Is the World Getting Uglier?

President Trump and the modern right have a theory of beauty. You see it in Trump’s gilded Oval Office, his imagined arch and his executive order requiring classical and traditional styles for certain federal buildings. This isn’t my theory of beauty, but it is a theory. And it’s a response, in part, to something that a lot of people have been feeling, and not just on the right: that the modern world is ugly, or getting uglier. I’ve seen at least a dozen articles or videos over the last few years asking, “Is the world getting uglier?” They point to the drabness of new apartment blocks, the sameness of new cars and the reign of “greige” in homes and fashion. So I’ve wanted to do an episode on this for a while. Why does the world seem to be getting uglier, or drabber? And at a moment when the right has a clear answer to this feeling, does the left have any answer at all? Debbie Millman teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and hosts the long-running podcast “Design Matters,” where she talks to creative people about design. In her long career as a brand designer, she revamped the logos for companies like Burger King, 7 Up and Häagen-Dazs. She’s also written a number of books on design, and recently wrote an article for Time magazine, “Is the World Getting Uglier?”

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features, like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi. Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad-free, I get backroom play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Why is everything so drab right now? Why is it all so same same? You've got these coffee shops, they all look the same. Architecture looks standardized. Buildings are colorless. Cars are interchangeable. Then, on the other side, you have Trump's gilded Oval Office. His imagined arch. His garish vision for the reflecting pool. Say what you will about Donald Trump. He and the modern right, they have a theory of beauty. Not my theory of beauty, but a theory. For a while now, I've been wanting to do an episode on this question that I've seen a lot of other people ask and that has bothered me, too. Is the world getting uglier? And if so, why?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Why do we seem to design so much that looks so boring, we're on the other side so loud? And in this moment, when the right has a clear theory of beauty, does the left have any answer at all? Debbie Millman teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She's a longtime graphic brand designer. She revamped logos for companies like Burger King, 7-Up, and Haagen-Dazs. And for over 20 years, she's hosted a podcast called Design Matters, where she talks to creative people about design. She joins me now.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Debbie Millman, welcome to the show.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Thank you, Ezra. It's great to be here.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  So, over the past couple of years, I feel like I have read or watched, I mean, a dozen essays on why everything is getting uglier. And I just read a piece from you with the title, "Is the World Getting Uglier?" So is it?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Depends on who you ask.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  I'm asking you.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  My opinion, it's getting more vulgar. In some ways, ugliness can be very intentional. Vulgar is accidental, because it doesn't have intention. Nobody really sets out to make something that's truly vulgar. Certain ugly can be seen through the lens of a trend as being really glamorous, or sexy, or interesting, or as subversive. But vulgar is always pretty awful. And I think that is the real word about where we're moving.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Give me some examples of this vulgarity.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Well, the Cybertruck. There's really no need for a car to look that imposing and that bloviated. Housing, where houses are now being raised that fit sort of sweetly on their lots with a front yard and a backyard, and maybe little alleys on either side. And now, they're being squeezed into the property so that there's maybe six or seven inches of grass between the house and the sidewalk. We're seeing it in clothing, particularly in Gen Z fashion, which I know that The New York Times has been writing about quite a lot.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  And if there's anything I'm an expert on, it's Gen Z fashion.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  But that, but Gen Z fashion is not forever. Fashion, by nature, is a type of expression that has an expiration date in it. Or certainly a pause date. It might come back, but for a while, it goes out of style. Some of it is forced obsolescence, some of it is just trends in style. Whereas houses, cars, vehicles, airplanes, things like that tend not to transition very often in the way that they fundamentally look and work.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  How do you distinguish, and I know this is like the oldest, hardest question in taste, but one woman's vulgarity is another woman's interesting ugly?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Is another person's, "Oh, that's a cool cyberpunk truck."

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. I think a lot of it has to do with proportion. And a lot of proportion has to do with mathematics. And so, there are things that are just more lyrically beautiful because they are in proportion. And generally speaking, humans can assess when something is out of proportion, not knowing anything about the math of it. Whether it be a building, or a car, or a coffee mug. And so, if something is out of proportion, it will give us a sense of discombobulation. And it could be the disproportion of a handbag, a skateboard. It could be the disproportion of anything. But things essentially make us feel things. Everything makes us feel something.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  And when something is out of proportion, it changes the DNA around us.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  I'm very interested in the way that we notice what the environment around us, or the objects around us, are making us feel. I always thought a big reason you had that Marie Kondo craze some years back was that there was a real genius to her giving people a practice of noticing what their objects made them feel.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  People had previously told people to tidy up. What she offered was a way to say, "You can tune in to the way your environment is making you feel." But there, too, I think you run into this question of, much that we now consider beautiful, when it was built, when it was designed, it was out of proportion. It was brash. It was aggressive. And so, the early reviews of it were very negative. So then, you get into this interesting question of, can you trust what you're feeling in the moment?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  There's so much to talk about just from that sentence. I want to go back to the first part of what you were saying about how things make us feel. We are social mammals, and every single way in which we've been socialized to experience the world around us is based on objects and things around us. And that goes all the way back. That goes back 50,000 years ago, when we started to create symbols to designate our reality. So, the very first marks was what we were seeing around us. So, we started to draw on the walls of caves.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  After that, we started to advance and move into tribes. What was the first thing we did when we moved into tribes? We designated where we belonged and what we believed in with a symbol. I belong to this religion, you belong to that religion. We signify and telegraph that through the use of this symbol. And it means as much for the people that are part of the same tribe as those that aren't. And that safety in numbers, that security in, "We all believe the same thing, so we're not going to go off and kill each other because we all believe in this." It allowed us to prosper and create bigger, stronger social ties when we're in those groups.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  So, that's the whole sort of, how do we feel around symbols? We've been trained, socialized, to experience the world through symbols, objects, and now brands since prehistoric times. So, if you're wearing a certain type of sneaker, you're part of a Nike tribe. A certain handbag, and that is telegraphing that you're a wealthy woman who bought her handbag on Rodeo Drive. We're even doing that now. This is really, really interesting to me with plastic surgery. So, we can reconstruct a nose, or reconstruct lips, or reconstruct our butts to look a

