March 6, 2020
Ordinary life was suspended during the epidemic. Confraternities, associations that brought laypeople together for charity work and socialising, could no longer hold meetings. Public sermons were forbidden. The city’s schools were closed. Taverns and inns were shut. Gambling dens and barber shops were closed, ball games forbidden.
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March 2, 2020
The virus seems well-turned to exploit the specific characteristic of the world we’ve created for ourselves - with our massive population tightly linked by air travel, exotic tourist excursions and just-in-time supply chains, and marked by brutal inequalities in health care and physical well-being.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 25, 2020
At its start, the internet was still relatively scarce, in the sense that we generally wanted more of it everywhere. iPhones were new; we were still excited about carrying portals to that utopia in our pockets and finding new ways to integrate two domains that were previously separate. Ten years ago, I could sit in a bar and wish that it better reflected the future I was experiencing.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 21, 2020
Brutal days, to be resisted, often demand brutality inkind. In such times, marked as they are by the fear anduncertainty that naturally metastasize out of truth’s debasement, there is but one bold act from which all other acts of dissent may precede. That is to tell — with utter, brutal frankness — the truth.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 17, 2020
Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe. I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it, caught in the shining jaws of a limestone bedding plane first formed on the floor of an ancient sea.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 13, 2020
There is the dream of an alternate aesthetic, of a world in which aestheticized experience worked only on things that were ordinary, local, small, repetitive, and recalcitrant, on things that really did happen to most of us in the everyday. This would imply a challenge to drama as we know it.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 11, 2020
I think of Keith Haring. (And someone named Ariel Allen.) I admire how he committed to every line — it looks like he never thought twice. I wondered what he would draw today, and it inspired me to create this piece.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 6, 2020
Does violence have a place in art? Whether it does, it has featured to a growing extent in the “actions,” or protest-performances, of Petr Pavlensky. The Russian-born provocateur first made a sensation of himself when, in 2012, he sewed his lips shut and stood in public protest of the jailing of members of Pussy Riot. (They were convicted of hooliganism for their punk demonstration, within the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, against the Russian Orthodox Church’s support of then-candidate Vladimir Putin.)
Read articleRead articleFebruary 3, 2020
As for circumstances. When mismanagement and corruption lead states into ruin; when the many are immiserated for the benefit of the luxuriant few; when the multitudes are treated not with basic dignity, but like swine at slaughter — first, a warning; then, with trepidation, a call to arms.
Read articleRead articleJanuary 31, 2020
Where the state and its affairs are so far beyond redemption, or where change is made impossible due to the state’s calcified limitations, that the last of these — what might signal revolution — is decided, the question of “how” invariably follows. Violence, in the form of warfare, may seem the natural answer. Yet, on occasion, solutions (nominally) barring violence have been known to achieve radical outcomes.
Read articleRead articleJanuary 31, 2020
... we’re going to take down your Fascist model of surveillance, social credit, and ideological control!
Read articleRead articleJanuary 29, 2020
Nothing in history is so constant as violence. Peering into the past, we are sure to find a host of evils perpetrated by humanity against its own kind. We are reminded daily of its persistence in the news, where it inevitably features in so many headlines and hot takes; and in our entertainment, which excites our fascination with its similitudes of violence both realistic and fantastic.
Read articleRead articleJanuary 17, 2020
Corporations — legal fictions that we ourselves created centuries ago — have whittled away the legal bounds that once constrained them. Without the imperative to act responsibly, on behalf of the wider public, they have run wild and reckless, looting their spoils and spitting in the face of justice. Less than a decade after Citizens United, they have more rights and freedoms, powers, and privileges than do we, the people.
Read articleRead articleJanuary 14, 2020
Fake news and post-truth yarns are muddling our minds and swaying elections . . . Algorithms, rather than serving as tools of our betterment, are slyly wielded to provoke our basest reactionary instincts . . . Ignorance paraded as wisdom, prejudice as justice, and schizoid fantasy as grounded reality . . . This is midnight in the century, and mental dysfunction is the new norm for just about every one of us.
Read articleRead articleJanuary 10, 2020
It describes itself as “a nonprofit, worldwide organization whose mission is to provide science that improves human health and well-being.” Since its foundation more than forty years ago (by a Coca-Cola executive), it has rosily convened “scientists from the public and private sectors to collaborate in a neutral forum on scientific topics of mutual interest.”
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