Is the World Getting Uglier?

Why is everything so drab right now? Or is it all so same-same? You got these coffee shops, they all look the same. Architecture looks standardized. Buildings are colorless. Cars are interchangeable. Then on the other side, you have Trump's gilded Oval Office. His imagined arch. His garish vision for the reflecting pool. Say what you will about Donald Trump. He and the modern right, they have a theory of beauty. Not my theory of beauty, but a theory. For a while now, I've been wanting to do an episode on this question that I've seen a lot of other people ask and that has bothered me. Is the world getting uglier? And if so, why? Why do we seem to design so much that looks so boring while on the other side, so loud? And in this moment when the right has a clear theory of beauty, does the left have any answer at all? Debbie Millman teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She's a longtime graphic brand designer. She revamped logos for companies like Burger King, 7-Up, and Haagen-Dazs. And for over 20 years, she's hosted a podcast called Design Matters. Where she talks to creative people about design. She joins me now. Debbie Millman, welcome to the show. Thank you, Ezra. It's great to be here. So over the past couple of years, I feel like I've read or watched a dozen essays on why everything is getting uglier. And I just read a piece from you with the title, Is the World Getting Uglier? So is it? Depends on who you ask. I'm asking you. My opinion, it's getting more vulgar. In some ways, ugliness can be very intentional. Vulgar is accidental because it doesn't have intention. Nobody really sets out to make something that's truly vulgar. Certain ugly can be seen through the lens of a trend as being really. glamorous or sexy or interesting or subversive. But vulgar is always pretty awful. And I think that is the real word about where we're moving. Give me some examples of this vulgarity. Well, the Cybertruck. There's really no need for a car to look that imposing and that bloviated. Housing, where houses are now being razed. That fit sort of sweetly on their lots with a front yard and a backyard and maybe little alleys on either side. And now they're being squeezed into the property so that there's maybe six or seven inches of grass between the house and the sidewalk. We're seeing it in clothing, particularly in Gen Z fashion, which I know that the New York Times has been writing about quite a lot. And if there's anything I'm an expert on, it's Gen Z fashion. But Gen Z fashion, is not forever. Fashion, by nature, is a type of expression that has an expiration date in it. Or certainly a pause date. It might come back, but for a while, it goes out of style. Some of it is forced obsolescence. Some of it is just trends in style. Whereas houses, cars, vehicles, airplanes, things like that, tend not to transition very often in the way that they fundamentally look and work. How do you distinguish, and I know this is like the oldest, hardest question in taste, but one woman's vulgarity is another woman's interesting, ugly, is another person's, oh, that's a cool cyberpunk truck. I think a lot of it has to do with proportion. And a lot of proportion, has to do with mathematics. And so there are things that are just more lyrically beautiful because they are in proportion. And generally speaking, humans can assess when something is out of proportion, not knowing anything about the math of it, whether it be a building or a car or a coffee mug. And so if something is out of proportion, it will give us a sense of discombobulation. And it could be the disproportion of a handbag, a skateboard. It could be the disproportion of anything. But things essentially make us feel things. Everything makes us feel something. And when something is out of proportion, it changes the DNA around us. I'm very interested in the way that we notice what the environment around us or the objects around us are making us feel. I always thought a big reason you had that Marie Kondo craze some years back was that there was a real, genius to her giving people a practice of noticing what their objects made them feel. People had previously told people to tidy up. What she offered was a way to say, you can tune in to the way your environment is making you feel. But there too, I think you run into this question of much that we now consider beautiful, when it was built, when it was designed, it was out of proportion. It was brash. It was aggressive. And so the early reviews of it were very negative. So then you get into this interesting question of, can you trust what you're feeling in the moment? There's so much to talk about just from that sentence. I want to go back to the first part of what you were saying about how things make us feel. We are social mammals. And every single way in which we've been socialized, socialized to experience the world around us is based on objects and things around us. And that goes all the way back. That goes back 50,000 years ago when we started to create symbols to designate our reality. So the very first marks was what we were seeing around us. So we started to draw on the walls of caves. After that, we started to, to advance and move into tribes. What was the first thing we did when we moved into tribes? We designated where we belonged and what we believed in with a symbol. I belong to this religion. You belong to that religion. We signify and telegraph that through the use of this symbol. And it means as much for the people that are part of the same tribe as those that aren't. And that safety in numbers, that security in we all believe the same thing. So we're not going to go off and kill each other because we all believe in this. It allowed us to prosper and create bigger, stronger social ties when we're in those groups. So that's the whole sort of how do we feel around symbols. We've been trained, socialized, to experience the world through symbols, objects, and now brands since prehistoric times. So if you're wearing a certain type of sneaker, you're part of a Nike tribe, a certain handbag, and that is telegraphing that you're a wealthy woman who bought her handbag on Rodeo Drive. We're even doing that now. This is really, really interesting to me with plastic surgery. So we can reconstruct a nose or reconstruct lips or reconstruct our butts to look a certain way to signify to others that those values, that that thing we think looks good, looks good to me and to you and you know that I know that you know that I know that we both did that and we both look good. Now, it also does the same thing for the people that don't like a big butt or a certain type of veneer. So I think that we have to look back at the trajectory of our evolution because looks, size, fashion, hair, all of those things, have so much to do with the politics of our time, with religion and with socialization. For you, what is good design and what is bad design? Good design makes me feel better about whatever I'm doing and whatever I'm doing it with. It's entirely subjective for me, what my specific definition of good design is for me. It makes me feel better. For the world, I think good design makes the world better. The experiences that people have, the way in which they're able to move through the