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.
Matthew R. Pauly — A colleague. At KU’s architecture school mock interview night, Matt taught me one of my favorite questions: what kind of pen do you like to draw with, and why? Fast ink, a precise line, how it sits in the hand? Any pen will do: the why is the question.
McMansion Hell — Listing photos of enormous suburban houses, annotated by architecture critic Kate Wagner. Every pilaster, transom, and turret accounted for. Few survive.
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.
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. Most of the letters circle love, death, or beauty, and he answers each at length, as if it were the only one he’d received that week.
Daring Fireball — John Gruber’s been blogging about Apple, design, and adjacent obsessions since 2002, with more attention to typography than anyone strictly needs.
David Macaulay — His books Cathedral and Castle are why I’m an architect, but Motel of the Mysteries is funnier and stranger: archaeologists in 4022 excavate an American motel buried in 1985 and identify the toilet as a sacred altar. It’s a send-up of Howard Carter opening Tut’s tomb and the Tut fever that followed. I don’t know if this book is for kids or adults.
Alex Prager — Staged photographs that look like stills from mid-century movies nobody made: crowds, strangers, small dramas in saturated color. I first saw a few of her prints at Crystal Bridges, then years later found myself paging through a book of her work just to see what she’d do next.
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 half 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.
Courtney Barnett — “Avant Gardener” is a song about gardening on a sweltering day and ending up in an ambulance, sung in a deadpan mumble. I first heard it on KJHK, Lawrence’s college station, in a hand-me-down Buick LeSabre with no air conditioning and great reception.
Clare Doveton — I’ve lived under this sky my whole life and mostly look at it through a windshield. Her paintings are what it looks like when you pull over.
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! — Is from 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.
Ray Nayler — The last time a book made me feel the way Bradbury and Le Guin did when I was thirteen, it was The Mountain in the Sea. It has two minds unlike ours: a population of octopuses that may have built a culture, and an android who may be a person.
OWI — Their robotic arm snaps together from a box of parts—the kind of toy I wanted as a kid. My wife caught me staring at one in a hobby shop and gave it to me for a birthday. Its sole practical use so far is moving cat treats from the bag to a small plate, one at a time, while the cats look on.
Theo Jansen — Builds wind-powered beasts out of plastic tubing and sets them loose on Dutch beaches, where they walk the sand like dinosaurs from another dimension. He talks about them as a new form of life, and I’ve let more than one cup of coffee go cold watching their legs cycle through the same patient stride.