Chicago

I was in Chicago last week for the HOW Design Live conference. Much more about the conference itself, the cool speakers I saw, and my own publishing talk there tomorrow on Publishing Wednesday. Today I want to talk about the morning of pure inspiration I spent walking along the lakefront from the convention center (which has the hotel attached and so where I had been indoors for 48 hours straight), through the cold but brightly glorious day up to downtown to visit Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" (known to its friends as the Bean, above) and the Art Institute (much more about the art I saw a the Art Institute on Art Friday). The gifts an unfamiliar city will give you -- from the skyline wedged between the brilliant water and even more brilliant sky, to your own reflection while taking obligatory Bean selfies, to a crowd of guys in tuxedos walking past a crowd of guys doing precision drumming on plastic buckets -- are the reasons I love visiting cities just about above all else.