More than one iPad-based Cultural Studies Reader of the future will remember these, the early 2010s, as the golden age of the tote bag. Once the province of PBS pledge drives and your spinster piano teacher (hers had piano keys and told the world "Music is my bag!"), totes are taking the world by storm. UnBeige HQ is so full of colorful, eco-friendly alternatives to plastic bags that we have totes for our totes.

A pioneer in the tote craze has been New York's Strand Book Store, which does a brisk business in classic Strand totes (we like the toile version) as well as an artist series that features illustrations by the likes of Art Spiegelman, David Hockney, and Adrian Tomine. Now the Strand has teamed with the School of Visual Arts, TOON Books, Drawn & Quarterly, and Fantagraphics Books to host a tote bag design contest. Artists and designers from around the world are invited to submit original illustrations representing the Strand and compete for the chance to see their work slapped on a tote that will be sold in the store and online. Other prizes include an afternoon with Françoise Mouly and the gang at TOON Books. You have until March 31 to impress a panel of judges that includes Mouly, Spiegelman, Tomine, and Steven Heller, who knows a good tote bag when he sees one. Go here for more information and to size up the competition.

Those inclined to more philanthropic tote bag design contests can head over to Print, which recently invited a dozen top graphic designers to create totes to benefit the charities of their choice. Christoph Niemann opted for Doctors Without Borders, Deanne Cheuk chose Operation Smile, and James Joyce went with the UK branch of Save the Children. You can follow in their charitable footsteps by choosing a favorite cause and creating a design for it that can be printed on a tote. Several designs will be featured in the magazine and one lucky winner's tote will be produced and sold alongside those of the commissioned designers. Draw fast, because the deadline (March 15) is tote-ally approaching.

Friends, we have seen the future of both typography and the whole print medium and we have to tell you, it is glorious. "Are you talking about the iPad or something?" you ask "Bah!" we scoff loudly (maybe too loudly, sorry). No, we are talking of the new 3*TYPE technology. Author and New Yorker editor Ben Greenman has taken on the roll of spokesperson for the company who is set to shake up all we know and completely revive the ailing medium of print, and made the big announcement on McSweeney's. You'll definitely want to read the whole thing, but here's just a taste of the future:

Powered by revolutionary stereoscopic typography developed exclusively, this new technology will usher in a heretofore unimagined era in reading. This piece, the first ever printed with our proprietary 3*TYPE process, should serve as both an introduction and a primer. You may notice that certain words words are printed twice twice, first in roman and then, immediately afterwards, in boldface. You may also notice the offer, at right, for a special pair of glasses glasses. Order them -- or, if you have them already, remove them from their plastic casing and put them on; you will notice that when viewed through these glasses, the doubly printed words appear to leap leap off the screen screen.

Despite having had some recent successes, like the news that Frank Gehry's theater plans are (maybe) back on and the demonstration of a working test of Michael Arad's memorial, we've been reporting on the mess that is the World Trade Center rebuilding/redesign for years now, from their numerous budget woes to the launch of a possibly ill-conceived new website to track their progress. Now as we're just a year and a half away from the 10 year anniversary of September 11th, some higher profile media is just starting to notice and ask "Hey, why isn't it finished yet?!" Case in point, the CBS news program, 60 Minutes recently ran this story, with the particularly damning title, "A National Disgrace." Below is part one. Part two is available here.

Redesigned money seems to be where it's at these days, so here's a complete wrap-up on all the latest from this exciting field for both designers and thieves. First up some news for you high-rollers (which most of you should be, given our very expensive UnBeige VIP subscription fee), following the recent redesign of the low-rent penny, the US Treasury has announced that they will be rolling out a new high-security 100 dollar bill on April 21st. It's set to be a big event, with Ben Bernanke included, among other officials, for the public release of the new bill. Unfortunately, this will do nothing to appease the group who wants Ulysses S. Grant off the 50 dollar bill and Ronald Reagan put in as his replacement. The movement is being fronted by Republican Representative Patrick McHenry from North Carolina, much to the chagrin of some Democrats and even a few fellow Republicans (reference to "pandering to voters" come from that camp). Finally, while we here in the US lay out new looks for old bills and bicker about whose face should be where, our neighbors to the north are planning a much more ambitious redesign. The Bank of Canada have announced that they will be transitioning from paper money to plastic-based polymers, which apparently makes notes far more difficult to forge. And while they're at it, they're also planning to redesign both the loonie and the toonie, their comically-named $1 and $2 coins. No word yet on whose face will be on any of their new money, but we're putting our votes in for Doug Henning, Norm Macdonald, and Lewis Urry (inventor of both the alkaline and lithium batteries).

