how fast things came together for the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center exhibit, check out this time-lapse video:

Kind of makes the process look seamless and simple, doesn’t it? But exhibit installations are actually very complicated.

What you don’t see in the video is the time it takes to collect the artifacts, measure them, determine how they’re grouped, and decide where each gets placed inside its respective display case. And then you have to figure out what to do when there are too few artifacts for a case (conduct more research and purchase some related objects) or too many (argue over what gets tossed).

Once you’ve done all that, you can then determine how each artifact gets supported within its case – directly on a flat surface, lifted, stacked, or tilted in favor of the viewer. Then you need to either find or fabricate the supports. This exercise determines the Plexiglas height. (For the Wolson Collection, each of the 15 individual Plex-top heights is different.) And all of this takes place after you’ve designed the display case groupings and had the bases fabricated, never knowing how many artifacts will actually be shown. The video makes putting a 120-pound, 6-foot-tall Plexiglas cover over the nearly 7-foot-tall dress form – under a 12-foot ceiling – seem pretty easy. And we haven’t even talked about the narrative panels and touchscreens yet.

With the help of my exhibit design assistant Steven Kutsch, along with a few others, we managed to make it all come together. Thankfully, the video skips over the challenges while serving to remind us that you can’t go through this experience without developing a tremendous respect and appreciation for an exhibit’s subject.

We do hope that Miss Woldson would have approved.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

from BROKEDOWN PALACE
Robert Hunter

River gonna take me
Sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy
all the way back home
It’s a far-gone lullaby
sung many years ago
Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come
since I first left home

Going home, going home
by the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

A study published nearly 20 years ago found that attractive children and adults were not only judged more positively than those who were unattractive, but also treated more favorably.

According to Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review, attractiveness, which is apparently universal, had a profound affect both on social appeal and on perceptions of occupational and interpersonal competence – as well as attention and reward.

As an unattractive middle-aged white dude of average intelligence and little in the way of marketable skills, I’m actually pretty excited about this. I mean, it’s only a matter of time before my people rise up and demand their rightful place at the grievance table, right? Which means I’ll get a piece of all the rights and privileges thereto pertaining.

Until then, I’ll just take comfort in finally knowing why CK yells at me all the time while giving Skooch a free pass.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Sorry, but there’s no such thing as a photographic memory, you can’t learn while you sleep, and multi-tasking is impossible. More on the limitations of memory.

Looks like the kids who were always chosen last in gym class are now writing research papers.

Matthew Walther on America’s greatest divide: “[T]he most fundamental division in American life is not partisan or geographic or, except incidentally, racial or religious. The real gap is…between the sort of people who accepted the sinister logic of credentialism and took their places in our globalized meritocracy and those who, for any number of reasons, remained behind.”

Now this looks promising.

Did you know that the complete Underground Grammarian newsletters are not only available online, but also free? And that’s not all…

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I. M. Pei recently passed away, but not without leaving a legacy of several iconic buildings from around the world. So it seems appropriate that I should share his (albeit thin) connection to one of Spokane’s finest architects.

While researching imagery for our 2013 exhibit SPOMa: Spokane Modern Architecture, 1948-73, I ran across a photograph taken in the mid-1940s at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Under the tutelage of Walter Gropius – Bauhaus founder and world-renowned architect in his own right – there was a three-year waiting list to be accepted into this prestigious program.

(left) Gropius, wearing a bow tie and glasses, is surrounded by his students. (right) Pei is in the foreground, wearing a vest, his back to the camera. Photographs courtesy of the Francis Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Though the photo caption didn’t identify all the subjects, one particular student caught my eye. Was it possible that it could be Royal A. McClure? I got in touch with Harvard’s archives and discovered there were additional images taken on the very same day – March 22, 1946 – with identities noted. Much to my surprise, the gentlemen with the receding hairline, narrow face, and round glasses was indeed McClure.

Both McClure and Pei graduated in 1946, Pei going on to become one of the great modernists of our time, McClure landing in Spokane in 1947. The partnership he formed with Tom Adkison ultimately became ALSC Architects.

So what sort of influence did McClure have on Spokane’s own mid-century modern movement? Tom Kundig had some thoughts back in 2003:

Most people have watersheds in their careers. Tom Kundig had a water cabin. When he was a boy vacationing with his family on Lake Coeur d’Alene…, he was drawn to this 1960 Modernist cabin designed by his father’s boss, the architect Royal McClure. ”It left an impression on me even then,” he said. ”It was a very classic midcentury design, with delicate detailing and proportions — open to the landscape and very optimistic.” Thirty-odd years passed, and Kundig became an architect like his dad and started building weekend getaways for his own clients. Five years ago, he was on a Coeur d’Alene building site when a flashback made him wander down the road a bit. In a perfect bit of coincidence, there stood the McClure cabin. ”That little cabin helped teach me to keep things light and expressive of the landscape,” he said.

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: the design life  |  comments(2)

I’m out early tomorrow, so here’s an assignment and a recommendation, in that order:

Caitrin Keiper’s “Do Elephants Have Souls?” is a magnificent read, and one of my favorite long-form magazine articles ever published – and that’s including all those New Yorker pieces that have brought me such unbridled joy. Please do yourself a favor and read it. Then go ahead and subscribe to The New Atlantis for even more awesomeness delivered right to your door. It’s one of the most interesting and consistently well-written periodicals out there.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone. See y’all next week.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

In a conversation about grammar and style over at Literary Hub, Mary Norris and Benjamin Dreyer were asked the number one grammar rule that everyone should know.

Dreyer, vice president, executive managing editor, and copy chief of Random House, got right to it: “People would do well to learn the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom,'” he said, along with ‘I’ and ‘me’ and, for that matter, ‘they’ and ‘them.’

Norris, copy editor at The New Yorker, had a slightly more…nuanced response. “You can have friends,” she said, “or you can correct people’s grammar.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment