xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

“The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum began the National Design Awards in 2000 to honor the best in American design… If design has an Oscar, the National Design Award is it. The honor is taken seriously… Because the Awards program was originally conceived as an official project of the White House Millennium Council, the First Lady serves as the honorary chair of the gala at which the winners are celebrated. She also traditionally hosts a breakfast at the White House to which all the nominees and winners are invited. That breakfast was today. This year, however, five Communication Design honorees decided to decline the invitation. They wrote a letter to Laura Bush explaining why.”

“In the January 30th [2004] issue of the The Wall Street Journal, a paper I frequently work for, the editor of its op-ed page with the evocative name of Tunku Varadarajan wrote an article called ‘Just Where Does an Illustrator Draw the Line?’ for the Friday ‘Taste’ section. In it he describes his difficulty in getting a certain illustrator (who he refers to in the opening paragraph as a ‘pompous little artichoke’) to accept an assignment without first reading it to see if he agreed with its political proposition. The illustrator, who is left-leaning, was evidently not comfortable with blindly accepting the assignment from an editorial page that generally leans towards the right.”

“The results of the U.S. presidential election have been mapped in a number of ways. For some, there are two Americas, and one of them is, um, Canada ó instead of running away to Canada, some think Canada should come to them. Fun.” More, more and more.

“David Brooks, cultural observer and author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, proposed an alternative analysis of the American political scene in his New York Times column recently. ‘There are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people,” wrote Brooks. ‘Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don’t shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.’ He went on to point out that ‘C.E.O.’s are classic spreadsheet people,’ five times more likely to donate to Bush than Kerry, and ‘Professors, on the other hand, are classic paragraph people,’ with Kerry donors outnumbering Bush donors eleven to one.”

“A caucus is a closed meeting of equals, the word probably derived from the Algonquin cau-cau-asu, translated as ‘proponent’ or ‘advisor.’ At 6:30 pm on January 19th, Iowa’s 1,993 precinct caucuses were called to order, beginning the first step of an elaborate six-month process… Although the count of state delegate equivalents is at least two steps removed from the actual votes cast by caucus attendees, the count is about as close as we can get to actual voting data, and deserves some study. Iowa is an interesting state because its 99 counties are all roughly the same size and shape.”