This has been blogged pretty heavily, but a friend hadn’t seen it so I’m posting it here. This is my favorite video short of this election cycle. It shows so much in just two minutes: war, Katrina, the economy, housing and infrastructure collapse... telegraphing familiar characters from their past comfort into the present crises, riding humor into pathos and back again into hope. For readers outside the US, the video is based on a short film that became a popular, widely aired TV ad some 8 years ago. More at wikipedia.

There are plenty of other factors (incumbents, for instance, tend to have a big financial advantage) but I found these numbers persuasive.

Updated November 11, 2012 to include 2012 numbers.

I’m sure I’ve heard this term in passing, but today in a meeting with a foundation that’s historically focused on grassroots groups in New York City it really hit home how gentrification is pushing people to further strata of the urban donut. In the selection of its cover graphic, the organization chose to zoom out, widen the map and refer not to “New York City,” but the “New York City Area.”

The org, it seems, is increasingly working with people who can’t afford to actually live in the City, but who still work or organize there — people living in northeastern New Jersey, north of the Bronx or east of Queens.

It sounds a bit like “Bay Area” vs “San Francisco.” Something larger than the property lines of the five boroughs but smaller than the tri-state region or New York metropolitan area.

In the Concorde station of the Paris Métro, the tunnel for line 12 is decorated with tiles spelling out the text of the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, a foundational document of the French Revolution. See more photos on Flickr or this panorama.

This works in so many ways: as a beautiful display of public typography; as a visualization of the correspondence between human rights and public transit, between policy and infrastructure, between theory, practice, and everyday life. In its deadpan presentation, there’s also something of a memorial to it which seems appropriate given its proximity to Place de la Concorde, previously Place de la Révolution, the site of the guillotine.

Not to mention a passing resemblance to The Matrix.

Looking at some of the striking photos of the December protests in Athens, I noted a couple of images a week apart with this poster of a gun turned on its owner.

It’s an iconic image, but I think it takes on a different meaning in an oppositional context vs a memorial. Regardless, while trying to find out more about its source I instead found this mixed collection of 41 posters by Greek designers in response to the riots.