world, it's easy, it's respectful. When I was coming to New York, I was in LAX and I was in a sneaky line where I had to stand behind a bunch of people in three lines that were all waiting to put their things in a container to then push onto a line. There's no rhyme or reason about where the three are. So even if you're in that position, you're not first. It's whoever got there first, and somebody's managing it. And then you have to sort of really fast push your things through so that it gets through. And I said to the guy, because I knew I was coming here today, I said, who designed this? This is a billion-dollar system that's in airports all over the world, and it is the worst design system I have ever witnessed. Where people are fighting to get their containers into the queue. They're fighting to go next. The whole thing was just a design disaster. I think design that's disrespectful. I think design that is greedy. I think that design that is immoral is bad design. One thing I've been thinking about as I've been, you know, reading and thinking about these essays over, you know, some period of time, you know, my team and I have wanted to do a show on this for a little bit, is, is the world getting uglier as a genre? It has sort of two different lines of critique happening in it at once. One is the critique sort of you're offering here, which is that it's getting uglier. The world makes you feel something. And the thing that makes you feel is bad. It's a negative feeling tone in the Buddhist terminology. And the other is, is that the world is getting not what I would call uglier. People often use that word, drabber. It is getting more drab. It is making you feel nothing more often. So one of the, I think, foundational essays here is an N plus one essay from 2023. And in that they talk about the drab sublime. The drab sublime unites flat pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design, an ocean of stuff so homogenous and under thought that the world it is inundated can feel like a digital rendering. One reason I sort of like the Cybertruck is I don't find it beautiful. What it makes me feel is not good, but it makes me feel something compared to so much else on the road right now, it reflects somebody's vision. I believe somebody somewhere found it beautiful. Yeah, there are people that buy it. So I think a lot of it comes down to taste and then also how well do things go with other things? The thing about the Cybertruck is that the Cybertruck infringes on the landscape. Maybe there's a strategy behind it, but I'm not entirely sure what that strategy is. Is it to command attention? Is it to intimidate? What is the intention of this? And when I think about the world getting uglier in its purest form, is the world getting uglier? Because we're making bad design decisions or is the world getting uglier because we don't care about what anybody else thinks but ourselves? And is the world getting uglier because we're behaving in ugly ways? Once you start to see people behaving in ugly ways, it's inevitable that that is going to trickle down into everybody else's behavior. Because we see if this could happen here, if somebody can get away with doing this, well, then why can't I do it? Well, I want to really position myself here because I think the Cybertruck is interesting to argue for, but around, but I want to really agree that it's ugly. It's not my taste. But you see, that's important for you to declare. But there is a trend here, right? So I feel like you could imagine two axes here. So there's whether something makes you feel anything at all, how much it makes you feel. And then there's whether or not that feeling is good or bad. But there's so much that surrounds us now. So many apartment buildings, I don't find them ugly. What I find them is inoffensive. I feel nothing when I look at them. They are mute to me. So many cars that they're mute to me. When something doesn't have any real intention to it, when it's built without any sense of purpose or strategy or respect for its surroundings. And that, I think, is worse than ugly. And maybe even worse than vulgar. I think we have been in a period where a tremendous amount of the world around us, from the fashion to the way apartments are designed, to the way cars are designed, to the way places we stay are designed. People describe this in many different ways, but it has been a flattening. But now what I'm seeing is a reaction to that, right? You're talking about this, I think, a little bit in your essay. You talk about this move towards vulgarity, towards oblivion. You can think about Donald Trump festooning the Oval Office in gold. You can think about this very attention-grabbing fashion style in Gen Z. You can think about the Cybertruck. There was recently, I mean, it's been covered in other places, a move towards more maximalist design. We've gone from. Looks maxing. Yeah, looks maxing is another one, actually. But I'm actually meant in decor. And so you write that we're living in an attention economy and attention rewards extremity. That the more a designer is rewarded for being instantly visible, recognizable, and shareable, the easier it becomes for them to be able to see what they're doing. The easier it becomes to lose sight of proportion, purpose, and the people have to live alongside it. But I think maybe the other side of it is that we do live in an attention economy. And the more everything is served to us by algorithm, the more also things, like, feel the same everywhere. You go to coffee shops. I mean, there's a point the writer Kyle Chayka has made. You go to coffee shops in New York and L.A. and Mexico City and Buenos Aires and Tokyo. And they're all kind of the same coffee shop. And all of a sudden, people begin to. It's not a coffee shop anymore. Yeah. You go into an airport, and it could be any airport in any city of the world. So how do you think about the relationship and the tension between those two things? The feeling of sameness, maybe, that people are rejecting. But then it creates this. It's creating, I think, a move towards what you're describing as a kind of a vulgar or obloviating answer to that. Well, I mean, if you look back to the original visual language of the iPod, you know, six weeks after 9-11, Apple introduced. Apple introduced the first iPod, and that came with the white earbuds. I did not know that was six weeks after 9-11. Yeah. Those are two events I had not put together in my head. Yeah, yeah. And there was a really interesting period of time where, as people began to acquire the iPod, they were able to showcase their allegiance with these white earbuds. It was actually really brilliant because the iPod wasn't sitting around, you know, outside of your closet. It was in a pocket, but the earbuds gave you away. And there was this sense of, like, I know that you know that we're the early adopters here. And people were very proud of that. Super minimalist, super minimalist, to really be able to cut through all the cacophony of that time. There was still a real sense of minimalism to it. And it's now, what, 26 years later, and that is still primarily the language. So much so that every other tech company has. taken on that same vernacular. So they all look a certain way because people have an expectation