Jarrett Fuller

Building my own bookmarking software

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, Craig Mod wrote about the “bonkers” finance app he built for himself over the course of a week with Claude Code:

For the first time in my life, I have a dashboard that gives me a true, holistic view, of everything financial happening in my life and business. I’ve named my glorious contraption TaxBot2000. It is astounding. Let me repeat: I built this in five days.

It’s not perfect, and it’s not done, but it is already better than what I had been using for the last decade. Until now, I’ve leaned heavily on Quicken — closed-source subscription software that often fails to connect to accounts with two-factor-authentication, silently losing chunks of financial data. Previously, I’ve mixed Quicken with Google Sheets, using a stack of Google Scripts to move information back and forth between currencies and formats and countries. I’ve used Japanese accounting software to export Japanese bank accounts and credit cards, and then reconfigure and import them into Quicken as converted accounts. Anyway, complicated and weird and a bit quirky: my situation. For TaxBot2000? No problem. I don’t think I’ll open Quicken again.

My own experience with AI, admittedly, has been minimal: I use it to summarize the interviews I record for Scratching the Surface and it helped me pull out big themes from the conversations I had when working on my forthcoming book. When I got a new computer and had to migrate my decade-old Jekyll static website over, I used Claude to help me troubleshoot setting it up again fresh; then used it to help me build some simple photo galleries for my website. Perhaps naively, I feel little fear in it taking my job and as I’ve written before, I don’t think it fundamentally changes my industry as much as speeds up a trend a long time in the making. My partner has made copious use of AI agents in her work that has me intrigued with possibilities in new ways.

This, combined with Mod’s ambition, inspired me to spend some time on Sunday morning building a custom bookmarking app for myself. For the better part of twenty years, I’ve used bookmarking software as my second brain: to save links, articles, urls, and documents that I may want to refer back to. I started with del.icio.us in the early web 2.0 days before flirting with the shortlived Google Bookmarks. For the better part of a decade, I lived and died inside Evernote where I threw everything I may want to reference later. As Evernote got increasly bloated (and I continued to use it in a way it wasn’t really designed for), I left ten years ago, briefly for Are.na before settling on Pinboard. Pinboard is stupidly simple: I save links via a bookmarklet. I copy quotes or notes into a text field and assign it some tags. Done. (I pay extra for the web cache version that saves archives of the pages but have never actually used it.)

I’ve been happy with Pinboard overall and have nearly 5000 links saved in my account. But the service hasn’t been noticeably updated in years and feels dormant. I’m noticing increased errors in saves and I’ve never gotten it work quite right (with apis and partner apps) on iOS. I’d been on the lookout for something to migrate too but all seem overly complex for my simple needs. I realized I could build one for myself.

And so I did. Over the course of about an hour and half, I got up and running a super-simple bookmarking app. Here’s how it works:

In Safari, there’s a bookmarklet button (just like Pinboard) that opens a new window. In that window, the page title and url are pre-saved and there’s a text box for notes and a field for tags.
When I click save, a python server saves that data in a markdown file named YYMMDD_title-of-the-webpage.md, my preferred naming convention for all my files, into a folder on Dropbox.
That Dropbox folder is called Bookmarks and lives in my Obsidian vault so I can now open and search all my bookmarks in Obsidian.

And that’s it! Like I said, my needs are simple. I increasingly want all my documents as text files so I’m not bound to any app or format and now nothing lives on a server or in the cloud, it’s all saved locally and synced via Dropbox. All my writing happens in Obsidian already — from essays to quick notes to journaling — and having all my bookmarks in Obsidian turns it into a powerful archive of both reading and writing; a place to both research and produce.

Example of the Markdown file the server creates for me as it's seen in Obsidian.

After some back and forth on specific features and getting the local server running, most of my time was spent formatting the Markdown files the way I wanted them. Then, I gave Claude the json file of all 5000 bookmarks in Pinboard and asked it to turn those into .md files too, named and formatted the same way. I downloaded that zip file and threw it in my Bookmarks folder, essentially rebuilding my entire Pinboard archive locally. Inside Obsidian, it’s still searchable, linkable, and, most importantly for me, integrated into my writing environment.

Next steps are building the iOS bookmarklet so I can save links from my phone and iPad and then customizing the design for the popup windows to better match my aesthetic. Was this a complex project, not at all. It’s on the easy side of what these models can do. It’s no finance app, that’s for sure. But does it solve a simple problem for me, in the exact way I want? Yes. Does it divorce me from living inside someone else’s platform? Yes. Does it keep my bookmarks in an easily transferrable format in case my tastes change in the future? Yes. All these things are important to me and I love that I can roll my own solutions for these particular values. In this way, it feels less like something new and more like the decades long open-source software movement.

Paul Ford, in an essay for the New York Times recently wrote:

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

That’s how I feel, honestly. After building this little bookmarklet and saving my first files, I felt a pride like the one I remember feeling in high school, building my first websites. Then I felt stupid because I didn’t build anything at all this time, I just asked a Claude to do it for me. But that ability to ask, for someone like me with just enough programming experience, feels like it opens up a world of possiblities in the same way learning to code html did twenty years ago. Today, anyone can build a website with simple tools, drag and drop interfaces, and premade templates. Maybe that’s the future of software too?

