Personal

When I changed high schools after the ninth grade, there was some confusion about how each school handled its history curriculum, and in the shuffle, I lamentably never got a formal education in 20th century world history. I assume this is why I was never required to read this book. Reading it now, decades late to the, uh, party, it’s hard not to wonder how it would have affected me as a teen.

Would it… See more →

After a long day, as I made my dejected drift toward Suburban Station’s 18th Street exit, I saw a mural cheerfully proclaiming, “My art gives me a voice,” to which I was startled to find myself reflexively responding aloud, “Oh, that’s cool. Mine slowly fucking kills me.”

I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical… See more →

I’ll begin by briefly weighing in on five of the most prominent pieces of the 2023 zeitgeist, at least from where I was sitting. Some cynical vibes ahead, so feel free to skip past this part if you’re not in the mood for negative energy:

• Taylor Swift: Gen Z’s version of Beatlemania is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, since I find Taylor Swift’s music to be entirely unremarkable, but that didn’t stop her… See more →

I’ve stared so intently at so many rapid antigen tests over the last few years, trying to discern if an impossibly faint second line was present, that I was entirely unprepared for how crystal clear my first positive result would be.

Covid-19 finally came for me on December 2, 2023, with aches, severe sinus congestion, and an obnoxious cough fully materializing three days later. Since all this arrived on the heels of a negative test… See more →

Maude

Leah and I became dog parents early in 2022, adopting a 15-pound, two-year-old Jack Russell / Chihuahua mix. Knowing Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned, we named her Maude, after the Bea Arthur character, who in 1972 was the first sitcom character to have an abortion. Living with Maude has been a big adjustment, but after getting over the initial hump, I’m not sure how we ever lived without her. She loves belly… See more →

It was as if National Review were running Criterion Channel. An art house streaming service with a foundation of conservative values, and somebody thought it would work. Or maybe they knew it wouldn’t, and that was the point. As I butted heads with virtually all of my colleagues, most of whom were also progressive-minded cineastes, I began to suspect the company had hired us just to tie up our expertise in a boondoggle. I wouldn’t… See more →

A few hours after my last post in this series back in May, L tested positive, as have many other friends and family members in the months since. As someone who still has yet to contract Covid, I may now be in the minority among the people I know. Nevertheless, between staying on top of my vaccine regimen and absorbing the zeitgeist, my day-to-day caution is almost back to pre-pandemic levels. I usually carry a… See more →

From: Twitter <noreply@twitter.com>
To: Rob Weychert <rob@robweychert.com>
Date: October 10, 2007, 5:54pm
Subject: Welcoming you to Twitter!

Hello, new Twitter-er!

Using Twitter is going to change the way you think about staying in touch with friends and family. Did you know you can send and receive Twitter updates via mobile texting, instant message, or the web? To do that, you'll want to visit your settings page (and you'll want to invite… See more →

On October 17, 2001, Low played a show in the sanctuary of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. Underground bands had been playing the church’s basement for years, but this was the first time anyone had ascended to the main room, and even in a secular music scene, the milestone seemed to take on a sacred significance. I didn’t go to the show, but it put Low on my radar, and after listening to Things… See more →

Nineteen children and two of their teachers were murdered in Texas yesterday and I have no intention of engaging with it. I’m truly sorry for that community’s tragedy, but I can’t help them and I can’t prevent it from happening again. Not with my votes, not with my donations, not with my woebegone tweet thread loaded with statistics decrying right-wing hypocrisy. Certainly not with my thoughts and prayers. Sandy Hook, an even worse massacre, occurred… See more →

A commonly expressed example of American excess is the fact that we constitute just 5 percent of the world’s population but consume a quarter of its resources. We haven’t quite reached that level with our share of the world’s Covid deaths, but our current 15.8 percent stake is still a plenty potent argument for American exceptionalism, though obviously not the sort of argument the exceptionalists prefer to make. Our Covid death toll makes well over… See more →

Let me begin by saying I promise this post is mostly good vibes. Skip ahead if you like, but if you’ll momentarily indulge my pessimism: What a stupid time to be alive.

