Core77

We can't link to any of it yet (the issue's not currently online), but the latest edition of Good Magazine arrived in our mailbox yesterday. The theme is Design (with both a capital and lower-case d), and it's a real grab bag of an issue, which seems fitting since design is a real grab bag itself these days. With an intro by Alice Twemlow, tons of contributors make an appearance--including Core77 Broadcast hosts Alissa Walker and Steven Heller--and a fair bit of ground is covered, touching mostly on artifacts but also throwing some ink at design process.

There are product dissection/anthropologies by Heller and Brian Fichtner (with cameos from Luke Hayman, Jessica Helfand, Tucker Viemeister, Peter Ringbom, and Brian Collins), an intriguing piece on Morman missionaries (curiously book-ended with a profile on Christie Hefner!), and an inspiring piece by Sarah Goodyear on Ashton Hayes, a village in western England, aiming to become the country's first carbon-neutral town.

The more opinionated back-of-the-book doesn't disappoint, and you might even want to start there. A favorite is Jenny Price's "Against Philanthropy" piece. It's as take-no-prisoners as Good gets, challenging some conventional wisdom. Here's a taste:

We sanctify philanthropists who give away the millions they earn in part by hoarding ever larger shares of corporate profits. Instead, we should be asking how they accumulate and invest the inordinate sums of money that make their generosity possible.

and

We can all be good citizens much, much more effectively in the course of making money than in the course of giving money away.

Good Magazine, as we've said before, is the ultimate bathroom book, since almost none of its articles are more than one page long. (Thank you for giving Alissa more than 500 words for her piece on Project M!) But that's the secret of its success perhaps; extremely digestible and, well, focused on the "good," Good is a nice pick-me-up in a portable form. Unless it's on the windowsill of the aforementioned room in the house of course, in which case it's simply waiting to inspire you upon your return.