My current projects include:
The Stanford Daily
I currently write a column titled “The Culture of Craft,” where I muse about what crafting/craftsmanship is, means, and can do. Read my articles here.
Health Bites
I occasionally write for my own blog, healthbites.blog, about topics related to healthcare systems, equity, and policy.
Leatherworking
Tweaking, slowly
Having just finished my Writer’s Bag project, it has now moved to the “I have made” page, but the task of slowly refining it remains. There can’t be any major structural changes, obviously, but adjusting various aesthetic or minor functional features—and taking notes on how the design and construction can be improved—can only start once the bag is actually in use. Otherwise, as in the pattern-making process, it is merely educated guesswork.
Bone needles
As a part of a class I’m taking (archeology of craft), I made bone needles for my final project. I made a few items (e.g., a moccasin) with them, to test various shapes/designs/techniques, but I want to continue playing around with them on various projects to get a better idea of how they constrain/inform design, material choice, and techniques.
A book?
I have a harebrained idea to write a novel.
The idea is to follow a young man who meets a charismatic character, who espouses neoliberal ideology and becomes the (figure)head of a political movement/government. it is meant to track the slow degradation of the main character’s personal relationship as it devolves into a Kafkaesque navigation of bureaucracy. Somehow, the “bureaucracy” itself doesn’t formally exist, yet is strictly ordered and administered (if only by sheer charisma and “market forces”).
I intend it as a sort of critique of neoliberal thinking and routinization. I’m inspired by: Weber, Kafka, Gramsci, Camus, Nietzsche, Foucault, Dostoevsky, Orwell, and a slate of neoliberal thinkers like von Mises, Hayek, and Friedman.
It will be a miracle if pen ever touches page in service of this half-baked, mostly derivative idea, though.
Quinn Cook 