Infographics by Simone Trotti

What decades of magazine design have put together, it has taken only a few years of apps to rent asunder. As mainstream print publications awkwardly rework themselves for Web and tablet, a set of websites and apps has created an alternative model for consuming, saving and sharing media. They are social, they are publication agnostic, and more often than not, they treat magazines, newspapers, blogs and catalogues as a kit of parts to be disassembled at will. Your will. You choose your apps, your bookmarklets, your pins, and what you are doing is assembling your own perfect publication. You may not even realise it, but you are also picking a side. Are you a picture person or a word person? Are you Pinterest or Readability? Flipboard or Instapaper? Tumblr or Twitter?

In the first minute of the TLC summer show “Craft Wars,” the host Tori Spelling says the word “craft” and its variants over a dozen times. It’s the “ultimate crafting competition.” Competitors have “every crafting tool they could dream of.” “As an avid crafter myself, with my own crafting line….” The repetition seems unnecessary, given the show’s title and the beauty wall behind Spelling featuring the full spectrum of fabric, thread, tools, and notions. But after listening to Spelling say “craft” a few dozen more times, without substitution, I realized her writers weren’t brand-crazy. They were just stumped. There are no synonyms for a word that has lost its meaning.

What “craft” mostly means on “Craft Wars” is the act of making things cuter. Take this shopping cart full of sports equipment and make a cute bag. Take this shopping cart full of school supplies and make a cute playhouse. That these bags will never be used, that some of them are not even completed, that, really, a duffel bag has already achieved ideal sports-bag form, are not considerations, not when a sawed-off tennis racket can be inserted “for ventilation” and tennis balls strung to make a “more comfortable” carrying strap. And what could be more delightful than a playhouse roofed in composition-book covers, never mind its ability to withstand rain?

Since the moment I received my first press release on the “Barbie I Can Be… Architect Doll” (for short, “Architect Barbie”), launched at the American Institute of Architects National Convention last year, I’ve had a consistently negative response. What does Barbie have to do with architecture? I’ve wondered. Future female architects should be playing with tools for building, not dolls inappropriate for use as scale figures. Also: Why isn’t she wearing flats?

There are dinosaurs in Utah.

Not living, of course, but fossils remain in canyons and quarries, washes and 124-million-year-old formations. Twenty years ago, while excavating the spiky, armored anklyosaur later named Gastonia near Arches National Park, scientists found parts of the largest raptor ever discovered, and matched them to a collection of dinosaur fragments found in the 1970s near Moab. The result was a new 20-foot-long predator, a larger cousin of the Deinonychus, soon named Utahraptor. Two years ago, paleontologists found partial fossils of two new members of the Triceratops family in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. They named the larger one Utahceratops gettyi.

The exhibition “Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000,” at the Museum of Modern Art, includes child-friendly designs like the Chica modular plastic children’s chairs of 1971, by Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino, Giorgio DeCurso, and Paolo Loma

Give a child a truck, and what happens? She rolls it. He shakes it. They both start trying to take the wheels off. That was the experience of the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia, as a kindergarten teacher and as a parent. In the 1920s, his solution was to make toys that were designed, and even encouraged, to come apart: a crudely carved world of people with removable heads, birds with interchangeable beaks, and villages of choose-your-own density. For Torres-Garcia, the wheels-off impulse was destructive, but also creative. “Children don’t always use designed objects or spaces in the ways that are intended. That’s where it gets interesting,” says Juliet Kinchin, a curator in the Architecture & Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art. “There is a two-way conversation between children and designers.”

That conversation is the topic of “Century of the Child: Growing By Design, 1900-2000,” an exhibition curated by Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, a curatorial assistant in the department, that opens at the museum on July 29, and runs through November 5. It surveys 20th-century design for children at multiple scales, from kindergartens to highchairs, Unicef’s School-in-a-Box to Barbie’s Dream House, inflatable animals to Montessori manipulatives. The title is taken from the Swedish reformer Ellen Key’s book of the same name, which was published in 1900, but the curators had nothing less than a rewriting of modern design history in mind — from the Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld’s primary-colored 1923 wheelbarrow forward.

Over the weekend, Zeke Miller posted an item at BuzzFeed about the new Obama typeface. Rolled out during the president’s recent Midwest bus tour, the fonts were chosen to present the Obama 2012 campaign’s new slogan, “Betting On America.” This only counted as political news because “America” was set in what looks like Revolution Gothic Extra Bold, from MyFonts, described as follows:

The original font is inspired by retro propaganda posters and wallpainting in Cuba from the 60s to 80s. And the original PAG Revolucion is the most popular font from Prop-A-Ganda.

In Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé,” the playground forms a fertile backdrop for her pop-sociological observations about child-rearing, French vs. American style. The upper-middle-class Manhattan moms (she can tell by the price of their handbags) follow their kids around the gated toddler playground narrating their activities. The French moms sit on the edge of the sandbox and chat with other adults. The Brooklyn dads follow their children down the slide. The French moms sit on a bench and chat with other adults. Her theory, a bestselling one, is that French parenting consists of more non, more équilibre, and thus more time for adults to be adults.

In the late 1990s, when I was working in midtown, I became obsessed with a new sandwich shop on Madison Avenue called Sandbox. Everything at Sandbox was pre-made, presented in bright cases in tidy plastic packages that somehow made the food look fresh rather than stale. The neatly stacked ingredients gave these sandwiches the appeal of an everyday tea party, and made sloppy subs and schmeary bagels unappealing. It was lunch as an industrial design product, as if Dieter Rams were let loose in a deli. A story in the New York Daily News on this so-called phenomenon had the headline “The Layered Look Is Back.”

The lobby of Murray Moss’s new enterprise is a far cry from the white-on-white-on-white minimalist eponymous design emporium over which he presided, on Soho’s Greene Street in New York, for 18 years.

The walls are lined in creamy tile, the ceiling edged with gold paint, the elevator lined in marble-pattern laminate. Moss, dressed as always in a white shirt, black jacket, looks as out of place here as he would on the Garment District street outside, where neighbours include an office furniture mart, a maker of batik maxi-skirts, and a corner kiosk where a rainbow array of rubber iPhone covers sway in the breeze.

But take the elevator to the 10th floor and the view becomes more rarefied. Between a pair of gold-anodised window frames sits a frame worthy of Snow White’s Queen: Studio Job’s 2008 Bavaria marquetry mirror, rosewood doors inlaid with laser-cut barns, bluebirds, roosters and blossoms.

I recently read a fascinating interview on the National Geographic NewsWatch blog with David Hancocks, the dean of zoo design. I was very interested in what he had to say about the shape of zoos to come — I feel like there has been a revolution within my lifetime, from the depressing concrete cages of the Boston Zoo to the African savannahs of the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro — but more intrigued by his casual use of the term “charismatic megafauna” to describe the elephants, lions, tigers and bears that no zoo thinks it can live without.