The Library of Congress announced the addition of twenty-five films to the National Film Registry today. Some of them, like “All the President’s Men” seem overdue, but others, like “Airplane!” are inspired and welcome. It was a big year for George Lucas, too; both “The Empire Strikes Back” and his legendary 1967 student film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB” were also added. Read the full press release.

In general I enjoy the holiday season, but I have a tepid relationship with Christmas music. That is, unless what’s playing is the phenomenal album “A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector.” This 1963 release features a dozen sterling tracks from a few of Spector’s then-current stable of artists: The Crystals, Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans, The Ronettes and Darlene Love, whose definitive performance of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is probably my favorite holiday song of all time. This is a wonderful, wonderful record.

Read a little bit more about this album over at Aquarium Drunkyard, or download the tracks from Amazon.com for a mere US$5.00. That’s a gift in and of itself. And have yourself a merry little Christmas, everyone.

Eye Magazine spotlights London design studio Big Active’s amusing response to the challenge of contemporary music packaging. Digital music formats have essentially destroyed the album cover, so for a release from Mark Ronson & the Business Intl, Big Active created a barrage of record covers embedded with the music via the capable but little-promoted iTunes LP format. The experience approximates flipping through Ronson’s record collection (which explains why the designs are cheekily reminiscent of the 1980s), a recreational activity that is becoming fetishized as quickly as it disappears.

Read more, including a link to an interview with Big Active, at Eye Magazine’s site.

The Spanish and Italian releases of Jean Luc-Godard’s 1963 film “Contempt” — an almost perversely gorgeous exploration of disaffection — featured an alternative and somewhat unofficial musical score by composer Piero Piccioni. Apparently, no currently available releases of the movie — whether authorized or bootlegged — feature this alternative score, so in many ways it’s a nearly forgotten footnote of cinematic history. Thankfully, the excellent film site Mubi has five pieces from the score that are available for listening over here. They’re delightfully evocative of the playfulness of the era, as well as of the underlying, vague sense of dread that the film touches on. Worth a listen.

“Worried that New York City is not spawning enough technology-based start-up companies with the potential to become big employers like Google, city officials are inviting universities around the world to create an engineering campus on city-owned land.”

Let’s hope this happens, and if it does, let’s hope the school just doesn’t turn into a feeder channel for the financial services industry.

An awesome, new(ish) blog examining the wardrobe details of the James Bond franchise in penetrating detail. The author’s sartorial knowledge is shockingly complete and edifying. For those who appreciate or are fascinated by the subtle semantics of men’s dress, every post is a pleasure to read.

For my birthday a few weeks ago I received this Tivoli Model One table radio as a gift from my mother. It’s basically a very simple, very solidly built AM/FM tuner. Here’s what came in the box: the radio itself and a power cable. Oh, and a brief manual that I didn’t even bother reading.

Set-up took about a minute: attach the cable to the back of the unit and then plug it into a wall and it was working. The tuning dial feels so substantial in its turning motion — incredibly precise, incredibly well-manufactured — that it has the feel of luxury. Not the flashy, superficial notion that passes for most luxury these days, which is really more about price tags than build quality. Rather this radio exudes a truly ‘high end’ sensibility that suggests enough thought and care have been invested in its design and engineering that the whole unit could last several decades.

I know that radio designers and engineers have almost a century of best practices and technological refinement at their backs when they sit down to create a product like the Model One. And it’s perhaps unrealistic to expect that today’s constantly changing networked technology products could work like this, could be so simple and solid. But it still made me wish that all electronic products could offer an out-of-the-box experience as satisfying as this. (Get yours at Amazon through this link and I get a little kickback.)

A rundown of (most of) the typefaces available on Apple’s devices, comparing what’s available on iPad versus iPhone. Looking at the full inventory like this, it’s surprising to me to see some of the fonts that Apple deliberately chose to include on the iPad. Zapfino, Copperplate, Bradley Hand and others strike me as running counter to the Apple design sensibility. See the full inventory here.

“Way back on September 13, 1931, The New York Times, founded in 1851, decided to celebrate its 80th anniversary by asking a few of the day’s visionaries about their predictions of 2011 — 80 years in their future. Those assembled were big names for 1931: physician and Mayo Clinic co-founder W. J. Mayo, famed industrialist Henry Ford, anatomist and anthropologist Arthur Keith, physicist and Nobel laureate Arthur Compton, chemist Willis R. Whitney, physicist and Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, physicist and chemist Michael Pupin, and sociologist William F. Ogburn.”

I’ve come across the work of this Italian editorial designer a few times, and each time I stop whatever I’m doing and marvel. His work for the Italian magazine Intelligence in Lifestyle is preternaturally precise, rich and bold.

Helpfully for those of us who would be students of his work, a trove of Franchi’s samples can be found over at his Flickr stream.