Designed Films

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My first film education came in high school in the basement of my grandparents’s house. My grandmother, ever the early adopter (and perhaps pirate?), was early to the VCR and had recorded dozens of movies for her personal library. Each video had two or three movies recorded onto it and was labeled with a number on the spine. A printed index hung on the wall next to the floor-to-ceiling shelves where you could find, for example, that North by Northwest was the second movie on tape 47. We visited their house for a week every summer and each night, I’d pick a new movie to watch; the only criteria I created for myself was that it had to be a movie released before I was born. I watched my first Hitchcocks from those videos. I watched To Kill a Mockingbird and the original King Kong. Aunts and uncles started recommending movies, pulling videos off the shelf for me. My love of movies started in that basement.

My second education was the two years I spent working at a video store in college. As employees, we could check out three movies at once for free, and I often maxed out my rentals, going through filmographies of directors or taking recommendations from the regular customers, often watching 4 or 5 films a week. I got into documentaries here. Certain movies, just seeing their covers, reminds me of working the late shift putting DVDs back on the shelves. Later, when I first subscribed to the Criterion Channel, what I consider my third education, I was reminded of both my grandparent’s basement and my short tenure at Hollywood Video. Criterion was my third education with its curated collections and video commentary, my movie watching became strategic and considered again in a way it was when I was younger.

This is perhaps a long winded way of saying that I’ve been interested in movies for as long as I’ve been interested in design and though I chose one to study and work in, the two have always co-mingled in my mind. Cinema has remained a touchstone in my cultural development and an influential place for inspiration in my work. I continue to look for connections between them and seek out the overlap in the construction of a design and the construction of a film. After all, many of the movies that stick with me — the ones I often count as favorites — I tend to describe as movies that feel as if they have been “designed”. But lately I’ve been wondering what that means: what makes a film designed? What does it mean for a movie to feel designerly?

Sometimes I think I say a film has been designed if it’s formally innovative, playing with narrative or structure. But this doesn’t feel quite right: there’s nothing inherent to design that equates to formal experimentation and there are plenty of formally ambitious films that don’t, to me, feel like they’ve been “designed.” I’ve been rewatching the movies of Charlie Kaufman lately and am continually dazzled by his 2009 film, Synecdoche, NY, a daring, epic, formally audacious film that seemed to fit my above description. Is this designed?

Perhaps, instead, I mean movies that are reflexive in some way; they make you aware of the artifice of the filmmaking process. Again, Kaufman’s movies would fit the bill here: Synecdoche, NY or Adaptation, a movie that’s literally about the making of the movie you are watching. I’m reminded, too, of Wes Anderson’s films, a director I’ve probably thought more about than any other. While the exquisite detail and structure to his sets is a turn off for many viewers, I find the imposed artifice exciting, as if it’s somehow more honest. I recently watched Ramell Ross’s 2024 film, Nickel Boys, a beautifully cinematic film which uses a fascinating first-person camera angle, with characters looking directly at you, the viewer, as if you were in the movie. Here, the viewer is both inside and outside the film. Or consider Lars von Trier’s “documentary”, The Five Obstructions, a constructed documentary about filmmaking and the creative process. I’ve called all of these movies designed at various points.

I do think this starts to get closer: in each of these the formal conceits become a part of the story. One of my very favorite movies is Orson Wells’ F for Fake, a film essay about cinema, trickery, and storytelling. (I made a whole film, ten years ago, inspired by it!). Here Wells blends found footage, documentary reportage, and staged scenes to explore his ideas into a form that starts to feel like it’s been designed.

Perhaps its not just any formal conceit or experimentation but specific structural models. A movie that has always felt designed to me is Mike Mills’s film Beginners. Interspersed in the narrative is voice-over narration with slideshow like montages of still images, found footage, and typographic treatments. Mills began his career as a designer and I think that sensibility shows in his films: there is something almost literary or book-like to their construction. But maybe I think of his films as designed just because I know he’s also a designer? The Norwegian director Joachim Trier does similar things in his films but with no design background. His film The Worst Person in the World, another of my favorites, and another that feels “designed”, opens with the title card “A story in 12 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue”. Again, there is a literary-feel to this structure and each chapter is introduced with a title card.

Is this what makes a film designed? The use of the tools of design? Typography, image color, line, shape, rhythm, etc? Both Mills and Trier use typography heavily in their movies and play with still images, illustration, and staged photos. Anderson, too, employs typography in title cards, supplemental information, and structural orientation. Consider his film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a story within a story within a story. Each layer is shot in a corresponding aspect ratio to delineate where in time you are; size, shape, and color used the way a graphic designer might. Is a designed film simply one that uses the elements of design?

Maybe that’s enough? I want to find a better language or framework for talking about filmmaking that feels designerly. I wonder if I’m just trying to apply my discipline’s language on another and it’ll never perfectly overlap. Or maybe I just want to claim the movies I love as something other than they are. Do I want them to be design or do I want design to contain filmmaking?

