Kyle Chayka

Photo by Gregory Gentert

Current Projects

The New Yorker: I am a staff writer at The New Yorker, where I write a weekly column about technology and culture called Infinite Scroll.

How to Be Moved: My third book, on life-changing encounters with culture & sensory experience, will be published by Doubleday.

Kyle Chayka Industries: A personal newsletter where I send out periodic work updates and personal essays.

One Thing: A weekly culture newsletter & experimental publication where I work with collaborators to publish link dumps and spicy arguments, the fun stuff.

I previously co-founded Dirt and Study Hall, now exited from both. I have given talks at Cannes Lions, Nike, The Menil Collection, Círculo de Bellas Artes, and many other institutions.


Books

Filterworld

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture was published by Doubleday in January 2024 and in paperback in 2025. Find it in bookstores or at these links:

Doubleday / Bookshop / Amazon

It was published by Bonnier in the UK and has been translated into a dozen languages, including Spanish, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian.

Filterworld is about how digital platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify took over our modes of cultural distribution in the 2010s. Algorithmic recommendations, like TikTok’s For You feed or Netflix’s homepage, control the majority of what we see and hear online. Though they promise personalization, the net result of so many algorithms is a homogenization of culture — a hyperglobalization of design, food, music, and identity. The book is a reported investigation as well as an essay. I had conversations with tech executives, computer scientists, users, influencers, and artists of all kinds to figure out what algorithmic recommendations have done to our cultural ecosystem. A running theme is “algorithmic anxiety”: the paranoia, fear, and confusion we feel when algorithms judge us either incorrectly or far too accurately.

Filterworld had an excerpted essay in The New Yorker and was reviewed in publications including the New York Times and The Atlantic. I was interviewed about it on The Daily Show, Fresh Air, The Ezra Klein Show, and many more venues.


The Longing for Less

The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, my debut nonfiction book, was published by Bloomsbury in January 2020, and in paperback in 2024 with an updated afterword. It’s available at these links:

Bloomsbury / Bookshop / Amazon

UK buyers can pick it up through Amazon UK. It is also available in translation in Russian, Spanish, Korean, and other editions.

The Longing for Less deconstructs the contemporary fascination with minimalism, analyzing the Marie Kondo cleaning boom and austere Instagram aesthetics as well as uncovering the roots of our fascination with absence in art, architecture, music, and philosophy. It’s a history told through the stories of the people who practiced minimalism, from artists like Agnes Martin and Donald Judd to the composer John Cage and the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. For more information on the book, see below.

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Archive

The Longing for Less Excerpts

Notices

  • "More than just a story of an abiding cultural preoccupation, The Longing For Less peels back the commodified husk of minimalism to reveal something surprising and thoroughly alive." — Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing

  • “In its lightly worn learning and serious grace, The Longing for Less functions both as a corrective to our shallow form of minimalism and as a guide to a deeper form that still has a great deal to teach us.” — Brian Phillips, author of Impossible Owls

  • “I'm no minimalist, but I am not immune to Kyle Chayka's searching, subtle, and finally quite moving exploration of the beauty of less.” — Lucy Sante, author of Low Life

  • “Kyle Chayka gently urges us to reconsider our inheritance of the minimalist legacy while offering nuanced, profound, and then outright dazzling angles on a subject as loved as it is overexposed.” — Paola Antonelli, curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art

  • “What if the whole voguish notion of minimalism is a capitalist ruse?” — Wall Street Journal Magazine

  • “…explores not only how one might live in a minimalist fashion, but in fact where the idea comes from and how it's changed and adapted over the ages.” — Town & Country

Reviews

  • “The minimalism that Chayka seeks encourages not an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it.” — Jennifer Szalai, New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

  • “Arrives not as an addition to the minimalist canon but as a corrective to it.” — Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

  • “An intriguing deep dive into the many manifestations of minimalism. A superb outing from a gifted young critic that will spark joy in many readers.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  • “Alluringly titled, Chayka's insightful book connects a wide array of thought-provoking approaches to the concept of less is more.” — Booklist

  • Reviews of the book have also appeared in The New Republic, Slate, LARB, Wall Street Journal, LitHub, and Washington City Paper.

  • Interviews about the book appeared in publications including Vanity Fair and Hazlitt.


Selected Journalism

This section is outdated; for most of my recent writing, see my author archive at The New Yorker.

 

FEATURES

— The Pandemic Countryside Boom, on the demand for quarantine real estate (New Yorker, 2020)

Architecture & Pandemic, on COVID-19’s impact on our spaces (New Yorker, 2020)

— Did the Internet Kill Monoculture?, on algorithmic culture and social experience (Vox, 2019)

— My Own Private Iceland, on overtourism and the search for authenticity (Vox, 2019)

— Group Therapy for the End of the World, on a climate-change retreat in rural Sweden (Garage Magazine, 2018)

The World Is Your Office, on digital nomads and the startup Roam (NYT Magazine, 2018)

The Rise of Left Media, on Current Affairs magazine and leftist publications (The Ringer, 2017)

— Future Agency, on design studios that imagine and create futuristic experiences (The Verge, 2017)

— Living on a Prayer, on defunct churches being converted into hipster condos (Curbed, 2016)

