Music

First time in the @philauu basement in a decade (to see @KINGTUFFY) and it feels as familiar as ever, like no time has passed at all.

Hello, dear reader!

April is gone, but its links remain.

I’ve been obsessed with my current personal project lately (more on that soon), so apart from a handful of very brief movie reviews, I didn’t do much writing in April, though the web designers in the audience might want to take a look at my notes from last week’s Generate conference.

The links this go-round include some gems for Prince fans on the second anniversary of… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

March is gone, but its links remain.

I gave a brief talk about designing information at the annual Society for News Design conference, and also shared my notes from the other talks I took in.

Always ahead of the trends, I left Facebook at the beginning of the month, a little over two weeks before the news about Cambridge Analytica broke (news which long-time readers may not have found shocking). Since think… See more →

Hello dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

My site was pretty quiet in February, up until yesterday when I published the final post in a series about the process behind my redesign. This one is about color, and the recent revelations I’ve had about how to work with it.

This month’s links have the usual range of topics, with the highlight for me being a treasure trove of interviews and demos on… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

January is gone, but its links remain.

In my little corner of the internet, I posted a roundup of my favorite stuff from 2017 (including a look ahead at plans for 2018). As a subscriber, you may be especially interested in the stats I compiled about the 299 links I shared last year.

I released my first open source software project, Column Setter, a Sass tool for building custom responsive grids that… See more →

Projects

Since 2011, working with A Book Apart was my way of contributing to the design community while my own direction as a designer was uncertain. Over the course of 2016, as my new job at ProPublica restored my enthusiasm for design, I wanted to get back to working on my own projects and sharing what I learned in the process. Making time for that meant something had to give, so after producing the paperback/PDF… See more →

Happy New Year, dear reader!

December is gone, but its links remain.

I did some more film writing this month, most notably on The Disaster Artist and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and I also published a collection of all the shorter film reviews I wrote in 2017.

This month’s links are a good mix of the topical (net neutrality, sexism, the new tax bill), year-end reflections, inspiring art and design, and more. I hope… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

Most of my writing energy this month went toward a post about the typography and spatial relationships underpinning my site’s recent redesign. I also wrote a handful of film reviews, the most substantial of which outlines my disappointment with the ambitious Loving Vincent, an animated film made from thousands of oil paintings.

Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of this month’s links are devoted to thinking through… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

October is gone, but its links remain.

For my part, I wrote a bit about my first ten years on Twitter, dusted off the ol’ dream journal, and published the full calendar for Robtober, my annual horror movie binge. I also wrote a bit about each of the 31 movies included in Robtober this year. They’ll all be collected on my site later, but for now they’re available on Letterboxd.

With Robtober keeping… See more →

My 13th @AndrewWk bangover hurts so good.

Down the Breitbart Hole

This is a current in American life we’ve not yet fully processed, but history will record a preponderance of today’s right-wing leaders who emerged in the toniest quarters of the nation’s bluest states. Apart from the obvious examples of Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon, annealed in Hollywood, you can think of Julia Hahn, who attended Alex’s high school and is now working with Bannon in the White House, and Ben Shapiro,… See more →

Why Hollywood Is Trying to Turn Everything Into Movies — Even Mindless Games Like ‘Fruit Ninja’

Vinson then realized that he was faced with a formidable predicament. There are no protagonists or antagonists in Fruit Ninja.

Goldner says the key to making movies from board games and toys is to “focus on understanding the universal truth about the brand.”

The film’s director and co-­writer, Tony Leondis, told me that “The Emoji Movie” actually began with… See more →

Tonight I’m finally seeing @IronMaiden for the first time. All it took was for them to play two blocks from my apartment.

Animated Subway Maps Compared to Their Actual Geography

These are a wonderfully concise look at design thinking.

How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science

Murray Energy — despite its enormous clout with Mr. Trump and his top environmental official — boasts a payroll with only 6,000 employees. The coal industry nationwide is responsible for about 160,000 jobs, with just 65,000 directly in mining, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

By… See more →

Toronto’s New Flag

I’m a big fan of Kenzie Ryder’s concept.

