Terrance Middleroom

Terrance Middleroom has kept the same second-floor desk for as long as anyone can date the second floor — a spot the furniture seems to arrange itself around, roughly equidistant from all four walls, in what were previously four smaller offices before the wall came down. He does not review a sofa so much as report where the room would prefer it stood, and the room, in his copy, always has a preference. Pages he sets down anywhere are found by morning to have drifted toward the center of the table. He considers this unremarkable. Snorbo first noticed him during a routine reflooring, when a contractor reported that one spot on the subfloor felt “further away than the tape measure said,” and Editorial elected to offer him a masthead position rather than a warranty claim.

His reviews assess a product by two questions no one else thinks to ask: where it belongs relative to the center, and where a person would have to be standing for it to make sense at all — which he considers the part most reviewers cowardly leave out. A sectional sofa is graded not on comfort but on how honestly it admits it is trying to surround something. Rugs are praised for candor. His measurements are trustworthy and never quite agree with one another: a bookshelf he calls “exactly correct” is listed as 71 centimeters wide from the left and 74 from the right, with a note insisting both are true and the discrepancy belongs to whoever chose a side. He does not photograph the things he reviews; he supplies instead a small diagram of where to place your body, and a note on which corner of the object to disbelieve. Editors describe working with him as “calm to the point of gravitational, if you don’t look at the whole thing at once.”