2021 was supposed to be the year the vaccine gave us our lives back, and while it did for some of us to some degree, its international distribution predictably favored wealthy nations, and the long-simmering anti-vax movement here in the wealthiest nation of… See more →

I’m in chronic funk territory again. Not the the good, George Clinton kind of funk, but the bad, “how can this many people be this reliably disappointing” kind of funk. The Delta variant has been in full bloom for weeks and ICU beds in some areas are reaching capacity again, making June’s steady drumbeat of reopening feel like a naive daydream. Masking indoors in public is back in vogue, not that it was gone for… See more →

Leah and I have now been fully vaccinated for six weeks. During that time, restrictions around the country have loosened steadily, and even in indoor public spaces, masks are disappearing, as are plexiglass barriers and floor decals encouraging social distancing. We’ve had gatherings of family and friends in our home and attended them in others’ homes. We’ve hugged people. We’ve ridden on buses and trains. I spent a day in New York, my first since… See more →

On March 10, 2020, I attended what would be my last indoor public gathering in a long time, a US Air Guitar competition at Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn. I was ambivalent about going. We were still holding out hope that the coronavirus situation would be contained, but that hope was feeling more and more naive. “I love you,” I told my friends, “but I’m not touching you.” That seemed responsible. Masks weren’t a thing… See more →

In a revival of an old-school blogging pyramid scheme, my friend Dan Mall wrote about his typical day and tagged me and others to do the same. What follows is a mix of both the aspirational and the factual, and the distance between the two suggests that if life is time management, I’m not especially skilled at life. If you’re not either, read on for sweet, sweet validation.

My alarm goes off at 7:00. These… See more →

Nearly 4,000 Americans died of COVID-19 on January 6th, a new record that was all but completely ignored as our horrified gaze was averted by an even larger number of Americans laying siege to their own United States Capitol, egged on by none other than the president himself. In the week since, as the president has been banned from social media and grudgingly condemned the riot while refusing to accept responsibility for it, as cabinet… See more →

I began last year’s “That Was 2019” post by expressing disappointment in my immune system’s poor performance that year, so let me begin this year’s wrap-up by praising that same immune system’s effectiveness in 2020. More than 1.8 million people died of COVID-19 in 2020, a disproportionately high 340,000 of them Americans, and I didn’t get so much as a head cold. I spent much of the year being grateful for my health and financial… See more →

We passed a quarter million American COVID-19 deaths today. The virus is surging, hospitals are reaching capacity, the mortality rate is ticking back up, and the lockdowns are starting again. In a few days, an order goes into effect here in Philadelphia banning all public and private indoor gatherings until at least the end of the year. Gyms and museums are closing, indoor dining at restaurants and bars is halting. Outdoor gatherings are to have… See more →

Tomorrow is Election Day. The polls say the path to victory for the incumbent president is a very steep one. But after 2016, no one trusts the polls, no matter how many articles explain how pollsters have adjusted their methods since then. (For the record, 2016’s predicted margins didn’t give me anywhere near the level of confidence in a Democratic win that everyone else seemed to have.) Anyway, anything other than a landslide Election Day… See more →

I’m at a low boil pretty much all the time now. I think the past three weeks or so have been a little better, but I’ll still sometimes catch myself snapping at Leah over something impossibly trivial, or throwing my hands up in disgust and falling into a prolonged funk at the slightest annoyance. This week’s Republican National Convention, a substance-averse cult gathering which kept Hatch Act experts busier than ever, didn’t help. With the… See more →

In the spring of 2001, a friend and I drove up to New York on a Friday night and were waiting for Skeleton Key to take the stage at Brownies, a deliciously grimy rock club in the East Village, when we got into a conversation with some locals who were curious about our native Philadelphia. “I went down there to visit a friend, and, like, what is there to even do there?”