• 8:54Speaker 02

  certain way, to signify to others that those values, that that thing we think looks good, looks good to me and to you, and you know that I know that you know that I know that we both did that, and we both look good. Now, it also does the same thing for the people that don't like a big butt, or a certain type of veneer. So, I think that we have to look back at the trajectory of our evolution, because looks, size, fashion, hair, all of those things have so much to do with the politics of our time, with religion, and with socialization.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  For you, what is good design and what is bad design?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Good design makes me feel better about whatever I'm doing and whatever I'm doing it with. It's entirely subjective for me. What my specific definition of good design is for me, it makes me feel better. For the world, I think good design makes the world better. The experiences that people have, the way in which they're able to move through the world, it's easy, it's respectful. When I was coming to New York, I was in LAX, and I was in a snaky line where I had to

• 10:20Speaker 02

  stand behind a bunch of people in three lines that were all waiting to put their things in a container, to then push onto a line. There's no rhyme or reason about where the three are. So, even if you're in that position, you're not first. It's whoever got there first, and somebody's managing it. And then, you have to sort of really fast push your things through so that it gets through. And I said to the guy, because I knew I was coming here today, I said, "Who designed this? This was, this is a billion-dollar system that's in airports all over the world, and it is the worst design system I have ever witnessed."

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Where people are fighting to get their containers into the queue, they're fighting to go next, they're, the whole thing was just a design disaster. I think design that's disrespectful. I think design that is greedy. I think that design that is...

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Immoral is bad design.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  One thing I've been thinking about as I've been, you know, reading and thinking about these essays over, you know, some period of time, you know, my team and I want to do a show on this for a little bit, is, is the world getting uglier as a genre? It has sort of two different lines of critique happening in it at once. One is the critiques of your offering here, which is that it's getting uglier. The world makes you feel something and the thing it makes you feel is bad. It's a negative feeling tone in the Buddhist terminology. And the other is that the world is getting, not what I would call uglier, though people often use that word, drabber. It is getting more drab. It is making you feel nothing more often.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  So one of the, I think foundational essays here is an N plus one essay from 2023. And in that, they talk about the drab sublime. The drab sublime unites flat pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design, an ocean of stuff so homogeneous and underthought that the world it is inundated can feel like a digital rendering. One reason I sort of like the Cybertruck is I don't find it beautiful. What it makes me feel is not good, but it makes me feel something. Compared to so much else on the road right now, it reflects somebody's vision. I believe somebody somewhere found it beautiful.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are people that buy it. So I think a lot of it comes down to taste. And then also, how well do things go with other things? The thing about the Cybertruck is that the Cybertruck infringes on the landscape. Maybe there's a strategy behind it, but I'm not entirely sure what that strategy is. Is it to command attention? Is it to intimidate? What is the intention of this? And when I think about the world getting uglier in its purest form, is the world getting uglier because we're making bad design decisions? Or is the world getting uglier because we don't care about what anybody else thinks but ourselves?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  And is the world getting uglier because we're behaving in ugly ways? Once you start to see people behaving in ugly ways, it's inevitable that that is going to trickle down into everybody else's behavior because we see if this could happen here, if somebody can get away with doing this, well, then why can't I do it?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Well, I want to really position myself here because I think the Cybertruck is interesting to argue for, but around, but I want to really agree that it's ugly.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  It's not my taste.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  But you see, that's important for you to declare.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  There is a trend here, right? So I feel like you could imagine two axes here. So there's whether something makes you feel anything at all, how much it makes you feel. And then there's whether or not that feeling is good or bad. But there's so much that surrounds us now, so many apartment buildings. I don't find them ugly, but I find them as inoffensive. I feel nothing when I look at them. They are mute to me. So many cars that they're mute to me.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  When something doesn't have any real intention to it, when it's built without any sense of purpose or strategy or respect for its surroundings. And that I think is, is worse than ugly and maybe even worse than vulgar.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  I think we have been in a period where a tremendous amount of the world around us, from the fashion to the way apartments are designed, to the way cars are designed, to the way places we stay are designed. People describe this in many different ways, but it has been a flattening. But now what I'm seeing is a reaction to that, right? You're talking about this, I think, a little bit in your essay. You talk about this move towards vulgarity, towards a bloviating style. You can think about Donald Trump festooning the Oval Office in gold. You can think about this very attention grabbing fashion style in Gen Z. You can think about the Cybertruck. There was recently, I mean, there's been covered in other places, a move towards more maximalist design. We've gone from.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Looks maxing.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, yeah, looks maxing is another one, actually. But, but I actually meant in decor. And so you write that we're living in an attention economy and attention rewards extremity, that the more design is rewarded for being instantly visible, recognizable and shareable, the easier it becomes, the side of proportion, purpose, and the people have to live alongside it. But I think maybe the other side of it is that we do live in an attention economy. And the more everything is served to us by algorithm, the more also things like feel the same everywhere. You go to coffee shops. I mean, there's a point the writer Cal Chaka has made. You go to coffee shops in New York and LA and Mexico City and Buenos Aires and Tokyo, and they're all kind of the same coffee shop. And all of a sudden.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  I mean, you can't even differentiate airports anymore.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  You go into an airport and it could be any airport in any city of the world.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  So how do you think about the relationship and the tension between those two things? A feeling of sameness, maybe that people rejecting, but then it creates this, it's creating, I think, a move towards what you're describing as a kind of a vulgar or bloviating answer to that.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, if you look back to the original visual language of the iPod, you know, six weeks after nine 11, Apple introduced the first iPod and that came with the white earbuds.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  I did not know that was six weeks after nine 11. Those are two events I had not put together in my head.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And there was a really interesting period of time where as people began to acquire the iPod, they were able to showcase their allegiance with these white earbuds. It was actually really brilliant because the iPod wasn't sitting around, you know, outside of your clothing. It was in a pocket, but the earbuds gave you away. And there was this sense of like, I know that you know that we're the early adopters here, and people were very proud of that. Super minimalist, super minimalist to really be able to cut through all the cacophony of that time. There was still a real sense of minimalism to it.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  And it's now, what, 26 years later, and that is still primarily the language. So much so that every other tech company has taken on that same vernacular. So they all look a certain way because people have an expectation of what excellence should look like. All of the tech companies, until recently, I think Samsung is beginning to move a little bit further away from that visual language because they brought in for the first time ever, a president of design, Mauro Portini. So he's making some of those changes. But up until then, we're talking about 25 years of tech looking a very specific way because everybody wanted to seem like the very best.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  And so it'll be interesting to see how that now changes with new people at the helm, both at Apple and at Samsung.