of what excellence should look like. All of the tech companies, until recently, I think Samsung is beginning to move a little bit further away from that visual language because they brought in, for the first time ever, a president of design, Mario Portini. So he's making some of those changes. But up until then, we're talking about 25 years of tech looking. in a very specific way, because everybody wanted to seem like the very best. And so it'll be interesting to see how that now changes with new people at the helm, both at Apple and at Samsung. If you're not a subscriber to The New York Times, we have some news for you. You can now explore The Times for free without any paywalls at all during your first month in The New York Times app. You say that design is a, quote, deliberate expression of intention. Tell me about that. So in order to do that, I have to go back to, well, what is a brand? A brand is manufactured meaning. We agree that a crucifix stands for something. You and I both agree. We might not agree. Hot take on Christianity, a brand. Well, it's just because I want to bring it down to, like, the most, the foundation. The very, one of the first brands. Although Hindu and Jain were well before that. But in any case, let's just go with something that a lot of people know. It is manufactured meaning. That cross could stand for anything. We agree that this crucifix, this symbol that people wear and pray to and worship, signifies something. Design is what communicates that differentiation. That is what design is. For me, that is the ultimate design definition. It is the communication of differentiation that is made through meaning manufacture. So I was interested to see you go on that question of intention directly to branding. Because I do take your point that the way the brand or the reputation or the meaning, of something across scale is constructed, is indeed constructed. But one of the things that I think is operating here, and I'm curious to explore this a bit, is that, I mean, brands want to differentiate from each other. They have to. And I think a frustration people have is often that they are under differentiated now. So I think it is widely felt, we can argue whether it's true, but it's widely felt that cars were more beautiful and interesting in the way they were designed 30 or 40 years ago than they are today. I had a friend recently had a 40th birthday, and as a present for him, his partner rented him a classic car. He got to ride around in an old Mustang. I think people like the old Mustangs more than they like the new Mustangs. I think that's common. But one reason so many cars look similar is that we've learned a lot about how to make them aerodynamic. We know things about how objects move through space at speed, that we did not know to the same level of certainty then. And we've put pressure on those things through fuel regulation standards and electric vehicle incentives and other things to push car companies in a certain direction. And so now the cars look more streamlined because that is very, very important for their fuel efficiency and their safety and their other different things that are operating here. And it pushes everything in a certain direction. And so one thing that I thought when I read your definition of design as a deliberate expression of intention is that the intentions we have now include, you know, many other things than just beauty or just aesthetics, right? We know more about how to make buildings energy efficient. We know more about how to make sure they don't fall down during earthquakes and all these things impose strictures that in some of the periods in the past that we often, you know, lionized for their superior aesthetics, they didn't have to optimize for as much. And so one reason the world is feeling a little bit more same to people in the construction of material objects is actually this, like, well, we're optimizing on things that actually do force a sameness. We know things about the world that have led us to design things in ways that are more consistent across different brands. Yeah. And I think that's just a matter of time. Because once we begin to master these new ergonomic ways of building, the next natural step will be to maximize the value via beauty, because you will want to differentiate. First, we're looking at function, and then we'll look at aspiration. And that's, while you were talking, I had the funniest example come to mind, which may or may not make sense. But I think back to the days when my grandmother used to wear girdles. Really ugly, really efficient, really, really ugly. Now we have Spanx and Skims essentially doing the same or better work to help shape a woman, but far sexier and far more beautiful. So I think it's just a matter of time, because that is the system we live in. We're always looking to improve and create something better than it was before. One of the interesting questions that came up when my producers and I were preparing for this episode was, you know, I was like, my producer lives in a much older home, and it's really beautiful. It's like you take a picture from it from the outside. It's got this beautiful tree in front of it. I felt something. I've never seen her home because we live somewhere else. It has soul to it. And also she was saying that part of her really envies people who live in these somewhat more soulless McMansions that are better designed for kids, that have a lot more space in them in the way the space is used, that have, you know, air, that have a lot of, that have been optimized for other purposes. And I just think a lot of things in life are like that. I think that when you make life frictionless, it begins to lose something, even if everything else is equal, even if sometimes like the quality of the product is higher. And so I grant completely that you can have, and I have experienced this, places, homes, cars, everything, right? You can have places where something is not as good as it is, but it's not as good as it is. And so I think that's a lot of things that we've been talking about. And I think that's a lot of things that we've been talking about. of soulless service. Like what? Like, I'd love to know what you consider that to be. I'm not myself a vinyl collector, but I know many people who are. And it is in part like the physicality, the annoyance, you have to get up and turn it over. You have to put the needle correctly. And those record collections mean more to people than their Spotify libraries. And people will say, oh, the sound is warmer. Yeah. Sure. It's a little warmer. I don't think that's what's really doing the work. The work is that you end up in a physical, tactile relationship where- Books. Reading books versus a Kindle. Exactly. I have a big Kindle library and I have a big physical book library. Same. So there are places where the fact that the world asks things of you that are, you know, perhaps like a little bit less convenient, you know, the fact that my Kindle's always with me and I can like look up all my highlights on my phone, it is more convenient. Yeah. And when I really love a book, I'll often just- Just go buy it physically. I mean, now I've actually moved more to physical books in general because having it is meaningful to me. Yeah. Even if