Movies Watched, 2025

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1/1/25 All of Us Strangers (2023)
1/2/25 Wham! (2023)
1/4/25 Monsters, Inc. (2001)
1/2/25 The Childhood of a Leader (2015)
1/11/25 The Boss Baby (2017)
1/11/25 To Die For (1995)
1/18/25 The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
1/24/25 Hunger (2008)
1/28/25 Blitz (2024)
2/1/25 Lilo & Stitch (2002)
2/6/25 Here (2024)
2/8/25 The Lorax (2012)
2/15/25 The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019)
2/16/25 You Hurt My Feelings (2023)
2/20/25 The Moustache (2005)
2/22/25 Saturday Night (2024)
2/22/25 The Cat In The Hat (2003)
2/28/25 Past Lives (2023)
3/1/25 The Wild Robot (2024)
3/3/25 Crossing Delancy (1988)
3/7/25 The Mystery of Picasso (1956)
3/7/25 A Real Pain (2024)
3/8/25 The Addams Family (2019)
3/12/25 Away We Go (2009)
3/15/25 Moana 2 (2024)
3/22/25 The Addams Family 2 (2021)
3/26/25 Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (2023)
3/28/25 Challengers (2024)
3/29/25 Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs (2009)
4/6/25 Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013)
4/13/25 Zootopia (2016)
4/19/25 The Lorax (2012)
4/26/25 Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (2025)
4/26/25 Horton Hears a Who (2008)
5/3/25 Flow (2024)
5/6/25 Showing Up (2022)
5/8/25 Art College 1994 (2023)
5/10/25 Decision to Leave (2022)
5/10/25 Ponyo (2008)
5/13/25 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
5/15/25 Conclave (2024)
5/17/25 My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
5/18/25 The Daytrippers (1996)
5/22/25 Sinners (2025)
5/23/25 Stopping the Steal (2024)
5/24/25 Hercules (1997)
5/31/25 Madagascar (2005)
5/31/25 Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)
5/31/25 Mountainhead (2025)
6/2/25 Camera Buff (1979)
6/7/25 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
6/10/25 Napoleon (2023)
6/12/25 Babygirl (2024)
6/14/25 Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012)
6/17/25 Bergman Island (2021)
6/20/25 Presence (2024)
6/21/25 WALL-E (2008)
6/25/25 Still Walking (2008)
6/28/25 Cars (2006)
6/30/25 Volver (2006)
7/5/25 Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)
7/5/25 The Good Dinosaur (2015)
7/6/25 Mike Birbiglia: The Good Life (2025)
7/10/25 Burn After Reading (2008)
7/12/25 Cars 2 (2011)
7/19/25 Cars 3 (2017)
7/26/25 Inside Out (2015)
7/29/25 Miami Vice (2006)
8/2/25 Inside Out 2 (2024)
8/3/25 Manhunter (1986)
8/3/25 Pee-wee as Himself (2025)
8/7/25 Godzilla (1954)
8/9/25 The Incredibles (2004)
8/12/25 Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
8/13/25 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (1992)
8/16/25 Marc Maron: Panicked (2025)
8/23/25 Toy Story (1995)
8/30/25 KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
9/6/25 Toy Story 2 (1999)
9/13/25 Toy Story 3 (2010)
9/14/25 Klute (1971)
9/18/25 The Parallax View (1974)
9/21/25 All The President’s Ment (1976)
9/21/25 Toy Story 4 (2019)
9/27/25 Shrek (2001)
10/4/25 Shrek 2 (2004)
10/8/25 Christine (1983)
10/12/25 Hotel Transylvania (2012)
10/13/25 Vampires (1998)
10/18/25 Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)
10/24/25 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
10/25/25 Prince of Darkness (1987)
10/26/25 Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018)
11/6/25 They Live (1988)
11/8/25 Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania (2024)
11/9/25 The New Yorker at 100 (2025)
11/15/25 The Wizard of Oz (1939)
11/16/25 DEVO (2024)
11/22/25 Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
11/25/25 After The Hunt (2025)
11/29/25 The Santa Clause (1994)
11/30/25 Rachel Getting Married (2008)
12/6/25 The Santa Clause 2 (2002)
12/12/25 Materialists (2025)
12/13/25 The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006)
12/14/25 Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)
12/15/25 Thelma (2017)
12/19/25 Louder Than Bombs (2015)
12/20/25 That Christmas (2024)
12/21/25 One Battle After Another (2025)
12/23/25 Zootopia 2 (2025)
12/25/25 Oslo, August 31 (2011)
12/27/25 The Muppets Christmas Carol (1992)

Books Read, 2025

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Against Platforms – Mike Pepi
Class Trip and The Moustache – Emmanuel Carrere
A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design – Matt Owens
Josef Albers: Life and Work – Charles Darwent
Stay True – Hua Hsu
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Notes on Peter Eisenman: The Gradual Vanishing of Architecture – M. Murry Schlabs
An Octoroon – Branden Jacob-Jenkins
Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy – Tony Fry
The Late Americans – Brandon Taylor
The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in the Age of Extremism – Tim Alberta
Lila – Marilynne Robinson
The Siren’s Call – Chris Hayes
Flourish: Design Paradigms for the Planetary Imaginary – Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlin
Abundance – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
The Extreme Self – Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Orbist
Sanding Down Gravestones – Lars Morch Finborud
House of X/Powers of X – Jonathan Hickman
Rental House – Weike Wang
The Making of the Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes
A *Co* Program for Graphic Design – David Reinfurt
A *New* Program for Graphic Design – David Reinfurt
Perfection – Vincenzo Latronico
The Novelist – Jordan Castro
Exhibitionist – Peter Mendelsund
Rejection – Tony Tulathimutti
Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening – Ben Ratliff
Audition – Katie Kitamura
Skyfaring – Mark Vanhoenacker
Weepers – Peter Mendelsund
Toyko These Days, Volume 1 – Taiyo Matusmoto
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company – Patrick McGee
Stoner – John Williams
Should Could Might Don’t – Nick Foster
Tokyo These Days, Volume 2 – Taiyo Matusmoto
Tilt – Emma Patee
The Invention of Design – Maggie Gram
One Woman Show – Christine Coulson
Perspective(s) – Laurent Binet
_Design and Visual Communication _ – Bruno Munari
Enshittification – Cory Doctorow
The Emperor of Gladness – Ocean Voung
Above The Pavement—the Farm! Architecture and Agriculture at P.F. 1 – Amale Andraos and Dan Wood
The House of Doctor Koolaas – Francoise Fromonot
The Hearing Test – Eliza Barry Callahan
The Design Comedy – Otto von Busch
Communications – Raymond Williams
More Than One: Geo Ponti – Manfredo di Robilant & Manuel Orazi (eds.)
Dubliners – James Joyce
Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat – Hito Steyerl
Theory & Practice – Michelle de Kretser
Tokyo These Days, Volume 3 – Taiyo Matusmoto
Twist – Colum McCann

