Dumpster fire

Perfectly timed for the dog (or maybe the rat) days of summer, an aggressively contrarian, perfectly bespoke lightning rod of an essay by Matt Shaw appeared last week in The Architect’s Newspaper. It railed against New York City’s much-debated plan to move its infamous piles of garbage bags, which pop up weekly (or more often) on street corners around the city, into a newly deployed battalion of plastic container bins, each about “as tall as a person and as wide as a small car.” The plan will “create a permanent wall of garbage,” Shaw complained, before channeling some classic NIMBY anxiety in predicting that the containers “will destroy the character of neighborhoods.” 

“The cure (dumpsters everywhere) will be worse than the disease,” he concluded.

Who says the Slate pitch is dead?

The essay managed to rouse what seemed the entire internet from its midsummer malaise; Shaw came in for a pixelated public stoning of the kind we used to see in the early days of Twitter. “Did a rat write this?” was a common jab, although I found funnier the replies suggesting Oscar the Grouch was the real author. “I hope you get the help you need,” one commenter said; another pasted in a headshot of the author under the heading “Matt ‘The Rat’ Shaw.” On Bluesky, where the haters tend to be wonkier, readers wondered if Shaw hadn’t ignored the fact that larger Manhattan buildings are required to use off-street dumpsters.

I’ve linked to (and sometimes despaired of) Matt’s writing before on Punch List, and he and I know each other a bit. I wrote to ask him if he’d join me here to talk about the dumpster piece and the backlash to it. To his great credit, he agreed. We conducted the interview by email. What follows has been very lightly edited for clarity.

Christopher Hawthorne: Congrats on writing the summer’s most viral—if also most aggressively ratioed!—piece of design journalism. And thanks for doing this Q&A—one thing I’ve always appreciated about you, even as we often disagree about topics related to architecture and cities, is your willingness to discuss and defend your work. I think we both feel that design criticism has grown soft and transactional of late. To begin, I need to put to bed my nagging suspicion that this is all just an elaborate, Swiftian work of satire that you and Architect’s Newspaper editor Jack Murphy cooked up. You genuinely detest the containerization plan, yes?