its function is actually objectively somewhat worse. Yeah. I 100% agree. So how do you think about those spaces though, where there's that conflict? Well, I think we're living at a time where the big tension is between convenience and individuality. And we are- We're giving up so much of our individuality and our privacy for convenience. That's something that we have to opt into. I don't know that there's anything wrong with having a bit of both, but I do think that perhaps if you're extreme on one way or the other, you're really missing out on a great deal. I mean, I love being able to read anything, anywhere, have all my highlights in one place, and- And have 45 books in my pocket. But I also love curling up with a book and filling the pages and being able to look throughout. I also really miss liner notes, those little booklets that used to come with band photos. I mean, I also have a vinyl collection, so that will go with me somewhere. I need a really big tomb where I'm going to put all that stuff with me that nobody else wants, but I can't get rid of. Even on my deathbed. So I think it's a matter of where do you live on that continuum? So there was this YouTube video by Sheehan Quirk about why things are getting uglier. And he's walking through London looking at lampposts and sewer systems built in an earlier era and then comparing it to what's being built now. And it's not that the new ones are bad. They work as lampposts, but they are drab. And the old ones have these sort of weird fish on them. And the new ones are just very functional. And I was watching it, and this part on air conditioning units really struck me. So I want to show you this because I think it maybe gets at some of the things we're talking about. Look at this air conditioning unit. I think it says more about the modern world than anything else, more than phones or social media. It's a miraculous technology, one that has changed the world. Hence, we stick them literally everywhere. But it's ugly. Ugly because it doesn't seem to express any belief in the idea that ordinary things can also be beautiful. But worse than ugly, it's boring. Now, it would certainly be a bit more expensive to make it prettier, take a little time and care and attention. But these days, it seems that we would rather make more money to make things look pretty. And? Maybe that's okay. First of all, this is an open call to James Dyson. I interviewed James Dyson last year. And one of the things that I learned in my research was James Dyson, all of his innovations have been with air, vacuums, hair dryers, etc. Who better to innovate an air conditioner than James Dyson? He's made the most beautiful vacuum cleaners, the most beautiful hair dryers, the most beautiful vacuum cleaners, the most beautiful air dryers. James, we need you. But I don't think that these are boring. I disagree. I think that they're obtrusive. Boring, you sort of fall away from seeing. Obtrusive, it's in your face and it's assaulting. They assault you. One thing I thought about with that, though, is where he ends on cost. I agree with you. One thing people dislike about window AC units is they're obtrusive. But window AC units tend to be put onto older buildings, or they tend to be, for people who don't have the money to put in central air. You can get ones that are nicer and less nice looking. I mean, I haven't seen any that are truly beautiful, but cost actually matters here. And so this is a place where I think there often really is a tension where you can put money into the design of things, but if you need to produce things in a very mass way, they often look boring or they can look very obtrusive. And there is a tension on many products, at least, between their form and their function. And so one critique you'll often hear of this conversation, the kind of conversation we're having, is that it's a bit elitist. That, yeah, beauty isn't nice to have, but there's a reason, you know, what kind of. What kind of survives from old housing stock is usually not the tenement buildings that the poor lived in, like those have largely been knocked down. And you get these nice row houses in Georgetown because, like, you know, people put a lot more money into it. So how much is what we're talking about here, the mass production of what was once luxury? And when you make things mass produced, it tends to lose character. I think, again, it really depends on intention. Years ago, Target had a wonderful line, that they launched called Design for All. And they worked with Isaac Mizrahi and really wonderful designers to create sort of bridge lines that you could buy at Target that would be less expensive, but would still be made with care. I think that Muji is also another company where you can go into a Muji and things are made with care and they're not overly expensive. There are alternatives. Years and years and years ago, probably at least 10 years ago, I became obsessed with the fact that all shower caps were heinous. I mean, truly grotesque. And I went online to look for alternatives and I found a company called Shower Cap, S-H-H-H-O-W-E-R-C-A-P. And they made these turban style shower caps. And yes, they are a little bit more expensive than your sort of standard three pack plastic. Uffant type shower cap, but they last forever. And they're gorgeous. And suddenly, you go from having this piece of sort of fungus on your head that's been sitting in your stall for however long to having this beautifully crafted, beautifully designed object that is not that expensive, but signifies that somebody thought that you deserve more respect in that experience. And somebody that wanted more respect in that experience, found them. So you are able to find these things. They're not everywhere, but you do have to look. There's something interesting about that because you actually sometimes get this completely opposite explanation for why many things feel and look worse today, which is that they have become cheap. And so we don't attend to them as much. We were talking in my team as we were getting ready for this about how it used to be hand-me-down furniture was a really important thing. People got their grandparents' bedroom sets all the time. Yeah, my grandmother's dining room table. And now I think many families have had the issue. It's like the elders pass on or are downsizing their home and they want to give what they have, what they cared about so much, what was so important to them, down to their children. Their children don't want it. And one reason they don't want it is that we have made furniture much cheaper. And so it's not as incredible an investment for a family to get a bedroom set or to get a dining room table as you can get one from Ikea. And you don't have to think about it that much necessarily because you maybe know that this is your starter home and in a couple of years you'll probably change it. And so in a weird way, when there was more scarcity, people had to attend to what they were getting to sort of give that attention you were just giving to that shower cap more often. But when people know that they're only going to have the thing for a few years, when they know that it's obsolete, they're going to have to think about it a little bit more. And I think that's a really good point. Treat