From The Boston Globe
By Chris Wright
“‘My wife and I disagree on condiments,” says Robert J. Glushko. “We disagree about where they should go.” In most marriages, ketchup-placement quibbles might not be cause for too much worry—you make a concession on throw-pillow arrangement and move on. But in the Glushko household, observations like “she explained that I shouldn’t mess with the pantry” carry additional weight.
Glushko, a professor at University of California Berkeley’s School of Information, wrote (or at least edited) the book on the organization of things. “The Discipline of Organizing,” published last month by MIT Press, is a textbook for those who store and inventory things for a living, including librarians, computer scientists, and museum curators. But while the book itself is considerably more abstruse than civilians require, Glushko insists that its lessons apply to pretty much every professional under the sun: homicide detectives, convenience store managers, zookeepers, candlestick makers.
In fact, Glushko will go further than this. His treatise, he says, all 540 pages of it, could serve as a handbook for living....