Photographer Pete Souza has a portfolio of photos of Barack Obama’s rise. Not all of them are as reverential as this one, but they’re still excellent photojournalistic works.

See more here at It’s Nice That or at Souza’s Web site. For our friends on the other side of the aisle, Souza also has a portfolio of equally excellent photographs of President Ronald Reagan, too.

I’d blog about this book for the title alone, but the premise is compelling in and of itself: in a world where there is more of everything than ever before, how do we pare down to just the essentials, the things that really matter, thereby simplifying our work, our lives, our thinking? The author, Matthew E. May has written a string of excellent books around the concepts of minimalism and elegance — his previous book, “In Pursuit of Elegance,” made a masterful case for the importance of omission in the act of creating — and is probably the most articulate writers on minimalism of the past decade. Even better, “The Laws of Subtraction” contains a brief contribution from yours truly. Get your copy from Amazon (affiliate link).

Why is there no longer a consensus understanding of which journalistic organizations are reliable sources for ‘the truth’?

“There’s no way to get Cronkite-like consensus without someone like Cronkite, and there’s no way to get someone like Cronkite in a world with an Internet; there will be no more men like him, because there will be no more jobs like his. To assume that this situation can be reversed, and everyone else will voluntarily sign on to the beliefs of some culturally dominant group, is a fantasy. To assume that they should, or at least that they should hold their tongue when they don’t, is Napoleonic in its self-regard. Yet this is what the people who long for the clarity of the old days are longing for.”

In other words, the 20th Century is really over. Read the rest of this remarkable essay at Poynter.org.

A series of wonderful portraits of American movie screens by the renowned Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The project began in the mid-1970s, and was shot on a 4 x 5 camera, usually surreptitiously.

See more from the series at C4 Gallery.

This article from Slate calls modern airline baggage tags “a masterpiece of design” for satisfying a myriad of complex and often contradictory manufacturing and usage criteria: they must be cheap and disposable yet reliably durable; they must be easy to attach but impossible to detach — until the user is ready to detach them; and as when they were first introduced they were meant to be compatible with older tracking systems as well as newer systems. Full story here.

From Kathryn Yu, marvelous shots inside the famous and now-shuttered TWA terminal designed by Eero Saarinen.

See Kathryn’s full set on Flickr.

Photographer Stephen Wilkes takes beautiful photos of factories in China that are reminiscent of a less ostentatious, more documentary Andreas Gursky.

See his full body of work at his Web site. Also, Quartz has an article about these photos.

The architecture magazine Domus periodically revisits stories from its archives on its site. The most recent entry in this series is this 1965 feature on the Deere & Co. building designed by Eero Saarinen.

It’s gorgeous. Full article here.

Stefan Killen takes photographs with “one of several homemade cameras designed to hold 120 mm film — either a small cardboard box wrapped in black plastic and electrical tape, or a slightly more elaborate panorama version.” The results are beautiful.

More photos here.

Age aside, what’s really remarkable is the lifespan consistency of major recording formats: “ If you look at the last 110-115 years, the major formats all have about 20 to 30 years of primacy.” Read more at NPR.