It's always nice to be in the papers...twice

As a freelance writer, it's nice enough to see your name in the paper* in a byline; when it's in the story itself, that's a special treat. And when it happens twice in one day... Well, please forgive my, ahem, momentary lack of modesty (what, you thought this blog was about you?): today, I got to see myself featured—and by "featured," I mean "referenced" and/or "indirectly alluded to"—in the print editions of both the New York Times and the Kansas City Star. The NYT piece actually went online last Thursday and the KC Star story was on the web last night, but both appeared on paper today.

*Note to not-so-future generations: paper is what they used to print some of the newsy parts of the internet on.

Corinne Jacker (Credit: Ken Collins, from In Their Company)Unfortuantely, the occasion for my name appearing in the Times was the death of a wonderful playwright named Corinne Jacker, who I had been grateful to interview for our book, In Their Company, and about whom I was honored to be contacted when the time came to write her obituary.

Alice Pollack, Jeff Shehan, and Josh Brady, in "To The Dogs" (Credit: Keith Myers, KC Star)The Star piece, meanwhile, didn't technically mention my name. But that's okay, because in a larger feature about The Barn Players, it mentioned my play, To The Dogs, and all the actors in it, along with a picture of them in action. In other words, three perfectly normal and very talented people are dressed up in silly clothes, pretending to be racing greyhounds, just because I wrote something that required/allowed them to... I'll take it.

What's that you say, refrigerator?

An interesting new exhibit opened today at New York's Museum of Modern Art. “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects" reveals how we, as a modern society, expect the things we make to interact with us, increasingly through words.

From the New York Times T Magazine blog:

[Curators] Antonelli and Carmody make much of the idea that it is no longer enough for an object to look good and work well. Their introductory text states, “As the purpose of design has, in past decades, shifted away from mere utility toward meaning and communication, objects that were once charged only with being elegant and functional now need to have personalities. Thanks to digital technology, these objects even have the tools to communicate through their interfaces, adding a new interactive dimension.” But, as with any object, low-tech or high-tech, the most successful designs in “Talk to Me” are those that actually have something to say.