A photographer, a graphic novel, and the remarkable story behind the headlines.

As we observe the eighth anniversary of Afghanistan’s latest occupation, the world would do well to reflect on the history that brought us to this most recent impasse. That complex history deserves a fittingly complex treatment, which it gets in the genre-breaking masterwork The Photographer.

First published in 2003 in French, The Photographer was reissued in English this year. Melding a graphic novel, photo essay, and travelogue, it tells the story of photographer Didier Lefèvre’s journey through Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Lefèvre documented the group’s harrowing covert tour in 1986 from Pakistan into a nation gripped by violence in the aftermath of the 1979 Soviet invasion. While a few of his 4,000-plus images were published upon his return to France, years passed before Lefèvre was approached by his friend, graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert , about collaborating on a book that would finally tell his remarkable story ...

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What the Arctic Circle has to do with the Bush administration and the lifecycle of rock ‘n’ roll.

In an ideal world, we'd all be able to tour the world's independent film festival circuit, pursuing our complete cultural enlightenment in documentaries on anything from the secret life of John Lennon to the history of horse racing. The world, of course, is far from ideal and most of us are geographically, financially, and otherwise strapped. Enter SnagFilms -- an ambitious repository of full-length, high-quality documentaries that you can watch however, wherever you like, for free.

By making the films streamable on-demand, 24/7, anywhere in the world, the project rallies for -- and, we dare say, greatly succeeds in -- expanding ...

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The hidden whimsy of cities, or what Parisian gardens have to do with the Tokyo subway.

We've always been fascinated by cities -- they are living organisms whose narrative is constantly evolving. Which is why we love Hitotoki -- a rather unorthodox exploration of the highly subjective cultural footprints of cities, creating a narrative map of the world.

Hitotoki is an online literary project collecting stories of singular experiences tied to locations in cities worldwide

The Japanese word Hitotoki connotes any brief, singular stretch of time. It's roughly translated as "moment" and is comprised of two components: hito, “one,” and toki, “time.” Which perfectly captures the project's ephemeral yet timeless quality as an anthology of ...

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Ecopragmatism, or how to stop doing what we’re doing in order to avoid going where we’re going.

Between 1968 and 1972, author and activist Stewart Brand, who helped start the environmental movement in the 60's, published the highly acclaimed Whole Earth Catalog -- an iconic counterculture compendium of tools, texts and miscellaneous information, which Steve Jobs went on to describe as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web.

Today, appropriately coinciding with Blog Action Day, Brand releases his long-awaited new book -- Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, a sharp and compelling vision for engineering our collective future.

Brand, who has always approached environmental and technological challenges as a solvable design problems, offers radical yet viable ideas for ...

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What tattoo art has to do with fashion, vintage atlases and Nazi concentration camps.

Maps are utterly fascinating -- through various elements of design, from typography to color theory to data visualization, they brilliantly condense and capture complex notions about space, scale, topography, politics and more. But where things get most interesting is that elusive intersection of the traditional and the experimental, where artists explore the map medium as a conceptual tool of abstract representation. And that's exactly what The Map of the Art, a fantastic Morning News piece by Katharine Harmon, examines.

Matthew Cusick, "Fiona’s Wave," 2005

Cusick's oversized collages are painted with fragments of vintage atlases and school geography books from the golden era of cartography, 1872-1945.

Arie A. Galles, "Station One: Auschwitz-Birkenau," 1998

A grim allusion to Nazi concentration camps, these drawings, based on Luftwaffe and Allied aerial reconnaissance film, were made over the course of a decade.

These maps come from Harmon's Map As Art, The: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography -- a remarkable collection of 360 colorful, map-related visions of experimental cartography by well-known artists and design thinkers like Olafur Eliasson (remember him?), Maira Kalman, Paula Scher, and ...

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