Your 5 Favorite Things for the Next 5 Minutes

Five things that intrigue me right now:

1) You Say You Want a Devolution? Here’s an interesting thesis from Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair: While there have been massive technological changes in the past 20 years, everything looks the same. That is, he suggests, if you looked at a random snapshot from 1991, the people and buildings and cultural objects would mostly look the same as today. So? Well, that certainly isn’t true if you looked at 1931 to 1951 or 1951 to 1971. This is one of the broad cultural essays that “seems right” though I’m not sure why.

2) The .xxx top-level domain went live yesterday. You will know it when you see it.

3) Who’s Afraid Of Lana Del Rey? I’m glad someone wrote this, but isn’t the artifice of “authenticity” itself the bugbear to be slayed?

4) Fast Co Design. Fast Company has a design blog that tries “to bridge the fuzzy border between design and business.”

5) New Walker Website. Waaaay back in the day, The Walker was one of the earliest organizations (and for sure, the first museum) to take up blogging, but the effort seemed to only get partial internal support. Last week, a site redesign revisited the idea of museum as a locus for content generation (or “idea hub”). Congrats, Schmelzer, nice work. (See also: The Atlantic & Artlog discuss the redesign.)