Sometimes it almost seems as if The Man has a sense of irony.

On July 17, Amazon.com pulled copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 from its new, fancy-schmancy electronic Kindle readers. These digitized books were apparently “illegal copies” that the website had inadvertently offered for sale. The company quickly refunded readers for the misunderstanding (and cognitive dissonance). Ha!

Life magazine’s inaugural issue was published on Nov. 23, 1936, just four months after the start of the Spanish Civil War. For the first few weeks of its existence, the pages Life dedicated to the war in Spain were astoundingly few, especially relative to the coverage domestic and other foreign affairs received. As Life boomed and the war raged on, the magazine claimed to present a balanced account of the conflict but in reality — notably in photography — favored the fascist Nationalist forces.

For a college that has seen much activism in recent months in response to a lack of administrative transparency, we are appalled that such a drastic step was taken by the College of Architecture, Art and Planning by closing the Knight Visual Resources Facility.

The KVRF — which will be closing in June — served the needs of many students and faculty within AAP where the facility was housed. Garnering national prestige, the resource was one of Cornell’s most notable collections of images and visual materials.

To the Editor:

Re: “AAP Dean Urges Milstein Construction to Move Forward,” Letters, Feb. 9

If studio space is to an architecture student what laboratory space is to a chemistry student then what is no space to an art student?

In hopes of relieving some of its financial woes, Brandeis University recently announced that it would close its Rose Art Museum in order to sell the collection. This deplorable decision must not go unnoticed by Brandeis’ peer institutions, including Cornell. By treating art as a liquid asset, Brandeis fails to recognize the true value of art and museums on college campuses.

Skip Ithaca’s sad excuse for Italian food this Wednesday and seduce your date instead with the work of student artists who participated in the study abroad program, Cornell Abroad in Rome, last semester. At Tjaden Gallery, third year students from the fine arts program are exhibiting the work of their independent studies in Italy. Their work covers a variety of mediums from paint to collage to sculpture. Nearly all the works have been influenced by the artists’ experience abroad. As the College of Architecture, Art and Planning’s Rome program is intended to mimic the traditional tour of Europe embarked upon by historic painters and architects, many of the works are inspired by the rich cultural traditions in Italy’s capital.

Saturday, November 22. Six p.m. On an evening that felt arctic — even by Ithaca standards — I anxiously stood huddled near the bus stop in Collegetown with a small gathering of Cornell University associates, waiting for my Cornell Underground Dinner Series experience to begin. What experience, you ask? This was unknown, as I stood that evening with very little knowledge about what the Underground night would bring.

Rumor has it that Alex Mergold ’00 set a scale model on fire during his thesis review — in front of alarmed critics. Research shows that he didn’t actually light the thing ablaze, though the project, a fire house, was provocative in its own way. After graduation, Mergoldd went on to found Austin + Mergold LLC with Jason Austin ’00, and is currently a visiting faculty member in Cornell’s architecture program. A+M’s show at Hartells Gallery, The Four Books of Archiculture, came down this past Saturday after a two-week exhibition.

The exhibition was a retrospective of the two architects’ built and proposed works in Pennsylvania. The projects include designs as varied as a grain dryer converted into a house and a miniature golf course built on a roofscape.

Since the Crimean War, there have been photographers documenting and crafting iconic images to present to the public, as representations of war, its consequences and its horrors. Sometimes, photographers veered away from strict documentary photography in favor of a more artistic slant, as in the case of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady. In some of his photographs of dead soldiers on battlefields, the photographer moved the bodies into more favorable compositions and had some of his friends and colleagues pose amongst the corpses so as to make the battlefield appear more populated.