The Italian Government Tourist Board warns would-be tourists to Italy NOT to purchase fakes while there. At the same time, we all know that archaeological treasures and antiquities can't leave Italy or trouble follows.

So what if you buy a forged antiquity? Do you get to keep it as long as you pay the fines?

Technorati Tags: antiquites, art, fakes, forgeries, getty, history, tourism

Just what is going on in my hometown of Chicago? Over at Archidose, I discovered the grim news that Berghoff's is closing and Marshall Field's will become a Macy's. Gosh, the Windy City sounds as bad off as New Orleans. Just kidding. Sort of. Well, not really.

Technorati Tags: chicago, chowhound, cities, eating, memory, shopping

As readers of this blog no doubt know, I am helping to run a program on “Networked Publics” at the Annenberg Center for Communication this year . Our spring lecture series begins next week with Geoffrey Bowker. All lectures are open to the public and take place at the Annenberg Center for Communication, 825 West Adams, Los Angeles. More at the netPublics site. Lectures will also be uploaded as video to netPublics after they are given.

Geoffrey Bowker [Executive Director and Regis and Diane McKenna Chair in the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University]
What’s Memory Got To Do With It Thursday, January 12 2:00-3:30PM

Yochai Benkler [Professor of Law at Yale Law School]
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Thursday, February 23 1:00-2:30PM

Sassia Sasken [Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics].
Networks, Power, and Democracy, Thursday, March 23 2:00-3:30PM

Technorati Tags: memory, network culture, networked publics, networks

I just discovered treehugger.com, a fantastic site claiming to be about the “green lifestyle” but also about much more. Pawing through the back entries, I noticed this post pointing to a Wall Street Journal article on the ongoing looting of New Orleans's architectural heritage. Read the article here.

Technorati Tags: architecture, cities, historic preservation, new orleans

Little by little, button nose by button nose, furry paw by furry paw, scientists are getting to the root of what it means to be cute, says the New York Times. Studies show that we are genetically predisposed for paedomorphism, that is “extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need.”

If scientists see our love for pandas or desire to lash stuffed animals to the front of garbage trucks as predetermined, Daniel Harris, in his Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic depicts cuteness as a vastly successful capitalist ploy to reframe life into the infantile and nonthreatening. To make toys for children, we amputate the paws of bears, extract their teeth, and sew their mouths shut. Children become docile cherubs and sex becomes innocent. In its dark vision of a society reduced to furry worship, Harris's book is brilliant. The Times article above tempers it, allowing us to better grasp this complex phenomenon. See also the wikipedia entry for “cute” before you descend into cute overload.

The New York Times carries an article today looking at the border wall between Israel and the West Bank. The piece reveals the influence of Brigadier General Shimon Navez on the Israeli strategy. Navez, it turns out, is influenced by Deleuze, the Situationists, and George Bataille, among others and is advocating that although the wall be removed, air surveillance be used to achieve control on the West Bank. But as the pro-Israeli and anti-theoretical New York Times tends to do, the article tantalizes with this information but doesn't go far enough. The article also briefly touches on the criticism of Eyal Weizman, one of the most important writers in architecture today. Read the article here. Read an interview with Weizman by Sina Najafi and Jeffrey Kastner at Cabinet Magazine.

With New Year's Eve upon us, it's time to think back upon the year, but it's also a date I always think of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. With that in mind, I was delighted that the best article that I've read to date on CLUI, Sarah Kanouse's Touring the Archive, Archiving the Tour: Image, Text, and Experience with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, is now available on the web. While you're at it, you may want to look at the Center's pages on its Owens Valley Bus Tour, a project which I lent a hand in during 2004 (hint: more on the Owens Valley on these pages in 2005).

Caught spying on Americans, the Bush administration's reaction is to accuse the New York Times of blowing its cover. Not only are we subject to a vast domestic surveillance program of unprecedented proportions, we are supposed to not know about it. Read more here.

As a follow up to the entry about the NSAA here's an item from Alternet: Annalee Newitz uncovers the EU's own plans for data mining.

Through Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond, I found this link to an article on the continued importance of Utopian thinking today. But, of course, what is the multitude if not a Utopian idea?

On a related note, Reinhold Martin's Critical of What? Towards a Utopian Realism is a good read by one of the best thinkers in architecture today. Martin bursts the bubble of post-criticism prior to outlining his thoughts on the emergence of a "utopian realism."