The Center for Investigative Reporting’s crack journalist, Mark Shapiro, is blogging from the climate change summit in Copenhagen. Follow him on their Muckraker blog. Check out Carbon Watch their partnership with Frontline/World. Here is hoping all those world leaders and climate experts make some real progress, set meaningful goals and do the hard, right thing.

I picked up these pins 20 years ago at the Berlin Wall while travelling around Europe with some friends. This week’s anniversary prompted me to dig them up. Well, it looks to me like the pins are Czech, but what the hell they’re still beautiful, no? I was there during a period where there were some rapid changes happening – for example, a day pass to go into East Germany was not hard to get. But we were still stunned, a week later, hanging out in the Netherlands to learn that the the wall was coming down.

It will likely take months for us to fully process last week’s PopTech 2009: America Reimagined conference. Fed by the notion of America itself as a great big idea, this year’s lot of speakers and participants commenced to hammering away at America’s, and the world’s massive challenges. Pictured here, just a small slice of a single day at the conference are, Alec Ross / senior adviser on innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Logan Richardson / Saxophonist, George Church / geneticist and initiator of the Human Genome and Personal Genome Projects and Marije Vogelzang / designer of eating.

Hey look, we designed this year’s conference identity for the PopTech conference. This’ll be our fourth year attending and it is still hard to describe how mind-expanding the experience is. We always leave invigorated, challenged, connected and with our heads swirling. We are continually amazed how it informs our work and ever grateful to the staff at PopTech who are amazing, generous, fierce and so much fun to work with.

This year’s theme is America Reimagined and among the many speakers are Katy Payne, an authority on the language of elephants, Nicholas Feltron, designer and personal informatician, and food activist Michael Pollan.

There may still be some tickets – you really should go!

Guster’s Lost and Gone Forever is 10 years old and the fellas will be pantomiming the whole damn thing on tour this summer. Designing that package was great fun and if you have a moment, take a look at the work of Philip Jones Griffiths, the gentleman and genius Magnum photographer who took the original photo of a boy hurling rock onto a piano.

Did I say pantomiming?