• 18:43Speaker 01

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• 19:31Speaker 00

  Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi. Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad free, I get background play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. So try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful.

• 20:02Speaker 04

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• 20:36Speaker 01

  You say that design is a, quote, deliberate expression of intention. Tell me about that.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  So in order to do that, I have to go back to, well, what is a brand?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  A brand is manufactured meaning. We agree that a crucifix stands for something. You and I both agree. We might not agree.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Hot take on Christianity, a brand.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Well, it's just because I want to bring it down to like the most, the foundation. The very, one of the first brands. Although Hindu and Jane were well before that. But in any case, let's just go with something that a lot of people know. It is manufactured meaning. That cross could stand for anything. We agree that this crucifix, this symbol that people wear and pray to and worship, signifies something. Design is what communicates that differentiation. That is what design is. For me, that is the ultimate design definition.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  It is the communication of differentiation that is made through meaning manufacture.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  So I was interested to see you go on that question of intention directly to branding. Because I do take your point that the way the brand or the reputation or the meaning of something across great scale is constructed, is indeed constructed. But one of the things that I think is operating here, and I'm curious to explore this a bit, is that, I mean, brands want to differentiate from each other.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  They have to.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  And I think a frustration people have is often that they are under differentiated now. So I think it is widely felt. We can argue whether it's true. But it's widely felt that cars were more beautiful and interesting in the way they were designed 30 or 40 years ago than they are today. I had a friend recently had a 40th birthday and as a present for him, his partner rented him like a classic car. He got to ride around in an old Mustang. I think people like the old Mustangs more than they like the new Mustangs. I think that's common. But one reason so many cars look similar is that we've learned a lot about how to make them aerodynamic. Like, we know things about how objects move through space at speed

• 22:57Speaker 01

  that we did not know to the same level of certainty then. And we've put pressure on those things through fuel regulation standards and electric vehicle incentives and other things to push car companies in a certain direction. And so now the cars look more streamlined because that is very, very important for their fuel efficiency and their safety. And there are other different things that are operating here. And it pushes everything in a certain direction. And so one thing that I thought when I read your definition of design is a deliberate expression of intention, is that the intentions we have now include, you know, many other things than just beauty

• 23:41Speaker 01

  or just aesthetics, right? We know more about how to make buildings energy efficient. We know more about how to make sure they don't fall down during earthquakes. And all these things impose strictures that in some of the periods in the past that we often, you know, lionize for their superior aesthetics, they didn't have to optimize for as much. And so one reason the world is feeling a little bit more same to people in the construction of material objects is actually this, like, well, we're optimizing on things that actually do force the sameness. We know things about the world that have led us to design things in ways that are more consistent across, across different brands.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that's just a matter of time. Because once we begin to master these new ergonomic ways of building, the next natural step will be to maximize the value via beauty. Because you will want to differentiate. First, we're looking at function, and then we'll look at aspiration. And that's, while you were talking, I had the funniest example come to mind, which may or may not make sense. But I think back to the days when my grandmother used to wear girdles. Really ugly, really efficient, really, really ugly. Now we have Spanx and Skims, essentially doing the same or better work to help shape a woman,

• 25:08Speaker 02

  but far sexier and far more beautiful. So I think it's just a matter of time because that is the system we live in. We're always looking to improve and create something better than it was before.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  One of the interesting questions that came up when my producers and I were preparing for this episode was, my producer lives in a much older home. And it's really beautiful. It's like you, you know, take a picture from it from the outside. It's got this beautiful tree in front of it. I felt something. I've never seen her home because we live somewhere else. It has soul to it.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  And also she was saying that part of her really envies people who live in these somewhat more soulless McMansions that are better designed for kids, that have a lot more space in them in the way the space is used, that have, you know, central air, that have a lot of, that have been optimized for other purposes. And I just think a lot of things in life are like that. I think that when you make life frictionless, it begins to lose something, even if everything else is equal, even if sometimes like the quality of the product is, is higher. And so I grant completely that you can have, and I have experienced this, places, homes, cars, everything, right?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  You can have places where somebody's idea of beauty and their idea of function have come into a beautiful union. But I actually think some of the drabness that we're talking about comes from people living in a world that has been smoothed for them, such that it, on the one hand, works really well. And on the other hand, it doesn't feel alive to them. It just sort of has been like flattened into a kind of soulless service.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Like what? Like, I'd love to know what you'd consider that to be.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I'm not myself a vinyl collector, but I know many people who are. And it is in part, like, the physicality, the annoyance, you have to get up and turn it over. You have to put the needle correctly. And those record collections mean more to people than their Spotify libraries. And people will say, oh, the sound is warmer. Sure, it's a little warmer. I don't think that's what's really doing the work. The work is that you end up in a physical tactile relationship where.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Reading books versus a Kindle.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. I have a big Kindle library and I have a big physical book library.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Same.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  So there are places where the fact that the world asks things of you that are, you know, perhaps like a little bit less convenient. You know, the fact that my Kindle's always with me and I can like look up all my highlights on my phone, it is more convenient.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  And when I really love a book, I'll often just go buy it physically. I mean, now I've actually moved more to physical books in general because having it is meaningful to me.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Even if its function is actually objectively somewhat worse.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I 100%, agree.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  So how do you think about those, the spaces, though, where there's that conflict?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Well, I think we're living at a time where the big tension is between convenience and individuality. And we are giving up so much of our individuality and our privacy for convenience. That's something that we have to opt into. I don't know that there's anything wrong with having a bit of both. But I do think that perhaps if you're extreme on one way or the other, you're really missing out on a great deal. I mean, I love being able to read anything, anywhere, have all my highlights in one place and have 45 books in my pocket.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  But I also love curling up with a book and feeling the pages and being able to look throughout. I also really miss liner notes, those little booklets that used to come with band photos. I mean, I also have a vinyl collection, so I, that, that will go with me somewhere.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  I need a really big tomb where I'm going to put all that stuff with me that nobody else wants, but I can't get rid of, even on my deathbed. So I think it's, it's a matter of, of where do you, where do you live on that continuum?