it that way because, you know, in the back of your mind, well, it's a temporary investment. It's a temporary visitor in my home, so it doesn't need to express as much about me. I feel bad for people that feel that way because why not have everything around you express something about you in some way that doesn't necessarily need to be how much something costs. But I also feel in the case of hand-me-down family furniture, there's a soul that's embedded in that. At one point, 60 years ago, my grandmother sat at that table. Now, I didn't need that table anymore because I, for a lot of different reasons, my wife wanted a different table, but I don't want to get rid of it. And so I had it in my basement and my niece needs a dining room table. So I am shipping her the table and now she is going to have her great-grandmother's dining room table. To me, that is magic. To me, that is a reason for living, that kind of continuity where you can pass something down that has been in a family that's a dining room table where people gathered, where they ate, where they cried, where they fought, where they did any kinds of things, that that has so much meaning embedded in it. And that's what I treasure most about objects. I tend to be a bit of a pack rat. My wife would say I'm absolutely a pack rat, but things have sentiment, they're embedded with sentimentality, with emotion, with memory. It's evidence of living that to me is more important than almost anything. In the back of my mind, while we've been talking, I've been thinking about how different structures in our life operate by different logics. And there's a logic of markets and markets like a logic that is, it's frictionless. Markets hate friction. Markets like things to be tradable. They like things to be legible across great distances. I was very moved a second ago when you said that giving this table to your niece, I think it was, is a reason for living, that participating in that ancestral continuity has a meaning far beyond the worth of the table if you put it up for sale on eBay or something. And I think a critique I kind of buy is that one thing that's going on in life is that markets hate friction. And markets don't, as I was saying, markets don't really want specificity. So I was thinking about homes. One thing that has been measured is that people are painting their homes gray more often. There's a study about this from Washington, D.C., a sharp rise in the number of gray homes. This has been described as the color recession. And it's not unknown why it is. So, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And so if you're seeing your home not as a place you will live for 50 years, but either as a place you're trying to sell to someone else and then maybe sell to somebody after that and sell to somebody after that, or just as a place you're only going to live for a few years because you yourself are more mobile and you only expect to be in this job in Washington, D.C. for, you know, four or five years, then you're going to move back to Asheville, North Carolina or something. Moving that home towards particularity, right? Painting it yellow and green because you're an idiosyncratic person who loves yellow and green is not good for the long-term resale value of the home. Absolutely. And even more than that, I mean, I grew up in a place with very strong homeowners associations where you were not allowed to paint your home a lot of different colors because it might change the resale value of the homes around you. It wasn't you. Right. It was about everybody wanted to make sure their home was an effectively tradable asset. Yep. And so there's this market logic that can infect more and more and that that is, you know, again, part of the trend towards sameness. I'm curious how that resonates or doesn't for you. Well, in many ways, it sort of brings us back to the whole notion of somebody raising their house and creating a house that's so big that it infiltrates in the sort of air and space of others, because that's exactly what is being controlled here. And that's why it's ugly. Now, I'm sad that there's so much that is being diluted now to eliminate some of what is strange, but also really beautiful or also really specific to a person. And look at all the auctions that go on when celebrities die, that somebody wants their desk or their hat or, you know, Diane Keaton had an auction, her family had an auction and all her clothes went on auction and people were clamoring for her bolo hats. So I think that there's this really interesting thing that I want to do some research now on in that we still want these really expressive ways of differentiating ourselves, but within a certain parameter. So if we are being urged to gray down our color palettes, what does that mean about how much color we can actually express? And when we hold back from that, what does that do to our creativity? And what does it do to, or what does it reflect about the way we want to move through the world? So one of, going back to our earlier axis of both, there's something that, do you feel anything at all versus what do you feel? Mm-hmm. I have a friend who, the way she dresses is meant to make other people feel things. Like what? She, joy, whimsy, but it's loud. Like you walk around with her and people are noticing. Right. And she is trying to get them to notice. And the way I dress, and when we move this podcast to video, it caused me a lot of stress. It's sort of bent to nothing. Not have people notice. I don't want you to be thinking about how I do it. Like, I want you to think it looks nice and then not give it any further thought. And there is this dimension where are you willing to have people have views about you, right? What your house looks like, what you're dressed like, how things are decorated, or recognizing that some people might love it and other people might hate it, right? That fashion can be polarizing and design can be polarizing. Right. Versus do you have a society that in some cultural way has become less comfortable with that, right? People in it do not want to expose themselves to judgment. They want to be looked at, judged as acceptable, and have the gaze fall off of them. I don't know if that's possible, Ezra. And even when someone takes a stance against being obvious or loud, that choice is still a choice. It's still a choice. It's still a choice. It's still a deliberate decision. Years ago, my father decided that he was no longer going to wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts because he didn't want to be a walking billboard for the brand. Okay? What did he do? I can't even say this with a straight face. He put a flag pin over the logo. I'm like, Dad, you just exchanged one logo for another. Now you are representing the United States on your shirt, on your polo shirt. He didn't want to buy new ones, so he covered up the logo, the polo logo, with a flag. As soon as you see that flag, it signifies something. I have always, in the last 20 or so years, been kind of afraid of wearing color. I only always wear black. Always, always. Anything else feels too fluorescent. I feel like I'm being looked at. Everything goes with everything. It blends. My nephew first, first realized, realizing it many, many years ago, he said, hey, why do you