Life of an Architect — Bob Borson’s long-running blog and podcast on architectural practice as it’s actually lived, from career advice to construction details. It’s the site I point students (or the merely archi-curious) to when they want to know what fills the hours between the fancy client presentations.
Common Errors in English Usage — Paul Brians has spent decades cataloging the mistakes I’ve apparently been making my whole life, in a language I would have sworn I spoke. Good for ten minutes, grand for two hours.
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency — Daily short humor with deadpan titles. It’s where a lot of people, me included, learned that a piece of writing could be built like a joke rather than merely containing one. Still publishing after 25,000 years in internet time, still good.
Weekly World News — Bat Boy, Bigfoot, the aliens who endorse presidential candidates. The newsprint tabloid that was a staple of grocery store checkout lanes folded in 2007, but nobody’s told the website.
The Red Hand Files — Nick Cave’s advice column, wherein fans send notes and queries to the troubadour, who responds at length.
Daring Fireball — John Gruber’s been blogging about Apple, design, and adjacent obsessions since 2002. Nobody needs to know this much about typography. He knows anyway.
David Macaulay — His books Cathedral and Castle are why I’m an architect, but Motel of the Mysteries is funnier: archaeologists in 4022 excavate an American motel from 1985 and identify the toilet as a sacred altar. I don’t know if this book is for kids or adults.
Stephen T. Johnson — Alphabet City is an alphabet book with no letters in it, just twenty-six paintings of New York where the A is a sawhorse and the E is a traffic light. And M! Oh my, you’ll have to see it yourself.
Justin Marable — I spent a third of my first “grown-ass professional” paycheck on one of Justin’s silkscreen prints, a ghostly rural Kansas building I’d been eyeballing all through my last year of school. Student loans were about to kick in and I’d be broke again, but for a golden minute I’d touched the middle class.
TopCity Motherland — T-shirts reprinting a Gen X Topekan childhood: WREN on the radio, the field trip to the Adventure Center, Por’e Richard’s after midnight. When the poet Eric McHenry told me about this shop, it felt like a gift. If you’re not from Topeka, none of this will mean anything to you.
O! Enkidu! — Another writerly Eric, this one my neighbor. Eric Farnsworth’s retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh from Enkidu’s side, which is the half of it nobody asked the scribes about.