This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Why is everything so drab right now? Why is it all so same-same? You’ve got these coffee shops — they all look the same. Architecture looks standardized. Buildings are colorless. The cars are interchangeable.
Then, on the other side, you have President Trump’s gilded Oval Office, his imagined arch, his garish vision for the reflecting pool. Say what you will about Trump, but he and the modern right 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 that has bothered me, too: Is the world getting uglier? And if so, why?
Why do we seem to design so much that looks so boring or, 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 the logos for companies like Burger King, 7Up and Häagen-Dazs. And for over 20 years she has hosted a podcast called “Design Matters,” where she talks to creative people about design. She joins me now.
Ezra Klein: Debbie Millman, welcome to the show.
Debbie Millman: 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 then I just read a piece from you with the title “Is the World Getting Uglier?” So, is it?
Depends on who you ask.
[Laughs.] I’m asking you.
In my opinion, it’s getting more vulgar. In some ways, ugliness can be very intentional. Vulgarity 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 — to a more vulgar world.
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 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. [Laughs.]
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 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. If something is out of proportion, it will give us a sense of discombobulation. It could be the disproportion of a handbag, a skateboard — it could be the disproportion of anything. But things essentially make us feel. 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.
Exactly.
People had previously told people to tidy up. What she offered was a way to say that 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, was out of proportion — it was brash, it was aggressive. And so the early reviews of it were very negative. 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 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 mark was what we were seeing around us, so we started to draw on the walls of caves. After that, we started 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 how 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 telegraphs 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 who 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 snaky 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, 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, “Who designed this?” This is a billion-dollar system that’s in airports all over the world, and it is the worst-designed 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 is disrespectful, design that is greedy, design that is immoral is bad design.
I love that. I totally agree with that. I find them so confusing and alienating.
One thing I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been reading and thinking about these essays over some period of time — my team and I have wanted to do a show on this for a little bit — is: As a genre, “Is the world getting uglier?” has two different lines of critique happening in it at once.
One is the critique you’re offering here, which is that it’s getting uglier. The world makes you feel something, and the thing it makes you feel is bad. It’s a negative feeling tone, in Buddhist terminology.
The other is that the world is getting not what I would call uglier, though 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 + 1 essay from 2023, in which they talk about the “drab sublime”:
This drab sublime unites flat-pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design: an ocean of stuff so homogenous and underthought that the world it has inundated can feel like a digital rendering …
One reason I sort of like the Cybertruck is that 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. A lot of it comes down to taste, and then also how well 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. To command attention? Is it to intimidate? What is the intention of this?
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 this 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?
I want to really position myself here, because I think the Cybertruck is interesting to argue for, but I want to really agree that it’s ugly. [Laughs.]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: 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; I find them inoffensive. I feel nothing when I look at them. They are mute to me. So many cars — 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 — 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 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. You’re talking about this, I think, a little bit in your essay. You talk about this move toward vulgarity, toward a bloviating style. 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 — it’s been covered in other places — a move toward more maximalist design. We’ve gone from ——
Looksmaxxing.
Yeah, looksmaxxing is another one, actually, but I meant in décor. You write that “we are living in an attention economy, and attention rewards extremity” — that the more design is rewarded for being instantly visible, recognizable and shareable, 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 things also feel the same everywhere.
This is 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 ——
I mean, you can’t even differentiate airports anymore. 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’s creating, I think, a move toward what you’re describing as a kind of vulgar or bloviating 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 the first iPod, and that came with the white earbuds.
I did not know that was six weeks after 9/11. Those are two events that are now put together in my head.
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 clothing. It was in a pocket, but the earbuds gave you away. 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 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, 25 years later, and that is still primarily the language. So much so that every other tech company has taken on that same vernacular. 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, Mauro Porcini. So he’s making some of those changes. But up until now, we’re talking about 20 to 25 years of tech looking a very specific way because everybody wanted to seem like the very best. So it’ll be interesting to see how that now changes with new people at the helm, both at Apple and at Samsung.
You say that design is a “deliberate expression of intention.” Tell me about that.
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 ——
That’s a hot take, calling Christianity a brand. [Laughs.]
Well, it’s just because I want to bring it down to like the foundation, one of the first brands. Although Hindu and Jainism 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.
I was interested to see you go from 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 great scale 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 brands want to differentiate from one another.
They have to. Otherwise, they’re not brands.
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.
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 there are 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 many things other than just beauty or 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 we often lionized for their superior aesthetics, they didn’t have to optimize for as much.
So one reason the world is feeling a little bit more same to people in the construction of material objects is, 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.
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 — my producer lives in a much older home, and it’s really beautiful. It’s like, you take a picture of 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’s soul.
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, central air, 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 sometimes 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 somebody’s idea of beauty and their idea of function have come into a beautiful union.
But I actually think some of the drabness that we’re talking about comes from people living in a world that has been smoothed for them such that it, on the one hand, works really well, and on the other, doesn’t feel alive to them. It just sort of has been flattened into a kind of soulless service.
