The Monday Media Diet with Regina Pozo Ruiz

On design, music, and dancing socks

Regina Pozo Ruiz (RP) is a longtime friend (and reader!) of WITI. She covers the worlds of design, furniture, social entrepreneurship, and music out of her office in Mexico City and has been at it for a long time (read this Times profile from 2012). We’re pleased to have a global + CDMX perspective on the page today. -Colin (CJN) 

Tell us about yourself.

I am a design curator based in Mexico City. In 2015, I founded txt.ure, a social entrepreneurship brand devoted to rescuing and preserving popular Mexican techniques as we embed them with design. We were featured last week in the FT’s HTSI Magazine supplement. A dream come true. I am also a DJ, though the last few years haven’t been great for live performance. 

Describe your media diet. 

Mexico just went through very complicated midterm elections, so my media consumption tripled. I went back to Twitter to try to make sense of the political climate, as our actual populist-left administration has proven to be very cunning in a despicable way. So, I usually like to find what other people are saying about the Mexican political climate like Jude Weber does for the FT. The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are also constantly reviewing Mexican politics and economics. I sometimes try an article in French through Courrier International which I love, much more in print. 

When checking my email I do one newsletter per day during the mornings, (I do WITI at least once a week!) My latest favorite was The Hermés Edition. I just subscribed to the First Floor Newsletter from my friend Shawn Reynaldo and I am thinking to subscribe to Blackbird Spyplane (Unbeatable recon! -CJN). I also find Ana Andjelic´s The Sociology of Business very useful. 

What’s the last great book you read?

Not necessarily a read per se, but it is an amazing book: The Age of Earthquakes by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. 

What are you reading now?

Just finished the historical essays by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on populist insurgency in Europe and just found his writing in the New Yorker on the topic as well. 

Also a book on psychology, womanhood, nerves, and hysteria with not such a good title though: The Shaking Woman or the History of my Nerves.  

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I usually go directly to the article I am buying the publication for. I am not subscribed to print, so when I find them at newsstands, I just go to the article of my interest first. I still have this thing with print that allows you to take some time during the weekends (or planes) and go through them thoroughly. 

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I admire Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican writer and essayist from my generation living in New York City for almost a decade. She has been multi-awarded by her essays and novels. For me Tell me How it Ends an Essay in Forty Questions which got the American Book Award in 2008 is a crude but touching narrative about the condition of Central American migrant kids that travel alone to the States. At the moment she wrote that book, Luiselli was a volunteer that helped translate kids’ narratives about their travels and perils when they were looking for asylum, It's exemplary work. 

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

MyNoise - An App that lets you design your own background frequencies. It is pretty amazing, as I constantly need to have my environment filled with music, or noise at night. 

Plane or train?

We don´t have that many trains down here, so I will do planes. I am kind of a plane geek, to be honest. I usually pick my flights based on the aircraft that I will be flying in... 

What is one place everyone should visit? 

Edward James’s Sculpture garden in Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, Mexico. A Late Surrealist jungle-architecture-ruin. 

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into. 

I was just made aware of the idea of “dancing socks” and was browsing them with a friend at a dinner party. I like how tactical they are: a super-specific design application for performance: the specifics read like a sports car: “built-in spin-spot, brake lines, grip control lines, and enhanced compression arch.” I often fall into these design rabbit holes even with mundane objects. This was my recent one. 

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Regina (RP)

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