• 29:35Speaker 01

  So there was this YouTube video by Sheen Quirk about why things are getting uglier. And he's walking through London looking at, you know, lamp posts and sewer systems built in an earlier era and then comparing it to what's being built now. And it's not that the new ones are bad. They work as lamp posts, but they're drab. And the old ones have these sort of weird fish on them. And the new ones are just very functional. And I was watching it, and this part on air conditioning units.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Really struck me. So I want to show you this because I think it maybe gets at some of the things we're talking about.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  Look at this air conditioning unit. I think it says more about the modern world than anything else, more than phones or social media. It's a miraculous technology, one that has changed the world and improved billions of lives. Hence, we stick them literally everywhere. But it's ugly. Ugly because it doesn't seem to express any belief in the idea that ordinary things can also be beautiful. But worse than ugly, it's boring. Now, it would certainly be a bit more expensive to make it prettier, take a little time and care and attention. But these days, it seems that we would rather make more money to make things look pretty.

• 30:55Speaker 05

  And maybe that's okay.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  First of all, this is an open call to James Dyson.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  I interviewed James Dyson last year. And one of the things that I learned in my research was James Dyson, all of his innovations have been with air. Vacuums, hair dryers, et cetera.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Who better to innovate an air conditioner than James Dyson? He's made the most beautiful vacuum cleaners, the most beautiful hair dryers. James, we need you. But I don't think that these are boring. I disagree. I think that they're obtrusive. Boring, you sort of fall away from seeing. Obtrusive, it's in your face and it's assaulting. It's they assault you.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  One thing I thought about with that, though, is where he ends on cost. I agree with you. One thing people dislike about window AC units is they're obtrusive. But window AC units tend to be put onto older buildings or they tend to be for people with, uh, who don't have the money to put in central air. You can get ones that are nicer and less nice looking. I mean, I haven't seen any that are truly beautiful, but, but cost actually matters here. And so this is a place where I think there often really is a tension. Where you can, you know, you can put money into the design of things. But if you need to produce things in a very mass way, they often look boring.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Or they can look very obtrusive. And there is a tension on many products at least between their form and their function. And so one critique you'll often hear of this conversation, the kind of conversation we're having is it's a, it's a bit elitist. That, yeah, beauty isn't nice to have. But, um, there was a reason, you know, what kind of survives from old housing stock is usually not the, like, the tenement buildings that the poor lived in, like the, those have largely been knocked down. And you get these nice row houses in Georgetown because like, you know, people put a lot more money into it. So how much is what we're talking about here?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  The mass production of what was once luxury. And when you make things mass produced, it tends to lose character.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  I think, again, it really depends on intention. Years ago, Target had a wonderful line that they launched called Design for All. And they worked with Isaac Mizrahi and really wonderful designers to create sort of bridge lines that you could buy at Target that would be less expensive, but would still be made with care. I think that Muji is also another, or another company where you can go into a Muji and things are made with care and they're not overly expensive. There are alternatives years and years and years ago, probably at least 10 years ago. I became obsessed with the fact that all shower caps were heinous.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  I mean, truly grotesque. And I went online to look for alternatives and I found a company called Shower Cap. S H H H O W E R C A P. And they made these turban style shower caps. And yes, they are a little bit more expensive than your sort of standard three pack plastic Oufa type shower cap, but they last forever. And they're gorgeous. And suddenly you go from having this piece of sort of fungus on your head that's been sitting in your stall for however long, to having this beautifully crafted, beautifully designed object that is not that expensive, but signifies that somebody thought

• 34:46Speaker 02

  that you deserve more respect in that experience. And somebody that wanted more respect in that experience found them. So you are able to find these things. They're not everywhere, but you do have to look.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  There's something interesting about that because you actually sometimes get this completely opposite explanation for why many things feel and look worse today, which is that they have become cheap. And so we don't attend to them as much. We, we were talking in my team as we were getting ready for this about how it used to be hand me down furniture was a really important thing. People got their grandparents' bedroom sets all the time.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  My grandmother's dining room table.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Uh, and now I think many families have had the, the, the issue. It's like the, you know, the elders pass on or downsizing their home and they want to give what they have, what they cared about so much, what was so important to them, you know, down, down to their children. Their children don't want it. And one reason they don't want it is that we have made furniture much cheaper. And so it's not as incredible an investment for a family to get a bedroom set or to get a dining room table. As you get one from Ikea and you don't have to think about it that much necessarily because you maybe know that this is your starter home and in a couple of years you'll probably change it. And so in a weird way, when there was more scarcity,

