Brian Gongol

Designer looks at an unabashedly commercial book from 1922 and finds it beautiful. That's because the US is a commercial nation through and through. And commercial culture is the secret weapon of Western civilization: As China becomes wealthier, they're discovering suppressed demand for beautiful things, like well-designed public works. But before long, the same people who want beautiful bridges will ask why they can't create beautiful things (like ideas) on their own without the government telling them what they can or cannot say. Ideas that seem harmless when expressed in architecture or art can lead people to make leaps that are much more dangerous to tyrants.

Telling us where we are, or what we're doing, or where we're going by giving us subtle cues that don't fight the environment, but enhance it -- like audio signals that uniquely identify individual train stations, or color cues that tell website visitors where to go first. Also thought-provoking: The Elements of Style for Designers.

Another block of evidence that one-size-fits-all rules aren't always the best solution -- sometimes fixing a problem requires addressing what's wrong with one individual, group, or firm at a time

Making logos from letters

Absolutely hilarious video


And calling that failure "criminal" is absolutely right. Such a failure isn't the fault of the poor themselves; humans are obviously brilliantly endowed with the capacity to come up with better ways of doing things. Such a failure must be clearly blamed upon the failure to establish a healthy legal and cultural framework for property in which free exchange can act on its own to lift people out of poverty.

They're projecting a million visitors a year, and everyone in Iowa hopes they make it. But they also haven't come up with full funding for the project, and they've already demanded lots of taxpayer dollars for the project. It's worse than originally proposed: $25 million from the locals, plus $50 million from the Department of Energy and $20 million from the state. The remainder? Debt.

Fewest days in session of any Congress in memory, and what they've done has been so tangled up in pork and special interests that they're not doing their jobs -- not to mention doing things antithetical to their jobs, like suspending habeas corpus for some criminals. What's the difference between a terrorist who tries to diminish rights by force and a politician who diminishes rights in the name of defending against the terrorists?

The Secretary of State calls for an immediate cease-fire in Darfur

It's not directly due to Hugo Chavez and his propensity to fly off the handle against the US, but that sure didn't help


Because people tend to let their guard down on sites like MySpace, they're more likely to expose themselves to criminal breaches of their identities

Appears on "The Daily Show," too

