viz.

This New York Times article discusses the implications of new online systems that allow parents to monitor their children’s grades and attendance.

I don’t know what to make of these new ads for Marc Jacobs featuring Victoria Beckham. This New York Times article covering the ads asks “When is a Fashion Ad not a Fashion Ad?” And I’m not sure what the answer is. Jacobs has a history of using images that don’t feature his clothes but are touted as being “interesting” and “provocative.”

As far as design goes, Obama has already won the presidency according to this New York Times article.

The ACLU is using this video to promote their campaign to collect signatures for a petition to stop a national ID and database program. The Real ID Act, passed by congress in 2005, would connect all state DMV databases into one interlinked database, “facilitating government tracking of Americans.”

I’m wondering why the debate over meat-eating and the treatment of animals keeps happening on women’s bodies. This newest addition to the controversy happened on America’s Next Top Model when the contestants were taken to New York’s meat-packing district where they participated in a photo-shoot dressed in various articles of clothing made out of raw meat.

Here is an amusing/horrifying animation of the history of human conflicts (WWII to the present day), which uses the foods typically associated with the various countries involved to act out the conflicts. It’s called “Food Fight.”

According to this New York Times article, office décor and location can be very important if you are a psychologist.

Apparently everything, including furniture, wall hangings, books, and office location, both reflects the philosophical underpinnings of a psychologist’s practices and can impact a patient’s response to those practices. A recent article in the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology argued that complications in the therapist/patient relationship may be caused by holding therapy sessions in the therapists’ homes, where too much information about the therapist’s private life may be brought into the therapy session via the more personal office environment. However, other psychologists argue that there’s also a danger in creating too clinical of a setting--one that’s entirely devoid of all personal effects.

The article discusses some very interesting examples of this phenomenon: one very strictly Freudian therapist placed nude watercolors of herself in her waiting room, another offered patients a place to sit on a dirty couch with cheap stuffed animals on it, and a child psychologist placed a book of Robert Mapplethorpe nudes on the coffee table of the waiting room.

If your style choices are statements about who you are, then it only makes sense that in a field where identification between patient and therapist are critical personal style could have some pretty serious repercussions.

This photo of Adrien Grenier had me totally pegged as I perused celebrity blog perezhilton.com in an effort not to do any of my real work.

But I really like the idea of a celebrity sending a message back to us, observing what we are doing at that very moment in such a completely accurate way while we try (or maybe Perez Hilton tries) to describe and make judgments about what he's up to.

I'm reminded of those shirts Britney Spears used to wear, in that those were sort of an anticipation of what the viewer was thinking about her, instead of about what, in this case, the viewer is doing.

In both of these cases there's a weird fusion of watching, making judgments, and sending messages that make reciprocal judgments all in one image.

This article from the BBC Middle East shows that the U.S. military and Iraqi government hope that some visual evidence will help them to win “hearts and minds” in their efforts to rid Iraq of al-Qaeda.

This piece in the BBC News UK "Fenced in--or out," is an interesting discussion of the symbolism and uses of walls.