2025 Year in Review

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I think we will look back on 2025 as a year when things changed. Politically, socially, technologically, culturally, it feels like 2025 was a transition year; an old thing is ending and some new thing is beginning. This is why Vinson Cunningham’s essay in the New Yorker, published on Christmas day, resonated with me so much. You should read it. Globally, 2025 feels like a transition but personally, it did too. I couldn’t shake the sense all year that my work was changing. That it needed to change. I felt, and continue to feel, like the work I’ve been doing the last decade or so is wrapping up in some sense and some new thing is emerging. I don’t know what that new thing is yet; if it’s big or small, a slight adjustment or a radical shift. But I sense change.

A big reason for this is because I spent a large part of 2025 wrapping up my new book. It’ll come out in the Fall of this year and feels, in many ways, like a summation of what I’ve been working on and working towards for the last ten years. It’s about graphic design and trying to figure out what that term means today. It’s a book of history and hopefully a possible path for the future. It has essays and interviews and case studies. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on and I’m curious to see how it’ll be received. I’ll have much more to say about it in the coming months.

That book, I think, is in dialogue (ha) with the conversations I continue to have on Scratching the Surface. My podcast will, somehow, turn ten this year. It started when I was in graduate school, trying to figure out what kind of designer I wanted to be and this book is some kind of answer. In 2025, I released seventeen episodes of Scratching the Surface and I’m continually amazed at how this platform is able to grow and shift and change with my interests. A decade in, it still feels central to everything I do. This year, I talked to editors and university presidents, garden designers and cultural historians. We talk about the past and the future, the land and the city. I’m honored to publish other writers, too, like a series of book reviews from James Dyer, excerpts from new books by James Voorhies, Archigram, and Anja Lutz, and other original content. And then over on our Substack, we continue to round up design stories and try to find new, deeper ways of talking about design. Paying members (subscribe! support my work!) get bonus interviews with previous guests like Michael Bierut, Nat Pyper, Mitch Goldstein, and Julia Watson.

Much of my own writing is published by Fast Company and Untapped these days. In August, I wrote about AI — a topic I’ve tried to resist and avoid — for Fast Company. Especially in graphic design, I think conversations around AI are masking larger issues with out industry and I wanted to shift the conversation a bit. I rarely write zeitgeist-y things and this is as close to going viral as anything I’ve written. The response was largely positive and feels like it hit on something in a new way. Also on Fast Company, I did two book roundups, one for back-to-school and one for my favorite books of 2025, and interviewed David Reinfurt about his new book, A Co-Program for Graphic Design. For Untapped, I published two essays, the first was a personal essay about growing up on a summer camp and the second was a review of the new English translation of Design and Visual Communcation. I’m especially proud of that essay about summer camp and am itching to do more memoir-esque essays like that. Finally, in my first piece for The Architect’s Newspaper, I reviewed Glenn Adamson’s book on the future, a Century of Tomorrows.

I continue to post other writing here on my blog, an activity I always wish I had more time for. I wrote about the late films of Steven Soderberg, the books of Craig Mod, the music of Alexander Biggs, and the difference between conversations and interviews. I also posted two photo sets, one of my mini, impromptu Cincinnati architecture tour and another of ten years of photographing a car in Baltimore. I continue to post semi-regularly on jarrettfuller.photo, my old-school photo blog.

I traveled more this year and gave more talks — including my first academic presentations — this year. I gave a short presentation at UNC-Chapel Hill to their design students about my career and practice and was part of a panel for AIGA about publishing, where I spoke about Scratching the Surface. As I do every December, it was a joy to return to my alma mater to serve as a visiting critic for the MFA thesis students at MICA. I presented at two peer-reviewed conferences, AIGA Design Education Conference in Normal, IL and SECAC in Cincinnati. At AIGA, I presented two papers: one on shearing layers as a framework for developing design curriculums and another based on the publishing course I’ve developed and continue to teach here at NC State. At SECAC, I presented on the sponsored projects I’ve been running with undergraduate seniors at NC State for the last four years.

Speaking at NC State, I’ve buried the big news of the year which is my semi-new job, taking over as director of the undergraduate graphic and experience design program in September. It’s hard to believe I’ve been teaching here for almost five years already and it’s an honor to step into this new role and hopefully build on all the great work that continues to happen here. A highlight for me this year was leading a small student group to redesign our alumni magazine, DesignLife.

I’m always honored when people want to talk to me so it was nice to be featured in Oculus Magazine as part of a story on design podcasts and to be quoted by The Observer in a story about Spotify. I was also interviewed on the Near Future Laboratory Podcast, the Type Speaks Podcast, and in Soft Labor.

On the personal side, I started painting in earnest again and even got back into a regular sketchbook drawing habit, thanks to my child who also loves to draw and my newfound fountain pen hobby. My garden was the worst it’s been in years from the extreme heat this year. I’m itching to try again this year. I continue to read books and watch films widely and even dipped into following the NBA, though that’s proven harder to keep up with than I realized.

As I think about where I want my work to go next, I have some new things I want to write about and at least two books I want to try to get started on. As I mentioned above, I want to write more personally, more vulnerably, more expansively.