• 36:07Speaker 01

  people had to attend to what they were getting to sort of give that attention you were just giving to that shower cap more often. But when people know that they're only going to have the thing for a few years, when they know that its obsolescence is planned for them, then maybe they don't treat it that way. Because, you know, in the back of your mind, well, it's a temporary investment. It's a temporary visitor in my home, so it doesn't need to express as much about me.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  I feel bad for people that feel that way because why not have everything around you express something about you in some way? That doesn't necessarily need to be how much something costs. But I also feel in the case of hand me down family furniture, there is a soul that's embedded in that. At one point, 60 years ago, my grandmother sat at that table. Now, I didn't need that table anymore because I, for a lot of different reasons, my wife wanted a different table, but I don't want to get rid of it. And so I had it in my basement and my niece needs a dining room table.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  So I am shipping her the table and now she is going to have her great grandmother's dining room table. To me, that is magic. To me, that is a reason for living. That kind of continuity where you can pass something down that has been in a family, that's a dining room table where people gathered, where they ate, where they cried, where they fought, where they did any kinds of things, that that has so much meaning embedded in it. And that's what I treasure most about objects. I tend to be a bit of a pack rat. My wife would say I'm absolutely a pack rat. But things have sentiment, they're embedded with sentimentality, with emotion, with memory.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  There, it's evidence of living that to me is more important than almost anything.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  In the back of my mind, while we've been talking, I've been thinking about how different structures in our life operate by different logics. And there's a logic of markets and markets like a logic that is frictionless. Markets hate friction. Markets like things to be tradable. They like things to be legible across great distances. I was very moved a second ago when you said that giving this table to your niece, I think it was, is a reason for living, that participating in that ancestral continuity has a meaning far beyond the worth of the table. If you, you know, put it up for sale on eBay or something. And I think a critique I, I kind of buy is that

• 38:47Speaker 01

  one thing just going on in life is that market logic is eating more and more and more and more. And markets don't, as I was saying, markets don't really want specificity. So I was thinking about homes. One thing that has been measured is that people are painting their homes gray more often. There's a study about this from Washington DC, a sharp rise in the number of gray homes. Uh, this has been described as the color recession. And it's not unknown why it is. So nearly a third of American home sales in 2021 went to people who had no intention of living in them. The homes were an investment vehicle or the homes are going to be flipped.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  In 2021?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  In 2021.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  And so if you're seeing your home not as a place you will live for 50 years, but either as a place you're trying to sell to someone else and then maybe sell to somebody after that and sell to somebody after that. Or just as a place you're only going to live for a few years because you yourself are more mobile and you only expect to be in this job in Washington DC for, you know, four or five years. Then you're going to move back to Asheville, North Carolina or something.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Moving that home towards particularity, right? Painting it yellow and green because you're an idiosyncratic person who loves yellow and green is not good for the long-term resale value of the home.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And even more than that, I mean, I grew up in a place with very strong homeowners associations, where you were not allowed to paint your home a lot of different colors because it might change the resale value of the homes around you. It wasn't even about you.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  It was about, everybody wanted to make sure their home was an effectively tradable asset.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  And so there's this market logic that can infect more and more. And that that is, you know, uh, again, part of the, the, the trend towards sameness. I'm, I'm curious how that resonates or doesn't for you.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Well, in many ways, it sort of brings us back to the whole notion of somebody raising their house and creating a house that's so big that it infiltrates in that sort of air and space of others. Because that's exactly what is being controlled here. And, and that's why it's ugly. Now, I, I'm, I'm sad that there's so much that is being diluted now to eliminate some of what, some of what is strange, but also really beautiful or also really specific to a person. And look at all the auctions that go on when celebrities die,

• 41:22Speaker 02

  that somebody wants their desk or their hat or, you know, Diane Keaton had an auction, her family had an auction and all her clothes went on auction and people were clamoring for her bolo hats. So I think that there's this really interesting,

• 41:38Speaker 02

  really interesting thing that I want to do some research now on in that we still want these really expressive ways of differentiating ourselves. But within a certain parameter. So if we are being urged to, to gray down our color palettes, what does that mean about how much color we can actually express? And when we hold back from that,

• 42:10Speaker 02

  what does that do to our creativity?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  And what does it do to, or what does it reflect about the way we want to move through the world? So one of, going back to our, our earlier axis of both, there's something that, do you feel anything at all versus what do you feel?

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  I have a friend who, the way she dresses is meant to make other people feel things.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Like what?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  She, uh, joy, whimsy, but it's loud. Like you walk around with her and people are noticing.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  And she is trying to get them to notice. And the way I dress, and when we move this podcast to video, caused me a lot of stress, is sort of bent to not have people notice. I don't want you to be thinking about how I do, like, I want you to think it looks nice and then not give it any further thought.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  And there is this, um, dimension where are you willing to have people have views about you, right? What your house looks like, what you're dressed like, how things are decorated.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Or recognizing that some people might love it and other people might hate it, right? That fashion can be polarizing and design can be polarizing. Versus, do you have a society that in some cultural way has become less comfortable with that, right? People in it do not want to expose themselves to judgment. They want to be looked at, judged as acceptable, and have the gaze fall off of them.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  I don't know if that's possible, Ezra. And even when someone takes a stance against being obvious or loud, that choice is still a choice. It's still a deliberate decision. Years ago, my father decided that he was no longer going to wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts because he didn't want to be a walking billboard for the brand. Okay? What did he do? I can't even say this with a straight face. He put a flag pin over the logo.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  I'm like, Dad, you just exchanged one logo for another. Now you are representing the United States on your shirt, on your polo shirt. He didn't want to buy new ones, so he replaced the logo, the, he put, he covered up the logo, the polo logo with a flag. As soon as you see that flag, it signifies something. I have always, in the last 20 or so years, been kind of afraid of wearing color. I only always wear black, always, always. It's, anything else feels too fluorescent. I feel like I'm being looked at. I sort of, this, everything goes with everything. It blends. My nephew first, first realizing it many, many years ago, he said, hey, why do you always wear black? I'm like, oh, it's just easier. I don't have to decide about too much. Everything goes with everything.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  He goes, that's weird. Yeah, it is a little bit weird, but it's easy for me. And I also feel like you in the podcast world, to have to then suddenly go into video is terrifying. But I do think that every decision we make is deliberate. We're revealing ourselves in ways that allow us to be perceived in a certain way. And clothing and objects and cars and houses and sneakers and handbags all express that.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  In a way, I'm not sure people mean that much by the Ralph Lauren brand, so it may not be a great example. But when people put a flag pin on now, like particularly in like the post 911 world and in that period, it, it was a very, very, very specific kind of statement about yourself that maybe it wouldn't have been at other times when it was just a, you know, people had American flags or they had an FDR picture hanging in their house. Or separately, what it meant to have a Mao picture or a Stalin picture in those societies meant something different than in societies where there's much more of a choice whether or not you hung those.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  You're talking about the sort of emotional resonance being different between Ralph Lauren and a flag pin?