— The Library of Last Resort, on the Library of Congress’s failure to adapt to the internet (n+1, 2016)

— Utopia, on a reality TV show that tried to create a perfect society (Matter, 2014)

— Wow This Is Doge, on finding the birth of an internet meme (The Verge, 2013)

* * *

ESSAYS

— Notes on Vibe, on TikTok and the capturing of mundane poetic moments (New Yorker, 2021)

— Culture of Negation, on our pandemic-era pursuit of feeling nothing (NYT Magazine, 2021)

— The Rise of Ambient TV, on ignorable but interesting streaming shows (New Yorker, 2020)

How Do You Describe TikTok?, on the platform’s automated feed of culture (newsletter, 2020)

— The Art World’s Travel Addiction, on cosmopolitanism and climate change (Frieze, 2019)

— Being in Nothingness, on Ikebana and Existentialism in 1950s Japan (Harper’s, 2019)

— In the Shadow of the CMS, on media companies selling their own software (The Nation, 2019)

— Style Is an Algorithm, on taste and technology (Vox, 2018)

— Crypto-Luxury, on digital currencies as the latest high-end consumer good (Garage, 2018)

— A Japanese Philosopher in Pre-War Paris, on Kuki Shuzo (Affidavit, 2017)

The Grays of Our Lives, on the aesthetics of gray clothing (Racked, 2017)

Reign, Supreme, on the streetwear brand and cultural meme (Racked, 2017)

— Playing House, on Airbnb and fantasy lives (Curbed, 2016)

Welcome to AirSpace, on the generic spaces and places created by digital technology (The Verge, 2016)

— The Oppressive Gospel of Minimalism, on the trendy misuse of the word (NYT Magazine, 2016)

— The Design of Fake News, on the ways Google and Facebook disguise shoddy websites (The Verge, 2016)

— Right Now, Forever, on the eternal presentness of 21st-century art (Hazlitt, 2015)

— Babes at the Museum, on my life in figure drawing (Adult, 2014)

— The Afterlife of Memes, on Doge and the strange persistence of virtual fame (Matter, 2014)

* * *

AUDIO INTERVIEWS

— Longform

— David Zwirner Podcast

— The Digital Human (BBC)

— North Star

— On Point

PROFILES

Beeple Broke the Art World, on Mike Winkelmann and the NFT market (New Yorker, 2021)

— The Decisive Moment, on Artforum and David Velasco (Columbia Journalism Review, 2019)

— All-Day Cafes, on restaurant designers The MP Shift (T magazine, 2018)

Be Happy with Less, on The Minimalists bloggers and podcasters (The Cut, 2017)

Startup Investing for Sport & Profit, on the VC investor Jeff Jordan (The Ringer, 2017)

— New York’s Renaissance Man, on Julian Schnabel (Port magazine, 2017)

The Last Lifestyle Magazine, on Kinfolk and Nathan Williams (Racked, 2016)

— Tomi Lahren Has Some Thoughts, on the far-right pundit and social media personality (The Ringer, 2016)

— Joshua Cohen Is Not Online, on the novelist’s exploration of tech (Rolling Stone, 2015)

— Uber for Janitors, on Managed by Q, whose contract cleaners have employee rights (Bloomberg, 2015)

— The Apartment-Sharing Economy, on the coliving startup Common (Bloomberg, 2015)

— Coworking & Rock Climbing, on Brooklyn Boulder’s definition of work-life balance (Bloomberg, 2015)

* * *

REVIEWS

— The Home Edit, Netflix’s reality show about plastic boxes (New Yorker, 2020)

— Donald Judd, on the Museum of Modern Art’s Judd retrospective (New Republic, 2020)

 Condé Nast, on the man who provided a model for the magazine industry, for better or worse (The New Republic, 2019)

— Air Mail, on Graydon Carter’s email newsletter venture (The Nation, 2019)

— George Trow & Social Media, on how the writer’s criticism relates to the internet (The Nation, 2019)

— The Tale of Genji, on an exhibition of art inspired by the novel at the Metropolitan (The New Republic, 2019)

— Tidying Up, on Marie’s Kondo’s Netflix reality show about cleaning house (The New Republic, 2019)

— The Brand Builder, on the architect Bjarke Ingels (The New Republic, 2018)

— Nowhere Mag, on Monocle (The New Republic, 2017)

— Dronestagrams, on a book of photography taken using drones (The New Republic, 2017)

* * *

MISC. COMMENTARY

— New American Maximalism, on Drake and Gigi Hadid’s elaborate interiors (New Yorker, 2020)

— Mimetic Protest Murals, on D.C.’s Black Lives Matter public art piece (New Yorker, 2020)

The Designification of Healthcare, on the aesthetics of medical start-up branding (Metropolis, 2019)

— Engineering the End of Fashion, on LOT2046 and fashion without choice (Ssense, 2018)

— Conversation Pits Make a Comeback, on furniture and socializing (Curbed, 2017)

— Deconstructing Selfies, on the painter Matthew Miller (Hazlitt, 2014)

* * *

CONVERSATIONS

— Patrick Li (Ssense, 2019)

— Geoff Dyer (Hazlitt, 2016)

Edmund de Waal (Hazlitt, 2015)