Table of Contents

The fifteenth issue of Cabinet features a themed section on "The Average." This section, guest-edited by Paul Fleming, includes artist projects by Rutherford Chang and Jason Salavon, an excerpt from Robert Shields's exhaustive diary (the world's longest, documenting every minute of his life), a history of paint by numbers, and a host of other theorizations of mediocrity.

• Colors / Purple
  Matthew Klam
  Good culla
• Inventory / $@#%*!!!
  Jeffrey Kastner
  David Kaufer and the origins of Eudora’s pepper system
• Leftovers / The Day of the Remains
  Philip Scher
  Battles over bodies
• Thing / No. 2
  Paul Maliszewski, R. K. Scher and Mary Walling Blackburn
  Three reports

• Streambeat
  Joseph Grigely
  Fran Betters and the mysteries of streamside representation
• Are the Stars Out Tonight?: An Interview with Robert Evans
  Jeffrey Kastner and Robert Evans
  Scanning the skies with the world's greatest supernova hunter
• Artist Project / The Celestial Incorporation Project
  Lee Boroson
  
• Wilkommen in Irak!
  Walead Beshty and Eric Schwab
  In Berlin, a little bit of Baghdad
• Rock Books
  Brian Tucker
  Richard Sharpe Shaver's lapidary fantasies
• En Piste: An Interview with James Niehues
  Jocko Weyland and James Niehues
  The art of the ski-area map

• 100,000 Average Joes
  Paul Fleming
  Defining the middle ground
• By the Numbers: An Interview with William L. Bird, Jr.
  Sasha Archibald, David Serlin and William L. Bird Jr.
  Painting a picture of the middle class
• Middle Men
  Eva Geulen
  The aesthetics of the mediocre
• The Law of Averages 1: Normman and Norma
  Dahlia S. Cambers
  Looking for Mr. and Mrs. America
• The Law of Averages 2: American Adonis
  Mary Coffey
  Eugenics, statistics, and the controversial paunch
• The Law of Averages 3: Meet Marianne
  Måns Wrange
  The Average Citizen project
• The Decline of the Average Mind
  Barry Sanders
  Things fall apart
• Artist Project / 100 Special Moments
  Jason Salavon
  
• Predictable You
  Dahlia S. Cambers
  On actuarial tables
• Standard Deviation: An Interview with Jürgen Link
  Anne Mihan, Thomas O. Haakenson and Jürgen Link
  Modernity and the reign of normalism
• One Damn Page after Another
  Robert Shields
  The relentless diary
• Life on the Bell Curve: An Interview with Theodore Porter
  Paul Fleming and Theodore Porter
  Redefining mediocrity
• Artist Project / Alphabetized Newspaper
  Rutherford Chang
  
• Fanfares for the Common Man
  A selection of political quotes
• How Little We Know of Our Neighbors
  Rebecca Baron
  Mass-Observation and the meaning of everyday life
• Buttons and Pockets
  Bernard Rudofsky
  Drawings by Bernard Rudofsky

• Postcard 1 / Homokak Family (A Nut Study)
  
• Postcard 2 / Fitter Families for Future Firesides
  
• Bookmark / The Pixel at Fifty