Inside the Airbnb offices

By LYDIA LAURENSON

Airbnb is one of the city's most fashionable startups right now, and it's riding the design wave. On Wednesday the 18th, I headed over to one of their free monthly Design Talks, a mixer/lecture at their current office in the Design District. The speaker was Patrice Martin of Ideo.org, whose tagline is "Let's Design A Better World With Everyone." Martin's presentation included one slide that said "Design As A Way Of Seeing The World"; she spoke about "design thinking" and how Ideo addresses social issues in "places where design can't reach."

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Sex slaves. Obliteration of natural resources. Malnutrition. San Franciscans craving an authentic, inexpensive vacation often turn to developing countries, but low costs often mean low standards of living. Join travel experts Jeff Greenwald and Malia Everette for "Ethical Destinations," a panel on how to spend your coveted tourist dollars in meaningful ways. 

Every November, Bay Area nonprofit Ethical Traveler releases its top 10 list praising developing countries that promote locally based, sustainable tourist economies.

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Recent Acquisitions: New Sculpture Brings Some Much-Needed Color to the Sunset District

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Much is made about our city's storied history in subversive art, with iconic groups like the Billboard Liberation Front, Survival Research Laboratories, the Cacophony Society, and the Suicide Club. A group in Paris, however, gives all of it a run for its money, if not a shellacking.

Meet the secretive Paris Urban eXperiment, aka the UX. It came into being in 1981, when the group came across (stole) plans detailing Paris' numerous underground passages, catacombs, and tunnels, and went exploring. Then UX started throwing events down below: staging plays, throwing up a movie theater and a bar, serving guests at a restaurant. The group also -- and here UX becomes part of the holy underground -- began restoring stuff. Fixing things.

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We glimpse strange man-made structures through the trees. Their forms seem out of date, pointing to a future that never was. The soundtrack shifts from the ambient noise of chirping birds into something more sinister, while flickering psychedelic images take over the screen. Eventually the pastoral scenery returns and in the background we suddenly recognize with a jolt the violin from "November Rain" by Guns N' Roses. This is Michael Robinson's short film Victory Over the Sun, a creative reimagining of the buildings and statues left behind after several different World's Fairs, and it is an excellent example of the way Robinson freely melds pop culture references with original footage to create something new and wonderfully disorienting.

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Take a Drug-Free Trip through San Francisco with Kalle Mattson's "Water Falls"

Video of the Day: The Altered Barbie Exhibition

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RJ Muna

When it comes to dance innovation, San Francisco thinks outside the bun. Our dance troupes perform off the sides of hotels (Niagara Falling), collaborate with indie-pop musicians (Oh, Inverted World), and use laundromats as venues (Laundromatinee). All the more reason for Alonzo King LINES Ballet -- a contemporary ballet company, school, and dance center for all skill levels -- to join hands (and feet) with S.F.-based electronic sculpture artist Jim Campbell, whose work has appeared at the Smithsonian, the Whitney, and New York's MOMA.

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Video of the Day: Dance Choreographed to Erotica

Fishnet Follies' Wild Women Make Our Tassels Spin

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Hanna Quevado

As home to Maker Faire, not to mention a lot of counterculture and counter-intuitive invention, the Bay Area is no stranger to D.I.Y., but it usually takes the rest of the country a while to catch on. For years, Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, has pointed to the far-reaching consequences of emergent ideas. And, despite some accusations of Wiki-plagiarism in his last book, he's been pretty good.

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Heineken R2D2, Lego Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, and Other Geek Glory from Maker Faire

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Rebecca Goldstein

Steven Pinker

Conventional wisdom states that when you take the long view, the arc of history is brutal. We live within a weird historical blip, some aberrant time of relative luxury and safety. But is this really the case? In his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, multi-disciplinary researcher Steven Pinker argues against this despairing view of history and human nature.

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Video of the Day: Literary Doucebag-Fools Pantheon

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Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely, behavioral economist, is giving a talk tonight about why we lie and still think of ourselves as honest people. Here's a brief clip of Ariely on the phenomenon. If you go tonight, be sure to bring flame-retardant pants.

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For the first time in history, the San Francisco Architectural Heritage will cosponsor a panel on historic preservation with the GLBT Historical Society. The San Francisco Architectural Heritage is a misunderstood organization, falsely believed to be monomaniacal about the city's most elite landmarks. Seeking greater collaboration and new audiences, both organizations prioritize significant physical locales associated with the community. "These Walls Can Speak: Telling the Stories of Queer Places" will explore the ways in which queer historic sites are being preserved, documented, and interpreted.

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Surian Soosay

The last time we found ourselves around someone waxing poetic about indexicality and polysemy at a cocktail party, our instinctual reaction was, "Shut up, asshole." We would have been less damning if the discussion in question was about assholism itself. Thankfully, Fresh Air contributor and Professor of Linguistics at Stanford and UC Berkeley, Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg, is here with a companion lecture to his new book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years.

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