What’s on your desk, Kate Cox?

Kate Cox is one of two senior producers running the Decoder podcast here at The Verge. Before she joined The Verge last summer, she had a decade and change as a reporter and editor covering tech policy, consumer tech issues, video games, and occasionally, nerd culture for several outlets.

She took some time to tell us about her workspace.

That’s a cozy-looking space. Where in your home is it?

Our house was built in 1951 and has this very weird, very small sort of L-shaped bedroom, with doors on opposite sides, directly off the kitchen. My husband and I share it as a home office, each of us sitting with our backs to one leg of the “L” and our desks perpendicular to each other, spaced out. The view behind / past my monitor is through the door into our kitchen, which is handy when I’ve got dinner roasting or simmering during the last hour of my workday and also when my kids are home and I can see the feet of a five-year-old who is trying to sneak snacks. And the blue accent wall shows up behind me in all my video calls. 

Tell us about your desk and why you chose it.

I love my desk unreservedly. It’s from Crafters and Weavers, and I picked it up in late 2020 or early 2021, when I was sick to death of an old Ikea setup that I’d bought for an earlier apartment and decided I was a grown-up and could have real wood furniture. 

I did a ton of research before I ordered it, and the last hurdle was emailing the customer service folks to see if they could get me a measurement from the bottom of the right-hand drawers to the floor because I needed to know if my 19-inch PC tower could clear it. (It could — just barely. Newer PC towers without a half-dozen drive bays are, happily, a little shorter.) 

Tell us about your chair and, again, why you chose it.

The chair is a classic Ikea Markus. I do not love it unreservedly, alas. It was a good replacement for a much older, decrepit chair about six to seven years ago, and it was great for the part-time home use it got at the time, but I’ve been working full time from home since 2019, and somehow my hips and back keep stubbornly not getting any younger. I keep meaning to replace it. Someday…

Here’s the big one. Tell us about the tech you’re using: computers, monitors, etc. Be as specific as you can — including why you chose it and if you’re happy with it (or not!).

The laptop is a 2021 MacBook Pro, Vox Media issued. I don’t love using Macs, even though almost all of my work-issued computers since 2013 have been MacBooks, and my job is 100 percent cloud-based, so I also do a fair amount of work from my personal PC.

I actually just…