Submissions to this Call ask for a 150-word pitch for a wider range of stories on our online platform, Booth, Please. We like to refer to Booth, Please as the every person's hangout for "weekly tangents about design and New Jersey, served up every Sunday." Where we are free to explore "the dreams, discoveries, confrontations, and epiphanies that emerge when design meets New Jersey—all set within the comforts of the world's diner capital."

Booth, Please stories begin with the general question: What if America’s most densely populated (and reviled) state is the key to helping us face the challenges of our ever-uncertain world? To go one step further, we've identified several prompts in the form of hashtags:

#LIVINGARCHIVE

A new form of "Show & Tell" stories that challenge how we connect archival materials with contemporary life.

#SENSINGTHEFUTURE

Stories that, sometimes literally, pull on all of our senses to get a whiff of NJ's future.

#JERSEYALLALONG

Stories that reveal the hidden powers that come with being the world's underdog.

#SISTERMYCITY

Satirical stories connecting one of NJ's 564 municipalities with one of the world's thousands.

#THECITYOFNEWJERSEY

Ambitious stories that imagine America's densest state as the city of the future.

#WESHAPEENVIRONMENTSSHAPEUS

Stories that highlight the ways in which people and place are deeply inseparable.

#WEAREMADEOFMIGRATIONS

Stories that trace the impacts of global human and non-human trajectories through NJ.

#MOSTFIRSTBESTWORST

Stories that unpack why New Jersey is the most, the first, the best and the worst at many things (clearly an homage to our namesake).

We accept local and global stories that are in-depth and narrative-focused. We consider long-form content as well as shorter, time-sensitive pieces that offer a more immediate response to current events. This includes but not limited to: essays, films, photography, multimedia, and audio stories.

Here are a few Booth, Please stories that range in their narrative style (which currently embody Issue 1's theme), such as the one about a vintage souvenir plate of the NJ Turnpike, the one about rest stop design while driving 5049 miles between NJ and Delaware, or the one about a recipe for venison stew unlike no other. Hint: notice how we use our hashtags.

This Call asks for a 150-word pitch in response to Issue 2's editorial catalyst: The Paterson Silk Strike of 1913.

This historical event invites speculations concerning the future of industrialized landscapes, activism, urban ecology, labor rights, manufacturing, unions, migration, fashion/textiles, material cultures, deep time/geology, housing and hydrology – not only locally, but regional and global scales, too.

We've clumped these speculations under the following themes, to spur further questions:

Industry: What is the future of the manufactory when its trajectory has been so unpredictable and ironic? What is a city of innovation? How does industry show up, and then leave? What is the future of the “development zone”?

Labor: How do we design work in the wake of a post-industrial world? What are the future sites of strike? Who has access to certain types of labor? What will the workday look like in the future? What is the future of the office?

Immigration: What is Paterson's legacy for immigrant labor rights? How is migration an act of survival and resistance? When we move, what do we bring with us? What are the new patterns of movement in a post-industrial world?

Material Culture: How do material conditions reverberate from the labor that made them? What are the deep histories of textile and weaving culture that exist outside of industry? How is weaving a form of resistance?

Ecologies: Is labor embodied in all ecological transformations? How do industrial extraction practices shape the ecology of a place? What will future ecological systems "produce" post-human, and for whom?

Place-making: How does arrival and departure continue to shape a space? How do the Paterson falls make a place? How have Paterson's place-makers always been making this place?