Hasta La Ideas

Stick-to-it-iveness Tape installations by Stephen Doyle at KIPP Infinity middle school in Manhattan. (Photographs by Stephen Wilkes for The New York Times.)

Did you manage to resist the doodle-covered, David LaChapelle-pink cover of yesterday’s education-themed issue of The New York Times Magazine, awash in charming sticker illustrations by Dan Cassaro? Allow us to extract the key lessons while you rummage in your neighbors’ recycling bin. For Paul Tough‘s cover story, “The Character Test,” on rethinking how students should be taught and evaluated, the magazine dispatched Stephen Doyle to Manhattan’s Kipp Infinity middle school, where he created massive masking-tape word art that was photographed to eye-popping effect by Bryan Liscinsky. And among the famous figures telling tales out of school for a feature on “The Educational Experiences That Change a Life” was Robert Storr. The artist and critic pointed to an influential encounter with Bruno Bettelheim, who advised his senior high school class to dabble with confidence. “He told us to beware of committing to anything until we knew for sure what we wanted to be, but recommended that we set out to become dedicated ABD (all-but degree) students of everything that excited our minds,” noted Storr. Meanwhile, Zaha Hadid discussed her unique early education in 1960s Baghdad, when confidence was high for building a new Arab state. She recalled, “One reason I became so interested in architecture is that I remember being taken to an exhibition—I was only six or seven years old, but I remember seeing models and things—of Frank Lloyd Wright‘s plan for Baghdad.”

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In case you missed it, over the weekend, the Economist set off something of a firestorm that’s continuing to reverberate this week with their story “Great Digital Expectations,” wherein they wrote that “next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous ‘BILLY’ bookcase,” followed by their reasoning for the change: “The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome — anything, that is, except books that are actually read.” As you might expect, this provided ample fodder for too many news outlets to list to jump in with headlines about the death of the printed book. Searching for “Ikea” and “bookcase” lands you pieces like the Globe and Mail‘s “Does a Revamped IKEA Shelf Spell the End for Books?” and Time‘s “Ikea Redesigns Classic Bookshelf, Foreshadows the Demise of Books.” The only rub is that nearly all of these stories relied upon the Economist‘s opinion, not necessarily the truth of the matter. NPR spoke to an Ikea representative, hearing that while the redesign news was accurate, “the change to the bookcase was made simply to allow people to store bigger books.” Curbed got even more info from the company, hearing directly from the Billy the Bookshelf himself (itself?), reiterating that “My shelves are deeper so I can house bigger books. Deeper books.” Our favorite response (and mentioned by Billy) came from Rosie Gray at the Village Voice who wrote in reply to all the frantic waving of hands and “sky is falling” reports, “It looks more like a thing that holds books and less like a thing that is setting out to kill the publishing industry, but maybe that’s just us.” And while all of this was going on, not many outlets seemed to pick up on the bigger story, that only had the company redesigned its 30-year old staple, but had also slashed its prices on the bookcase, a sign for those, like at Bloomberg, who take seriously the “Ikea Index,” in which price changes reflect international financial health.

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If you’d been wondering, as we have been, what misfortunes would befall artist Ai Weiwei again after he began ignoring a total media ban imposed upon him by the Chinese government after releasing him from a three month detainment, we may soon find out. Following his forays back onto the internet and granting interviews to the media, the last of which, with the LA Times, he admitted that he’d been getting into trouble for talking too much, he’s perhaps reached something of a breaking point with his latest move. Appearing just before the holiday weekend here in the US, Weiwei penned an essay about Beijing for Newsweek, which also appeared online on the affiliated Daily Beast website, wherein the only two positive things he says about the city, before calling it “a constant nightmare,” are a) “people still give birth to babies” and b) “there are a few nice parks.” The rest is positively damning, calling out the government for establishing a culture of fear among its inhabitants, crafting an unfair and harsh judicial and policing system, and he even addresses his own arrest (which was apparently point number one in the gag order he was placed under). In response, the Independent reports that Chinese authorities have ordered that the page Weiwei’s essay appears on in this week’s Newsweek be torn out and destroy from each and every copy. Thus far, the artist apparently has not been reached for comment, and we wouldn’t be surprised if that keeps up for a while.

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One of Theo Jansen’s self-propelling Strandbeests (beach animals) beside a drawing by the artist depicting the creature’s “stomach” of recycled plastic bottles containing air that can be pumped up to a high pressure by the wind and “muscles” of plastic tubing.

“Theo showed me around his small on-site workshop [near Delft, The Netherlands]. It was filled with tools like vises, saws, clamps, and heat guns for softening the plastic tubes. On perforated wallboards, tools hung neatly inside their black magic-marker outlines. From a workbench Theo picked up a piece of three-quarter-inch PVC tube about two feet long. He said this was the basic element in the Strandbeests’ construction, like protein in living things. ‘I have known about these tubes all my life,’ he told me. (He speaks good English.) ‘Building codes in Holland require that electrical wiring in buildings go through conduit tubes like these. There are millions of miles of these tubes in Holland. You see they are a cheese yellow when they are new—a good color for Holland. The tubes’ brand name used to be Polyvolt, now it is Pipelife. When we were little, we used to do this with them.’

He took a student notebook, tore out a sheet of graph paper, rolled it into a tight cone, wet the point of the cone with his tongue, tore off the base of the cone so it fit snugly into the tube, raised the tube to his lips, blew, and sent the paper dart smack into the wall, fifteen feet away. He is the unusual kind of adult who can do something he used to do when he was nine and not have it seem at all out of place. ‘I believe it is now illegal for children in Dutch schools to have these tubes,’ he said.”

–Ian Frazier in his article on Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen that appears in the September 5 issue of The New Yorker
continued…

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If you’ve ever spent time at a press check, which implies that you’ve been at the printer’s office for no fewer than five hours with very little to do, you’ve undoubtably wound up flipping through the trade magazines in the lobby. Sadly, one of the oldest of those is stopping production after 128 years. Late last week, American Printer, which catered to commercial printers and began in 1883 under the name Inland Printer, announced that its publisher, Penton Media, won’t be releasing any new issues after its now-final edition in August. Editor Katherine O’Brien wrote on the magazine’s blog, “…ultimately, there was no foreseeable model to achieve profitability.” Here’s a bit from Penton, speaking to Folio about shutting it down:

According to a spokesperson from Penton, the publication has been discontinued because “it was just not a model within our scope and it wasn’t a strategic fit anymore–we’re constantly looking at publications within our scope and if they don’t really make a strategic fit within our list of publications than we have to look at that and see what fits and works within our strategic realm, that’s the thought behind that.”

This week, Penton also wound up closing a second magazine, the much more insider-sounding trade, Paper, Film & Foil Converter, which was founded in 1927.

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