02. Amtrak Photos, Summer of Cooking, and the Critic/Creator

Hello from Brooklyn, where I’m sitting at my desk, with a fresh brewed cup of coffee (a Topeka Breakfast blend in a Kalita Wave for those interested) and a nice breeze blowing through the windows. I’ve long said I don’t have a favorite season but that’s been a lie: it’s fall.

Anyway, I’m Jarrett Fuller and you’re getting this newsletter because you signed up for updates from me on my work, photography, reading, and general thinking. There are so many more of you this time around — it seems mostly from this way-too-nice mention in Robin Sloan’s recent newsletter! The Robin Sloan bump is real! It was his weekly newsletter that inspired me to begin this one; it’s all come full circle!

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Every Tuesday, I take an Amtrak train to Philadelphia to teach an advanced typography course at University of the Arts. I've come to enjoy Tuesdays, the quick trip out of New York, and especially that train ride. The train has become the place I do most of my writing and is a time for slower, deeper thinking. All the photos in this issue were taken on these weekly Philadelphia trips.

This month:

• I've been getting back into the groove of the semester. I’ve updated my undergrad classes this year and experimenting with a few ideas I’ve had for a while. So far so good.
• Speaking of teaching, I finally put together a teaching page on my website with complete syllabi and class sites for every course I’ve taught over the last four years. I’m hoping to get some lectures, notes, and other documents online to share resources.
• And speaking of my website, I implemented a new 'dark mode' so if you have your Mac or iOS device set to dark mode, my website's colors will now reverse to match!
• I wrote a review of Henry N. Cobb: Words and Works for Design Observer. This is easily the best design monograph I’ve spent time with in the last few years and deserves more attention than I feel like it’s getting. On my blog, I shared some favorite passages from the book that didn't make into the final DO edit.
• For Scratching the Surface, I interviewed and released episodes with Danah Abdulla on decolonizing design, Jenny Odell on her book How to Do Nothing, Vishaan Chakrabarti on cities, architecture, academia, and Eddie Opara on being a Pentagram partner and pushing the boundaries of graphic design.
• I'm also putting the finishing touches on a brand new Scratching the Surface website that will hopefully be launching later this month.
• Haunted Bauhaus, the book from MIT Press and designed by me, that I mentioned last month is now available for purchase. Here are a few images of the printed version!

To accompany this new sweater weather and your pumpkin spice lattes, I put together a little Fall playlist. It's called Heroes and Ghosts / Buildings and Graveyards. You can stream it on Spotify here. I've been making seasonal playlists for nearly a decade now and have most of them archived on my website if you're interested.

Over the summer, I took over most of the cooking duties in our house. I've always loved cooking but my wife is a consummate foodie who has been known to make a quiche that takes three days to prepare! So needless to say, she ran our kitchen and I was still intimidated to cook for her. But after our daughter was born and since I mostly work from home, cooking became my responsibility as we figured out how to divide tasks with this new third person in the home. Cooking, for me, has always felt like another creative outlet and I've been running with that this year, generally feeling more confident and experimental. Here are a few highlights from my kitchen the last few months:

A summer favorite this year was Bon Appetit's sweet and sour brussel sprout tacos which I think I ended up making at least a half-dozen times over the last few months.

When I was in Boston for the Design Observer conference at the beginning of September, I had an amazing Nashville hot mushroom sandwich with my friend Sara Hendren. When I got home, I tried to recreate it and am adding this to my regular rotation now! (it should have been inside the pita but I'm stupid and accidentally got pocketless pitas.)

Using our Sous Vide, I made pickles for the first time which we ate VERY FAST!

And, of course, I've been taking my pizza making pretty seriously for the last five years or so and keep refining my recipes and techniques. (I want to write a longer blog post on pizza this month.)

I don't have photos but I've been making this fried eggplant sandwich for years (I usually leave off the roast beef) and it's easily one of my top-five favorite sandwiches. I'm having one for lunch today. Allison Roman's pasta with lemon and zucchini was delicious and this fried egg and garlic-green rice felt like a Mexican bibimbap! I'll share more dishes over the next few months...

This piece by Emily Gosling in Eye on Design on 'acid graphics' is one of those essays that gives name to a thing I've been seeing around (much like Mr. Keedy's essay on The Global Style did a few years ago). Acid design is the metallic, dark, maximalist work that's so pervasive today. It's felt at once familiar and decidedly new and I'm glad to finally have a name for it.

I loved Dana Goodyear's New Yorker profile of photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper, Tad Friend's profile of Impossible Burger, Micheal Chabon's thoughts on the purpose of art, and Wesley Morris's audio collage of how black music all popular music today. Tavi Gevinson's personal and thoughtful look at Instagram and being public online is so good and hit close to home for me.

I completely devoured Room to Dream, the biography/memoir of filmmaker, musician, painter, photographer David Lynch. It made me want to rewatch all of Twin Peaks but also made me want to double down on my own art practices. (I can't believe I watched Eraserhead ten years ago, beginning a decade of admiration for Lynch's work.)

I'm half-way through Ta-Nahisi Coates's first novel, The Water Dancer and next up is the new Ben Lerner novel, The Topeka School, which I'm very excited to dig into! I'm loving the new albums from James Blake and The New Pornographers and the new seasons of Succession and The Deuce. I'm very excited for Damon Lindelof's adaptation of Watchmen and for how many awards Phoebe Waller-Bridge is winning for Fleabag, of which season two is easily my favorite show of the year.

More on tv: I'm completely taken with the first trailer for USA's Briarpatch, an upcoming detective anthology series produced by Sam Esmail and written and show run by Andy Greenwald. It feels fresh and like a strange mix of Twin Peaks and something from the Coen Brothers. Esmail, of course, is the creator of Mr. Robot and director of Amazon's Homecoming (as well as an underseen) but worth your time movie, Comet. Despite thinking Mr. Robot would have been better off as a one-season limited series, I'll watch anything Esmail has his hand in (including the rumored Metropolis remake).

But the real reason I'm excited for Briarpatch is Andy Greenwald. This is Greenwald's first television show but I've been following his work for years. Greenwald was the tv critic for Grantland and is co-host of The Ringer's podcast, The Watch. The critic becomes the show runner! This is exactly the crossover career I love.

That's it for now. As always, if you have thoughts, comments, feedback, ideas, or just want to chat, simply hit reply to this email. I'd love to hear from you.

Until next time,
Jarrett