The UN’s Global Environment Outlook report is out, and boy is humanity fucked. To put it short: the biosphere is massively polluted, depleted, and abused; we’re running low on resources we need to survive, many of which are past the point of recovery or are hopelessly contaminated; and it’s probably too late to do much of anything. As Ars Technica reports:
The human population of planet Earth is, in effect, maxed out on its credit cards and soon will have problems paying the mortgage. Unless concerted global efforts are made to address these mounting problems, GEO-4 concludes that we shall shortly pass the point of no return.
Are those “concerted global efforts” going to happen before it’s too late? No—hell no. I’d wager my life on it, because as a species, humanity won’t buy a fire alarm until after its house has burned down. We’re simply incapable of addressing danger when it’s not clear and present. In America’s case, if we can’t even get universal health care—something with obvious, immediately palpable, tremendous benefit to the entire population—what chance is there that something as abstract as preventing a slow catastrophe will pass Washington? Europe can’t even pass its own Constitution. China might have the fiat muscle but the communists won’t see a profit in saving the environment.
Kunal sent me this link to the Inversion House, an incredibly cool work of form by two opportunistic artists:
This extraordinary structure on Montrose Boulevard took motorists by surprise. A pair of artists, Dan Havel and Dean Ruck was responsible for this house installation. The two wooden buildings were to be replaced by a new built project, so the few months before the demolition they turned them into an architectonic installation.
There’s two things that hit me: 1) it’s interesting how such a massive area (the front) gets turned into a tiny jutting tunnel on the opposite side and 2) it totally reminds me of some works by famed paper architect Lebbeus Woods. (”Paper architect” meaning that most of his projects are hypothetical, not that he works exclusively with paper or is himself made of paper.)
Above: Lebbeus Woods’ Havana Re-imagined, 1994.
I mean, the resemblance is superficial because those works are doing very different things… but look, lots of tiny pieces of something!
Alright, it’s 4 AM, I have 10 hours before mid-review—is now a good time to completely restart my design?
YES.
Y’all with latent Ivy League (i.e., H-Y-P) hate are going to love this classic New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell, “Getting In“:
The admissions committee [at Yale] viewed evidence of ‘manliness’ with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because ‘there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.’ Another candidate, admitted despite his schoolwork being ‘mediocre in comparison with many others,’ was accepted over an applicant with a much better record and higher exam scores because, as Howe put it, ‘we just thought he was more of a guy.’ So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form used by alumni interviewers actually had a physical characteristics checklist through 1965. Each year, Yale carefully measured the height of entering freshmen, noting with pride the proportion of the class at six feet or more.
I think you’ll agree that the Ivy League is endlessly interesting, if not necessarily in the most positive terms. It really is the history of America’s most obvious instrument of class separation and promotion.
Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite—and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.
*Incidentally, I apologize that this blog has become the Yale-Soaked Scraps Show: I’m as tired of typing the word “Yale” as you are of reading it. But, that’s my night-is-the-new-daytime life right now.
A’ite, everyone here knows about the arrow in the FedEx logo, right? Look between the “E” and the “x.”
Now look at the classic Yale “Y” hoodie:
Yeah, that’s the spot.
(Shamelessly nabbed from this Metafilter post.)
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