The Writings of William James, edited by John McDermott
Immersion: shallow, just a few of the compiled essays, which nonetheless stuck with me. In particular, the parable of the squirrel in What Pragmatism Means has been really valuable in driving my own thought. I want to write an essay at some point making a comparison between it and the javelin anecdote told about Protagoras.
Ways of Worldmaking – Nelson Goodman
This might be my favorite work of philosophy (with some close contenders). I love it because of the way in reconciles philosophy of science and philosophy of art, without degrading either, because of how it synthesizes ideas from other corners of philosophy, because of its accessible and humorous prose... you get it. It’s a good book. Maybe give it a try.
Immersion: medium — I’ve read every essay at least once, and wrote about the collection for a class. There are a lot of things I really admire about Goodman’s philosophy and his writing style, and I’m working with Patrick to put together a creative project very much influenced by it.
Against Method – Paul Feyerabend
I’m currently working my way through this, and really enjoying Feyerabend’s prose style, which swings from brash and irreverent to dense and technical (an intentional rhetorical maneuver, by his own admission). I also appreciate that his method is very operational, taking you through specific historical examples to make his points about the chaotic development of scientific knowledge and tradition.
– 11/30/25
The Normal and the Pathological – Georges Canguilhem
I read segments of this book in a college philosophy course about the concept of normality and the way it’s enforced socially and politically. I remember finding Canguilhem rather dense and long-winded at times (as to be expected of a French philosopher), but ultimately the book’s project, of destabilizing any sense of objectivity in scientific standards of normality, was very compelling to me. I’m eager to revisit.
Rationality – Jonathan Bennett
This is another analytic text that I recommend to anyone looking for something eminently readable and compelling — Bennett takes you through a theory of what makes a being ‘rational’ using a thought experiment involving bee communication.
Immersion: shallow — I read most of the way through it for a class, but haven’t actively engaged with the text otherwise.
The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy – Hilary Putnam
This book is actually no longer on my shelf! I have returned it to The New School Library. That it was a library book to start off with was a fact (ha) that I somehow forgot, until almost five years after it came into my possession. This is possibly explained by me never having ‘checked it out’ in the traditional manner.
During the pandemic, a couple professors directed me to it as a kind of corrective, after I expressed a naive interest in logical positivism. I put in a request for access, thinking to get a digital copy. A very kind and diligent librarian responded to me, saying that it was not in their collection, but suggesting other NYC-based library systems where I could get it. I explained that I was studying remotely from San Jose, and thanked her for the effort, thinking the inquiry was a dead-end. But some time later, she emailed to ask for my address — apparently she had happened upon a copy in a used bookstore, and she offered to send it to me, on the condition that I eventually return it for the library’s collection.
So it happened that I had this book on my shelf, and fool that I am, the whole proceeding slipped out of my memory until early this year. I resolved to finally give it a full read-through, which I completed in May, and then I returned it to the library this summer, per our original agreement.
Immersion: Shallow, one read-through of most of the chapters, omitting some that felt irrelevant to my interests. I did some notetaking and attempts at light exegesis here.
After finally giving this book the attention it demanded, I have to admit, I was slightly underwhelmed. Since Putnam is writing for non-philosopher academics, he does not wade too deeply into the conceptual depths of his arguments, and tries to cover a lot of ground in a very short span of text; for these reasons I did not find him to be very persuasive, despite being much more sympathetic to his position than I was as a college sophomore.
I was also frustrated by Putnam’s habit of getting into the messy weeds of the debates he had with contemporaries. Parts of the book, such as the discussion of thick ethical concepts felt like a summary of back-and-forth rejoinders in analytic philosophy journals, dwelling on how he took apart his opponent’s misguided arguments. I was not particularly attracted to his opponents’ positions in the first place, and I found them to be a distraction from what could have been a more substantive elaboration of Putnam’s argument in its own terms.
Despite my lukewarm experience with this particular book, it gave me some powerful leads to follow to get a better understanding of Putnam’s pragmatist approach to ethics and epistemology, to which I am broadly receptive.
– 11/29/25
Must We Mean What We Say – Stanley Cavell
Immersion: medium — I’ve only read a few of the essays in this collection, but spent a lot of time specifically with Music Discomposed and A Matter of Meaning It, which have been deeply influential on the way I think about the role of tradition, intention, and shared meaning in philosophy and design practice. Cavell is, as a former professor of mine put it, a great stylist and a true pleasure to read.
