M.C. Tapera

The Best Year-End Lessons Don’t Come From Top-10 Lists (An Office Meditation)

Don’t resist. Relax and let it happen. It shouldn’t hurt, though you might feel a tugging sensation. It’s okay to stop—just for a little while—the striving, planning, strategizing, evaluating that make your work so successful, that you hope makes you notable and valuable. It’s fine to step away from the carefully wrought echo chamber of […]

Quality Down to the Last Crumb

Having grown up in a household in which we ate simply and fairly close to the land, I’m pretty sure I didn’t consume my first Cheeto until college. I don’t remember the exact occasion—I like to imagine it as a coming-of-age moment, along with my first taste of Twinkie and ferreting out the existence of […]

What’s Your Evil Twin Saying Between the Lines of Your Content?

I don’t want to freak anyone out, but… your evil twin might have co-opted your message. Don’t have an evil twin? I’ll take your word for it, but that leaves me wondering about the contradictory messages in your content. In fact, subtextual messages have been responsible for some of the most fraught, but enlightening, interactions […]

The Tao of Quality (Or, What I learned from Auto-Tune)

If you’ve heard any pop music at all over the past several years, you’ve probably heard Auto-Tune, seasoning and sometimes overwhelming the performances of the gifted and mediocre alike. It forces sounds to conform to a particular musical key, eliminating the hundreds of deviant microtones that distinguish the human vocal instrument—which may be why digitally […]

The Quality Mixtape: 20 Web Resources for Content Creation

Some of my most memorable musical discoveries were made thanks to meticulously compiled and lovingly decorated mixtapes, created for me by friends with the eclectic tastes and artistic fervor of adolescence. I know I’ve just utterly and irrevocably dated myself, but I don’t care; just thinking about those tapes makes me happy, reminds me that […]

The Year of Living Quality

2010 is a droplet trembling on the rim of space-time, and I think I’m ready for it to fall. This is the one time of year that I feel justified in reviewing the preceding 12 months and asking navel-gazing questions about accomplishments, miracles, snafus and “I’d-better-not-let-that-happen-again” craziness. It’s an arguably cerebral manifestation of our chronobiological […]

The Quality Hustle

Fast, cheap, good: pick two. You may have heard the adage, and it makes lots of sense applied to the world of media. We’ve already examined the exigencies of fast and relished the comforting ripples good can generate… but can cheap ever fit in with a quality ethos?

The Couch Whisperers

Remember the cozy, protected feeling that came with barricading your little-kid self inside a homemade fort? So do the architects at Build LLC, a firm in Seattle, Wash., who analyzed a selection of couch-based battlements. Besides catapulting me back to a long-ago basement rec room where I “fortified” a couple of low-slung, eggshell-hued sofas with […]

Quality Is Love

Somewhere in the world, right now, there’s a robot folding hankies. Seriously. Take a look at it. OK, they’re not really hankies; rather, “rectangular pieces of cloth.” But, just focus for a moment on the the geek-love expressed by the title of the accompanying post (“Adorable Laundry-Folding Robot Gives Your Towels Fastidious Attention”). The robot […]

Is There a Future for Quality in Media?

Does this very question set me up as a nostalgia-sodden, elitist Luddite? Of course I don’t think so: I believe that there can be no high art without low. I even realize that my use of “high” and “low” smacks of my own convenient and possibly specious value judgments. But it seems indisputable that the […]