As we told you back in late January when we shared the shortlist with you, it's Brit Insurance Design Awards season at the Design Museum. Now the winners have been announced and while we're not completely in love with everything that won like we were last year, it's still a great collection of quality design. And, as you guessed it, Alexander McQueen took home the fashion category win (for his recent 2010 collection roll-out), which seemed a given after his recent untimely passing. Here's the complete list of winners:

Architecture Award: Monterrey Housing, Mexico. By ELEMENTAL, Chile

Fashion Award: Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer ‘10 and Spring/ Summer ‘10 Catwalk Presentation, Plato’s Atlantis. Designed by Alexander McQueen, UK

Furniture Award: Grassworks, Netherlands. Designed by Jair Straschnow

Graphics Award: The Newspaper Club, UK. Created by Ben Terrett, Russell Davies and Ton Taylor and supported by 4iP

Interactive Award: The EyeWriter, USA. Developed by members of Free Art and Technology, openFrameworks, Graffiti Research Lab, The Ebeling Group and Tony Quan

Product Award: Folding Plug, UK. Designed by Min-Kyu Choi

Transport Award: E430 Electric Aircraft, China. Designed and manufactured by Yuneec International

How do you maintain your street cred when your work is fronting auction house catalogs and selling out screenings at Sundance? Turf war! The grudge match between Bansky and the London grafitti pioneer turned shoe repairman known as Robbo wages on. Last December, Banksy appropriated (read: painted over) part of a 1985 Robbo original while creating a series of new works along London's Regent's Canal. This bold move prompted Robbo to come out of retirement and reclaim his realm in a Christmas morning re-tagging (above) that has fueled rival camps to show their support by scrawling "Team Banksy" or "Team Robbo" on any available surface. The street art scuffle recently made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, whose readers are apt to confuse "Banksy" with a nickname for Tim Geithner. Robbo and Banksy have never seen eye to eye, reveals Gabriele Steinhauser:

[In the mid-1990s], Robbo says he encountered Banksy, who was just surfacing, in an East London bar. After a fellow graffiti writer introduced them, Robbo says that Banksy replied, "I've never heard of you." Robbo says he cuffed Banksy in the face, sending his glasses flying.

"You may not have heard of me, but you will never forget me," Robbo says he told Banksy. The two haven't spoken since. Banksy declined to comment on the incident.

Maybe it was the forgetful spray, the unseasonably warm weather, or the relative affordability of a $4,000 Polaroid photo (by Philip-Lorca diCorcia), but the Armory Show attracted a new high of 60,000 visitors during its five-day run, up from 56,000 in 2009. And there were sales aplenty. White Cube found a major collector to part with $4.6 million for Damien Hirst's 2007 painting "Skull with Glass of Water," while Copenhagen's Faurschou sold an Edvard Munch landscape to a private collector for $6 million. Lisson Gallery quickly found a home for Anish Kapoor's crowd-pleasing "Void" (1991), which was sold to U.S. collectors for $758,000, while several Joan Mitchell works changed hands for high six figures. Our big question: Did Friedman Benda find a buyer for its massive Ai Weiwei orb? Indeed. We're not sure of the sale price, but the gallery reports that the work is now rolling its way into "a great collection."

Recently on UnBeige:

There will be no more secrets hidden behind I.M. Pei walls and tinted windows at MIT's famous Media Lab, as this past Friday marked the opening of the school's new building for the storied program. The new structure was designed by Pritzker-winning architect Fumihiko Maki and features wide-open, airy spaces full of floor-to-ceiling glass and, as follows, lots of natural light. A big departure from the building they'd been in, Pei's aforementioned Wiesner Building. And because this new structure has been in the works for the past twelve years, one could argue that this could be former Media Lab director John Maeda's final contribution to the program. Here's a bit of description:

Influences on the building's design included the artists Piet Mondrian and George Seurat, as well as the art of Japanese paper lanterns. The white, glass, and aluminum building includes touches of the primary colors red, blue, and yellow, which are often found in Mondrian's paintings.

The MIT Media Lab Complex design, which MIT had originally requested consist entirely of glass walls, had to be tempered to fit Cambridge energy requirements that restrict the use of glass construction in buildings. To accommodate the codes, Maki and his team integrated translucent aluminum screens over the building's many glass and solid walls.

Seventeen minutes. That's how long it took the tickets to sell out for Animal Collective and artist Danny Perez's collaborative performance piece at the Guggenheim late last week (we hope you were one of those on the phone queue after we told you to act fast a few days before they went on sale back in mid-February). While we weren't able to make it to the show, given our use of an old rotary phone and the fact that one of us lives in Chicago, the Wall Street Journal sent writer Kimberly Chou to file this report for their arts blog, Speakeasy. From Chou's description, which is wonderfully lengthy, it sounds like it merited that rush of ticket grabbers. Much less like a show and far more like a temporary exhibition, the even featured all sorts of miscellaneous bits and pieces of audio-visual projections, allowing those lucky few who were able to attend the event, part of the Guggenheim's 50th anniversary celebration, to wander and take it all in as they saw fit. Here's a section of Chou's description:

Advance press materials warned visitors not to think of "Transverse Temporal Gyrus" as an Animal Collective concert or art installation. Instead, the band played recorded music composed for the event, paired with Perez's accompanying visuals. The sounds and images were broadcast from different points throughout the Guggenheim's famous spiral structure, creating an immersive art-rock womb for guests to wander through. In the center of the rotunda's ground floor was the band. The members were elevated on stools and decked in dark cloaks and masks that made them into hoary, horned beasts, with each presiding over soft, boulder-like forms that contained glowing orbs. Costumed this way, with a giant mountain of the same plush material behind them and clear stalagmites piercing the floor in the foreground, the Animal Collective guys stood mostly immobile for the three-hour show -- a feat in itself, especially considering that they'd already performed the piece once in the afternoon. ("Motionless performances are the hardest," admitted Marina Abramovic, performance art legend, in a profile in this week's issue of the New Yorker.)