Key to Improving Subway Service in New York? Modern Signals

Over the years, the authority has kept pushing back the timeline for replacing signals. In 1997, officials said that every line would be computerized by this year. By 2005, they had pushed the deadline to 2045, and now even that target seems unrealistic.

London has moved more quickly on signals because officials completed the work… See more →

A Metallica concert in 2017 is pretty unnecessary but I went anyway and my main takeaway was that Lars’s drums were purple and sparkly.

Wall-to-wall joy at the Revolution show tonight. I never got to witness the man himself, but I’m so glad I got to at least do this.

I worked for Jared Kushner. He’s the wrong businessman to reinvent government.

I worry that this new office will be more of the same: a vanity project, one that exists primarily to put Kushner in the same room with people he admires whom he wouldn’t have had access to before, glossing government agencies in the process with a thin veneer of what appears to be capitalism but is really just nihilistic cost-cutting designed to project… See more →

Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking

While assessing the significance of Flynn’s and Sessions’s meetings with Kislyak, an ambassador, consider this:

The label ‘intelligence official’ is not always cleanly applied in Russia, where ex-spies, oligarchs and government officials often report back to the intelligence services and elsewhere in the Kremlin.

What Is Race?

A good crash course on race from Whit Taylor.

Pissed Jeans: Why Love Now

I’ll probably have this… See more →

Blown Away

If you’re suffering from an excess of self-respect, the Corey Haim/Feldman erotic thriller is now available on Hulu.

King Crimson: Starless

RIP John Wetton. Colon cancer. Here’s my favorite King Crimson song, which he co-wrote, sang, and played bass on.

What Can Ivanka Trump Possibly Do for Women Who Work?

Before the election, her main interest in women was getting them to buy her clothing, her handbags, and her shoes. Who can forget… See more →

Rob Weychert’s Year in Review

My personal movie-watching stats for 2016, provided by the always delightful Letterboxd.

Why Classic Rock Isn’t What It Used To Be

But do radio stations rely at all on the institutional knowledge of their DJs to decide what to play?

Nope. The role of the song-picking DJ is dead. “I know there are some stations and some companies where if you change a song it’s a fireable offense,” Wellman said,… See more →

What’s Your Ideal Community? The Answer Is Political

It’s conceivable that people who live in cities come to value more active government. Or they’re more receptive to investing in welfare because they pass the homeless every day. Or they appreciate immigration because their cab rides and lunch depend on immigrants. This argument is partly about the people we’re exposed to in cities (the poor, foreigners), and partly about the logistics of living there.

The suburbs… See more →

Tonight I got to see Megadeth play in a room a little bigger than my apartment and it was very very great.

Kasich Goes for ... McCain

At least three prominent Republicans are publicly throwing away their vote.

The Different Stakes of Male and Female Birth Control

for some women, there are tradeoffs between their reproductive freedom and their mental and emotional health.

Not so for men. Though men have an equal responsibility to prevent unwanted pregnancies, they don’t share equally in the consequences, and never have. The burden of birth control has always fallen largely on… See more →

Barbara Crampton on Stuart Gordon, Chopping Mall, and the new wave of indie horror

For fans of 1980s B-horror, here’s a good AV Club interview with the delightful Barbara Crampton.

Anti-Christ in a custom van: The churchy cheap thrills of A Thief In The Night

It may seem impossible to not think of the end of the world in poetic terms, but never underestimate the premillennialists.

Why Punching Down Will Never Be Funny

Watters and… See more →

Shellac and Shannon Wright at the Bell House tonight. It was really really good.

Fear of a Female President

To understand this reaction, start with what social psychologists call “precarious manhood” theory. The theory posits that while womanhood is typically viewed as natural and permanent, manhood must be “earned and maintained.” Because it is won, it can also be lost. Scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that when asked how someone might lose his manhood, college students rattled off social… See more →

Tonight I saw the actual Misfits play a whole bunch of Misfits songs. My voice may never come back from this one.

I wanted to share with y’all a video of The Hold Steady playing all of Boys and Girls in America front to back, but I was too busy dancing.

Written documentation of last night’s Wolves in the Throne Room fan who solemnly held aloft a single invisible orange for several minutes.