Andreas Angelidakis

DAMDI Architectural Publishing: Korea
Global distribution: ideabooks.nl
ISBN 9788991111325, DAMDI, Idea Code 08128

Paris

Photo: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
NYTimes:

In a final that rarely resembled anything other than one-way traffic, Nadal was at his clay-covering, forehand-whipping finest as he won his fourth straight French Open by beating up on his erratic, increasingly dispirited Swiss rival.

The stunning final score — 6-1, 6-3, 6-0 — was the most lopsided result in a major men’s final since John McEnroe also surrendered just four games against Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in 1984.

“I was walking out worrying about losing; it would have been impossible to imagine it would turn out like this,” Nadal said. “I think I played an almost perfect match, and Roger made more mistakes than usual.”

Oil

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Traders working in the energy options pit on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday in New York City.
Dow Slides 394 Points; Oil Surges $10.75
All 30 of the stocks that make up the Dow Jones industrials took a hit as the index dropped nearly 400 points on fears that high energy prices will extend and deepen an economic slowdown.

“The market is meeting its worst fears right now,” said Quincy Krosby, chief investment strategist at the Hartford, a financial services firm.

The New, New City

Sze Tsung Leong for The New York Times
The Frontier: Southwestern Shenzhen under construction.
From Sunday's New York Times Magazine (The Architecture Issue):

“Don’t tell anyone,” Rem Koolhaas said to me several years ago as we headed down the F.D.R. Drive in New York, “but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.” Koolhaas’s viewpoint is widely shared by close observers of the evolution of cities. But not even Koolhaas, it seems, was completely prepared for what would come next.

In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable in size to New York have sprouted up almost overnight. Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing village of a few thousand people, and Dubai had merely a quarter million people. Today Shenzhen has a population of eight million, and Dubai’s glittering towers, rising out of the desert in disorderly rows, have become playgrounds for wealthy expatriates from Riyadh and Moscow. Long-established cities like Beijing and Guangzhou have more than doubled in size in a few decades, their original outlines swallowed by rings of new development. Built at phenomenal speeds, these generic or instant cities, as they have been called, have no recognizable center, no single identity.

It is sometimes hard to think of them as cities at all. Dubai, which lays claim to some of the world’s most expensive private islands, the tallest building and soon the largest theme park, has been derided as an urban tomb where the rich live walled off from the poor migrant workers who serve them. Shenzhen is often criticized as a product of unregulated development, better suited to the speculators that first spurred its growth than to the workers housed in huge complexes of factory-run barracks. Yet for architects these cities have also become vast fields of urban experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, who first envisioned the city as a field of gleaming towers, could have dreamed of.

http://tiny.cc/qTcyh

"Bugliosi presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq. Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses—a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world."

1968

Photo: Richard Valles

Illustrator/Author: Eric Hanson

© Eric Hanson.
Watercolor. From "The Terrible Truth About Grownups" written and illustrated by Eric Hanson. Publication to be announced.

"What you don't deserve is another election that's governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon -- that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first."

Thomas Hargrove

Like a bird
Singing in the rain,
Let grateful memories
Survive in time of sorrow.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Happy Birthday, Tommy.

Whitman

Photo: Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University
"Leaves of Grass," by Walt Whitman, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Self published, July 4, 1855. Original binding.

Yves St Laurent 1936 - 2008

Photo: AP
ca 1955
"I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober."

Greece

NYTimes:

ATHENS — Defying governmental wrath, the mayor of a remote Greek island performed the country’s first same-sex marriages on Tuesday, wedding two men and two women.The civil ceremonies, held at sunrise in the nondescript town hall of Tilos, a tiny island in the eastern Aegean Sea, defied statements by a senior Greek prosecutor last week that such unions were illegal.“It’s done, now,” the mayor, Anastassios Aliferis, said in a telephone interview. “The unions have been registered and the licenses have been issued. It’s a historic moment.” With its abundance of glamorous gay bars and summer island resorts such as Mykonos, Greece has long drawn thousands of gay tourists annually. But gays and lesbians in this European Union nation of 11 million people frequently complain of discrimination. Public displays of affection are widely frowned upon. The country’s military bars gays from joining its ranks, and in 1993 a private Greek television network, Mega Channel, was fined $116,000 by the National Radio and Television Council for showing men kissing in a weekly drama. Greece’s powerful Orthodox Church has also denounced homosexuality as a sin and “defect of human nature.” On Tuesday, however, a bubbling just-married Evangelia Vlami emerged from the Tilos town hall, telling the BBC that the unions would help end discrimination. “We did this to encourage other gay people to take a stand,” she said.

Spain

Photo: Monica Gumm for the International Herald Tribune

IHT: The combination of resort-building and intensive farming has put new pressures on the land and its dwindling supply of water.

This year farmers are fighting developers over water rights. They are fighting one another over who gets to water their crops. And in a sign of their mounting desperation, they are buying and selling water like gold on a burgeoning black market, mostly from illegal wells.

Southern Spain has long been plagued by cyclical drought, but the current crisis, scientists say, probably reflects a more permanent climate change brought on by global warming. And it is a harbinger of a new kind of conflict.

The battles of yesterday were fought over land, they warn. Those of the present center on oil. But those of the future — a future made hotter and dryer by climate change in much of the world — seem likely to focus on water, they say.

“Water will be the environmental issue this year — the problem is urgent and immediate,” said Barbara Helferrich, a spokeswoman for the European Union’s Environment Directorate. “If you already have water shortages in spring, you know it’s going to be a really bad summer.”

Weegee

"Opening of the George Washington Bridge, New York City," Oct. 25, 1931

NYTimes: As his star rose in the 1950s and 1960s, Weegee began to travel extensively, make experimental films and worked for other directors, some as illustrious as Stanley Kubrick, for whom he served as a consultant during the filming of “Dr. Strangelove.”

Texas, America

Eric Gay/Associated Press
Nancy Dockstader, a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, embraced her 9-year-old daughter Amy after they were reunited at the Baptist Children's Home Ministries Youth Camp near Luling, Texas, on Monday.
NYTimes:
http://tinyurl.com/5odbey