On Certainty – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Immersion: none / only slightly perused (but deeply interested, after having spent a lot of time with the Philosophical Investigations)
Logic, Language, and Meaning Vol. 2 – L.T.F. Gamut
Immersion: none / only slightly perused
I found this textbook being given away in the NYU Linguistics building, and it was recommended by my tour guide (a linguistics MA student). It waits for the moment that I decide to go beyond the basic first order logic I learned in college.
Naming and Necessity – Saul Kripke
Immersion: none / only slightly perused
I will probably disagree strongly with this book because of my existing philosophical commitments. But in the spirit of pluralism and acknowledging Kripke’s reputation, I want to give it a read.
Science and Necessity – John Bigelow and Roger Pargetter
Immersion: none / only slightly perused
Given to me by Emily, who found it a few years ago in a used bookstore. Don’t know too much about it, but I’m guessing its named after the book to the right and writing in the tradition that Kripke initiated.
Meditations / Discourse on Method – Descartes
Immersion: medium — like most philosophy majors I spent some considerable time in college with the Meditations, but not enough to feel like I truly have a strong grasp of the material (beyond the ways in which it has been inherited by Western philosophy)
Man a Machine / Man a Plant – La Mettrie
Immersion: shallow — read once-through alongside the Meditations.
Ethics – Baruch Spinoza
Immersion: medium — engaged closely with parts 1 and 2 (which are the core of his metaphysics, and enough of a slog on their own) to write several papers, have not seriously explored the rest.
Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant
Immersion: medium — I spent countless hours reading, annotating, listening to commentary about, and writing about this hunk of a book. It was very rewarding and has been applicable to many readings I’ve done since. It was also hardly exhaustive: there are sections I haven’t even set eyes on, and much that I read but still barely follow (e.g., the transcendental deduction).
Pragmatism in the History of Art – Molly Nesbit
A birthday gift from Emily — Nesbit’s writing style and the postmodernist philosophical tradition she’s drawing upon are not my normal reading palette, but are refreshing for that reason. Apart from the prose, INFO-CO’s design is intriguing and beautiful. I really appreciate when design is applied thoughtfully to seemingly dry academic subject matter.
Immersion: shallow, lightly perused
Studies into Darkness, edited by Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich
This is a new volume from the Vera List Center, derived from a lecture series at The New School exploring contemporary discourse around free speech. I’m as morally invested as anyone in the contentions and contradictions surrounding free speech, but I also find them academically fascinating, as one area in American law and culture where you see the seams in our conventional worldviews.
I get the feeling from the one chapter I’ve read, by Mark Bray, that the perspectives herein will be a lot more anti-institutional than what I’m used to (or am generally predisposed to agree with) — I’m looking forward to that exposure.
Illuminations – Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin
I’m shocked, in retrospect, that I never encountered Benjamin during my time as an undergraduate. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is such a compelling and prescient exploration of how we relate to “copies” of objects as well as different forms of media. It made for what felt to me like one of the most generative discussions that I’ve had with Patrick — very fittingly at KGB bar, reading passages by the light of our table candle — for Word and Image.
The other of his essays that I’ve dug into so far is Unpacking my Library, which was a very valuable influence on On Bookshelves and Bowers.
Minima Moralia – Theodor Adorno
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
This book and its author (who has elsewhere argued with Donald Knuth about typography) are really fascinating to me for their creative engagement with logic, analytic philosophy, and mathematics alongside art and literature.
Immersion: medium — I was for a time reading this regularly, but definitely a lot left and I want to revisit it soon.
Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
I got this book after it was recommended to my social psychology class by our professor, who also introduced Kahneman’s studies within the course. I think the most powerful takeaway from his research for me was that a huge portion of human thought and behavior which appears to be the product of explicit reasoning is in fact driven by automatic and imprecise intuitions. There’s a lot of resonances with this idea in philosophy of mind.
Immersion: shallow — despite my larger takeaway, and having read a considerable chunk of the book, I haven’t necessarily actively engaged with the material (especially considering the standard set by Andy Matuschak in Why Books Don’t Work).
You Are Not a Gadget – Jaron Lanier
I really value Lanier’s perspective on the way in which interfaces can and have changed the way we relate to each other and think about ourselves.
Immersion: medium — read it cover-to-cover and took notes, have integrated the ideas in bits of informal writing.
