¡Hi! My name is Des and I am a des•igner who ships impact through craftsmanship & code.
A table of tourists was finishing dinner at Eleven Madison Park, the last meal of a week spent eating their way through New York, and one of them said the only thing they'd missed was a hot dog from a…
Print the Houston Rockets' shot chart for the 2017-18 season and it looks like a doughnut. A dense ring of attempts behind the three-point line, a cluster at the rim, and almost nothing in between. Th…
Robert Moses resigned, in writing, again and again for forty years, and every letter was an instrument. A governor or a mayor would cross him on a route, an appointment or a budget line, and a letter …
In the 1940s a city planner named F. Dodd McHugh was drawing up a master plan for New York's airports, and he asked Robert Moses for a strip of land. The Van Wyck Expressway was about to be cut throug…
In 1983 Andy Grove wrote the management career down as an equation. A manager's output, he says in High Output Management, is the output of their organisation plus the output of the neighbouring organ…
Take a screenshot of an iPhone tab bar, then scroll and take another. They won't match. The bar is glass now, and glass shows what's behind it, so the same control is bright over a white page and murk…
In December 1952 the people living along one mile of East Tremont, in the Bronx, received a letter signed by Robert Moses. Their buildings stood in the path of the Cross-Bronx Expressway and would be …
The word sits under the box in grey. Thinking. Sometimes with a timer next to it, sometimes with a few lines scrolling past in the voice of a diligent junior: checking the dates, going back to confirm…
A public authority, when New York invented the modern kind in the early 1930s, was meant to be disposable. The state chartered it to build one thing, in this case a bridge. It let the authority sell b…
A voice note arrives, four minutes and eleven seconds long. I listen to it in just over two, at 2x, with the pitch held so the sender sounds like herself in a hurry. She'll never know, because there's…
Jones Beach opened on 4 August 1929, on a barrier beach that had to be raised by dredging before anything could stand on it and was held in place with beach grass planted by hand, one clump at a time.…
A leader is on the fourth slide of an all-hands, explaining that the reorganisation changes nobody's reporting line for now, and in a WhatsApp group with nine people in it someone has already typed th…