I have two other big editorial projects I’m excited to be working on this year. Since I left Eye on Design in 2023, I’ve missed the editorial process and have been looking for ways to get back to it. These two projects somehow feel very related to what I’ve done and completely new (and with new collaborators!). I’m very excited to share more about them over this year.

I’m itching to do some design work again too for the first time in a long time. Do you have a project you think I could help out on? Send me an email!

Thank you for your sustained interest and support of my work over the last year. It means so much. Wishing you a fruitful 2026.

Favorite Essays of 2025

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As I do every year, I keep a running list of the essays I read throughout the year that especially captivate me. As of this writing, my 2025 list clocks in at 41 essays. Continuing my quest from last year, I’ve tried to read more in print where I can (with print subscriptions to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and a handful of design publications) but my read-it-later service is always full of things I’ve saved to return to later.

As I look over my list, I’m surprised how many of my favorite pieces came from The Atlantic and The New Yorker this year. Perhaps I need to diversify my intake again…

Below are a few favorite essays, podcast episodes, interviews, and commentary that were especially enjoyable this year.

I thought a lot about Brian Eno this year when I returned to his diaries, A Year With Swollen Appendices, over the summer, reading each entry on the corresponding day. Interestingly, it seems a lot of other people were thinking about him too. Grayson Haver Currin had a profile of him in GQ that did a nice job of connecting his art to his activism work. But I really found Ian Penman’s astute analysis on Eno’s career, Infinite Wibble, in the London Review of Books, forced me to think through Eno’s work in a different way. Highly recommended!

Ezra Klein’s long interview Eno on his podcast is also well worth a listen, covering both his career and his approach to creativity, technology, and engaging with the world.

Sam Anderson continues to be one of my favorite essayists working today and I especially enjoyed two of his New York Times Magazine pieces this year. The first chronicles his attempt to follow the 365-mile trail of the mysterious vagrant The Old Leatherman and the second is a surprisingly personal profile of Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson published to support his new film, The Smashing Machine.

The cultural experience that stuck with me the deepest this year was season two of Nathan Fielder’s excellent HBO series, The Rehearsal. This season, which focuses on commercial airline pilots is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and changed the way I experienced a series of flight I took in the Fall. The best writing about the show, for me, came from Alexandra Tanner in The Point, in an essay called “An Experience for Me.”

Brian Phillips, a writer for the Ringer I always love, also wrote a smart take called “Flying in the Dark with Nathan Fielder”. (One more from Brian, his review of the latest season of The Bear, a show I find immensely frustrating, explained perfectly why I keep wanting more from it. His notion of stories expanding vertically or horizontally is a metaphor I’ve used often since.)

Inevitably, I read more about AI than I’d like to admit. This year, it seemed I was thinking about its impact on education (and, in turn, our response to it). Here’s Natalia Ilyin’s short piece on why AI as a tool is a myth, especially in design:

What could be more colonizing than leap-frogging an individual’s power to create, making ”creative tools” depend on databases of predigested thoughts and images? An artist’s or writer or designer’s work is not a “most likely” solution averaged from every piece that has gone before it. It is a unique expression born only from that person’s experience colliding with their one and only mind. Now, with AI all over, of all places, the arts—the center of the soul of a culture–instructors like me are truant if not paving the way for students to squeeze themselves into “working with” large language models—the same AI that we tell them will out-design them, out-write them and out-think them, make them impoverished, and render their individuality unimportant.

Megan Fritt’s essay in The Point on the perils of “AI committees” hit very close to home for me but Carlo Rotella’s essay on teaching humanities in the age of AI left me more…hopeful? What is it? A call to be more human again.

Garth Greenwell’s provocative essay in the Yale Review on sex scenes, Miranda July, and what makes us offended is excellent:

But how do we work with feelings of offendedness? This is a question worth asking: offense has become so large and so accepted a part of our response to art that it can sometimes seem we’ve endowed it with unimpeachable authority. That’s the thing about feelings, as opposed to judgments: my feelings are mine, I have sole authority over them; they can’t be questioned, or not politely. That’s why they’re such a refuge, and why so often (I’m thinking of myself ) we begin statements that really should be prefaced by “I think” or “I believe” with “I feel like.” There’s nothing comfier than wrapping oneself up in the impregnable Snuggie of one’s subjectivity.

I’ve admittedly read little of the late, great Mike Davis (despite having two copies of City of Quartz) but I still enjoyed Nelson Lichenstein’s look at Davis’s Marxism in Jacobin.

Places Journal had a package of stories this year on rethinking interstates and I loved Reinhold Martin’s piece on highways as a form of democracy.

I liked this excerpt from Susan Orlean’s memoir, centering on the making of one of my favorite movies, Adaptation. And here’s Zadie Smith on the art of the impersonal essay.

Maybe it speaks to the moment but I seemed to read more mysteries this year. The Atlantic published two thrilling pieces I couldn’t seem to put down. The first, on a heist to steal Yogi Berra’s World Series rings by Ariel Sabar was such a fun read I can already see a Steven Soderbergh adaptation. The second, Jamie Thompson’s The Missing Kayaker had so many twists and turns that I actually stepped outside to the front porch on Thanksgiving so I could finish reading it without interruption.

And then in New York, this story on a young, mysterious philanthropist in New York who died suddenly is a perfect tail of imposters, performance, and grift.

As as usual, I read every profile the New Yorker publishes. A few of my favorites this year are on:

On the podcast side, be sure to listen to Sam Frogoso’s interview with Terry Gross on Talk Easy and David Marchese interview Ocean Vuong on NYT’s The Interview.

