Letters from New Orleans

Pointless, sporadic, and free ... and essential. The Letter From New Orleans — “pointless, sporadic, and free”— began as a bunch of emails to interested parties, from New Orleans. The book Letters From New Orleans, includes all the Letters, as well as additional material. Subjects covered in Letters From New Orleans include: Celebratory gunfire, rich people, religion, the riddle of race relations in our time, robots, fine dining, drunkenness, urban decay, debutantes, the nature of identity, Gennifer Flowers, the song “St. James Infirmary,” and mortality.

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, business, the arts, and other subjects. He writes the BRANDED column for Fast Company and has contributed to The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, NewYorker.Com, Design Observer, The Organist, and many others. His latest book is The Art of Noticing (Knopf). He is on the faculty of the Products of DesignMFA program at the School of Visual Arts.