All of them, in different ways, take extreme urban situations as their subject.

ECONOMIST: The absurdist art of a Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist

Superstorm Sandy illustrates another compelling reason to incorporate natural infrastructure into urban development: resilience to extreme weather events.

FORBES: Smart Communities will Build Green Infrastructure

Thanks to an extreme anti-urban bias and the abolition of rules governing the relative size of constituencies, the largest constituency has nine times more voters than the smallest.

WSJ: Philip Bowring: The Realignment of Malaysian Politics

Notes from the Shuttle, for instance, is named not for a common urban mode of transportation but for its more extreme NASA counterpart.

NPR: Peter Fedofsky: 'Maybe She Was Wrong'

Using data collected from soil samples, the research team ran an extreme scenario - where kudzu covered all non-urban and non-agricultural soils in the species' range by 2050 - through a "chemical transport" model.

BBC: Invasive plant 'increases ozone pollution'

Although reform is necessary if China is to achieve successful urban-rural integration and advance its development, it should be handled with extreme care by Chinese policymakers.

ECONOMIST: Letters