Round-Up: Did art solve a murder? Plus a 2,600-year-old city

Archaeologists furiously excavate a millennia-old city before it becomes a copper mine, iPad tortoises are retired, a new doc looks at the history of African American photography and there is a drought, but it appears as though the rich have been unaffected. This and more in today’s Round-Up:

— Let’s start with water, as in our dwindling supply of it. Rich people are cutting their consumption from municipal systems … by trucking their water in. Yay, civic responsibility! (Gizmodo)

— Archaeologists are struggling to excavate a 2,600-year-old city in Afghanistan (with artifacts dating back to the time of Alexander the Great) before it is turned into a copper mine.

— The controversial Aspen Museum iPad tortoises have been retired and relocated to warmer climes. Wondering what the art industry will treat us to next: donkeys with Google Glass?

— Plus: Washington City Paper offers six ideas for keeping the Corcoran Gallery relevant in the wake of its absorption into the National Gallery and George Washington University.

— How a work of art by Robert Rauschenberg led to a break in a decades-old murder case.

— The Atlantic has a terrific photo essay about the urban oil fields of Los Angeles.

— Video gaming is no longer just a man’s world. (The macho tech writer quote in the last paragraph of this article makes me grit my teeth.)

— A history of African Americans in photography, from the days of slavery to the post-Michael Brown hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, is discussed in WNYC’s story about the new documentary, “Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.”

— Artist Dread Scott’s op-ed article on Ferguson, Mo., for the Walker Art Center’s blog offers an interesting examination of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied citizenship to African Americans.

— And a terrific essay by Teju Cole on blackness in America: “You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the street or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys.”

— Russia wants Bulgarians to stop vandalizing Soviet-era monuments. Which is unfortunate, because this is one of the best cases of art vandalism I’ve ever seen. (@sansuzie)

— The L.A. County Museum of Art is on Snapchat. Hopefully it’ll be transmitting all its art’s naughty bits.

— Born before 1985? You are part of the last generation in history to know life before the Internet.

— The architecture of dystopia: a look at how art and design projects made entirely out of materials such as wood and bamboo foreshadow a future when crude shelters are all we might be able to build.

— Speaking of dystopia, the new Atlantic Media/Siemens State of the City Poll finds that Americans who live in the suburbs are most satisfied with their quality of life.

— Plus, when good facades go bad: Writer Oliver Wainwright is no fan of that shotgun marriage between real estate developers and historic facades. (I have to confess to liking the bottom one.)

— Burning Man as corporate off-site for Silicon Valley brogrammers, complete with air-conditioned yurts and models flown in from New York.

— The New Yorker has a worthwhile profile of Cassandro (Saúl Armendáriz), the drag-queen Mexican wrestler who many Angelenos may recognize from his glamorous turns on Lucha VaVoom.

— On the act of social-media braggadocio (and #humblebragging) in two articles: The first, an essay in Ploughshares about “Writers You Want to Punch in the Face(book).” The second, a follow-up article about the me, me, me in social media, by Teddy Wayne in the New York Times.

— Finally, because we all need this: a digital animation of the Sunset Foot Clinic sign. Thank you, Internet. (Rhizome)