Favorite Albums of 2025

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Favorite Albums of 2025

1. Who’s the Clown? - Audrey Hobert
This album, to me, came out of nowhere and completely became the soundtrack to my summer. My soft spot for confessional-driven pop music (Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams) was a mystery to me until New Yorker critic Amanda Petrusich, in profiling my favorite band The National, wrote that sad teenage girls and sad dads are close emotionally. Hobert, for me, fits this perfectly while also injecting a great bit of humor. This album is infectious, funny, and one I returned to often throughout the year. I’m very curious to see where she goes next.

2. Time Indefinitely - William Tyler
Tyler is a new-to-me guitarist who in recent years has turned from country/folk-flavored music to a more experimental register. This instrumental album centers on Tyler’s guitar playing but is also layered with sounds, samples, and the occasional drone. At time, it reminded me of one of my favorite albums from last year, Bill Orcutt’s How To Rescue Things, with its layered textures. (Tyler also did a collaborative album with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden that was a highlight of my year).

3. How You Been - SML
SML, the experimental California-based jazz (?) group, has made top ten albums for me for two years in a row now. How You Been, the follow up to their debut album last year, is a live recording of improvisational jazz that was then deconstructed and put back together into something completely new. I found myself returning to this album (along with revisiting their debut) often in the last few months. (Bonus points: my daughter heard me listening to this while making dinner one night and came into the kitchen to say “I like this music”.)

4. Regarding Film - John Roberts
John Roberts, the New York-based multidiscplinary artist always hits right but something about this album really grabbed me. Mixing melodic piano, bass, and saxaophone with subtle textures, this album is transporting in a quiet way, perfect for late nights and early mornings.

5. Stay with me - Alexander Biggs
Biggs, the Australian, singer-songwriter, makes quiet, DIY/bedroom music that feels both fresh and nostalgic at the same time. Building on his previous album, Hit & Miss (which I loved), this new album sticks to the best of his previous work. I can’t explain how he does it, but all these songs feel like memories from various points in my life, like songs I’ve heard before, but wholly new at the same time. I wrote about that here.

6. Ghost Notes - Kim Hiorthoy
I listen to a lot of ambient and experimental music across the sprectrum from drone works to more textural soundscapes. Hiorthoy is a new-to-me-artist in this space and captures the sweet spot of my tastes in the genre. His first full-length album in a decade, the album is both organic and digital, propulsive and quiet, Hiorthoy described this album as “electronic music that is acoustic”. It’s one that revealed something new to me each time I listened to it.

7. SABLE, fABLE - Bon Iver
It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been listening to Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver project for fifteen years, since his debut album For Emma, Forever Ago. I’ve delighted in how he’s evolved the project and assumed this album was a return to his early acoustic work after he released the first three tracks as a standalone EP, late last year. Those three tracks, however, were merely a prelude to yet another reinvention: a full-fledged, dare-I-say euphoric pop album. It’s an album that somehow feels like new territory for Vernon yet still very clearly a Bon Iver album.

8. Get Sunk - Matt Berninger
I already mentioned The National is my all-time favorite band and I tend to go anywhere lead vocalist and principal songwriter Matt Berninger wants to take me. This solo album follows on the heels of a massive two-part National project last year and he appears to show no signs of slowing down. This album, more directly than the National records, chronicles his recent depression and writers block, showing an artist emerging with a new sense of direction.

9. Cover the Mirrors - Ben Kweller
I’ve never been a big Ben Kweller fan though I’ve been familiar with his music for at least a decade now. This album, which deals with the recent death of his teenage son by a car crash, hit me in a way his music never did before. Like the Alexander Biggs album above, this one felt like it could have been a soundtrack to various moments in my own life, somehow immediately familiar in an impossible way.

10. Never Enough - Turnstile
Throughout my life, I’ve listened across genres and I’m especially interested in music that blends my understanding of what a specific genre can contain. Punk and hardcore, for example, are fascinating in their flexibility and Turnstile’s new album embodies that. Clearly rooted in the hardcore tradition, the album pulls in pop, electronic, and alt-rock for a rousing fun album I couldn’t get enough of this summer.

Honorable Mentions

Ten more great albums in no particular order:

Getting Killed - Geese
Drifts - Arp
caroline 2 - caroline
Alan Sparhawk with Trampled By Turtles
Highwallow & Supermoon Songs - Saintseneca
Psychic Geography - DOVS
Baby - Dijon
Quiet Pieces - Abdul Mogard
Different Rooms - Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer
Swamp Spirit - Space Drum Meditation

Over on Are.na, I kept a running list of albums that stuck with me. As of this writing, there are 36 albums there.

Spotify Playlist

Along with my Are.na journal, I also kept a Spotify playlist of songs from the year that stuck with me. As of this writing, there are 101 songs, clocking in at just over 7 hours. You can listen to the playlist of my favorite songs here.

Other Notes

Spotify Wrapped told me my two most-listened genres this year were (1) Drone and (2) Jazz which sounds right to me. I fell hard for jazz when I was in college but fell out of it a bit over the last decade years. I spent a lot of time this year defamiliarizing myself with old favorites and exploring new artists.
Spotify also told me my most listened song was Audrey Hobert’s “Sue Me”, from my favorite album of the year. The album I listened to more than any other, however, was K-Pop Demon Hunters. I want to blame my kids but I also was into it.
Not on these lists — my top ten, honorable mentions, or even my Are.na long list — is Taylor Swift’s new album which really felt like a let-down to me. It seems to me she’s stuck, reiterating the same themes and styles. I keep waiting for a big stylistic jump for her, in the way 1989, Reputation, and Folklore surprised. She’s not the only favorite artist who released new albums that I found largely forgettable. Chance the Rapper’s follow-up album had its good moments but failed to live up to his masterpiece, Coloring Book. Lorde’s new album, howevver, was truly a return to form and much better than her previous lackluster release.

