The Eiffel Tower was a scandal and the subject of much revulsion upon its unveiling in Paris in 1889. In a short video for Frieze magazine, the architect and writer Douglas Murphy compares and contrasts the tower with Anish Kapoor’s contribution to the 2012 Olympic Village in East London, a large and loping structure — think the Seattle Space Needle devoured by a kudzu vine of K’Nex — called the ArcelorMittal Orbit. Murphy, to put it mildly, is skeptical about the Orbit’s cultural durability. “Fireworks art,” he calls it. Not a compliment.

Over at Cornucopia, a beautiful English-language magazine that focusses on Turkish culture, writer Sule Bilgin surveys Istanbul’s “too often overlooked” green spaces, among them Yildiz Park, Fenerbahce Park, and Nezahat Gokyigit Botanical Garden. Also: Don’t miss EthnoTraveler contributor Danley Shackelford’s pictures of the Istanbul Tulip Festival.

Guardian writer Kevin Rushby goes hunting for caiman, a stealthy, alligator-like reptile, along the banks of Nicaragua’s San Juan River. “The potential for wildlife and eco-tourism in this, the largest country in Central America, remains huge,” says Rushby.

Paneled and opaquely poetic, with the fluid feel of an underwater mosaic, the Algerian artist Abdullah Benanteur’s The Triumph is one of the jewels in the collection of the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar.

Carlos Fuentes, a man of letters if ever there was one, died today in Mexico City at the age of 83. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2011, Fuentes talked about, among other things, the headless narrator of his last novel, his differences with his “great friend” Gabriel Garcia Marquez over Fidel Castro, and the ascension of Brazil to the helm of Latin America.

If camel-jumping were an Olympic sport, Yemen would win gold. New York Times photographer Ed Ou recently traveled to one of the poorest parts of the country to photograph the sport, which dates back thousands of years.