There’s actually plenty… See more →

I live in Philadelphia now. While I was still in Brooklyn, I aspired to get outside every day, but my stretches indoors got longer and longer. My last one was 11 days. I’m getting out much more regularly now, and it feels good, but it’s invariably an exercise in frustration. The latest CDC guidance says that surface transmission, while possible, is much less likely than transmission via respiratory droplets. Nevertheless, at least half of the… See more →

Since we’ve all been stuck at home since mid-March, my friend Sequoia has been hosting delightful trivia nights for friends on Zoom. In Philadelphia, pub trivia is known as “quizzo,” so Sequoia’s weekly event is cleverly dubbed Sequizzo (or, if you don’t have time for all those syllables, Squizzo). This week’s theme was rock and roll, and when I was asked to commandeer a round, I decided to focus on fictional bands. My questions are… See more →

I went for a bike ride early Sunday morning. It ended my longest indoor streak yet: five full days. I suppose my area of Brooklyn bustles more than most, but after reading about how everyone staying inside had given major cities the appearance of ghost towns, I expected a lot less activity. And more masks. The CDC’s guidance recently shifted to a recommendation that everyone cover their nose and mouth when going out. It makes… See more →

I’ve never liked Sunday. It’s the worst day of the week. It’s an imposter, shamelessly riding Saturday’s coattails, campaigning on the promise of freedom when it knows it will soon bring that freedom to an end. Saturday asks us what we want to be. Sunday tells us who we are.

Today is a Sunday. The first day of the first full week of the year. Renewal is meant to be in the air. The days… See more →

My immune system didn’t do me many favors in 2019. I was sick on five or six separate occasions in the first half of the year, including an obnoxious bout of bronchitis that lasted the entire month of February. Luckily that didn’t stop me from having an adventurous and fulfilling year, and for the first time in my four years at ProPublica, I used every single one of my vacation days.

Projects

My first three… See more →

Sometime during the development of Tinnitus Tracker, it occurred to me that color would be a good way to give its many entries—which span nearly three decades—a sense of time and place. Colors would change with the seasons and fade over time. In effect, every single day of the past 30 years would have a unique color scheme, each day looking slightly different than the day before. As a bonus, the color’s constant flux as… See more →

I expected learning musical notation to be like learning another language, and it is. But unlike learning a phonetic language that uses a familiar alphabet, music’s symbology constitutes its own unique alphabet. And while its symbols can be interpreted vocally, they’re just as likely to be interpreted with an instrument (in my case, a guitar). Rather than an English speaker learning Spanish, the process is more like an English speaker learning Arabic and translating it… See more →

Thanks to Tinnitus Tracker’s many browsing options, there are more than 1,000 lists of shows on the site, making the show list the most prevalent design pattern. It was clear from the start that this would be the case, and the design of event listings is something I’ve given a lot of thought as a designer and music fan, so it was the first thing I explored in early sketches and mockups.

My initial… See more →

Earlier this month I launched Tinnitus Tracker, my last big personal creative project left over from 2018. That frees me up to get down to business on my main creative goal for 2019: making music.

I’m a lifelong music fanatic and always wanted to be able to call myself a musician, but I didn’t get around to really making an effort until about ten years ago, when I started taking guitar lessons. I had to… See more →

In the spring of 2015, Last.fm, a social site that tracks users’ music listening habits, gave subscribers a sneak peek at its upcoming redesign. The first thing I noticed was that the Events section, which I had been using for a decade to catalog the shows I went to, was gone. It was reinstated when the redesign was publicly unveiled a few months later, but the temporary evaporation of my data was a good reminder:… See more →

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

I was at a party where I was being honored for some kind of achievement that wasn’t all that much of an achievement. JS said a few nice words about me to those gathered, and when I thanked her afterward, JK appeared and showed me an amazing new project: something to do with a structure that lived in his backyard, whose upside-down mirror image was beamed holographically across the city to his office via direct… See more →

A couple of years ago, I got a very unexpected email:

I wanted to inquire as to whether you were student at Kutztown University under the tutelage of Dr. Tom Schultz, and if you made an animated film in 1998 under the tile "Twelve Bucks".

Apart from the misspelled name of my professor (it’s actually Schantz), this was correct. But why on earth would someone be contacting me about an old, obscure student film?

The… See more →

In my work as a designer, color has never been my strong suit. I often try to avoid dealing with it entirely (as seen in the previous version of my site). Through education and experience, I’ve picked up the basics of color theory and mostly avoided catastrophe, but my rudimentary process has been anything but reliable.

