Consumer behavior

"Consumed"

The "Consumed" column, which appears weekly in The New York Times Magazine, examines consumer behavior from a hybrid business-and-anthropology standpoint. Each column discusses a new product or consumer trend. Everything in "Consumed" already has some kind of traction with some group of consumers; the column attempts to figure out what consumers are responding to in that "product," which can be anything from dish soap to beer to a television show.

Murketing.com

Murketing.com is Walker's blog, descended from an earlier Walker project called the Journal of Murketing, which was an email newsletter on subjects now written about in "Consumed." "Murketing" ... as originally coined by Walker in an article in Outside magazine about the energy drink Red Bull ... derives from "murky:"

Buying In

A book exploring themes similar to those in Walker's "Consumed" columns, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are was published by Random House in June 2008.

Significant Objects

With writer/editor Joshua Glenn, Walker "curates" an online writing project/social experiment called Significant Objects. Walker and Glenn purchase objects ... for no more than a few dollars ... from thrift stores and garage sales. A participating writer is then paired with the object, about which he or she writes a fictional story. In this way an unremarkable, castoff thing acquires "significance." The item is listed for auction on eBay, using the writer's story as the sales copy. (Care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax potential buyers.) The winning bidder is mailed the significant object, along with a printout of the object’s fictional story, and a new item ... with a new story attached ... is listed for sale. According to the Significant Object website, "the object should ... acquire not merely subjective but objective value."

Launched in 2009, the project has already employed the talents of such writers as Kurt Andersen, Nicholson Baker, William Gibson, Myla Goldberg, Ann Nocenti, Luc Sante, and Colson Whitehead; and has gone through three "volumes." In Volume One, proceeds from the sales of the objects went to the respective writers. In Volume Two, proceeds went to 826 National, a creative-writing tutoring program for teenagers in seven cities. Volume Three will benefit the creative writing nonprofit Girls Write Now.

The Significant Objects project has been extensively covered in the press, including on NPR's "All Things Considered," the "Paper Cuts" blog of the New York Times Book Review,the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist online.

Letters from New Orleans

Walker's 2005 book, Letters From New Orleans, was compiled from Walker's emails "to interested parties" about life in New Orleans, where he lived in the late 90s and early 2000s. Subjects covered in the book include celebratory gunfire, rich people, religion, the riddle of race relations in our time, robots, fine dining, drunkenness, urban decay, debutantes, the nature of identity, Gennifer Flowers, and mortality. All author proceeds from Letters from New Orleans went to relief organizations such as the Red Cross and others working with victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"St. James Infirmary" and "NO Notes"

One of the chapters in Letters from New Orleans discusses the song "St. James Infirmary." Reader feedback about that chapter led to Walker starting the "NO Notes" blog. "NO Notes" is place to collect some of the links, leads, thoughts, and suggestions relating to the song sent in by readers – from Finland, the Netherlands, Australia, Spain, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the United States.

"MLK Blvd"

A number of the photographs in Letters From New Orleans are from a Walker project called "MLK Blvd." Interested in how many cities have a street named for Martin Luther King Jr., and how many of these MLK Boulevards – as in New Orleans – seem to have an awful lot of abandoned property, scary-looking bars, and small groceries that accept food stamps, Walker planned on doing some sort of photo book on the subject of this "legacy." This was before Walker became aware of a documentary called MLK Boulevard, or the book, written by Jonathan Tilove, with photographs by Michael Falco called, Along Martin Luther King: Travels On Black America’s Main Street. Eventually, Walker's project became an open source journalism project, housed on Flickr.com.

Titans of Finance

Walker has written a number of comic book stories published under the name R. Walker. A collection of his satirical stories of the business world was published in 2001 as Titans of Finance: True Tales of Money & Business. Collaborating with artist Josh Neufeld, Walker tells the tales of Wall Street's most well-known Icaruses. The stories are entirely based on press accounts, with practically no embellishment. Among those profiled are Ronald O. Perelman, Al Dunlap, Mike Vranos, and Victor Niederhoffer.

Titans of Finance received a good deal of attention from the mainstream business press, including Fortune Small Business, U.S. News & World Report,Kiplinger's Personal Finance, Money and The New York Times.

Walker is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Texas, Walker now lives with his wife, photographer and designer Ellen Susan, in Savannah, Georgia.

• Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House, June 2008) ISBN 1400063914
• Where Were You? (self-published zine, 2007—present)
• Letters From New Orleans (Garrett County Press, 2005) ISBN 1891053019
• Titans of Finance: True Tales of Money & Business (with artist Josh Neufeld) (Alternative Comics, 2001) ISBN 978-1891867057

Notes

Sources

• "Brian Lehrer Show" interview on WNYC radio
• Gothamist interview
• Core77.com interview