Roundup: Wonder Woman, LaBeouf; plus Giuliani, video game defender

A certain cross-dressing, former New York City mayor defends a video game company, looters are busted at the Four Corners, images of the drought and a history of Wonder Woman. Plus, Sherlock wallpapers and digitally rendered museums. There is some interesting stuff going on in the annals of culture. Here is the Roundup:

— Let’s begin with the hard stuff: “For potential recruits raised in front of Xbox consoles, the Islamic State says it’s making its own video game and released a trailer modeled after the violent and vice-filled ‘Grand Theft Auto.’” Lorraine Ali on the very savvy ways that the Islamic State is using social media.

— New money laundering regulations have led to a drop in gallery sales in Mexico.

— The last outfits of El Salvador’s disappeared. A harrowing photo essay by Fred Ramos.

— At Columbia University, a mattress becomes a symbol of art, sexual violence and political protest.

— A riveting story (with some very seductive animations) about a federal sting that busted looters in the Four Corners area of Utah. An interesting look at who pays the price for purloined artifacts. (Hint: it’s not always the big-time collectors.)

— “The STEM ‘bundle’ is suitable for building a Vulcan civilization, but misses wonderful irrationalities inherent to living life as a human being.” Creativity expert Justin Brady says that the current American obsession with STEM education focused on math and science is all good, but if this country wants to create innovators, schools need to teach the arts.

— A stirring photo essay by Matt Black on the toll the drought is taking on the agricultural communities of the Central Valley. This related video is also pretty excellent.

— Which brings us to other historic images capturing a difficult moment in American history: Yale has mapped Library of Congress photos from the Great Depression.

— Now, on to art and money: Oscar Murillo, an artist mainly known for his soaring auction prices, frustrated a crowd of tony collectors at a garden party in Brazil when he skewered that country’s labor and class issues in a work of art and a speech.

— And New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz’s gives the phenomenon of big expensive art topped by lots of word salad a critical spanking.

— But Saltz is totally into Richard Prince’s macho/naughty Instagram paintings, in which the notorious appropriation artist takes other people’s Instagram images and makes them into very large inkjets — a phenomenon otherwise known as Richard Prince 2.0. To make the circle complete, I made an Instagram of Jerry Saltz’s review of Richard Prince’s Instagram painting. Now everyone can go home.

— Actor Shia LaBeouf will run around the Stedelijk Museum as a work of performance art he’s doing in collaboration with artists Luke Turner and Nastja Säde Rönkkö. If the art world is running anything, it’s out of ideas.

— For stuff that’s think-y, yet approachable: in the video “What is a city?” a pair of physicists attempt to answer the question in some really interesting ways. In the process, it explains why people in New York walk so fast...

— Plus, Rudy Giuliani, video game defender. (You read that right.)

— The British Museum will be digitally re-created in the block-building game Minecraft.

— In a sort of related story, the art of the Pokémon Tournament.

— The New Yorker has a striking examination of Wonder Woman, her connection to feminism, Margaret Sanger and a highly unorthodox former Harvard psychologist. Plus: the inspiration for her bracelets, explained! Seriously, this is a must-read.

— Since we seem to be on the subject of women … John Oliver gives the Miss America pageant a righteous dismembering.

— Just because: design writer Alexandra Lange has a bit about the wallpapers in “Sherlock.”

— And finally, your moment of L.A. time lapse.

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