My V6 redesign seemed like a good opportunity to try to improve my color game, since my site is… 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 →

Once I solidified my V6 redesign’s reason for being and wrestled its content into some semblance of order, it was time to create a system to govern its appearance. The site consists almost entirely of things to read, so typography would be the core of that system. Tasked with satisfying the site’s various functional requirements as well as establishing visual character, it would be a necessarily multifaceted typographic core. So where to begin?

The typographic… See more →

Dear Mosquito,

I must commend you on a successful campaign of terror, even if its motivations are unclear. What a feast I would have been! A steak the size of a city, unconscious and completely unaware that its tender extremities were under siege by a tiny, carnivorous dive-bomber. And yet, you sacrificed your own self-interest for the sake of unprovoked spite, and landed right on the paragraph I was reading, just as my eyelids were… See more →

I didn’t understand Twitter at first. A service that would constantly update me via SMS about the minutiae of my friends’ activities? Uh, no thanks? Using it via its website was less intrusive and slightly more appealing, but the whole thing still seemed to me like a really disorganized and fairly pointless chat room. Nevertheless, most of my friends in the web design community had joined by late 2006, and the service dominated SXSW Interactive… See more →

Twenty years ago, techno-utopians rightly recognized that the internet in general and the web in particular would democratize the distribution of self-expression in a revolutionary way. Over the next decade, the number of blogs sharing art and recipes and poetry and personal stories grew seemingly exponentially, and their proliferation in the wake of the dot-com crash was a testament to the noncommercial, grassroots nature of the movement. As hand-coded sites gave way to hosted blogging… See more →

After politely listening to one of my diatribes on the untapped potential of music metadata, Jeremy Keith introduced me to the work of Chloe Weil in the fall of 2012, specifically Sound of Summer, which dynamically collates the songs that soundtracked her summers dating back to 2001. I was fascinated by the project, but didn’t get around to actually meeting her until Jeremy introduced us in person a year later at Brooklyn Beta, and we… See more →

The day will have a typically slow start, so you’ll still be catching up on news and e-mail when your sister calls late in the morning. You’ll expect her to ask if you can make it down from Brooklyn to the Jersey shore where your family is vacationing, mostly out of a genuine desire to see you, but partly out of playful sibling rivalry: your absence from a family gathering makes you the lesser child.… See more →

Dear Frances Bean Cobain,

First of all, it was lovely having lunch with you, even if you did get a bit confrontational at the end there. I’m glad I woke up before I could rebut, because a cooler head has shown me that your assessment of my taste in music, if incomplete, was remarkably astute. Dark themes, deceptively simple songwriting, played loosely but with discipline. You kind of nailed it. And even if you didn’t,… See more →

Personal statistics fascinate me, and in the information age, I’m collecting a ton of them. Last.fm keeps track of what music I listen to and when I listen to it. Letterboxd does the same for movies, and the tagging system I’m using within it tells me how the movies were formatted, where I watched them, and more. Goodreads and Instapaper keep tabs on my reading, Foursquare and Tripit chronicle the details of my travels, and… See more →

Inspired by Daniel Markovitz’s Harvard Business Review article “To-Do Lists Don’t Work”, I have been “living in my calendar” for a few weeks now. While I’m still a long way from becoming as productive as I’d like to be, I’m definitely getting more done, and I’m also getting a clearer sense of my capabilities (read: my ideal productive self may as well have been born on Krypton).

In a nutshell, my (evolving) process works like… See more →

Dear Elderly Woman From My Dream,

I can appreciate your frustration. There you were, undertaking a civic duty that was not even yours, trying in vain to remove a massive tree branch from the road so that people like me could pass through your neighborhood unimpeded. You were not expecting some guy to come shrieking around the corner on a bicycle, much like I was not expecting to have my path suddenly and fully obstructed… See more →

Over three years ago, I won my first air guitar competition in Philadelphia. It had more of an impact on my life than I ever would have expected, introducing me to a bizarre and joyful underworld of free spirits who forced me to reevaluate what it means to experience music.

A few months later, and not entirely coincidentally, I accepted a job offer in Boston at what might be described as competitive air guitar’s above-ground… See more →