Om Malik Interviews Louis Rossetto

Terrific interview by Om Malik with Wired magazine co-founder Louis Rossetto. Rossetto:

Life is funny, because you’re supposed to — well, at least when I was growing up — you were supposed to have this clear idea of the trajectory of your life, a career that you could envision how it’s going to turn out, and the steps that you would take along the way to make that dream real. My life has been about serial obsessions, which I compare to love affairs. You can’t will yourself to fall in love, but suddenly you find yourself in love, and then it becomes something amazing.

I think people do their best work when they’re obsessed by something they have to work out. That’s been the story of my life. It certainly hasn’t been linear. It’s been about following passions along the way. Sometimes it’s been about being a journalist, or an editor, or an entrepreneur, and other times it’s been about being a father, or a chocolate company guy. Now it’s about being a writer. Each of these have had their own moment; they’ve each absorbed my full being in order to work out whatever it was I had to deal with.

Rosetto has a new book, a novel titled Change Is Good, that is being designed and printed by Erik Spiekermann. The first edition is available exclusively through Kickstarter.

Those early years of Wired were just incredibly inspiring to me. I loved everything about the early Wired — what they wrote about, how they wrote about it, the typography and design of the magazine itself, and even the quality of the inks and papers they used. It was so good, and so perfectly captured a hard-to-capture revolution.

★ Monday, 21 August 2017