What’s on the bench

The newsletter’s name. It’s been Taking Things Apart since the first draft of the brief — always with an asterisk that said “working title,” which is naming’s way of saying “someone else’s problem, later.” Later arrived.

The decision

The newsletter is called Knolling. Buttondown sends it — that half of the decision came easy: markdown in, markdown out, a real API so the issues live in this repo and the archive lives on this domain, and subscriber export is one click if I’m ever wrong about them. The old working title survives as the working tagline: taking things apart to see how they work. It was always a better sentence than a name.

How I took it apart

A name here has four jobs: span all four pillars, survive an inbox from-line, work as a noun in a sentence (“did you read ___ this week?”), and sound like me. The candidates fell one by one.

Taking Things Apart is a phrase, not a name — it describes and never nouns. The Teardown had the best internal logic on the board: my format is literally called teardown and the archive lives at /teardowns, so the name would just be the content model saying its own name. But the namespace is crowded — a motorsports podcast, a couple of others, and a video game that owns page one of search — and outside these walls, a “teardown” of something reads as a hit piece. I disassemble things to understand them, not to leave them on blocks.

Exploded View was the one I wanted to want: the engineering diagram that separates every part while showing exactly how they fit is precisely what an issue does. But the first word is a bomb. If the name sounds violent to me, it sounds violent to some reader every single week. The Deconstruct family came next and arrived carrying more luggage than expected — Derrida at the seminar table, deconstructed salads on menus, and, most significantly for a guy with a religion degree, “deconstruction” now names the movement of people leaving evangelical faith. Some readers would assume that’s the newsletter. It isn’t, so the name can’t be.

Then: knolling. The word comes from Frank Gehry’s furniture shop, where a janitor named Andrew Kromelow arranged stray tools at right angles between tasks — Knoll-furniture style, hence the name — and Tom Sachs later canonized it as “Always Be Knolling.” It means laying every part out, square and visible, so you can see what a thing is made of. Nothing explodes. Nothing gets torn down. Everything just gets seen. And the namespace check came back empty: no newsletter, no podcast, nobody. The clincher is that this site exists to introduce people to concepts worth knowing — so a newsletter named after a concept I’ll have to teach isn’t a liability. It’s the mission statement running a live demo, starting with its own masthead.

What I got wrong (or don’t know yet)

The obvious bet: nobody knows the word. “Did you read Knolling this week?” may earn blank stares for a year, and I’ve chosen to believe that’s the feature. Ask me at issue twenty. Also punted to the brand pass: whether the archive should move from /teardowns to /knolling, and whether the tagline holds. And in the spirit of entry 009, the disclosure: this name came out of a long back-and-forth with the bots — they generated candidates and ran the collision checks; I vetoed, redirected, and picked. The judgment was mine. So is the blame if it’s too clever.

Next up

Brand: colors, type, and the logo question — including a wordmark for a word nobody knows yet.

Costs so far: $12/yr / 2 hours (the naming session — a duet with the bots; their half of the labor cost pennies in tokens)