Two months after the 10-gun brig Beagle left Devonport docks bound for Patagonia, 23-year-old Charles Darwin experienced a rainforest for the first time. The incident took place during a Brazilian stopover on February 29 – 1832 was a leap year – and Darwin, to put it mildly, was overwhelmed. “To a person fond of natural history,” he wrote in his journal, “such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure the he can ever hope to experience again.”

Riding in his car, she understands for the first time in her life, the feeling of being a passenger. But the car is a Jaguar. Fear and excitement mingle in the pit of her stomach, storehouse of ambiguous feelings. He steps on the accelerator. She wonders bravely about what lies in store.

Personal audio devices, PADs for short, were used by women only. A PAD could whisper in your ear flattering and tender words, sometimes of intimate kind, sometimes not, keeping reasonably decent at the same time. Just as much decent as it was necessary for you on that very day. The built-in computer learned with awe-inspiring capacity, keeping and accumulating in the memory all the personal tastes of a client. And then, after three or four sessions, there came a breathless moment of pure magic...

German artist Thomas Demand constructs life-size sets entirely out of paper, which he then documents as full-color photographs and, finally, destroys. Take for example the astounding picture Clearing, where springtime sunlight breaks through 270,000 paper leaves in a dense forest of trees.

Today, when I was waiting for the tea water to boil, I found myself at the living-room bookcase, paging through those big picture books that designers love to publish about each other. After looking at the Tibor Kalman book again and the Alexey Brodovitch book, and after thinking that I should call Sears and ask them if my propane stove should really take this long to boil a damn teapot, I came upon my well-worn copy of the tome of famous graphic designers...

Suicide has always been an option.  It’s as though I was born with the understanding that with the swallow of a pill I could change my life. It attached itself to me like a funny-colored mole . . .

Alvin Kilmer decided to join the US Army when he was 18 years old. There was really nothing much else to do in Tupelo, Mississippi. “I need to get out of here. Anywhere will do. I just need change.” He explained all of that to Sergeant Ralph Peterson in the Boxwood Mall shopping center . . .

A table groaning with delicious food makes our senses bloom and can send us into a rapture of imagination, intellect, emotion and wonderment. But talking about the food itself, at that moment, is like discussing lip tissue while kissing . . .

Planted squarely on a barren hilltop in the no-man’s-land buffer zone between the West Bank and Israel, Neve Shalom Wahat al-Salam – “Oasis of Peace” in both Hebrew and Arabic – glimmers hopefully in a desert of violence. To prove co-existence between Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians is possible, villagers have meticulously maintained a 50:50 balance . . .

THE BIRTH OF MODERNISM - Design critic Natalia Ilyin unfurls our modernist DNA.

WHOOPING IT UP IN THE UNCANNY VALLEY - Porcelain veneers and gastrointestinal anarchy in suburbia, by Jennifer Shreve.

BRAND-NEW CITIES - Wayne Curtis on how "starchitecture" is transforming the urban world.  

SWEATY, FAT NIGHTMARE - One woman's torrid affair with technology, by Sergey Gerasimov.

Opinion, analysis & fiction by Mounsi, Tawfiq Zayyad, Paul B. Hertneky, Michael Hey, Shoilee Khan,  Jesse Zerger Nathan,  Susan J. Miller...

Illustrations & images by Pedro Inoue, Michael Wolf, Andres Serrano, Brain Ulrich, Larry Towell, Shahryar Nashat, Peter Granser, Muti Randolph, Paul D'amato, Carolyn Drake, Danwen Xing, Andy Rementer, Matt Nightswander, Alex S. Maclean...

Guest art directed by Jonathan Barnbrook.

An ancient Chinese proverb warns that two dragons cannot live on the same mountain. For most of Asia’s recorded 6,000 year history, this was not an issue between Japan and China. Today, China, the sleeping giant Napoleon warned not to awake, has opened its eyes and is yawning and stretching.

In this brave new century, we are blessed with an abundance of inordinately wealthy (therefore brilliant) individuals. As these affluence-artists – these Monets of the Marketplace – bestride the earth, astounding us with the by-products of their sheer financial savvy – their Bruckenheimer-directed films, their rapidly-downloading porn sites, their dazzling amounts of bling – it almost feels as if the rest of us get poorer (therefore stupider) with every sacred breath they draw.

It took Bolivia 470 years after the Spanish conquest for an indigenous person to return to govern its territory. In that period of nearly five centuries, what has happened in this country and in this continent? What is happening now? The answer to the latter question is that something has awoken, something that resembles the light of a new dawn.

A quietly profound victory in the name of national sovereignty was won in Ecuador this past May, with potentially far-reaching corporate and international implications. The US petroleum company Occidental, accused of 42 legal violations, including environmental destruction and spying on protesters, was – to the shock of the company, the US government, and a pleasantly surprised Ecuadorian populace – refused a contract renewal for exploration and exploitation of Ecuadorian natural resources. The move was not a capricious expropriation on the part of Ecuador, rather the legal conclusion to a long saga of dispute with the company.

As a society, we’re in deep dukkha. Roughly translated from Sanskrit, dukkha means “suffering,” but Zen priest Steve Hagen eloquently likens it to “a wheel off kilter. If we think of this wheel as one that performs some important function, such as a potter’s wheel, then the out-of-true wheel creates constant hardship for us every time we try to make a clay vessel.” It’s an apt diagnosis . . .

It seemed like the ultimate strategic alliance, but future generations of Britons might wonder what, if any, benefits came out of the Bush-Blair relationship. The Prime Minister’s friendship with President George W. Bush is regarded as “one of the great political riddles of our time,” as former Labour insider Mark Seddon puts it, a riddle that seemingly no one can solve: is it a marriage of convenience or star-crossed hubris?

There is something to be said about the moral righteousness of war. When President Bush made his first remark about “Good versus Evil,” people around the world laughed and dismissed him as a simpleton. While such words are meaningless on the political ground, they mean everything on the battleground of war.

Newly elected Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi says he wants to shake up Italy’s strangled media. The idea would have once seemed a fantasy in a country ruled for five years by the many-tentacled Silvio Berlusconi, who held political control over the public broadcaster and financial sway over six of Italy’s seven main television channels.

Before pharma-giant Glaxosmithkline (GSK) was sued by the state of New York in June 2004, over two million children and adolescents in the United States were popping Paxil to treat their depression. Doctors comfortably prescribed the drug because published clinical trials – while showing mixed effects on children – did not reveal anything overwhelmingly negative. It was the best information they had, and it turned out to be completely misleading.

America’s soft power reached its height during the Cold War. That influence rested on its ideals realized in practice – personal freedom, equality under the rule of law, social mobility and economic opportunity. In his seminal book, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan recounts that Sukarno told a group of Hollywood executives in 1956 that he regarded them “as political radicals and revolutionaries who had greatly hastened political change in the East.