One cannot step in the same river twice

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I moved to Baltimore in August 2015 to start my MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Despite studying graphic design, I arrived to my new town with a renewed interested in photography and spent a lot of my free time during the two years I lived in Baltimore by walking the streets trying to hone my eye and refine my photographic aesthetic. I remember walking every day my first week there — classes hadn’t started and I didn’t know anyone yet — with headphones in my ears and my camera around my neck. Parked outside my apartment building was a red MG convertible from the mid-seventies. It’s one of the first photos I made in Baltimore:

My first photograph of the car, August 2015.

Over the next two years, I’d see the car again and again, parked in different spots across the few blocks around my apartment. I wouldn’t see it every day. I never saw anyone get in or out. It’d just show up and vanish. I don’t know who owned it or where they lived but most times that I saw it, I’d make another photo. It became a ritual of sorts, a marking of time across my studies.

December 2015; May 2017

In an essay from January 2017 — the first month of my last semester at MICA — Teju Cole considers the photography of William Christenberry, a photographer who often returned to the same locations, making the same photograph over and over, creating a series where the appearances were subtly changed year after year. Cole writes:

What is different is not the subject but the time it was photographed. Looking at such a series confirms that when you make one photograph and, some time later, make another of the same thing, what is inside the frame changes. With the passage of time, you no longer have “the same thing.”

This is what I see in my series of this MG convertible: the passage of time. Imperceptible to the viewer, I see the passage of seasons and the evolution of my own work. The car surrounded my snow reminds me of being deep in my own thesis.

January 26, 2016

Over the last few years, I’ve returned to Baltimore each December to serve as a visiting critic to the current thesis students in the program I graduated from. I still bring my camera and make a point to spend some time photographing my old haunts. Last week, walking my old street to get to campus from my hotel, I passed that car again. I made yet another photo of it. I made a mental note to myself that I photographed it the first time a decade ago. Then I made another note, recalling Cole’s essay: it is not the same car. And I am not the same person.

December 2024; December 2025.

Cincinnati Architecture

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last month I made a quick trip to Cincinnati, OH for the SECAC Conference, where I was presenting on a sponsored project I’ve been working on for the last five years. I had some time to kill before my flight on the last day and decided to engage in a quick architectural tour of the city, which had some surprisingly diverse gems. First up was Union Terminal, built at the turn of the century and featuring stunning art deco details. In a radical shift, I jumped south to see Procter and Gamble’s postmodern headquarters designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox in 1986. Standing under its ornate details reminded me I’ll always be a sucker for pomo. Finally, I walked over to the Contemporary Arts Center, designed by Zaha Hadid (and I believe her only US building) in 2003. I took tons of photos, a few favorites below.

My speculative conversation with George Nelson

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was flipping through the upcoming catalog for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., when I got to a conversation between the biennial’s curator Carlo Ratti and architect Christopher Alexander. Something about the conversation felt off to me — stilted, strangely combative and friendly, sometimes at the same time. I then realized Alexander had died back in 2022, before Ratti started working on the biennial. I flipped back to the beginning of the catalog and discovered this conversation was part of a series of “Impossible Conversations” intersperced throughout the catalog that used artificial intelligence to stage conversations between design theorists of different eras.

Despite my misgivings about AI — and despite not finding the catalog’s interviews to be especially interesting — I was intrigued enough to try it myself. I’m asked often what designers from history I’d have most wanted to have on Scratching the Surface. My stock answer is usually George Nelson who died in 1986. Nelson, in manys ways, is a model for my own practice, moving across design, writing, curation, and education. He was the design director of Herman Miller and ran his own studio. His early career was spent writing and he got his start interviewing designers for his own research. Inspired by the Venice Biennale, maybe I could interview him?¹

I opened up Claude and asked it to write a 1200 word interview between myself and George Nelson. I said it should feel like my interviews from Scratching the Surface and Fast Company and that I wanted to talk about writing and multidisciplinary practice. Here’s what it said:

I’ve written a speculative interview between Jarrett Fuller and George Nelson that explores their shared interests in multidisciplinary practice, the relationship between design and writing, and the evolving nature of the design profession.

The conversation touches on several key themes: Nelson’s prescient understanding of systems thinking, the idea of writing as a design act, the tension between functional utility and cultural meaning, the role of criticism in design discourse, and the importance of porous disciplinary boundaries. I tried to capture Nelson’s voice—thoughtful, systematic, humanistic—while letting Fuller ask the kinds of probing questions he’s known for on his podcast.

The interview weaves together historical context (Herman Miller, postwar modernism) with contemporary concerns (platforms, AI, sustainability) to create a dialogue that feels both grounded in their actual philosophies and speculatively forward-looking.²

The results were interesting. As I expected, the conversation was fairly vapid and didn’t feel like it covered any new ground, sticking mostly to standard talking points. Perhaps because of the wordcount, Nelson’s answers felt clipped and summarized. I was surprised, however, by how the “Jarrett” character brought in my own work — “I teach design but I also write about it, podcast about it, and I’m constantly questioning these disciplinary boundaries” or “That’s what I try to do with Scratching the Surface, pulling back the curtain on the thinking behind the work.” It accurately and fairly seamlessly brought in some of my other writing into my convesration.