Evita – Marysa Navarro
I got this at Libros Del Pasaje in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, on a trip last Spring (Fall there). Visiting the city after many years and navigating it alone with Emily was exhilirating; but it was also a harsh, often embarassing reminder of how steeply my Spanish has declined, and how disconnected I am in many ways from my family’s culture.
I purchased this Spanish biography of Eva Perón to learn more about a formative figure and period in the country’s history, and as one tool to start improving my handle on the language. I think it’s a decent choice for the latter because (unlike Hopscotch) it’s straightforward nonfiction prose, so the grammar is easy to follow, and mostly I just need to look up vocabulary as I read.
– 11/30/25
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
All the Colors of Darkness – Lloyd Biggle Jr.
Progress: one read-through.
Found this in a book store/cafe and unabashedly purchased it for the beautiful cover. It’s a 60s science fiction novel with the basic premise that teleporters have just been invented, and turned into a new form of mass transit. The writing is nothing too remarkable and very of-its-time, but on the whole I found it to be a really entertaining story and exploration of the scenario.
– 11/29/25
Orbital – Samantha Harvey
Progress: One read-through
I don’t remember the last story I read where as little “happens”, in the conventional plot-development sense, as in this novel. It’s set in the International Space Station, and – as the title would suggest – takes you through the orbits of the ship across the planets surface, and the activities and inner lives of the astronauts. The book is full of rich and almost ritualistic descriptions of their perspective from orbit — earth’s geography, weather events, the city lights that signal human life, the shadows and highlights cast by the sun, the disorientation of time on their unique rotation of the planet, so on and so forth. The prose is beautiful, as are Harvey’s character studies of the astronauts. With that said, I found the novel difficult to get through, for the reason I stated at the beginning. I do enjoy this type of fiction, but I’m not sure a book-length exploration was the best setting for me to appreciate it.
– 11/29/25
The Employees – Olga Ravn
I’ve now done one read-through — short, sweet, profound, and beautiful. Without giving away too much, there were echoes of Electric Sheep in the way that the author treats the dynamic between humans and humanoids, the phenomenological experience of the latter, and the visceral horror of a techno-capitalist future. When it came to those themes, I actually enjoyed/appreciated it a lot more than the Philip K. Dick classic, which I find too utterly despondent, coarse, and misanthropic.
Then there were “the objects”, which ultimately felt less central to the narrative to me than the author was trying to make them; though I think this may be because I haven’t totally figured out their mysterious significance, and also because the aforementioned themes more immediately captivated my personal interests. It seems they were based on a set of sculptures by Lea Guldditte Hestelund, which also sparked the original conception of the book — there’s an interesting discussion of this collaboration here.
In general I think this book would lend itself to repeat reading — even as I went once-through, I noticed myself paging back-and-forth, referring to past entries as I pieced things together.
Rayuela – Julio Cortázar
Was gifted to me alonside the English translation to the right by my parents after I showed them a design project I did with a similar nonlinear structure, and expressed interest in re-learning Spanish through literature. Given how challenging this novel is even in English, I don’t know if it’s the best work to start that off with, but I aspire to regain enough fluency some day that I can enjoy Cortázar in his native tongue.
Progress: none, lightly perused.
Hopscotch – Julio Cortázar
See my entry on the original Spanish text to the left for context.
Progress: around 30% through it, going through the linear way from chapter 1-56 (I know, I’m boring). Emily is reading it the cool way and we agreed to compare experiences when we finish.
Tokyo Ueno Station – Yu Miri, trans. Morgan Giles
Found with Emily in an SFO gate bookstore while waiting for our flight back to New York. She got The End of August, also by Yu Miri, and we have been respectively working our way through the novels. Tokyo Ueno reads like a meandering train of thought — only one chapter, and the barest of partitions between sections. It’s been a rewarding return to literature for me, prompting me to rethink my attitude towards the genre a little bit.
Progress: Read once cover-to-cover.
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Immersion: shallow, read through ~40% but would need to re-read to develop a real connection with the poems and fragments. Nonetheless at the level of pleasure I love what I have read, the style and structure of the writing as well as its engagement with philosophy appeal deeply to me.
Bluets – Maggie Nelson
I was introduced to this book appropriately in a freshman seminar entitled ‘Poetry and Philosophy’ and deeply enjoyed it for its concept, literary style, and the aphoristic structure. I would like to revisit it soon, although my copy is unfortunately covered in the pen scribbles of my naive 18-year-old self.
