Michael Silverberg

Last week, the long-awaited 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City finally opened to the public, on the site where the Twin Towers had stood. But it was the museum’s gift shop that provoked the stronger reaction. For many, its selection of September 11-themed souvenirs—”memorial pool” iPhone cases, “survivor tree” earrings, plush toys, and a cheese plate shaped like a map of the US, with the three sites of the plane crashes marked on it—seemed to make light of the events they intended to memorialize. In Maclean’s, Anne Kingston called it ”catharsis consumerism.”

At the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, you can buy a September 11 cheese plate that marks the attack sites with hearts, but you can’t ask questions without first getting permission. That’s what Jen Chung, the editor of the New York–based news site Gothamist, found out on Wednesday, the day the museum opened to the public.

Tony Palladino, who designed the indelible title of the film Psycho, died last week in Manhattan from complications of pneumonia, the New York Times reports today. He was 84. The title encapsulated the schismatic violence of Alfred Hitchcock’s film with a remarkably simple gesture: Palladino tore up the type, ransom-note style.

In most cities, the bus stop is the lowliest piece of urban infrastructure. Not so in Krumbach, a small, rural town in a region of Austria known as Bucklige Welt (“hunchbacked world”) because of its hilly landscape. Last year, the town’s cultural association invited seven architects from Chile, Russia, China, Norway, Spain, Belgium, and Japan to design bus shelters for its 1,000 residents. Instead of their typical fees, the architects were offered vacations in Krumbach. (The Schloss Krumbach, an 11th-century castle converted into a hotel, is a popular local attraction; it offers a wellness spa, as well as tours of its former dungeons.) The bus stops opened this month, accompanied by an exhibition at the Vorarlberg Architecture Institute.

In 1985, Jello Biafra, the singer of the punk band the Dead Kennedys, came across a painting by the Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger in a copy of Omni magazine. “I was absolutely floored,” Biafra says in a new interview (audio) posted on the website of his record label, Alternative Tentacles. “Best stuff I’d seen since Bosch.”

Yesterday, I wrote about the troubling visual clichés that seem to recur on the cover of every book about Africa: an acacia tree, a sunset, an arid plain. A graphic that ran with the story (via the blog Africa Is a Country), showed a remarkable visual sameness across 36 diverse authors and settings. When it comes to Africa, no matter the subject matter, publishers are inclined to slap together a folksy vision of the savannah.

Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both.

Sunglasses exist for two reasons: to make you look cooler and to shield your eyes from the sun. But what if they could change your outlook too?

In the 31 years since an engineer named Charles Hull invented 3D printing, it has gone from a way for car companies to quickly prototype plastic parts to something that’s touted as a technological cure-all. Meanwhile, the price of consumer 3D printers has come down dramatically, and last month, office-supply retailer Staples opened a handful of “experience centers” in Los Angeles and New York City where customers can try out the printers before buying them.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday afternoon outing with Senator Rand Paul at the Kentucky Derby was ripe with political symbolism. A piece in yesterday’s New York Times on the “Murdoch stakes”—the conservative power broker’s search for a candidate to back in the 2016 presidential elections—divined signs of the News Corp chairman’s intentions from the day’s straw hats, seersucker suits, mint juleps, and kettle corn.