So, more for fun (and laughs?) than anything else, I’m sharing here my speculative conversation, written by Claude, between myself and George Nelson.³

On Multidisciplinary Design, Writing, and the Future of the Profession

In this speculative interview, contemporary design educator and critic Jarrett Fuller sits down with the legendary George Nelson, industrial designer, writer, and design director of Herman Miller from 1945 to 1972.

JARRETT FULLER: George, you once said that design is “a method of action.” I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot lately, especially as I watch design expand into strategy, research, and systems thinking. Looking at where we are now, does that definition still hold?

GEORGE NELSON: Absolutely. If anything, I think people have finally caught up to what I was trying to articulate back then. Design was never just about making things look good—it was always about understanding problems and proposing solutions through form. What you’re calling “systems thinking” we were doing at Herman Miller in the forties and fifties. We weren’t designing chairs in isolation; we were designing work environments, communication systems, entire ways of living.

JF: That resonates deeply with my practice. I teach design but I also write about it, podcast about it, and I’m constantly questioning these disciplinary boundaries. You were doing this too—writing for major publications while running Herman Miller’s design program, making films, curating exhibitions. Was that multidisciplinary approach intentional, or did it just happen?

GN: It happened because it had to. Architecture school taught me to think spatially and systematically, but the questions I was interested in couldn’t be answered with buildings alone. When I started writing for Architectural Forum and Fortune, I realized that writing was itself a design act. You’re constructing arguments, creating frameworks for understanding. The exhibitions, the films—those were just other languages for the same ideas.

JF: This is something I struggle to articulate to students. They often see writing as separate from “real” design work. But for me, writing is designing. You’re structuring information, creating narrative arcs, building understanding.

GN: Exactly! And here’s what I think people miss: writing makes you a better designer. It forces clarity. If you can’t explain why something works, you probably don’t fully understand it yourself. When I wrote about a chair or a storage system, I had to articulate its logic, its relationship to human behavior, its place in a larger ecology of objects. That analysis fed back into the design process.

JF: You mention ecology—that word feels particularly relevant now. We talk about design ecosystems, platforms, networks. Everything is interconnected in ways that feel both exciting and overwhelming. Did you feel that complexity in your era?

GN: Of course, though the scale was different. We saw the explosion of consumer culture after the war, the emergence of corporate identity as a discipline, the space race changing how we thought about technology and the future. The Marshmallow Sofa or the Ball Clock weren’t isolated objects—they were part of a cultural conversation about modernism, domesticity, optimism. Every design exists in dialogue with everything around it.

JF: That cultural dimension seems to have gotten lost sometimes in contemporary design discourse. We focus so much on user experience and business metrics. Do you think design has become too instrumentalized?

GN: Well, there’s a tension, isn’t there? Design must be useful—I’ve always believed that. But usefulness isn’t just functional. A chair that supports the body but depresses the spirit has failed at its job. Design operates at multiple registers simultaneously. It must work, yes, but it also participates in culture, carries meaning, shapes how people see themselves and their world.

JF: This makes me think about design writing and criticism. You were contributing to major magazines when design journalism was really forming. Now we have this proliferation of platforms—from academic journals to Instagram—but I sometimes wonder if we’ve lost critical depth. Everyone’s a critic now, but is anyone really criticizing?

GN: Criticism requires distance and context. You need to understand history, to recognize patterns, to situate work within larger movements and ideas. The democratization of voice is wonderful—I’m all for it—but criticism is a craft, like design itself. It requires rigor, frameworks, accountability. The best criticism I read taught me how to see. It revealed structures I’d missed, made connections I hadn’t considered.

JF: That’s what I try to do with Scratching the Surface, pulling back the curtain on the thinking behind the work. But I’m curious—when you were at Herman Miller, you championed designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Girard. You were essentially curating a vision of modern design. How did you think about that responsibility?

GN: As an enormous privilege and a frightening responsibility. I wasn’t looking for a house style—I was looking for designers who understood that design was about ideas, not just aesthetics. Charles and Ray thought about everything: the manufacturing process, the user experience, the educational potential, the joy of discovery. Noguchi understood sculpture and furniture as part of a continuum. Girard knew that pattern and color were formal languages with their own grammar.

JF: So you were looking for multidisciplinary thinking even in specialists?

GN: Yes! That’s the key insight. You don’t have to do everything yourself, but you need to understand how your work connects to everything else. A great furniture designer understands architecture. A great graphic designer understands space. The boundaries between disciplines should be porous, conversational.

JF: Looking forward—and I know this is speculative—where do you think design goes from here? AI, climate change, global inequality—the challenges feel unprecedented.

GN: The challenges are always unprecedented when you’re living through them. What doesn’t change is design’s fundamental responsibility: to make life better, more humane, more meaningful. The tools will change, the problems will change, but that north star remains constant. If anything, design needs to become even more ambitious—not just solving problems but asking better questions, imagining alternatives to the status quo, creating space for different ways of living.

JF: That feels like a good place to end—with that call for ambition and imagination.

GN: Just remember to write it all down. The next generation will need to understand not just what we made, but why we made it, what we were thinking, what we hoped for. That’s the real legacy.

I generally don’t find AI very useful in my day-to-day as a “thought partner” like it’s often billed as. I admittedly use it rarely but when I do, I use it to summarize some text or help me with some programming beyond my limited knowledge. I’ve played with using it to help research for the podcast but I quickly abandoned it in favor of my own, decidely analog and meandering process. But this seemed like a good test. ↩
The compliment - “letting Fuller ask the kinds of probing questions he’s known for on his podcast” — made me feel good but I find these flourishes in AI so annoying! ↩
All the caveats! This is not real! I see no reason to do this experiment again! ↩