Immersion: medium, read all the way through but nothing beyond that.
Get Out (screenplay) – Jordan Peele, Tananarive Due
Are.na Annual 2021: Tend
Are.na Annual 2022: Portal
Are.na Annual 2023: Service
Are.na Annual 2024: Trace
Are.na Annual 2025: Document
Dot Dot Dot 12
This out-of-print issue was discovered by Patrick miraculously at the Strand, and we agreed if one of us didn’t get it the other would and let him borrow it. I think the writing and design treatment are fascinating, completely holding up to the praise I’ve heard from folks like Jarrett Fuller. Also, in the spirit of the spine, I’ve digitized one of the essays and uploaded it here
Immersion: medium, just read through most of the essays once.
Publishing as Method, edited by Lim Kyung yong and Helen Jungyeon Ku
A kind gift from Patrick, who picked it up for me at an art bookstore in Korea; it’s a bilingual (English + Korean) collection of reflections and interviews on independent publishing practices in Asia, designed by Sulki and Min. I hope it’ll inform us in our own publishing endeavors to come...
Publishing as Practice
I know the parallels with the book to the left are striking! I haven’t dug enough into either to know if there’s any cross pollination though.
Revue Faire no.45, Made Redundant (4 Templates) – Stuart Bailey
Bending the rules a bit here by including an issue of a periodical, although I supposed I did the same with Dot Dot Dot (left/above). It’s fitting to pair the two, as Stuart Bailey was one of the key designers involved in Dot Dot Dot.
This collection of essays uses four projects to explore a thread running through his/Dexter Sinister’s design practice: the idea of creating, working within, and being in dialogue with templates.
Thus I think it also makes a good pairing with Designing Programmes (right/below), which is analogously a collection of 4 essays that use the works of the author as case studies, and which are concerned with the analogous idea of a “programme” or ruleset governing a design system.
Immersion: medium, one complete read-through.
Designing Programmes – Karl Gerstner
A very kind gift from a former professor.
Immersion: light. I’ve only read the introduction and skimmed the sections. But this has been enough to give me the sense that the book’s ideas have a strong resonance with the ways I’ve thought about my own practice. I’ll say “more TK” on that for now.
Karel Martens Re-Printed Matter, Fourth (extended) edition
Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design – James Dyer and Nick Deakin
Immersion: medium, about 3/4 of the way through and have stopped there for now.
What Design Can’t Do / Essays on Design and Disillusion – Silvio Lorusso
Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design and How to Escape From It – Ruben Pater
A clever parting gift from the folks at XXIX, where I interned last spring.
Immersion: shallow, I’ve just perused the first chapter and listened Pater lecture on the book. But from these small exposures I do have the sense that Pater speaks in a frank and grounded manner about the ethical conflicts in our field and the positions we hold, which I really appreciate — I’m excited to dive in.
The Office of Good Intentions / Humans(s) Work
A random find in the SF MoMA bookstore clearance section — I was attracted to the refined design and to the subject matter, as I interpreted it, of the ways architecture shapes our working environments.
aperture No. 157: Image Worlds to Come
I was first exposed to this issue when Shannon Mattern shared the article by Peter J. Karol about A.I. Copyright Law — this is a dimension of A.I. which, as exhaustively as the industry has been covered lately, I hadn’t yet found a particularly thoughtful treatment of, so I ordered the issue to read it as well as the other essays, and get a sense of how practitioners and critics of photography were experiencing this technological moment.
In retrospect I think that of all mediums, photography may actually be the best equipped to understand what A.I. means both for artistic practice and for our relationship to images in the world; its own development, after all, was the outcome of a radical technological shift that changed our relation to images, and there is a long tradition in writing on photography of dissecting its relationship to reality and its status as a form of creative output. I was pleasantly surprised in many of the articles — the essays by Karol, Rob Horning, Noam Elcott and Tim Trombley, as well as the interviews with Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen — by an extremely balanced and knowledgeable exploration of the subject. I feel like I was missing this level of depth from the economy-focused daily tech coverage that I typically follow.
