February 2014

Police using tear gas and water cannons at Gezi Park, Istanbul. Photograph by Alan Hilditch by Anna Feigenbaum Scrubbing away the white-wash of ‘less lethal’ riot control reveals a history littered with humanitarian disasters, weaponisation, inadequate testing, and corporate profiteering. What does a ‘public consultation’ on water cannon mean...

Topology is a term I heard many times when I was studying architecture, too often without questioning its implications for the world around us, and more immediately for our own bodies.

So long as discontent and unrest make themselves but dumbly felt within a limited social class, the powers of reaction may often succeed in suppressing such manifestations.

Sketched on your wall, “Three women wearing the same pair of breasts” does time like a caveman artist relic. The various faces above the breasts bear yet withhold their statements.

I would like to offer you today a beginning of a meditation on the word yes, on the gesture of affirmation. We should take great care not to conflate affirmation and saying yes – saying it once, twice, or many times over  – and in which language? All too...

The Lego Movie, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014 From The Fortnightly Review: SCENE: THE TORCH-LIT office-hewn-from-rock of Skepticus, the principal chamber of his retreat, high above the city. A long work table, strewn with papers, books, scrolls, pens, pencils, and quills; at its center, a laptop computer sits open. At...

Almost from the start, Miley could hardly have made it clearer that she was not hysterical – that this was not a mental breakdown but instead a rather virtuosic performance of just the sort of mental breakdown made popular by people like her pop predecessor and purported idol, Britney...

Living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia, the Kogi believe that the cosmos is shaped like an egg, and they build temples that replicate this egg-shaped multi-leveled cosmos. Kogi temples are circular buildings with walls of upright posts and capped by a thatched conical roof....

Do Help, along with Dazed & Confused, fill the gap left by The Face.

Image of Kiev via @TheFunambulist From The New York Review of Books: The students were the first to protest against the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych on the Maidan, the central square in Kiev, last November. These were the Ukrainians with the most to lose, the young people who...

From 3:AM: Not long ago, I set my copy of The New Yorker out on the curb with the recyclables. I thought, no, it goes with the regular trash. Because trash is something you don’t want to see again – resurface. So to The New Yorker goes the The...

The Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is currently undergoing a revival with a recent exhibition of her work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She has long evoked interest not only because of her distinctive style but also because of her eccentric personality, her dominant — very dominant...

by Elias Tezapsidis [ NOTE: Originally I intended for this piece to be a statement in regards to form. I remembered enjoying Exley’s book when I first read it, and was quick to identify myself as his fan; I thought a literal application of this title would be a...

Before my reading yesterday, I sat there and sat there and sat there (nervous, sitting through my nerves, the life of nerves, the work of nerves) waiting for my turn to read and thinking about how I now know there are things we can only say to each other,...

The Kogi survived despite brutal onslaughts of Spanish colonialism and Colombian nationalism. For more than five centuries, there were campaigns to enslave the Kogi and other indigenous peoples and annihilate their culture and religion.

In 1980, Lady Isobel Barnett was found guilty of stealing a can of tuna and a carton of cream and fined about £75. Barnett was a very public figure. For a decade or more, from the early nineteen-fifties, she had been a regular on the English version of “What’s...

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c.1558 From VQR: If my love for poetry could be said to have begun in childhood wonder, in the afternoons spent with my father, in the excitement of early school days, my need for poetry, my faith in it,...