Walls and Bridges

WRITER

USA

Biography

Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, science, and culture, among other subjects, for many publications, including Wired, Outside, The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wilson Quarterly, Artforum, The Wilson Quarterly, Travel and Leisure, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Metropolis, and Popular Science. He is contributing editor to Artforum and the design magazine Print and I.D., contributing writer of the popular blog Design Observer, and columnist for Slate magazine.
His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (Knopf, 2008). He is also the author of two previous books: Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America and The Sneaker Book. His early writings for The Baffler have been collected in two anthologies, Commodify Your Dissent and Boob Jubilee, and he has also contributed essays to a number of books.
He has consulted for a variety of companies, from ad agencies to Fortune 500 corporations, and has given lectures at a variety of institutions around the world. He has appeared on a wide variety of radio and television programs, including NBC’s Today Show, ABC News’ Nightline, NPR’s Morning Edition, Fresh Air with Teri Gross, the BBC’s World Service and The One Show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Fox Business, and CNN’s Business Today, among many others. He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, and has received fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visiting Arts, the Design Trust for Public Space, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is also a member of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Cold War Advisory Committee, a group studying the identifica- tion of sites and resources significant to the Cold War.