• 46:11Speaker 01

  No, what I'm, what I'm talking about here, what I think I'm talking about here is that the logic of branding, we have become so used to thinking of it as branding, as like the thing corporations are trying to do with it, that even when the symbol is coming out of a non-commercialized sphere, a sphere that would understood to be representing very different things about somebody, we almost now sort of see them all on, all in the same plane. You know, when I was a kid, I wore a gold chai, which is a Jewish symbol.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  And I wore that at a time when I was quite religious as a kid. I would, there appeared where I wanted to be a rabbi. And, and what that meant to me wasn't what it meant to me some years later when I like got my first Nike shoes or when I was trying to dress to fit in with other kids.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Like I was expressing something that was more private. I mean, it was existing publicly too, but it wasn't. And, and I think these are different. And so it's funny because it's not where I thought our conversation would go, but I think it's a very interesting place for it to go, which is places where maybe, um, logics or ways of accessing the world that should remain separate actually begin to converge. And, and I want to get into the public and private spheres here. And maybe a good way to do it is this, we sent you an email asking you for an example of something ugly that you thought was good design. And you talked about these ads that used to be on the subway from Dr. Zemmour, is it?

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Zemmour.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  So can you, can you describe them for, you know, listeners in audio here?

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Yes. Dr. Zizmore was a dermatologist. He, I don't know if he's still alive, but he's definitely not in practice anymore. And for many, many, many years, he essentially took over the billboards in the New York City subway system and had really garish chartreuse, orange, lots of rainbows, Dr. Z was, will, will fix your face, you know, all about what your, um, high hopes could be to eradicate acne. They were really hideous, really, really hideous.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  But over time, they were enormously consistent. They used the same visual language over and over.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Like rainbows.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Rainbows and really badly kern type and terrible vertical and horizontal scaling and bad silhouettes. But they became sort of like the Crazy Eddie ads of the seventies.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Prices, Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Part of the tapestry of the New York City subway system. And so they became really familiar and ultimately really beloved. Now, this is something that's really important to branding. Even when something is ugly, if you see it enough times, it becomes something that you recognize and you begin to associate with something. That thing could have good feelings, it could have bad feelings. Again, back to the feelings. And in the case of Zizmore, because he seemed like a nice guy and there were no scandals and he seemed to do good work and he was somewhat inexpensive and he talked to the populace, people love these ads. They love them.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  What people get so upset about now, when you change logos, it's not so much that the logo that is being changed is any good. It's that it's taking us away from the thing that we're most familiar with. And in a day and age where everything feels so tenuous, taking that familiarity away, even if it's a juice carton, makes people feel really insecure.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  So I want to take this on a different direction. So I was looking at those ads and I think they're wonderful. And one reason they're wonderful, though ugly and weird and crowded and, is that they feel like a person was behind them, not a committee.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  They don't feel like they came out of a sophisticated branding agency that had, you know, a kickoff meeting and a scoping meeting and, you know, you can, you can feel the, the, the sort of bureaucratic energy behind, you know, very sophisticated campaigns. But to go back to this point of maybe the market eating a lot of other spaces and imposing its logic on them. A column I have wanted to write and not written in part because I've been afraid of the reaction to it, is that as a newcomer to New York City, I moved here three years ago, I find the presence of the advertising on the New York City subway and on the buses.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Really sad. And not that it doesn't exist in other places. It does. We're not, you know, the MTA is not the only transit authority that raises so many through advertising. But that is a public space. It is actually one of the most remarkable public spaces, I think, in American life. The New York City subway, for whatever its flaws, is incredible. It is egalitarian. It is all stratas of society mixing with each other. It is people going in all kinds of places. And yet, it is all happening beneath the glare of these ambulance chasing attorneys and Tinder ads and plastic surgery ads. For a long time,

• 51:52Speaker 01

  the subway system I would walk into with my kids, it had an ad for the reboot of The Exorcist above where we would walk in. And it was black and white, and it was these two girls' faces, and they're like spitting blood icker. It was this horrifying grotesque ad. And I looked into this. The MTA gets about 1% of operating revenue from advertisements. And on the one hand, I know that the MUD administration is trying to make buses free, and isn't it a little bit elitist to say you should spend that money on making the subways non-commercial rather than making the buses free? And on the other hand, as I've thought about writing this piece, it seems to me that maybe public spaces should

