Recently enjoyed:

• Damien James' The Magic Easel is a fascinating piece in the Chicago Reader on a viewing machine by artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes. The pair (literally, they are twins) have developed the above viewing machine to aid them in creating detailed concave perspective drawings. [via metafilter].
• On the topic of drawing, I've been revisiting Mason White's Making Plans, a speculative text on the role of the plan in architecture. This thoughtful essay contextualizes contemporary thinking about plans through concise commentary and some great precedents.
• The Interscale: Art after Neoliberalism is a text inspired by theorist Brian Holmes' visit to The Sixth Taipei Biennial. What starts out as a critique of a several featured pieces at the politically themed Biennial quickly unfurls into a history of neoliberalism complete with nods to Archigram, commentary on the economy and observations on tension between regional and transcontinental programming.
• Leave it to nettime to be the first place for an English translation of Paul Virilio's recent interview in Le Monde to pop up. In this discussion with Gerard Courtois and Michel Guerrin Virilio frames the recent economic meltdown in relation to his ongoing research into catastrophe aesthetics and speed.
• From one form of bankruptcy to another, Facebook in a Crowd is a fun article by Hal Niedzviecki in this weekend's New York Times. The text documents a self-esteem train wreck whereby the the author decides to host a party for all 700 of his "facebook friends" - and only one person shows up. In these tumultuous times if we can't count on our facebook friends, where does that leave us?
• Authors Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin just released a free PDF of their 2002 book Atlas of Cyberspace. The text was just plugged by Andrew Vande Moere at infosthetics as an "interesting overview of the early years of (more popular forms) of data visualization, including chapters about mapping Internet infrastructure and traffic flows, mapping the Web, mapping online conversation and community, imagining cyberspace in art, literature, and film."