THE STORY: Capturing the full character of architectural discourse, PRIVATE JOKES, PUBLIC PLACES offers a disturbing and humorous glimpse inside the contemporary world of architecture. Margaret, a young Korean-American student, presents her thesis

Safdie is one of the greatest and most energetic architectural thinkers of our time. This book features essays on his work, illustrated in color photographs.

There are many ways to approach the subject of public space: the threats posed to it by surveillance and visual pollution; the joys it offers of stimulation and excitement, of anonymity and transformation; its importance to urban variety or democratic politics. But public space remains an evanescent and multidimensional concept that too often escapes scrutiny. The essays in Rites of Way: The Politics and Poetics of Public Space open up multiple dimensions of the concept from architectural, political, philosophical, and technological points of view. There is some historical analysis here, but the contributors are more focused on the future of public space under conditions of growing urbanization and democratic confusion. The added interest offered by non-academic work—visual art, fiction, poetry, and drama—is in part an admission that this is a topic too important to be left only to theorists. It also makes an implicit argument for the crucial role that art, not just public art, plays in a thriving public realm. Throughout this work contributors are guided by the conviction, not pious but steely, that healthy public space is one of the best, living parts of a just society. The paths of desire we follow in public trace and speak our convictions and needs, our interests and foibles. They are the vectors and walkways of the social, the public dimension of life lying at the heart of all politics.

(Theatre World). Celebrating its 60th year, this Theatre World remains the authoritative and pictorial record of the Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway seasons and touring companies. Volume 60 features the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for 2004 and the Tony Award-winning Best Play, Douglas Wright's I Am My Own Wife , which also earned star Jefferson Mays the Best Leading Actor in a Play Tony Award. Avenue Q , the human-plus-puppet Tony Award winner for Best Musical, made news announcing that it will only play on Broadway and in Las Vegas. Other highlights of the season include the six-time Drama Desk Award-winning blockbuster musical Wicked ; two of Off-Broadway's most successful and acclaimed shows, Bug and Sarah Jone's bridge and tunnel ; and the world premieres of August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean , at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and Imaginery Friends with Cherry Jones and Swoozie Kurtz, at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. As always, Theatre World 's outstanding features include: An expanded highlights section of professional regional productions from across the U.S.; A listing of all the major theatrical awards; The longest running shows on and Off-Broadway; Biographical data, obituaries, and a comprehensive index.

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut's critical writing—serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Bierut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut's intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as newcomers, like McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and color-coded terrorism alert levels. Along the way Nabakov's Pale Fire; Eero Saarinen; the paper clip; Celebration, Florida; the planet Saturn; the ClearRx pill bottle; and paper architecture all fall under his pen. His experience as a design practitioner informs his writing and gives it truth. In Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, designers and nondesigners alike can share and revel in his insights.