1) Dwell on L.A.'s blind spots and interstitial spaces. Geoff Manaugh interviews CLUI's Matthew Coolidge.
2) The Stranger on the topography of terror, or: How Seattle's famed Freeway Park became “a garden of earthly delights—for the city's crazed murderers and inhuman rapists.”
3) Cabinet Magazine on geophagia.
[S]oil eating is poverty and hunger's most extreme outpost. It is an activity that is charged with a strangely archaic quality where a lack is miraculously turned into a surplus. In his febrile state of hunger, the soil eater transforms the clay of the bed river into filling food. He is set within a hallucinogenic landscape where the very ground he walks on is transformed into nourishment.
4) Deborah Fisher on her Monuments to Vanishing Cities.
5) AlterNet on the National Mall redesign. “Critics of the redesign [...] are complaining that the National Park Service's proposed redesign, still in its formative phase, is a subtle attempt to restrict [the] time-honored ability to congregate and complain.” NPS disagrees.
6) BBC News on uranium-eating fungi for “toxic war zones.”
7) culiblog and Cornell Mushroom Blog on growing food in transit.
‘Made in Transit’ is a supply chain concept in which the food grows on board a vehicle on the way to the supermarket, shifting the paradigm of packaging from preserving freshness to enabling growth, and shifting ‘best before’ to ‘ready by.’
8) Edouard François, who designed this marvelous aviary, takes on garage doors. See it?