Like what? I’d love to know what you consider that to be.
I’m not a vinyl collector, but I know many people who are, and it is, in part, 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.” Sure, it’s a little warmer. But 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 the Kindle.
Exactly. I have a big Kindle library and I have a big physical book library.
Same.
So there are places where the world asks things of you that are perhaps a little bit less convenient. You know, the fact that my Kindle’s always with me and I can look up all my highlights on my phone — it is more convenient.
And when I really love a book, I’ll often 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 even if its function is actually objectively somewhat worse.
Yeah. I 100 percent agree.
So how do you think about those spaces 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 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 in 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 have 45 books in my pocket. But I also love curling up with a book and feeling 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 that will go with me somewhere. [Laughs.] 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 Quirke about why things are getting uglier. He’s walking through London, looking at lampposts and sewer systems built in an earlier era, and then comparing them 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 ——
Oh my God, yes.
It really struck me.
I saw it. Yes.
I want to show you this, because I think it maybe gets at some of the things we’re talking about.
Archival clip of Sheehan Quirke: 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 and improved billions of lives. 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 than make things look pretty. And maybe that’s OK.
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 that 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. 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 A.C. units is that they’re obtrusive. But window A.C. 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 ——
None.
But cost actually matters here. And so this is a place where I think there often really is a tension — 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.
So one critique you’ll often hear of the kind of conversation we’re having is that it’s a bit elitist: that beauty is nice to have, but there’s a reason, you know, what 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 rowhouses in Georgetown because 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 SHHHOWERCAP, 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 bouffant-type shower cap, but they last forever, and they’re gorgeous.
And suddenly, you go from having this piece 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, how it used to be that 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: 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 — to their children. But their children don’t want it.
And one reason they don’t want it is that we have made furniture much cheaper. 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 maybe this is your starter home, and in a couple of years you’ll probably change it.
And so 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 is a soul that’s embedded in that.
At one point, 60 years ago, my grandmother sat at that table. Now, I don’t need that table anymore because, 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 many kinds of things — 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 lives operate by different logics.
There’s a logic of markets, and markets like a logic that is 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, 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 just going on in life is that market logic is eating more and more and more and more. And markets don’t, as I was saying, 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 an analysis 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: Nearly a third of American home sales in 2021 went to people who had no intention of living in them. The homes were an investment vehicle, or the homes were going to be flipped.
In 2021? Wow.
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 four or five years, then you’re going to move back to Asheville, N.C., or something — moving that home toward particularity, 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.
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 even about you. It was about everybody wanting to make sure their home was an effectively tradable asset.
And so there’s this market logic that can infect more and more, and that is, you know, again, part of the trend toward 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 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 bowler hats.
So I think that there’s this really interesting thing that I want to do some research on now 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, or what does it reflect, about the way we want to move through the world? Going back to our earlier axis of, do you feel anything at all versus what do you feel — I have a friend, the way she dresses is meant to make other people feel things.
Like what?
Joy, whimsy, but it’s loud. Like, you walk around with her and people are noticing. And she is trying to get them to notice.
And the way I dress — and when we moved this podcast to video it caused me a lot of stress — is sort of meant to not have people notice. I don’t want you to be thinking about how I look. Like, I want you to think it looks nice and then not give it any further thought.
Right.
And there is this dimension where you are willing to have people have views about you — 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.
Versus you have a society that in some cultural way has become less comfortable with that. 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 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 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. 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.
Why?
Anything else feels too fluorescent. I feel like I’m being looked at. Everything goes with everything. It blends.
My nephew, first 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 too much. Everything goes with everything.” He goes, “That’s weird.” [Laughs.] And 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 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 specific kind of statement about yourself that maybe it wouldn’t have been at other times, when it was just, you know, people had American flags or they had an F.D.R. 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 think I’m talking about here is that the logic of branding — we have become so used to thinking of it as branding, as the thing corporations are trying to do with it, that even when the symbol is coming out of a noncommercialized sphere that would be understood to be representing very different things about somebody, we almost now sort of see them all on the same plane.
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 I wanted to be a rabbi, and what that meant to me wasn’t what it meant to me some years later, when I, like, 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 existed publicly, too. 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 where maybe logics or ways of accessing the world that should remain separate actually begin to converge.
I want to get into the public and private spheres here, and maybe a good way to do it is this. We’d 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. Zizmor, is it?
[Laughs.] Dr. Zizmor.
Can you describe them for our listeners in audio here?
Yes. Dr. Zizmor was a dermatologist. 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 — you know, 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 kerned type and terrible vertical and horizontal scaling and bad silhouettes. But they became like the Crazy Eddie ads of the ’70s — 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 begin to associate it with something.
That thing could have good feelings; it could have bad feelings. Again, back to the feelings. And in the case of Zizmor, 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 loved these ads. They loved them.
What people get so upset about now, when you change logos, it’s not so much that the logo that is being changed is any good; it’s that it’s taking us away from 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 in a different direction. I was looking at those ads, and I think they’re wonderful. And one reason they’re wonderful, although ugly and weird and crowded, is that they feel like a person was behind them, not a committee.
