Persia peeks out
Nations delineated on a world map have an attractive but misleading simplicity: marked out with a single name and a single colour, we tend to ascribe one-word attributes to them as well. But one doesn’t have to look hard to…
Looking for less than zero
With sustainability rapidly emerging as a typical design criterion for higher-end buildings, third-party “green building” certifications like LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) have become familiar terms even to non-architects. New or renovated buildings may be LEED certified at…
Teaching electric eagles to soar
Ever since the mythical Icarus and his father Daedelus attempted to fly by affixing bird feathers to their arms with wax, humankind has systematically used nature as a model in its quest for the secret of flight — an approach…
Recent best: Sonia Katyal
Sonia Katyal is a professor of intellectual property and civil rights law at Fordham Law School in New York City. She is the co-author of Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership (Feb 2010, Yale…
Midlake’s new nineteenth century
Guest post by Luke Grundy In 1999, a group of jazz students at North Texas University played Led Zeppelin and funk jams under the alias “The Cornbred All-Stars”. Now, eleven years after these first musical forays, Midlake, as they have…
Natural life as parade, x-ray, fossil
“A nature documentary filmed with an x-ray camera” might, as a description, conjure a fairly accurate mental image of Ladislao Kelity’s drawings. But while in many of his works the skeletons of animals can indeed be clearly seen through their…
