The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning . “The true Constitution is not a document. It’s more of a gut feeling. It is a shimmering legal gas that settles wherever conservatives need it most…”
Rebecca Solnit: What Is the United States of America Now? “The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked.” But also: “It is the country that gave the world jazz…”
Report from a cruise full of celebrity impersonators . “A woman sat a toddler down beside us, while another, larger toddler tugged at her capris. At this point, every child was starting to look like Wallace Shawn.”
Roberto José Andrade Franco | ESPN | June 30, 2026 | 5,652 words
The artist wanders along deer paths on Block Island, which sits a few miles off the coast of Rhode Island. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article
"A dispatch from the final Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where the drinks were good, and the nature documentaries were, for the most part, sad."
‘Society, in fact, is neighbourhoods’ – how Karl Hess transformed from a Republican speechwriter into a radical welder - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon
Artists share stories of grief and community after deadly earthquakes; plus, Mamdani’s budget for culture in NYC.
In the shattered aftermath of war, Sartre delivered a formidable lecture on freedom and meaning. Its urgency remains - by Skye C Cleary Read on Aeon
Making stuff up is harder, stranger, and occasionally more dangerous than it looks. Seven stories that explore the world of constructed languages.
It’s difficult to ride a bicycle in the pitch darkness. We need to see where we’re going to avoid obstacles. And it’s hard to maintain our balance. When we choose to avoid the conversations that make us uncomfortable, we’re pedaling in the dark. Talk about it. Turn on the lights.
Mortimer J. Adler rose to cultural prominence in the mid-twentieth-century United States, not that a figure like him could have done so in any other place or time. A haphazard professional and intellectual path involving copy-boy work at the New York Sun, night school, and an
Facing a humanitarian crisis, everyday citizens have become rescue workers, and tight-knit art communities are creating networks of support.
Several ancient sculptures and vessels acquired between 1971 and 2001 were among the objects extracted from The Met's collection this June.
Erling Haaland “brings the intensity of a raiding party to the sport” . And: “Haaland can call to mind a shark circling dark waters.”
This week, we honor a German artist who plumbed the depths of geometry, a Venezuelan painter, and a Korean museum director and printmaker.
Marc Kreisel’s secret art practice, Gwyneth Bulawsky’s queer and trans landscapes, Barbara Carrasco’s lifelong muralism, and more.
This essay is adapted from Traversal. She is looking at the staff lines of a strange symphony in blue, her cautious disbelief punctured by a burst of delirious wonderment. Brushes and tubes of paint are scattered about her — paint she has spent years mixing into the perfect
My Family Has Been Here Since 1621. That Is Not What Makes Me American. “We are a nation of immigrants that has watched as immigrants arrive, assimilate and begin pulling the ladder up behind them.”
The overall city budget also establishes a "Cultural Stability Fund" for struggling arts organizations.
There’s been so much crazy to pay attention to over the past few weeks that I missed this: Midjourney, the AI image-maker that you access through Discord, is making a medical imaging machine . “It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light…”
A graphic of a floppy disk hamburger was created on an early Amiga computer, photographed, and then deleted (more specifically, it couldn’t be saved). Stuart Brown set out to recreate this image as accurately as possible, including colors, dimensions, etc. This is deliciously
I love the aesthetic of Fresco , a video game where you play as a character embedded into Egyptian wall paintings. In many ways, these wall paintings are ancient precursors to side-scrolling games.
For the latest episode of Howtown , Adam Cole and Joss Fong look at wildfires and how investigators go about determining and proving how they start. The backdrop of video is the investigation into the Palisades Fire and the related arson trial that just concluded. What started
"Five years after Anthony Broadwater was belatedly cleared for the sexual assault of Alice Sebold, the questions of how he came to be wrongly convicted and how one or more serial rapists operated for years with little consequence have only deepened."
"Through hosting two decades of Top Chef , writing four books, and opening restaurants across the country, the celebrity chef never stopped showing up to cook in the kitchen of Craft, his pioneering New York restaurant. Until he decided to close it."
The Seoul-based artist's lush paintings have an aura of wistfulness and quietude. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Guimi You’s Atmospheric Oil
You know sometimes you learn some ancient lore and suddenly some contemporary pop culture thing snaps into place? Anyway, I found out how Isadora Duncan died and now I better understand the “no capes” thing in The Incredibles .