Tom Vanderbilt is an American journalist, blogger, and author of the best-selling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).

Personal life

Vanderbilt was born in Oak Forest, Illinois

Oak Forest, Illinois

Oak Forest is a suburban city about south/southwest of downtown Chicago in Bremen Township in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The population was 28,051 at the 2000 census.-History:...

 and raised in Wisconsin

Wisconsin

Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...

, he now resides in Brooklyn, New York. He is married to Jancee Dunn

Jancee Dunn

Jancee Dunn is a journalist, author and former VJ. She is now a contributing editor at O, The Oprah Magazine but is mostly known for her work at Rolling Stone, where she worked from 1989 to 2003.- Background :...

, a former features writer for Rolling Stone.

Career

A freelancer, Vanderbilt has contributed articles on a broad range of subjects encompassing design, technology, science, and culture to such publications as Slate

Slate (magazine)

Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...

, Wired, The London Review of Books, Artforum, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, New York Times Magazine, Harvard Design Magazine, Cabinet, Metropolis, The Wilson Quarterly

Wilson Quarterly

The Wilson Quarterly is a magazine published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The magazine was founded in 1976 by Peter Braestrup and James H. Billington. The Quarterly is noted for its nonpartisan, nonideological approach to current issues, with articles...

, and Popular Science.

He is also a contributing editor of I.D.

I.D. (magazine)

I.D. was a magazine covering the art, business and culture of design. It was published eight times a year by F+W Media....

and Print

Print (magazine)

The publication, Print, A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts, was a limited edition quarterly periodical begun in 1940 and continued under different names up to the present day as Print, a bimonthly American magazine about visual culture and design.In its current format, Print documents and...

.

In 2002 he published his first full length book, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America. H-Net Reviews said of the book, "Survival City offers an insightful exploration of the ruins of atomic America that demands attention in our current moment. In the poignant aftermath of September 11 the futility of Cold War architecture suggested throughout the book takes on new resonance."

After three years of research, in 2008 he released Traffic which, according to the publisher Knopf’s promotional material, had a first run printing of 150,000 copies and was a feature of the Book of the Month Club. The Wall Street Journal called Traffic, “a fascinating survey of the oddities and etiquette of driving”. The Boston Globe wrote, "He found no serious general books about [driving] but did find a mountain of research. So for three years he immersed himself in the subject, traveled around the world, interviewing drivers, researchers, and traffic engineers. With almost 90 pages of footnotes, the book is a bottomless compendium of research."

He is also a contributing writer for the blog Design Observer

Design Observer

Design Observer is a website devoted to a broad range of design topics centered on graphic design, communications arts, print, typography and criticism. The content of the site is composed of short essays and articles...

. He has his own blog, How We Drive, which continues his findings about the sociology of driving.

As author

• The Sneaker Book: Anatomy of an Industry and an Icon, The New Press, 1998
• Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), Knopf, 2008

As contributor

He has also contributed to a number of books, including:

• Season’s Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree, Melcher Media, 2004 (afterword)
• Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, The MIT Press,
• Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler, W.W. Norton,
• Boob Jubilee: The Mad Cultural Politics of the New Economy (W.W. Norton), and
• The World and the Wild (University of Arizona Press).

External links

• Official website
• Tom Vanderbilt’s Flickr page
• NPR article and interview (audio), July 28, 2008
• Google Lecture, August 15, 2008
• Video discussion with Vanderbilt about his works on Bloggingheads.tv
  Bloggingheads.tv
  Bloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers...
  
  

Online articles

• Harvard Design Review, It’s a Mall World After All: Disney, Design, and the American Dream, , Fall 1999
• New York Times, Walker in the Wireless City, November 24, 2002
• Slate, Courier, Dispatched: How the U.S. State Department put the kibosh on the typewriter font., February 20, 2004
• Slate U.S. Army's New ClothesWhy has the Army redesigned its uniforms?, Sept. 8, 2004
• The Guardian Is this Bush's secret bunker?, August 28, 2006