– 11/30/25
The Work of Art – Adam Moss
I remember long before Emily gave me this lovely book, I listened to an interview Moss did with Ezra Klein while he was doing a press tour for it, and really appreciated his perspective on the work of being an editor, as well as the premise he gave for the project: that he himself was coming to art as a relative novice, hitting a wall in his own practice, and wanted to dig into the messy specifics of how seasoned artists find the drive and inspiration to do their work (hence the double entendre of “the work” in the title). I really connect with this, from years of personal experience struggling with my own creative output. Moss has the aesthetic judgement and connections to have selected a fascinating group of artists to cover – e.g. Kara Walker, Steven Sondheim, Wesley Morris(!) — and there have been some really rich insights on artistic process in the interviews I’ve dug into so far.
Immersion: shallow, have read a few of the interviews with the artists/designers/authors I’m most familiar with.
– 11/30/25
Convolution Journal 5-7
Convolution Journal is an experimental publication, and I can’t think of a better description of it than their own about page. The issues were designed by my former professor Andrew Shurtz in concert with We Have Photoshop. He talks a little about the collaborative process by which they made this cover in this lecture (which I also make a brief cameo in):
I love this more than anything I’ve made in the last few years. I’m also fascinated that what I love the most about it isn’t how it looks, but how it was made. I think it looks nice, but more than anything else I’m thankful that I have friends that I could work with and that are willing to feed me dumb instructions, and then other friends who are willing to go along with our dumb ideas and let the whole thing exist in the world. I see this as a possibility, both as a way of working and a way thinking about work. The form is important, but it’s not the most important. The work is the work, but not what it looks like.
Andrew was one of my very first typography teachers, and I owe a lot of what I know and how I think about type to him. He has a certain playful and skeptical attitude towards “design”/“good design which I deeply admire and have unfaithfully inherited.
Blind Maps and Blue Dots – Joost Grootens
Framework 101
This is a yearly volume produced by my program at Parsons, compiling student work and guest lectures. You might see my surname among the ones on the cover — this is from the year I graduated, and contains my thesis project. Another detail about the cover that isn’t captured by the scan is that the shapes are actually printed with a shiny gold foil.
This book and the one to the right were generated programmatically using a system designed by two of my former professors, E Roon Kang and Andrew LeClair, under the heading of 908A. I respect both of them tremendously and they have had a deep influence on the way I approach and think about design.
1, 10, 100 Years of Form, Typography and Interaction at Parsons
See left for more context — this book is from the year before I graduated, and celebrates the 10th anniversary of the current Parsons CD curriculum as well as the longer history of the program.
Designing the Editorial Experience – Juliette Cezzar and Sue Apfelbaum
Comically I had and referenced this book before I met or really knew of Juliette. I later took her course on editorial design, and she has become an extremely valuable teacher and mentor for me as I’ve pursued a career in this sector of design.
Thinking With Type – Ellen Lupton
The Elements of Typographic Style – Robert Bringhurst
The Elements of Style – Strunk and White
I found this on my mom’s shelf — she got it when she first moved to the U.S. and was learning to write prose in English. I truly intend to reference it (without worshipping it), but I also just find the typography on the cover to be very amusing.
Copy This Book – Eric Schrijver
Tender – artbook by Choo
Stages of Rot by Linnea Sterte
I discovered this Desert Island Comics, and was struck by the gorgeous linework and coloring (pen and watercolor, I’m guessing?), as well as Sterte’s biological and sociological worldbuilding for this alien planet. It reminds me a lot of Scavenger’s Reign, in depicting the mechanics of a strange ecosystem which is at once grotesque and beautiful.
Magic Hat – Bird Pit
A tiny and adorable illustrated choose-your-own adventure book, picked up at an art book fair from Bungee Space. I have yet to explore all the pathways!
Medusa – Yoyo Munk
I got this book after going to the mixed reality installation of the same name at Pioneer Works. The work was astonishingly beautiful — sitting in a grand space with a pianist playing ambient tones, watching a mirage of colorful pillars morph over our heads. The book, which is beautifully designed with an array of inks and materials (not well captured by my scan), documents the show and discusses the architectural and ecological ideas that inspired it.
Sights of Unary
I came across this at Spoonbill & Sugartown in Williamsburg. On one level, its content is just an album of the author’s family and vacation photos going back several generations . But it has a very simple and beautiful formal conceit, of being printed on a translucent paper stock which makes the photos bleed through each other from page to page (you can see some nice interior scans here). This, coupled with the seeming lack of order to the photos (mixing chronology, locations, and people wildly), is a really interesting variation on a conventional album — it makes me think about the parallels of experience across generations and between individuals.