• 52:33Speaker 01

  not be commercialized in that way. Maybe this should be a space of oasis from constant advertising, from your attention and your, you know, visual field being captured by the market. These ads make the New York City subway much uglier than it could be.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  So what I love on the New York City subways is sometimes they'll use the spaces they use for ads and put poetry there. Like, that's really beautiful. They occasionally have art on them. I think that's really cool. It has like a very old-style progressive movement, like the enriching of the citizenry. You can imagine a world where that was the only thing

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  that existed, that was, you know, non-utilitarian visuals there. And I think it'd be really beautiful if the ads were gone. It's like the market has eaten something that is for the public, and the market is the dominant visual language in something that they are not the dominant player paying for it.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  They don't pay for most of it.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  You're a visual prisoner.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yes. And, and we used to, I mean, if you go back to the 50s and 60s, people worried a lot about how the visual field is being taken over by advertising.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  And we've come to accept it in a way that is a little surprising and a little sad, and represents a diminishment of our ambitions for public space or the built environment.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Well, part of it is that the ads are really ugly. If they were interesting, if they were provocative, if they were something that made you think or inspired you, then it might be a little bit different. But if you're writing this article, two things that you might be interested in. San Paolo, for a while, took all their billboards down.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  In Brazil?

• 54:13Speaker 02

  I don't know if they still, yeah. I don't know if that's still the case, but they did that as a test, and it really changed the visual environment. And then Ed Ruscha, the artist, has a whole series of pieces, he did a whole series of pieces of blank billboards. And it's beautiful. No messages, just the white plain billboard in, in urban environment. And it's really quite provocative.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  That's so interesting about San Paolo. And I mean, you go to, I mean, I've been to other countries and their subway systems, and you don't always have advertising everywhere. So to me, it gets to something we're talking about, which is, we have begun to accept the logic of the market in a lot of spaces you might have not expected the market to be. We've begun to see things that are not market-based, like religions in market terms.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  And, you know, the market, I think, has certain desires. It's not that the market hates beauty. It would love to sell you something beautiful. But the intentionality of the market is to sell product.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  We see ads now in, over urinals and public bathrooms. I mean, really? That's when you want to get somebody's attention? I mean, there's virtually no space that is left free from a corporate mark. You have logos on eggs, on the actual egg.

• 55:29Speaker 00

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• 57:08Speaker 01

  As we're getting into politics here, I want to ask you about, there's been a real movement on the right in recent years to, in, in a very certain way, resuscitate an argument about beauty.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  And you've seen it in, I mean, Donald Trump uses the word beautiful.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  More than any president, I think, probably ever. And certainly, his idea of beauty is not my idea of beauty, but he cares about it.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's now even a term for it. Let's not forget. Mar-a-Lago face is actually a term in our culture right now.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, they are building things and going back to neoclassical, you know, architecture in different ways. And, and it's not just him, it's sort of all the people around him. I thought this from, from Tucker Carlson, this clip I'm going to show you, was genuinely interesting.

• 58:00Speaker 06

  This is another third rail in American politics. You're not allowed to note that our buildings are grotesque and dehumanizing. Why are they bad? Because they're ugly. And ugly dehumanizes us. And by, let me be more precise about what I mean when I say dehumanizing. Dehumanizing is the act of convincing people that they don't matter, that they are less significant than the larger whole, that they are not distinct souls, that they are not unique, that they are not created by God, that they are merely putty in the hands of some larger force.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Him starting by saying, you're not allowed to talk about this is strange, because you're definitely allowed to talk about this. But you do see a move on the right to say that we have allowed, like, beauty to become subordinate as a public goal. I'm curious what you've thought of it.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Well, it's the first time, I think, I've ever agreed with Tucker Carlson, ever. But I don't think it's true. I don't think that's true about the right at all. If that were the case, then there would be much more of an uproar about what the president is doing to the White House, to the East Wing, to the arches that he's putting up, to the reflecting pool. I mean, there's so much damage that is making Washington uglier. I don't, I don't see how that is being protested by the right at all.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Well, don't they think they're going to make it more beautiful? Doesn't Donald Trump think his reflecting pool is luminous?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  I don't know anybody that's like, you know, that, that, the Oval Office, that looks really good now.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Trump. The person who thinks that is Trump. But I mean that very seriously.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  But no, I do too. There's nobody on the right saying, you know what? Let's invest in gold filigree. No one's talking about that. That's not a trend that's catching on in any way, thankfully.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Well, let me make, not the argument for what they're doing, but I think the challenge they are posing that is interesting for liberals and people on the left to try to take seriously. The right's rediscovery of classical architecture, of Roman columns.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  The right, because it is a more, pretty the modern right in America, is a much more reactionary movement. It is able to locate a very clear moment of beauty, which is old things. And, you know, in ways where, if you read The White Nationalist, right, they're very explicit about this. You know, what they understand is like the, the European inheritance. And I think that the left, and the term the left is tricky, because obviously, you know, you have moderates and liberals and leftists, but has more trouble knowing what it wants to answer this with. Not because it doesn't think beauty is important, but because it doesn't want to dictate what the beautiful should be. Who am I to say?

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  And it's not binary.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  And it's not binary. And so you have an interesting thing, right? I do think that the right is doing something interesting in trying to move ideas of beauty back to something more, more centrally contested in politics. And I'm not sure I've really seen an answer, or even like a willingness to, to argue about it with them among people on the, the left, in part because if you understand the past to be full of problems, and you want to move to a future that is not yet built, well, what, what visual grammar, what visual language can everybody agree on for that?

