The adorable Allison Arieff, who I interviewed almost a year ago about her new gig at Bay Area design firm IDEO, has taken a job as editor-at-large for Sunset. The former editor of Dwell has her work cut out for her:

The magazine is working on a brand re-envision/relaunch and I’ll be working on taking them in a new more provocative/more contemporary direction. I’ll also be doubling up my New York Times posts allowing me to have an even bigger soapbox for issues near and dear to my heart like community, sustainability, and of course, great architecture and design. I am super excited.

Sunset’s one of those magazines I’ll pick up first at the dentist’s office but would never really admit to reading, let alone buying, because the grandma quotient is just a bit too high. That said, I love the content and there’s nothing a little re-envisioning can’t solve. Here’s to Allison bringing Sunset out of the sunset years!

I was thrilled to see this story by Janet Cromley in today’s LA Times, “StairMaster with a view: Hiking the stairways of Echo Park, Silver Lake.” Not just because finding and hiking the stairways in my neck of Hollywood has become my own personal obsession, but because the subject of the story, Dan Koeppel, took me on an abbreviated version of his 16.2 mile hike a few years ago.

Dan’s a freelance writer with outdoor inclinations (and, if I remember correctly, the calf muscles to match). But his step obsession began while writing the memoir To See Every Bird on Earth. The book is about his father, who basically left their family to become one of the pre-eminent birders in the world (he’s seen over 7,000 species). Dan needed something to help him escape his own head, so he started hiking and cataloging a route that started outside his front door. When Dan and I took our walk, he was working on Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (which came out last year) and peppered our hike with at least 50 fascinating banana anecdotes. I got the feeling Dan might need more than a simple stairway hike to download after he finished that book.

I still have a paper version of the map that Dan gave me, an eight-page document rainbow-coded to elevation gain (red=thigh burn), along with a spreadsheet that gives directions and tips (”Tricky, make sure you’re on Lucile!”). Now Dan’s put the map online so fellow stairmasters can join in the hike. When we parted ways almost three years ago I swore to create a route linking my stairs with his. The stairs are there—I’ve got a solid route from my neighborhood all the way west through Beachwood Canyon, and I’ve hiked some in Los Feliz Estates, throughout Franklin Hills, right down into to Silver Lake and Echo Park, and beyond into Eagle Rock—but I failed to keep up my end of the bargain. Maybe I need to write a book.

If you’re white and you like stuff there’s no place on the internet better suited to your needs than Stuff White People Like. The blog, which just launched this year gets upwards of 500 comments per post and has spawned dozens of unworthy knock-offs. They’ve already got a book deal with Random House; Stuff White People Like: A Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions will be out in August. According to this article in Heeb, founder/editor Christian Lander—above, recycling (#64), wearing a t-shirt (#84) and going to Whole Foods (#48)—is more like you and me than I expected (and not just because he’s white and likes stuff):  He works at LA design firm Schematic as a copywriter.

UK-published Eye is the publication you should just happen to have stacked in the bathroom if you want to impress your graphic design friends. The beautifully-produced issues never disappoint; the latest issue includes a review by David Womack of the MoMA Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition website, an article on eye strain and, of course, there’s always founding editor Rick Poynor’s provocative column. Last Friday, Haymarket Media Group announced that it would be releasing ownership of Eye to its esteemed editor John L. Walters, a fairly rare move for a design mag (they’re much more likely to get gobbled by conglomerates). Besides moving offices to Hoxton Square (which he says is in Shoreditch, London’s “design gulch”), John tells me that the first order of business is taking care of business:

Making sure the readers and subscribers and advertisers know we’re very serious, and that there’s no interruption to service…we’re using the same distributors, and the website is hosted externally, so many things don’t need to change.

And yes, there are some small, medium and big plans, including more special issues (the latest is a type special, which also features Marian Bantjes on Origami and Keith Miller on Robert Polidori), but I’ll leave details of those for my next monthly editorial email.

Which, if you don’t already get (and you should), you can sign up for here. I especially love them because he signs each one “Be seeing you.” Get it?

On this week’s Studio 360, the fabulous weekly radio show hosted by Kurt Andersen, they’re airing a segment I got to see being produced when I was in Miami last year. During Design/Miami, Aric Chen, Tobias Wong and Josée Lepage created a tattoo parlor where they took the concept of limited-edition design collecting to the extreme. You could get a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork by famous designers like Hella Jongerius, Yves Béhar and Tord Boontje right there on your body. FOREVER.

While covering the event for UnBeige, I met Studio 360 contributor Tania Ketenjian, and I snapped a few shots of her and the buzz surrounding the tattoos. In the slideshow for this week’s show, Studio 360 ended up using one of my shots, the only temporary tattoo available, as modeled by the lovely Jill Singer, one of my editors at ID. You can listen to art collector Ronnie Pirovino get one by graffiti artist Kaws in the segment (that buzzing sound still makes me cringe):