Design:
Building Things:
- From The Washington Post: how proposed changes to trade policies from the Trump administration threaten segments of the economy that are growing (like advanced manufacturing) but depend on globe-spanning supply chains.
Body/Image:
- Sports, like dance, is always about aesthetics: we are transfixed not by the mechanistic progress of one team against another, or the breaking of a speed record, but by the unusual elegance in how that work is performed, or those tasks achieved. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that young athletes are using visual-first platforms like Instagram to draw attention to their abilities so that scouts might discover them and offer handsome scholarships, and later convert those large, adoring audiences into paying customers buying into their personal brand should they be fortunate enough to go pro.
Waste:
- Communities in the U.S. are at the very beginning of absorbing the fallout from China tightening up its recycling import policies, dramatically reducing what it accepts from other nations. One report suggests that this change will trickle down to more recyclables being diverted to landfills, accelerating how quickly landfills are becoming saturated, perhaps hitting that point in as little as 13 years. The power of recycling has always been a bit of a smokescreen for making rampant consumption seem okay: don't feel bad about all those soda cans because we can reprocess them. The reality is that most materials are rapidly down-cycled into inferior materials that have limited value, making it difficult for recyclers to reliably profit from the practice. Policies and planning for reuse (sterilizing glass bottles for another go-round), or simply consuming less are vastly preferable, though inconvenient for corporations hell-bent on pumping out more and more marginally profitable widgets one quarter to the next.
Machines for Moving:
- An interesting conflict in Greater Boston area bike-shares: Boston and a few surrounding cities have made exclusive deals with a docked bike-sharing system, and a new dockless competitor working with neighboring cities has resulted in what amounts to a bureaucratically-tinged turf war; with the docked bike loyalist municipalities impounding any rogue dockless bike found in their jurisdiction. The resulting patchwork of services is a perfect example of how absurd and wasteful certain kinds of public-private partnerships can be.
Material Culture:
- Helen Rosner on the viral social media stunt of a restaurant selling gold-covered chicken wings, and the ancient appeal of conspicuous consumption, once reserved for royals, now open to your every day finance bro or micro-influencer. Eating gold is obviously on the extreme end of the consumption broadcasting spectrum, but relates to more common forms like only ever sporting spotless sneakers: an indicator that one has the ability to easily consume far and above what is utilitarian, through a materialistic embrace that implies a possible transcending of our world of flesh and dust.
Branded:
- Hasbro has won a trademark on the smell of Play-Doh, a fairly rare victory: as of 2015, the U.S. Patent Office recognized a mere 10 officially protected scents.