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Well, nobody will ever agree. Not, not one, there will never be one way of assessing beauty. But I, I do want to make a distinction between taste and style and power. And so I don't think that anybody on the right is looking back to Roman and Greek architecture, or the architecture of Versailles, and thinking, now there was some really magnificent architecture. I think what they're actually saying is, this is the type of power that's represented.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  This, this architecture is representing a certain power, and that power is the way we want to lead.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  I don't agree, I don't think that's

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  I don't agree with that. I think they really do think it's beautiful. Or at least I think it's worth trying to grant them that they think it's beautiful.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  But I think they think it's, okay, I agree there. I think they think it's beautiful because it represents a certain type of leader and a certain type of power. And those things you can't always separate. It's like Mar-a-Lago face being beautiful for a certain reason. Those people think it's beautiful. You and I might not, but they think it's beautiful. I'm not questioning somebody's own sense of what is beautiful to them. But what I think is more important than what they think is beautiful is why? Why do they think it's beautiful? What does this represent to them?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  So I think I agree that the set of the tributaries of why we think a thing is beautiful are very complicated. Going back to what you're saying, even at the very beginning about proportionality and the mathematics. And I mean, you'll get into these things like, what is the perfect figure? Or, you know, the looks maxers in the men's movement now are sitting there like measuring the distance, the proportional distance of their whatever to their whatever.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  And why people have come up with what they think is beautiful is obviously contested. And then, as you also said, changes over time. But I take the right as, or at least this part of the right, as even if power is part of it, believing like now having a kind of politics of beauty that I don't think George W. Bush had, that I don't think Romney had, that I think is a sort of a new entrant into politics, right? The immediate executive orders on, you know, neoclassical or classical architecture. And I guess one of my questions, because I do think people, including on the left, is where a lot of the articles about everything becoming ugly that we're talking about are coming from.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  I do think people have a feeling that the world is becoming less beautiful to them. And I think they want this represented. I think that there is a yearning for beauty to be a publicly held value again. But I think the right always has an easier time with this because they can sort of just reach back.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Right, that's the make America great again. Well, if you're making America great again, you're going back to things that were once considered a certain way. That could be behavior, that could be social structure, that could be architecture, art, music, politics, et cetera. So I think that's all part of it. It would be shocking to me if make America great again, or the current president was like, let's, let's innovate a new style of architecture to represent our future. That's not going to happen.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  So alongside this new right, which I think is reaching backwards in its design aesthetic, you also have the tech right. We've talked about the cyber truck a bunch in this conversation. But crypto and NFTs had a very legible visual language. You have a certain amount of AI from slop to art. But, but you do have a kind of emergent language of what the kind of digital design of the future is supposed to look like. It's certainly a theory of the future. I'm curious how you think about that as like a contestant and what you think it is communicating.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  I think it's one faction of design that is apparent now. Because I could also point to Apple Park and the beauty of the building there and the buildings there, which are truly extraordinary as a counterpoint to some of that. Interestingly, a lot of the cyber chic is very linear, very sharp edges, whereas Apple Park is all rounded edges. You see that in Bilbao, you see that in some of the way the Whitney was redesigned. So I think that that's there also. But like everything else, I think that we're in this space of tension between which visual language is going to win out.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  There's always more than one.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  We, we've been talking about this very much, but a lot of what we're talking about, I think in a, sometimes sub rosa, some of these very explicit ways masculine and feminine coded. I mean, Cybertruck is a very male design. Say, say what you will about it.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  And you were just talking about like sensuality and curves. I mean, how much is some of the fight we're having here about the sort of larger political gender war dynamic that we've been in?

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  I'm going to go back to what I said before. I don't know that it's a gender war so much as a power play. How do, how do we believe power should be communicated and visualized? And that's, I think, what we're seeing now.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  So do you think about in a sort of modern ways, a kind of answer to what the Mar-a-Lago world has come up with for their beauty? Do you think there is an, an answer to that? You know, you can say, yes, the world has become uglier. I mean, I think it's something you're saying. And, and, and what you're sort of saying is what they are doing is ugly because it is garish, because it is vulgar, because it is out of proportion, because it is about power, because it is about intimidation.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  And I'll be very honest, it represents politics that I don't believe in.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Yes. And so do you think there's a, an answer to that you do believe in? And that does allow though, you know, people whose politics you do agree with to speak about beauty in a way that is more legible and inspiring to people?

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Ezra, I'd like to say yes. I'd like to say yes. In my practice, I am an analyst. I look at the time and back to try to make sense of what's happening right now. I'm not a futurist. I'm not even sure I would claim to be an optimist. But I hope so. I want to say I hope so.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  And I think that's the place to end. So then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  So I've been giving this a lot of thought.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  Going to name three of my favorite books over the course of my life. And then I'm going to push in one more that I discovered in the last decade or so that changed my life. So I'm going to, if that's okay with you.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Okay. So number one, it's a book of poetry called The Voice That Is Great Within Us. It's by Hayden Carruth, and it is a remarkable, remarkable collection of 20th century poetry. That's where I first became aware of my favorite poem of all time, which is a poem by Charles Olson called Maximus to Himself. P.S. I name my dog Maximus. That's number one. Number two is what I think is one of the greatest love stories of all time. It's a book written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez called Love in the Time of Cholera, which has the greatest last line of all time in a book. And so you have to read it all the way through before you get to that.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  And then my third book is a book that I hope one day to be able to do a visual version of. I fell in love with this book in college. It's James Joyce's Ulysses. I even went to Ireland for Bloom's Day, which is the day that, uh, the day in the life of Leopold Bloom that James Joyce wrote about in Ulysses and took a walking tour of Ireland and went to Sandy Mount Strand. And those are my three favorite books. Books have profoundly changed my life. But more recently, in 2017, I started reading a book called Hunger by Roxane Gay. And when I read that book, I fell in love with the author.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Sight unseen, just reading her words, so much so that I reached out to her. I wanted to get her on my podcast. She said, no. I tried to stay in touch. She was very squirrely about it. And then through a mutual friend, she got wind that I was actually not a crazy person. And then I asked her out on a date in 2018. And in 2020, we got married.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  So my book Hunger by Roxane Gay.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  That, that is a wonderful fourth recommendation.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Debbie Millman, thank you very much.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 1:11:04Speaker 05

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