Yes.
They don’t feel like they came out of a sophisticated branding agency that had a kickoff meeting and a scoping meeting — and you can feel the sort of bureaucratic energy behind 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 have 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. The M.T.A.’s 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 strata of society mixing with one another. 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 had an ad for the reboot of “The Exorcist” above where we would walk in. And it was black-and-white of these two girls’ faces, and they’re spitting blood ichor. It was this horrifying, grotesque ad.
And I looked into this: The M.T.A. gets about 1 percent of operating revenue from advertisements. And on the one hand, I know that the Mamdani 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 noncommercial, 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.
Yes.
So what I love on the New York City subways is that 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 — nonutilitarian 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 most of it.
You’re a visual prisoner.
Yes. I mean, if you go back to the ’50s and ’60s, people worried a lot about how the visual field was being taken over by advertising. 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: São Paulo, for a while, took all their billboards down. I don’t know if they still ——
In Brazil?
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 of blank billboards. And it’s beautiful. No messages; just the white plain billboard in an urban environment, and it’s really quite provocative.
That’s so interesting about São Paulo, and 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 that 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.
And 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 over urinals in public bathrooms. I mean, really? That’s when you want to get somebody’s attention?
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: There’s been a real movement on the right in recent years, in a very certain way, to resuscitate an argument about beauty. And you’ve seen — 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.
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 clip from Tucker Carlson I’m going to show you was genuinely interesting.
Archival clip: This is another third rail in American 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 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. [Laughs.]
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 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 more of an uproar about what the president is doing to the White House, to the East Wing, to the arch that he’s putting up, to the Reflecting Pool.
I mean, there’s so much damage that is making Washington uglier that 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 know anybody that’s like, “You know, the Oval Office, that looks really good now.”
Trump. The person who thinks that is Trump. But I mean that very seriously.
Right. 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. OK.
The right, because part of the modern right in America is a much more reactionary movement, 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. What they understand is the European inheritance.
And I think that the left and — and the term “the left” is tricky because, obviously, you have moderates and liberals and leftists — 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 in trying to move ideas of beauty back to something more centrally contested in politics.
And I’m not sure I’ve really seen an answer, or even a willingness 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 visual grammar, what visual language can everybody agree on for that?
Well, nobody will ever agree. There will never be one way of assessing beauty. But I do want to make a distinction between taste and style and power.
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 architecture represents a certain power, and that power is the way we want to lead.
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.
OK, 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 were saying even at the very beginning, about proportionality and mathematics.
And I mean, you’ll get into these things, like, what is the perfect figure or the looksmaxxers in 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 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 — now having a kind of politics of beauty that I don’t think George W. Bush had, that I don’t think Mitt Romney had, that I think is a sort of a new entrant into politics, right? The executive orders on neoclassical or classical architecture.
And I guess one of my questions, because I do think people — including on the left, which is where a lot of the articles about everything becoming ugly that we’re talking about are coming from — 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 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 backward in its design aesthetic, you also have the tech right.
We’ve talked about the Cybertruck a bunch in this conversation, but crypto and NFTs had a very legible visual language. You have a certain amount of A.I. — from slop to art — but you do have a kind of emergent language of what the 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 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 buildings there, which are truly extraordinary, as a counterpoint to some of that.
Interestingly, a lot of the cyberchic 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 that 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. But there’s always more than one.
We haven’t talked about this very much, but a lot of what we’re talking about — I think in a sometimes sub rosa, sometimes very explicit way — is masculine- and feminine-coded.
I mean, the Cybertruck is a very male design. Say what you will about it. And you were just talking about sensuality and curves.
How much of the fight we’re having here is about the sort of larger political 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 we believe power should be communicated and visualized? And that’s, I think, what we’re seeing now.
So do you think — 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 — there’s an answer to that?
You know, you can say, “Yes, the world has become uglier”? I think it’s something you’re saying. 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. So do you think there’s an answer to that you do believe in, and that does allow, though, people whose politics you do agree with to speak about beauty in a way that is more legible and inspiring to people?
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 a place to end. So, then, always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
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, if that’s OK with you.
Please.
OK, so No. 1, it’s a book of poetry called “The Voice That Is Great Within Us.” It’s edited by Hayden Carruth, and it is a 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 No. 1.
No. 2 is what I think is one of the greatest love stories of all time. It’s a book written by Gabriel García Márquez, 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 college. It’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” I even went to Ireland for Bloomsday, which is 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 Sandymount Strand. And those are my three favorite books. Books that 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 squirrelly 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 in 2020 we got married. So “Hunger” by Roxane Gay.
That is a wonderful fourth recommendation. Debbie Millman, thank you very much.
Thank you, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin and Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King and Kyle Kelley. Video editing by Kristen Williamson. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Vanessa Friedman. Transcript editing by Filipa Pajevic and Lauren Leibowitz.
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