The Guardian: A museum devoted to the wreckage of lost love

The Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles exhibits the wreckage of lost love. On show are everyday objects submitted by ordinary people who have gone through a breakup or lost a loved one – the jilted and bitter, the nostalgic, the relieved. It is a collection of personal mementoes that permits a voyeuristic glimpse into a very private realm. The most mundane tokens – a watch, a bottle opener, a Zippo lighter – take on a strong emotional charge. [...]

The Museum of Broken Relationships was originally conceived in 2006 by two Croatian artists who, having split up, were about to throw out the detritus of their love affair – the small gifts, the photos – but decided that their time together should instead be celebrated. They opened premises in Zagreb in 2010 and now their collection has a second permanent home in LA. What better location than the heart of Hollywood – where dreams are supposed to come true but so often don’t and where shining new stories turn out to be full of tawdry cliches? Equally fitting, it has opened on the Hollywood Boulevard site of an iconic lingerie shop that went bankrupt.

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The Guardian: The new type of hotel rescuing Italy's hill villages

It was an unusual invasion: well-to-do people, most speaking strange tongues, and pulling their belongings behind them on little wheels. Arriving as couples, families, groups of friends, they spent money in the village shop and ate at its few restaurants. Feathers were occasionally ruffled when an outsider sat in some local’s chair at the bar but, overall, these “tourists” were seen as a good thing. This is not somewhere remote in the developing world, however, but Tuscany, just a few years ago. People often fail to grasp how much more there is to this region than Chiantishire and coach tours. Tuscany is bigger than Wales and almost as mountainous, with plenty of places where no one’s heard of Waitrose or – until recently – wheelie bags.

One of these villages, Semproniano, amid undulating woods and golden farmland in southern Tuscany, is Fulvio Ponzuoli’s childhood home, to which he returned in 2008 after a business career. He could see the potential of the 1,000-year-old village atop its wooded hill, and decided to develop it using a model dreamed up in Friuli, north-east Italy, in the 1980s as a way of reviving earthquake-ravaged communities. The model is the albergo diffuso, which translates best as “scattered hotel” and has really taken off this century. Rather than building a hotel to bring tourist euros into a picturesque village, or knocking buildings together, an albergo diffuso takes the more sustainable route of refurbishing empty or abandoned homes – generally within 150 metres of “reception” – as its guest rooms.

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DW: UN slams 'collective punishment' for Palestinians following Tel Aviv attack

Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Friday the Israeli military's decision to revoke entry permits of some 83,000 Palestinians following the Tel Aviv attack is tantamount to "collective punishment."

Hussein's spokesperson, Ravina Shamdasani, told reporters that the UN official believes the cancellation of permits "will only increase the sense of injustice and frustration felt by Palestinians in this very tense time." [...]

The West Bank village of Yatta, home to the attackers, is also under lockdown by Israeli security, with no one allowed to leave or enter the village except in humanitarian or medical emergencies. The village has become a flashpoint for violence in recent months.

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Fast Co. Design: A First Look At IKEA's New Museum

The museum is located in what was once IKEA's first retail store, and it features many of the usual suspects. The Billy bookshelf and Klippan sofa—the two most-produced IKEA items ever—have dedicated installations. A series of "period rooms" brim with IKEA furniture and accessories from the archives (complete with decade-accurate computers, magazines, and ephemera). The curators strove for historical faithfulness—nothing was reproduced or reissued for the rooms—and put out a call for submissions to obtain certain pieces from customers that they didn't have themselves. Even the humble meatball (which has had its fair share of controversy over the years) gets the gallery treatment. The most rabid fans can also snap a selfie in a set done up like the cover of an IKEA catalog.

In recent years, the company has made efforts to deepen its design credibility, bring more customers into the fold (the brand sees its 800 million customers in 2015 as just a drop in the bucket compared with the world's population of 7 billion), and attempt to dispel the stereotype that the brand only sells cheap, mass-producible design. The museum gives IKEA a place to tell its story exactly the way it wants. But it omits some of the darker chapters of IKEA's history (as far as I could tell on a recent tour of the space, which was still under construction): Kamprad's alleged Nazi ties, the company's logging practices, and more.

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