“When I start an artwork, I forget I’m in prison,” says Moath al-Alwi, presumably recorded from within Guantánamo Bay in a short documentary. Directed and produced by Dara Kell and Veena Rao for The New York Times Op-Docs series, the film zeroes in on al-Alwi’s elaborate ship
From Timothy Snyder again , this time on what lessons we can draw on to prevent America’s collapse into fascism . 4. Big business should support democracy. In the Germany of the 1930s, business leaders were not necessarily enthusiastic about Hitler as a person. But they
Historian and scholar Timothy Snyder, who wrote On Tyranny and this amazing piece about the fascism of Trump and the conservative movement, wrote about a crucial difference in how the media are covering Biden versus how they cover Trump . It should seem odd that media calls to
Co-curated by Teresita Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, this exhibition places two artistic practices in an intergenerational conversation.
The Forgotten Black Explorers Who Transformed Americans’ Understanding of the Wilderness . Esteban, York and James Beckwourth charted the American frontier between the 16th and 19th centuries. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Along the Seine in the thicket of Roumare Forest, an installation of thirteen striking sculptures celebrates France’s woodland heritage and ongoing preservation efforts. The handful of selected works, chosen from an open call that received more than 300 applications from 33
From Heather Cox Richardson, writing on the night of the debate , a reminder of just how bad Trump’s performance was, a shambolic spectacle that was met with shrugs because that’s what we expect of him: In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over
An interesting teaser trailer for F1 , the racing drama starring Brad Pitt — it’s like a 90-second music video. Joseph Kosinski is directing…he did Top Gun: Maverick, which makes me optimistic about this one. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Visit the rural villages of Doaba, in India’s Punjab state, and you’ll likely encounter enormous sculptures of airplanes, tanks, and soccer players perched atop homes. The regional custom began in the late 1970s with Indian citizens who had immigrated to other parts of the
Rebecca Solnit: Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race? I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing
Whoever the Democratic Candidate Is, Americans Have Already Lost. “If you take your eye off the ball of democracy for any length of time, no amount of history will save you. Americans have taken our eyes off the ball.”
Cut off from her family, Yuge carved ‘circular mantras’ into snow and sand to mark time with a personal ritual of longing - by Aeon Video Watch at Aeon
Image via Internet Archive Last month, MTV News’ web site went missing. Or at least almost all of it did, including an archive of stories going back to 1997. To some of us, and especially to those of us old enough to have grown up watching MTV on actual television, that won’t
Knowledge and technique used to be closely guarded secrets. Admission to the guild was reserved for a few, and crafts like typesetting, plumbing and medicine were off limits to most folks. One of the reasons for the explosion in productivity and innovation in the last century
There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. German has the word Backpfeifengesicht, which roughly means a face that is badly