mad men

Honoured as a laureate by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for his significant contributions to the field, the life and career of Alvin Lustig (*1915 - †1955) by complications of diabetes.
Lustig’s interests and acumen were not only restricted to designing book jackets and covers and magazine illustration but also to architecture, working with Victor Gruen on retail outlets, and interior design with a special emphasis on office spaces. His “Lustig Chair” made for Paramount studios was particular popular and inspires and informs retro-styles to this day. At the invitation of Joseph Albers, Lustig briefly taught at Black Mountain College. His wife and collaborator, Elaine Lustig Cohen (*1927 - †2016), was an accomplished artist, archivist and designer in her own right, sharing the same distinctions as her late husband and earning more over the course of her professional career.

first congress of the comintern

On this day in 1919, delegates from around the world representing labour rights groups and revolutionary socialist movements gathered in Moscow, the newly designated capital of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic for a four-day summit to establish Communist International.
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin, were joined by left-leaning organisations from Germany, Denmark, the US, the UK, Australia, China and Japan. The ongoing Russian Civil War made publicising the meeting difficult as well as travel for sending-parties—with many in attendance not formal plenipotentiaries for the groups that they were representing—so after a bit of housekeeping, a follow up session to be held in the summer of 1920 in Petrograd was decided up on, with decisions on major structural matters and steering committee leadership deferred until then.

lakawana limited or as pure as the driven snow

Drawing on several sources, Just a Car Guy introduces us to the passenger line operated by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad—later by the Erie Railway—that shuttled holiday-makers to resorts in the Poconos, marketing the prestige train as Phoebe Snow, to demonstrate how anthracite powered trains had cleaner exhaust than the steam locomotives of its competition. The engine was kept a pristine white, supposedly, to show when pulling into each station, that passengers need not suffer indignities of soiled clothes thanks to clean coal. Read more at the link up top.

window of discourse

Curiosity piqued by an unfamiliar term heuristically invoked during an interview with US Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (previously), TYWKIWDBI presents a nice primer on the Overton Window—that is, the range of tolerance for public discourse. This sliding scale named after political scientist Joseph P Overton (*1960 – †2003) proffers that the political viability (and endurance) of a policy proposal is chiefly determined by where it falls within the spectrum of acceptability and governmental intervention. Much more to explore on defenestration at the link above.

tulpenmanie

Recognising a clear line of succession from the first socio-economic bubble—the Tulip fever (previously) whose speculative collapse had never been experienced before (though have little financial impact on the Dutch Republic) straight through to the disruptive power of crypto-currency, Berlin-based artist Anna Ridler is using artificial intelligence to mine for impossible flowers. Naming her installation “Mosaic Virus” after the vector that produces the unpredictable but highly-sought after variety in the monocots, Ridler employs a generative adversarial network as an algorithm to weed out undesirable mutations and select for valued traits—a contemplation on nature and market tendencies coloured by human impulse and aesthetic.