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Who do you turn to for life advice? In "My Huddled Masses," a new weekly Esquire column, editor-at-large A.J. Jacobs is turning to 100,000 of his closest Facebook friends.

The experiment in life advice for the masses puts Jacobs at the helm of an open-sourced pool to which anyone can contribute. Jacobs describes his role as a kind of Nate Silver of columnists, "curating and collating and commenting on the mass’s responses." Each week, he'll print the best answers, credit the proper contributors, and come to a collaborative conclusion.

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The next big thing is funding urban infrastructure is now coming online in Chicago, and Tim Logan has done a deep dive on what that means at Next American City. The core idea is simple:

Governments across Europe, Canada and Australia have long turned to the private sector to help finance public assets, and even in the U.S., more places are dabbling in it. But it’s still rare for cities to take the lead. And no place, at least in this country, has tried what Chicago is launching this year: A nonprofit agency devoted to tapping private capital through structured financing while retaining public ownership, both for big-ticket items but also for workaday municipal infrastructure.

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After designing buildings all over the world, from Helsinki to Beijing, the New York-based architect Steven Holl has finally completed his first freestanding structure in the city. Unfortunately, it’s on a neglected corner lot at Manhattan’s northernmost point--a less than prominent location for Holl’s belated New York debut.

In New York, his adopted city of 35+ years (Holl was born and trained in Seattle), Holl has only done a few small galleries and interior renovations. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Holl has been involved, in varying capacities, in many of the city’s most significant urban projects: the High Line, Hudson Yards, and the World Trade Center. In each case, Holl’s proposals were either disregarded as architectural reveries or passed over for less inspired alternatives.

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A common, if facile, critique of Brutalism is that it is widely unsuited to domestic application. A home, after all, is not a city hall (Brutalism was most extensively rendered in the service of civic structures), and it need not embody the lofty ideas of an entire populace. Nor do the big, brash, and top-heavy concrete forms of sprawling government or housing complexes transfer to the single family home all that well. Surely, few would characterize unfinished, “textured” concrete surfaces as comfy.

But BAK Arquitectos have dismantled this argument time and time again. The now disbanded Buenos Aires-based firm amassed a portfolio of dozens of concrete homes, many of which are concentrated in Mar Azul, a small coastal town outside the capital and home to fewer than a thousand year-round residents. It’s here, strangely enough, that BAK staked its reputation as purveyors of sumptuous Brutalist villas.

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The growing arsenal of 3-D-printed weapons now includes homemade bullets. As highlighted by the Daily Dot, a Tennessee man recently posted a YouTube video demonstrating what kind of damage can be done (hint: a lot) by the plastic shell, created by 3-D-printing enthusiast Tony Griffy.

The fact that the plastic bullet is fired from a real gun is a twist on the approach you're probably more familiar with: a real bullet being shot from a 3-D-printed gun. That gun, dubbed "The Liberator," was first created by Defense Distributed, a firm that fashioned the weapon almost entirely from ABS plastic, using an $8,000 3-D printer.

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12:40 p.m., 05/24/2013

Parrot Shows Off Drone Videography

Parrot, whose smartphone-controlled Ar.Drone 2.0 is one of the best-known consumer quadrocopters, wants consumers to know its UAVs are robust. Over the last month, Parrot rolled out a series of films showing off its Ar.Drone 2.0 performing beautifully in extreme heat and extreme cold.

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