always wear black? I'm like, oh, it's just easier. I don't have to decide about too much. He goes, that's weird. Yeah, it is a little bit weird, but it's easy for me. And I also feel like you, in the podcast world, to have to then suddenly go into video is terrifying. But I do think that every decision we make is deliberate. We're revealing ourselves in ways that allow us to be perceived in a certain way. And clothing, and objects, and cars, and things like that. Cars, and houses, and sneakers, and handbags all express that. In a way, I'm not sure people mean that much by the Ralph Lauren brand, so it may not be a great example. But when people put a flag pin on now, particularly in the post-9-11 world and in that period, it was a very, very, very specific kind of statement about yourself that maybe it wouldn't have been at other times when it was just people had American flags or they had an FDR picture hanging in their house. Or separately, what it meant to have a Mao picture or a Stalin picture in those societies meant something different than in societies where it was much more of a choice whether or not you hung those. You're talking about the sort of emotional resonance being different between Ralph Lauren and a flag pin. No, what I'm talking about here, what I think I'm talking about here, is that the logic of branding, we have become so used to thinking of it as branding, as like the thing corporations are trying to do with it. And I think that's that even when the symbol is coming out of a non-commercialized sphere, a sphere that would understood to be representing very different things about somebody, we almost now sort of see them all on the same plane. You know, when I was a kid, I wore a gold chai, which is a Jewish symbol. And I wore that at a time when I was quite religious as a kid. I went through a period where what that meant to me wasn't what it meant to me some years later when I got my first Nike shoes or when I was trying to dress to fit in with other kids. Like I was expressing something that was more private. I mean, it was existing publicly too, but it wasn't. And I think these are different. And so it's funny because it's not where I thought our conversation would go, but I think it's a very interesting place for it to go, which is places where maybe logics or ways of accessing the world that should remain separate actually begin to converge. And I want to get into the public and private spheres here. And maybe a good way to do it is this. We had sent you an email asking you for an example of something ugly that you thought was good design. And you talked about these ads that used to be on the subway from Dr. Zimor, is it? So can you describe them for, you know, listeners and audio here? Yes. Dr. Zimor was a dermatologist. He, I don't know if he's still alive, but he's definitely not in practice anymore. And for many, many, many years, he essentially took over the billboards in the New York City subway system and had really garish, chartreuse, orange, lots of rainbows. Dr. Z will fix your face, all about what your high hopes could be. to eradicate acne. They were really hideous, really, really hideous. But over time, they were enormously consistent. They used the same visual language over and over. It's like rainbows. Rainbows and really badly current type and terrible vertical and horizontal scaling and bad silhouettes. But they became sort of like the crazy Eddie ads of the 70s. Crazy Eddie. His prices are insane. Part of the tapestry of the New York City subway system. And so they became really familiar and ultimately really beloved. Now, this is something that's really important to branding. Even when something is ugly, if you see it enough times, it becomes something that you recognize and you recognize it. And it's not just a bad thing. It's a bad thing. It's a bad thing. It's a bad thing. It's a bad thing. That thing could have good feelings. It could have bad feelings. Again, back to the feelings. And in the case of Zizmore, because he seemed like a nice guy and there were no scandals and he seemed to do good work and he was somewhat inexpensive and he talked to the populace, people love these ads. They love them. What people get so upset about now when you change logos, it's not so much that the thing that we're most familiar with. And in a day and age where everything feels so tenuous, taking that familiarity away, even if it's a juice carton, makes people feel really insecure. So I want to take this on a different direction. So I was looking at those ads and I think they're wonderful. And one reason they're wonderful, though ugly and weird and crowded, is that they feel like a person was behind them, not a committee. They don't feel like they came out of a you know, a kickoff meeting and a scoping meeting. And, you know, you can you can feel the the the sort of bureaucratic energy behind, you know, very sophisticated campaigns. But to go back to this point of maybe the market eating a lot of other spaces and imposing its logic on them, a column I have wanted to write and not written in part because I've been afraid of the reaction to it is that as a newcomer to New York City, I moved here three years ago. I find the presence of the advertising on the New York City subway and on the buses really sad. And not that it doesn't exist in other places. It does. We're not you know, the MTA is not the only transit authority that raises some money through advertising. But that is a public space. It is actually one of the most remarkable public spaces, I think, in American life. The New York City subway, for whatever its flaws, is incredible. It is egalitarian. It is all stratas of society mixing with each other. It is people going in all kinds of places. And yet it is all happening beneath the glare of these ambulance chasing attorneys and Tinder ads and plastic surgery ads. For a long time, the subway system I would walk into with my kids, it had an ad for the reboot of The Exorcist above where we would walk in. And it was black and white and these two girls' and they're like spitting blood ichor. It was this horrifying, grotesque ad. And I looked into this. The MTA gets about 1% of operating revenue from advertisements. And on the one hand, I know that the MomDot administration is trying to make buses free. And isn't it a little bit elitist to say you should spend that money on making the subways non-commercial rather than making the buses free? And on the other hand, as I've thought about writing this piece, it seems to me that maybe public spaces should not be commercialized in that way. Maybe this should be a space of oasis from constant advertising, from your attention and your visual field being captured by the market. These ads make the New York City subway much uglier than it could be. So what I love on the New York City subways is sometimes they'll use the spaces they use for ads and put poetry there. Like, that's really beautiful. They occasionally have art on them. I think that's really cool. It has, like, a very old-style progressive movement, like the enriching of the citizenry. You can imagine a world where that was the only thing that existed that was, you know, non-utilitarian visuals there. And I think it'd be really beautiful if the ads were gone. It's