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In this New York Times article from Monday, Henry Fountain takes the recent unveiling of the glass boxes on the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower as a jumping off point (pun intended) to discuss how new kinds of glass are finally making the architectural impulse towards completely translucent buildings a possibility. What would a [...]

According to an unverified source, today is the anniversary of the first public library opening. Dating this aniversary is all the more problematic because if you go back far enough, people’s definitions of “public library” start to differ significantly . For instance, did the dry sections of Roman baths where there were scrolls available for [...]

It’s funny, this obsession we have with predicting the cities of the future, no? It’s as though urban space is always already outdated, battered, overused and redundant, in need of updating, up-scaling and re-development. Such reverie isn’t strictly the province of the toiling masses either. Architects, engineers, businessmen and politicians are equally prone to dreaming [...]

As you’re undoubtedly well-aware, the current financial melt-down has the U.S. government propping up several of the world’s largest banks in hopes of maintaining some semblance of confidence in our economic system. Much of this disaster is bound to shaky real estate investments, but in the shuffle of discussions about foreclosures on private homes, we’re [...]

Last year, an ambitious plan to redesign the Tappan Zee Bridge just North of New York City got us all excited. After all, bridge construction in this city is basically a once-in-a-century sort of thing, and we had bold hopes for a nifty new bridge design because, let’s face it, nice solid 19th century structures [...]

Octuplet lady keeps gettin’ crazier!
Renee Zellweger gets Harvard’s Hasty Pudding award, wears fat suit.
Barbie, in utero.
Dubai has become a parking lot.
Another Facebook relationship casualty.
Christian Bale sorta apologizes.
How much is your website worth?
Ugh, really? A Sex and the City sequel?
Aw, Michael Phelps loses Subway endorsement too.
John Mayer, you’re alright.

By now we’ve all see the Obamaguration satellite pictures, which brought home once again the tremendous power of the space-bird’s eye view. Of course, there are also the various creepy government surveillance possibilities of satellite imagery, but we feel those have been adequately explored in several Hollywood blockbusters. No, for us satellite images are simply [...]

Mark “Deep Throat” Felt passes away at 95
Burger King’s meat-scented perfume
Dennis Leary Remembers Dennis Leary Movies
Porn for the Blind (NSFW, but only aurally) (via saramcpherson)
Levi Johnston’s mother arrested on drug charges
5 Lovable Movie Racists
The Carbon Atlas
Versace’s refrigerated beach in Dubai
New LOST posters! (via The Daily What)
10 Lists General Enough to Get on the Front Page [...]

As we all disperse towards our favored holiday partying and wintering places, our weekly psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays asks that you keep your eyes open for gratuitous instances of the most familiar form in modern architecture: the phallus.
As Freud tells us constantly, every human activity that isn’t sex is the direct result of displaced sexual impulses, [...]