CNN

Every Friday morning, students walk into an art class in Atlanta, Georgia. Some look dazed, uncertain in their environment, as if it’s vaguely familiar but they can’t fully recognize where they are — until they sit down and begin to draw.

The moment their brushes hit the paper, their faces light up. Using bright colors — yellows, oranges, greens, purples — they begin to transfer the images from their minds. Sometimes they paint what they want and sometimes they draw the highlighted centerpiece of the day. One week it’s vegetables, another week it’s hats. As their artworks progress, they look happy, smiling and glancing at their teachers for approval. They’re not the only ones who are pleased.

Tania Becker, president of the board of the Spruill Center in Atlanta, developed the Arts 4 Alzheimer’s program with the help of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Alzheimer’s Association. This program helps Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers escape the disease, even if only for a few hours.

“One of the ways to get to people with Alzheimer’s is to engage them through art, because art is so creative,” says Becker. “It’s the one thing, of course, you learn as a child, so those memories are still there and we can get into their memory bank through art. It’s just amazing to see how this works.”

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The Urbanophile

Cities turn to starchitecture in order to create iconic images to symbolize their city and its aspirations to the world. Famous buildings can, as with the Bilbao Guggenheim or the Milwaukee Art Museum, even come to symbolize a city itself. Such buildings or spaces also fulfill the human need for the spectacular, and for sacred space in the community.

Similarly cities create “gateways” to mark the entry to special districts, or engage in various “placemaking” initiatives around branding. We frequently see, for example, the main street, plaza, or square of a town especially beautified.

This is true of all great cities. Consider London, with its many famed iconic spaces and landmarks, such as the Tower Bridge.

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GOOD Magazine

Over the past few years, the media hype for electric vehicles has built to a fever pitch. These sleek, highly conceptual cars, we are told, will forever change the way we drive. But how many of these cars become more than just a flashy 3-D rendering? Between auto dealers rushing to compete in the new market and media enthusiasm for the subject, there is a lot of buzz to sort through.

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Yes! Magazine

100 days into the BP disaster, it’s time to quit claiming that an economy based on fossil fuels is our only option.

It’s been a tough summer for the oil industry—or so you’d think.

BP’s geyser of oil has now made headlines for 100 days, each one a reminder that oil extraction poses dangers we can’t control.

Even with the temporary cap on the well providing a respite from new oil, there’s been little time for the industry to breathe a sigh of relief, much less burnish its image: A second well, even closer to shore, ruptured after being struck by a barge and began spilling more oil into the Gulf. In Michigan, 800,000 gallons of oil poured into the Kalamazoo River from a broken pipeline. In China, an explosion at an oil terminal caused a massive fire that took 15 hours and 2,000 firefighters to extinguish, as well as a nearly 300-mile large spill of thick crude oil, one of the worst in that country’s history.

And in the Arctic, May and June broke records for the fastest ice melt of any summer since recording began.

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