like the market has eaten something that is for the public. And the market is the dominant visual language in something that they are not the dominant player paying for it. They don't pay for it. They don't pay for most of it. You're a visual prisoner. Yes. And we used to, I mean, if you go back to the 50s and 60s, people worried a lot about how the visual field is being taken over by advertising. Yes. And we've come to accept it in a way that is a little surprising and a little sad and represents a diminishment of our ambitions for public space or the built environment. Well, part of it is that the ads are really ugly. If they were interesting, if they were provocative, if they were, something that made you think or inspired you, then it might be a little bit different. But if you're writing this article, two things that you might be interested in. San Paolo, for a while, took all their billboards down. I don't know if they still, yeah, I don't know if that's still the case, but they did that as a test and it really changed the visual environment. And then Ed Ruscha, the artist, has a whole series of pieces. He did a whole series of pieces of blank billboards. And it's beautiful. No messages, just the words. Just the white plain billboard in an urban environment. And it's really quite provocative. That's so interesting about San Paolo. And I mean, you go to, I mean, I've been to other countries and their subway systems and you don't always have advertising everywhere. So to me, it gets to something we're talking about, which is we have begun to accept the logic of the market. In a lot of spaces, you might have not expected the market to be. We've begun to see things that are not market-based, like religions in market terms. Yep. And, you know, the market I think has certain desires. It's not that the market hates beauty. It would love to sell you something beautiful. But the intentionality of the market is to sell product. We see ads now in, over urinals and public bathrooms. I mean, really? That's when you want to get somebody's attention? I mean, there's virtually no space that is left free from a corporate mark. You have logos on eggs, on the actual egg. As we're getting into politics here, I want to ask you about there's been a real movement on the right in recent years to, in a very certain way, resuscitate an argument about beauty. And you've seen it in, I mean, Donald Trump uses the word beautiful. More than any president, I think, probably ever. And certainly his idea of beauty is not my idea of beauty, but he cares about it. Yeah. And there's now even a term for it. Let's not forget Mar-a-Lago face is actually a term in our culture right now. And, you know, they are building things and going back to neoclassical architecture in different ways. And it's not just him. It's sort of all the people around him. I thought this from Tucker Carlson, this clip I'm going to show you, was genuinely interesting. This is another third rail in America. In politics, you're not allowed to note that our buildings are grotesque and dehumanizing. Why are they bad? Because they're ugly and ugly dehumanizes us. And by, let me be more precise about what I mean when I say dehumanizing. Dehumanizing is the act of convincing people that they don't matter, that they are less significant than the larger whole, that they are not distinct souls, that they are not unique, that they are not created by God, that they are merely putty in the hands of some larger force. Him starting by saying you're not allowed to talk about this is strange because you're definitely allowed to talk about this. But you do see a move on the right to say that we have allowed, like, beauty to become subordinate as a public goal. I'm curious what you've thought of it. Well, it's the first time I think I've ever agreed with Tucker Carlson. Ever. But I don't think it's true. I don't think that's true about the right at all. If that were the case, then there would be much. Much more of an uproar about what the president is doing to the White House, to the East Wing, to the arches that he's putting up, to the reflecting pool. I mean, there's so much damage that is making Washington uglier. I don't see how that is being protested by the right at all. Well, don't they think they're going to make it more beautiful? Doesn't Donald Trump think his reflecting pool is luminous? I don't. I don't know anybody that's like, you know, that the Oval Office, that looks really good now. Trump, the person who thinks that is Trump. But I mean that very seriously. But no, I do too. There's nobody on the right saying, you know what, let's invest in gold filigree. No one's talking about that. That's not a trend that's catching on in any way, thankfully. Well, let me make, not the argument for what they're doing, but I think the challenge they are posing that is interesting for liberals and people on the left to try to take seriously. The right's rediscovery of classical architecture, of Roman columns. Yeah. The right, because it is a more, part of the modern right in America is a much more reactionary movement. It is able to locate a very clear moment of beauty, which is old things. And, you know, in ways where if you read the white nationalist, right, they're very explicit about this. You know, what they understand is like the European inheritance. And I think that the left, and the term the left is tricky because obviously, you know, you've moderates and liberals and leftists, but has more trouble knowing what it wants to answer this with. Not because it doesn't think beauty is important, but because it doesn't want to dictate what the beautiful should be. Who am I to say? And it's not binary. And it's not binary. And so you have an interesting thing where I do think that the right is doing something interesting and trying to move ideas of beauty. Back to something more, more centrally contested in politics. And I'm not sure I've really seen an answer or even like a willingness to, to, to argue about it with them among people on the left in part, because if you understand the past to be full of problems and you want to move to a future that is not yet built, well, what, what visual grammar, what visual language can everybody use? What can everybody agree on for that? Well, nobody will ever agree. Not one, there will never be one way of assessing beauty, but I, I do want to make a distinction between taste and style and power. And so I don't think that anybody on the right is looking back to Roman and Greek architecture. Or the architecture of Versailles and thinking, now there was some really magnificent architecture. I think what they're actually saying is this is the type of power that's represented. This, this architecture is representing a certain power and that power is the way we want to lead. I don't agree. I don't think that's, I don't agree with that. I think they really do think it's beautiful. Or at least I think it's worth trying to grant them. That they think it's beautiful. But I think they think it's okay. I agree there. I think they think it's beautiful because it represents a certain type of leader and a certain type of power. And those things you can't always separate. It's like Mar-a-Lago face being beautiful for a certain reason. Those people