Territorial Masquerades

Words Without Borders, a site that translates contemporary world literature into English, has a new issue out showcasing graphic novels on “topics ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the Shining Path, organized labor in France and broken homes in South Africa.”

From Wired: How the Mexican city of Cuernavaca’s bus traffic helps physicists model complex systems. Turns out, nature, math, and bus departures in Cuernavaca all exhibit a delicate balance of randomness and regularity known as the “universality principle.”

Rebecca Solnit examines how Google and other Silicon giants have created parallel infrastructures for their employees in San Francisco, making the city a gentrifying bedroom community for the world’s tech capital.

All my Internet ones and zeros are apparently routed (rooted?) through this building; just one hub plugged into 550,000 miles of undersea cabling that circuits the globe.

My new favorite Tumblr: WTF Evolution?

Jason Dittmer has a smart review of Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography. In atoning for what went wrong in Iraq, Kaplan is found flailing in the “shallows of geopolitics.”

Anthropologist Wade Davis has a smart review of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday. Davis critiques  “the shallowness of the arguments” in the book “and it is this characteristic of Diamond’s writings that drives anthropologists to distraction.”

Speaking of shallowness: Like it or not—and as mad as it makes us—we’ve lost the war of position to the likes of Jared Diamond, Thomas Friedman, and Robert Kaplan… Sounds like the start of a bad joke.

Reinhold Martin at Design Observer ponders the contemporary significance of “Public and Common(s)”—major appearances by Arendt, Habermas, Hardt and Negri.

Meghan Flaherty’s has a smart review of Carlos Fuentes’ last novel: “Adam in Eden is a novel about drug-trafficking that doesn’t talk about drug-traffickers. It is a novel about the Garden of Eden that hardly acknowledges God. It is a political novel free of rants and rhetoric. And it is a funny novel, with a sort of hidden poignancy: it makes you laugh until, upon closing it, you find yourself no longer laughing.”

Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (U of Chicago, 2012) by Susan Schulten was recently reviewed in Public Books. The book has an interesting companion site, where you can find more graphics and info (e.g. “Slavery and the Origin of Statistical Cartography”).

Shadow and Act provides a brief glimpse of a new film documentary on Stuart Hall that will be premiering this month at Sundance.

What to give the child that has everything? How about a detailed, authentic replica of the RQ-1 Predator Drone—with display stand! The comments gave me a chuckle.

As was seen when Argentina collapsed in 2001, hardcore soccer fans also played a role in the pitched battles of the Arab uprisings.

Model Cities: The idea that never dies. Despite being ruled unconstitutional, Honduras is reconsidering (as in: potentially going through with) building fully privatized “charter cities” (a.k.a. Maquiladoras with a playground).

Instead of tote bags, invitees to the World Economic Forum received a copy of Global Risks 2013, a veritable catalog of potential world disasters. Apparently, or so Design Observer seems to think, “resilience” is the name of the game.