Photo: Allison SamuelsOne night in June, a young artist in cutoff jeans and paint-spattered Nike high-tops was walking down Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. In his hand, he carried one of the main tools of his trade: a bucket brimming with wallpaper adhesive. He planned to use the stuff to affix a giant copy of one of his linoleum-cut prints to a nearby building. Suddenly, up drives one of New York City's finest, lights flashing and sirens blaring. "I told him I was going to my studio," says the artist, who works under the pseudonym Gaia. "But …

The green building gurus must have spit their coffee across the table when they saw the full-page ad in the Toronto Star this week. The U.S. Green Building Council and its Canadian sister organization had rallied hundreds of architects and developers to the city for their annual love-in, Green Build. Forest conservation groups seized the opportunity to plant ads in the local paper, with the USGBC logo photoshopped to read "U.S. GreenWASH Building Council." OK, not the cleverest of PR ploys. (We'll have to reserve that title for one of PETA's many gags.) But it had to smart just a …

For those who argue that city living represents the Great Green Future, Urbanized, the latest from filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified) is pure eye candy. It's a sensuous, slant-lit tour of the urban world and all its promise and problems. Workers labor like ants on a Beijing skyscraper. Kids chase kites through a shantytown in Santiago. The camera slides silently along a train line through an eerily vacant downtown Detroit. (For a taste, check out the trailer, below.) The clips of cyclists in Copenhagen alone make the film worth watching. Copenhagen is a city of 1.2 million people where 37 …

Shwetak Patel.Got your undies all in a bundle about Facebook's latest infringements on your privacy? Pshaw. Twenty-nine-year-old Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor in all manner of tech-related fields at the University of Washington, dreams of a not-so-far-off day when computers monitor our every breath. (His cell phone is already monitoring his.) When you and I were monkeying around playing Donkey Kong, the 8-year-old Patel was designing his own computer games on an old TI 49A, and it's been full throttle since then. His clean energy ideas just got a turbo boost in the form of a five-year, half-million-dollar "genius award" …