Come for the jokes, stay for the applied design: MoMA curator Paola Antonelli matched wits with Stephen Colbert Wednesday, highlighting objects from a vase made by bees (through “slow prototyping”) to Massoud Hassani’s landmine-exploding “dandelion.”

Photographing both Supermax prison complexes and suburban developments from the air, Christoph Gielen began noticing “striking” similarities in planning forms, which raise questions about the idea of “prisons as our new mass housing.”

Aiming to “foster the creative debate on urban recovery after Hurricane Sandy,” MoMA is hosting a call for ideas to sustainably rebuild the boardwalk, housing, social spaces, and other fixtures of Rockaway Beach. Deadline is March 15.

“Baffling, Byzantine, fantastically uncohesive”: A few words musician/blogger Moby uses to describe Los Angeles’ built environment in a new video promoting Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., running April through July 2013.

Before Wikileaks blew up to become a household name, Metahaven created an identity for the group. Quickly events prompted a new focus—on fundraising for legal battles. Enter a Metahaven-designed Wikileaks scarf that “talks about opacity and transparency.”

Handsome devils, a bleeding-heart message in felt, fake wood type: School of the Visual Arts design staffers Steven Heller, Debbie Millman, Marshall Arisman, and others offer their alternatives to the cutesy pink Valentine.

Copying is both timeless and, given the nature of the Internet, particularly contemporary, writes Steven Heller. Which is why New York gallery P!, run by Project Projects’ Prem Krishnamurthy, is tackling the topic during a six-month series.

    “If surface is a kind of place, or site, the designer is its geographer. Surface is folded out in order to produce value, while it is folded in to secure it.” —Metahaven   For the 28th edition of the Insights Design Lecture Series, we’ve invited leading designers from around the world to bring […] “If surface is a kind of place, or site, the designer is its geographer. Surface is folded out in order to produce…

Rob Walker looks at the ElRay, a new punctuation mark for our enthusiastic social-media era. Proposed by photographer Ellen Susan, it would reside “in the emotional range between the just-the-facts period and the whoop-to-do excitability of the exclamation point.”