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A white Light Phone in grass.
Courtesy The Light Phone

A Smartphone Alternative We Can Totally Get Behind

Aileen Kwun

February 29, 2020
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Americans spend an average of more than four hours a day on their smartphones—and it’s hardly innocent fun. A new study finds that smartphone addiction can have the same effect on the brain as drug addiction, reducing gray matter and delivering a dopamine rush that’s even likened to the high of snorting cocaine. For artist Joe Hollier, it took just one stint working in an experimental program at Google—where he was tasked to conceive the very apps designed to keep users glued to their screens—to convince him to take an about-face approach to tech. “I kind of said, well, geez, could being any more connected to my smartphone for another two hours a day be what I actually need,” he recalls, “or am I constantly craving escape and wishing I lived in a van off the grid?”

In 2014, Hollier joined forces with product designer Kaiwei Tang to launch Light, then the latest startup to offer a “dumb phone” under the premise that “a phone is a tool, and it should serve you as the user, not the other way around.”  Its current model, the Light Phone II—touted as “a phone that actually respects you”—features a monochrome touchscreen and a smaller handheld size, with severely edited-down features. No social media feeds; no apps, push notifications, emails, or ads; and no camera. Still, the Light II is smarter than other designer dumb phones. Unlike Jasper Morrison’s phone for Punkt—which scraps an internet connection and touchscreen altogether in favor of static, calculator-like buttons (a design that philosopher and social scientist Christian Madsbjerg discusses his affinity for on Ep. 27 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—Light’s phone makes a few concessions. It has full texting capability and typography that’s easy on the eyes, and will soon roll out features for ride-sharing and listening to music (i.e., millennial essentials).

At first glance, you might simply mistake Light as an older iPhone model from the early aughts. But while Light may read as a nostalgic wish to tuck Pandora back into its box—and ironically gaining attention on Instagram along the way—Hollier attests it’s not about dialing back the clock on innovation, or intentionally staying a few steps behind current tech trends. For him, it’s simply presenting an alternative that makes a case for reclaiming idle time: “Many artists have claimed that boredom is the necessary aspect, if not the essential aspect of creativity.”

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Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.