Rhetoric

Negative Space

February 8, 2021August 13, 2020 by Joshua Barthel

Considerations on Banishing the Corporate Lobby

It takes a certain type of person to walk into a space and get … mad at it. This distinction is usually left to persnickety architects, interior designers, decorators, and Kate Wagner. Spend enough time around these types, and soon you too will find yourself fuming at the inanimate, exhaling audibly as if your life partner personally slighted you in conversation. We speak of the language of architecture, after all.

End Games

February 8, 2021July 25, 2020 by Joshua Barthel

I think often of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, with its opening salvo of nonchalance and pure haunt. It is a useful reminder of how, no matter one’s levels of self-awareness, revelations will lag:

Hug the Tree; Shoot the Messenger

October 12, 2020July 12, 2020 by Joshua Barthel

Environmentalism and the pitfalls of doomsday rhetoric

Spring in Washington is a beautiful book. So much so that it sounds positively hokey to the modern ear. Today’s reader might be challenged to sit-straight faced through passages like this, about the sheer glory of the cherry blossoms’ annual performance in the capital’s Tidal Basin: