7 AM, Saturday, September 5, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org
Our mirrors have changed. We are living the reversal of two centuries of criticism and journalism. It is a time of the loss of commentators, critics, or writers. There are 3 – maybe 5 – full-time, dedicated national architecture critics left in America from over twenty a generation ago. But architecture is not alone. Yelp has similarly fired food criticism, “fashion” is on the phone not the next Vogue: we scroll 20 second vids – we no longer wait for Walter Cronkite to define “That’s the way it is.”
We still use our buildings, see art, eat food, see the world around us, but for everything beyond our daily encounter, the world has – in a generation – changed from a place where words and pictures on paper were presented to us through writers, editors and institutions into a direct injection of anything in the world via each person’s phone into our perception.
We once needed curators to see beyond our daily lives: now everyone each has agency to peek at anything: Without editors will a mobocracy end cultural direction or will it reveal an unfiltered creativity? It is virtually a cliche, but as we fret AI, humanity cis hanging through technology more now than anytime since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. As Kurt Andersen, author, critic, polymath who has spent a lifetime swimming in all the cultural currents in every form of national media says we are in a world of “the decline of Establishment gatekeepers and the rise of extreme democratization, for worse as well as better.”
Andersen is joined on DESIGN NOW! by Paul Goldberger, writer, teacher and long time critic of architecture of the New York Times and Martin Pedersen, the co-creator of the Common Edge Collaborative – after nearly 20 years of being the Executive Editor of Metropolis Magazine. We may be out of control, but we may not be out of understanding: LISTEN!