Reading

Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 02:46

‘The streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theatre and a battleground,’ reads the opening card of Helen Levitt’s In The Street. At the Barbican’s Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle, Levitt’s documentary, a loose assembly of footage from the streets of 1935 East Harlem, features alongside Alice Neel’s portraits […]

Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 02:30
He’s all at sixes and sevens… The Washington Post reports: Tucker Carlson — who was fired by Fox News last week at the height of his popularity and influence in right-wing punditry — has aspirations of moving into a larger role that doesn’t limit him to a single medium, according to people familiar with his thinking. And he is willing to walk away from some of the millions that Fox is contractually obligated to pay him, if that would give him the flexibility to have a prominent voice in the 2024 election cycle. Most ambitiously, Carlson wants to moderate his own GOP candidate forum, outside of the usual strictures of the Republican National Committee debate system. The idea, which he has discussed with Donald Trump, the front-runner for the party nomination, would test his vaunted sway over conservative politics. And it would take a jab at his former employer — Fox is hosting the first official primary debate, which Trump has threatened not to attend — if he can manage to make his grandest plan happen.
Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:30
Is it open season again so soon? “Road rage incidents are on the rise nationally and right here in San Diego, according to the California Highway Patrol,” reports NBC 7 San Diego: “Somebody who is driving aggressively is driving in and out of traffic, slamming on brakes, making unsafe lane changes, following too closely, that type of stuff,” CHP Sgt. Brian Pennings said. “It escalates into offending or upsetting another driver.” Offending someone else isn’t always intentional, but once it happens, road rage is a common response. This can and has escalated into the road rager threatening gun violence. In recent months, the San Diego City Attorney has secured five road-rage-related gun violence restraining orders for alleged road rage drivers. These civil orders stop someone from buying, possessing or using a gun and can stay in effect for up to five years. Sgt. Pennings has seen his share of road rage incidents, including one that turned deadly for a driver at a stop light. “He looked over and there was a driver of the vehicle who was a female,” Pennings remembered. “She looked over at him, smiled, and he smiled back.
Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:00
Donatello was driven to devise original solutions by the success of the older Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose mastery of linear perspective in relief sculpture could never be surpassed. But there can be little doubt that Donatello also came increasingly to relish angular collisions of form, rough finishes, ragged edges and natural disorder to a degree never previously found in sculpture.
Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:00
There was something perverse about Israel’s choice of Asunción as a destination for dispossessed Palestinians. Alfredo Stroessner had been running Paraguay as a military dictatorship for fifteen years when the transfers began. It was also where Nazi war criminals – Josef Mengele is the most famous – had gone to hide. More interesting for Palestinians is the under-reported legacy of indigenous resistance in the country.
Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:00
Is there​ a thread we can trace back through the post-independence era that might help us arrive at an explanation for what is happening in Khartoum now? There’s no doubt that successive experiments in modernity were stifled by crony capitalism, insider dealing, firesale bargains for the well-connected, a tangle of illicit trafficking and contrivances against years of sanctions, imposed on Washington’s insistence.
Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:00
Europeans were eager for Native Americans to tell them the location of precious metals and the source of beaver pelts. But less practical Indigenous knowledge needed either to be assimilated into the existing intellectual scheme of the world or placed outside it as a monstrous anomaly. Like the jumbled artefacts in Renaissance Wunderkammern, Indigenous travellers to Europe were made into spectacles: ethnographic specimens and sensational sideshows.
Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:00
One​ could, broadly speaking, describe the history of Western cosmological thinking in terms of three vocabularies: classical, Christian and scientific. Zoom out, and the three appear chronologically sequential. Zoom in and the picture is messier and more complicated, with areas of overlap, syncretism and accommodation, latent tensions and open conflicts.
Created
Fri, 05/05/2023 - 00:00
What’s so impressive about Anaximander is that he was willing to ‘redesign the universe’ – to hypothesise an extra hemisphere of reality – on the basis of evidence that would have been easy to explain away. It’s less the discovery itself than the intellectual courage that Carlo Rovelli admires: such radical questioning, he says, is the essence of science.