Douglas Rushkoff isn’t a futurist, he’s a "presentist." In the video above, he explains that that means that he no longer is concerned with the future, because the future is merely a construct of a certain, linear way of viewing time. That model, he argues in his book Present Shock, is no longer operable in a digital age when everything--emails, tweets, TV shows, finance--happens instantly.

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The supermarket may be a marvel of social engineering, a highly calibrated machine designed to fulfill our gustatory desires--at the expense of our wallets--but it’s a stretch to call it architecture. Why? Because supermarkets lack the ambition to rise beyond their basic function.

NL Architects aims to change that. Their proposal for a supermarket in Sanya, China, is ambitious and perhaps a little zany. The original brief called for a simple shopping structure on a triangular plot adjacent to a row of residential slabs. What could have been a banal box with an “unattractive interface” was morphed into a glassy addition with a lushly planted roofscape.

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At yesterday’s Google I/O we heard about the latest batch of products and releases coming out of the Googleplex this year. And while Google’s engineers are hard at work cranking out new features, another team at Google is busy dreaming up what to do with them. Google’s Data Arts Team is an elite group of creative coders, led by creative director Aaron Koblin, whose sole task is to imagine the most inspiring ways to use Google technology.

They’re the team responsible for the 100,000 Stars project and that one HTML5 Arcade Fire music video everyone loved so much. They were the first to envision and experiment with the potential of WebGL with another interactive music video, Three Dreams of Black, and continue pushing the capabilities of web technology through the popular Chrome Experiments website.

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The Museum of Art of São Paulo wants visitors to take guided tours, so, with agency DDB Brazil, it has illustrated the dramatic stories behind the art on its wall using comics. The comics are created in the style of the artist in question, with panels inspired by painting and the narratives informed by real events in the artist’s life.

The comic below features the tragic life of Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. Modigliani spent most of his career in France painting nudes and elongated modernist faces. He lived an impoverished life and died of tubercular meningitis at the age of 35. The comic, which ends with the tagline, "a painting is just one frame of the story," reminds us that behind every painting is a human being with his or her own story to tell. See comics for Renoir and Van Gogh below.

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For his book The Apple Revolution, Luke Dormehl spoke to dozens of former Apple employees. I sat down with Dormehl to talk to him about what he learned--and found that the pinnacle of many former employees’ careers wasn't in what they did at the company, but what they went on to do after.

Tell me about some of the people you got the chance to speak with?

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