Dubai Design Downpour

The Gulf News came up with a witty wet-ink cover treatment in its coverage of the torrential rain they've had in the United Arab Emirates this week -- note how the smudges run down into the article text.

Mumbai Manga

First, a history-vocab lesson, from the great old Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases:

And now a present usage, a truncated story from the oft-cited Mumbai daily DNA:

This brings up a long-standing question for me: how do you represent a generic, anonymous criminal without reorting to sketchy cliches about what a "representative" criminal looks like? The ingenious DNA answer: just use an anime-character silhouette!


(I couldn't find the exact stance, but here's, perhaps, our dacoit's tourist girlfriend, as seen on the animenano podcast)

Falling Back

Surveying a handful of American newspapers last Sunday, I had fun doing a close comparative reading of how they handled the end of daylight saving time. I guess it's a sad-but-true fact of the mechanics of newspaper journalism that perhaps the most crucial (in terms of having direct effects on the immediate lives of their readers) information that will grace the front page all year is a little graphic of a clock with its hour hand in a motion-blur, springing foreward or falling back.

LA Times: Fall Back Did you remember to change your clocks? Daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Time has changed Did you remember to set your clocks back at 2 a.m. today, or when you went to bed last night? Hope so.

Boston Globe: Turn clocks back Daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m. today. Set your clocks back one hour.

Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger: Fall back Did you remember to set your clock back one hour and change batteries in smoke detectors?

New York Times: A Reminder Standard time resumed at 2 a.m. today. Clocks were set back one hour.

I love the nuances of tone and paper-reader relationship implied in the slightly different phrases. Is the paper offering a patient, reminding, question-marked question; sneaking in an added public-safety tip (darn it! we will be usefuller than the competition!); offering a stern no-fuss order (Boston); or, befitting the paper of record, recording the event for posterity, with none of that messy directly-addressing-the-reader stuff. "Clocks were set back": Pure objective passivity, or so they want us to think.

The Ballad of Aussie Raccoon

Here's an ad that sometimes runs the full bottom span of the Sydney Morning Herald. I just thought it was odd to use a raccoon as a spokes-animal, especially given Australia's many zany indigenous species. Does a raccoon scream "North America" like a kangaroo screams "Australia" hereabouts?

High-End Architecture for the Poor: Solidarity or Slumming?

Simon Romero / NYTimes:

MEDELLÍN, Colombia, July 11 — Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, sporting three days’ growth of beard and unruly hair nearly down to his shoulders, Sergio Fajardo looks every bit the nonconformist mathematician who spent years attaining a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

But that was a past life for Mr. Fajardo, this city’s mayor and the son of one of its most famous architects. Now he presses forward with an unconventional political philosophy that has turned swaths of Medellín into dust-choked construction sites.

“Our most beautiful buildings,” said Mr. Fajardo, 51, “must be in our poorest areas.”

With that simple idea, Mr. Fajardo hired renowned architects to design an assemblage of luxurious libraries and other public buildings in this city’s most desperate slums. [full article]

So on the one hand: what a cool idea! And how refreshing to hear about a leader working to bridge the gap between rich and poor by giving the latter some actual good, helpful services, and by honoring them with "the best" rather than "the adequate". The article does touch on a couple of critiques for such a scheme—wouldn't it be better to spend the money on improving basic services?, and um, do the folks in the neighborhood actually appreciate the "beauty" that their mayor's worked to bring to them? Sometimes high-concept architecture gets, um, tried out on the poor because it's easy for visionary city planners to push it through on them. I remember the first time I went to New York City, riding the train past all these massive housing project towers, and realizing it looked exactly like the early 20th century futurism I'd been reading about—Corbusier and his World's Fair knockoffs, "the home as a machine for living" etc. Back then the visionaries had said, "in the future we'll all live in these great planned housing complexes". So they built them first for the poor, to prove the concept. But in the end the rich never signed up for their own housing projects—so the only people who lived in the futuristic world were those who didn't have much choice.

Back to Medillin—for a while I've been puzzling over why, when it comes to my Colombian news, I prefer the front page of the Medillin El Colombiano over the better-designed, more-nationally-focused, Bogotá-based El Tiempo. (I've linked the websites, but visit Newseum to see the latest front pages: El Colombiano; El Tiempo) I think maybe it's to do with the mix of big-city news and charming provinciality—the annual flower fair, or textile week. Plus lots of coverage of cycling and inline skating. But also, the article made me realize, quite a bit about public art (both high-concept sculpture and more populist Christmas lights on the aerial tramway). So perhaps the mayor's to thank for that. I hope his work appeals to the locals—from every background—even more than it does to me.