I can forgive Paola Antonelli for liking Karim Rashid because I love her. She’s the design curator at the MoMA in NYC and she has this amazing knack for animating our built and designed environment in an entertaining and charming way while also lightly inserting some very serious remarks about its history and politics. This TED talk is from 2007. I was so happy to hear her comments about design in North America – how, contrary to the way design is understood in Italy, design mistakenly tends to be viewed here as decoration. She also speaks about the problem of design’s over-associated with luxury, and this is probably a natural extension of the former point. Antonelli was at one point a contributing editor for Nest Quarterly of Interiors (under her former name, Paola Lenti) as well as Domus Magazine and many others. There’s a great interview with her on designboom, where I fell in love with her for hating those 80s blouses with the fabric tie around the neck and for saying that as a teenager she dreamed of being Paula Nelson, the fifth Beatle.