think it's beautiful. You and I might not, but they think it's beautiful. I'm not questioning somebody's own sense of what is beautiful to them. But what I think is more important than what. They think is beautiful is why. Why do they think it's beautiful? What does this represent to them? So I think I agree that the set of the tributaries of why we think a thing is beautiful are very complicated. Going back to what you're saying, even at the very beginning about proportionality and the mathematics. And I mean, you'll get into these things like what is the perfect figure or, you know, the looks maxers and the men's movement now are sitting there like measuring the proportional distance of their whatever to their whatever. And why people have come up with what they think is beautiful is is obviously contested and then as you also said changes over time but i take the right as or at least this part of the right as even if power is part of it believing like now having a kind of politics of beauty that i don't think george w bush had that i don't think romney had that i think is a sort of a new entrant into politics right the immediate executive orders on you know neoclassical or classical architecture and i guess one of my questions because i do think people including on the left is where a lot of the articles about everything becoming ugly that we're talking about or coming from i do think people have a feeling that the world is becoming less beautiful to them and i think they want this represented i think that there is a yearning for beauty to be a publicly held value again but i think the right always has an easier time with this because they can sort of just reach back right that's the make america great again well if you're making america great again you're going back to things that were once considered a certain way that could be behavior that could be social structure that could be architecture art music politics etc so i think that's all part of it it would be shocking to me if make america great again or the current president was like let's let's innovate a new style of architecture to represent our future that's not going to happen so alongside this new right which i think is reaching backwards in its design aesthetic you also have the tech right we've talked about the cyber truck a bunch in this conversation but crypto and nfts had a very legible visual language you have a certain amount of ai from slop to art but but you do have a kind of emergent language of what the kind of digital design of the future is supposed to look like it's certainly a theory of the future i'm curious how you think about that as like a contestant and what you think it is communicating i think it's one faction of design that is apparent now because i could also point to apple park and the beauty of the building there and the buildings there which are truly extraordinary as a counterpoint to some of that interestingly a lot of the cyber chic is very linear very sharp edges whereas apple park is all rounded edges you see that in bilbao you see that in some of the way the whitney was redesigned so i think that that's there also but like everything else i think that we're in this space of tension between which visual language is going to win out there's always more than one we've been talking about this very much and i think it's a very important point and i think it's a very important point and i think it's a very important point and i think it's a very important point because very much but a lot of what we're talking about i think in a sometimes subrosa somebody's very explicit ways masculine and feminine coded i mean cyber truck is a very male design say say what you will about it uh and you're just talking about like sensuality and curves i mean how much is some of the fight we're having here about the sort of larger political the gender war dynamic that we've been in i'm going to go back to what i said before i don't know that it's a gender war so much as a power play how do how do we believe power should be communicated and visualized and that's i think what we're seeing now so do you think about in a sort of modern way as a kind of answer to what the mar-a-lago world has come up with for their beauty do you think there's an an answer to that you know you can say yes the world has become uglier i mean i think it's something you're saying and and and what you're sort of saying is what they are doing is ugly because it is garish because it is vulgar because it is out of proportion because it is about power because it is about intimidation and i'll be very honest it represents politics that i don't believe in yes and so do you think there's a an answer to that you do believe in and that does allow though you know people whose politics you do agree with to speak about beauty in a way that is more legible and inspiring to people um ezra i'd like to say yes i'd like to say yes in my practice i am an analyst i look at the time and back to try to make sense of what's happening right now i'm not a futurist i'm not even sure i would claim to be an optimist but i hope so i want to say i hope so all right i think that's the place to end so then always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience so i've been giving this a lot of thought i'm going to name three of my favorite books over the course of my life and then i'm going to push in one more that i discovered in the last decade or so that changed my life so i'm gonna if that's okay with you please okay so number one it's a book of poetry called the voice that is great within us it's by hayden caruth and it is a remark remarkable collection of 20th century poetry that's where i first became aware of my favorite poem of all time which is a poem by charles olson called maximus to himself p.s i named my dog maximus that's number one number two is what i think is one of the greatest love stories of all time it's a book written by gabriel garcia marquez called love in the time of cholera which has the greatest last line of all time in a book and so you have to read it all the way through before you get to that and then my third book is a book that i hope one day to be able to do a visual version of i fell in love with this book in cholera and i'm going to read it all in college um it's james joyce's ulysses i even went to ireland for bloom's day which is the day that uh the day in the life of leopold bloom that james joyce wrote about in ulysses and took a walking tour of ireland and went to sandy mount strand and those are my three favorite books books have profoundly changed my life but more recently in 2017 i started reading a book called hunger by roxane gay and when i read that book i fell in love with the author sight unseen just reading her words so much so that i reached out to her i wanted to get her on my podcast she said no i tried to stay in touch she was very squirrely about it and then through a mutual friend she got wind that i was actually not a crazy person and then i asked her out on a date in 2018 and i was like oh my god i'm going to die i'm going to die i'm going to die i'm going to die and in 2020 we got married so my book hunger by roxane gay that that is a wonderful fourth recommendation debbie millman thank you very much thank you ezra you