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In Iceland the politicians promised to deliver 30 terrawatt hours of energy in an environmentally sustainable manner. So everyone immediately thinks, oh, that is scientific, rational and probably true.

Sirius B by Tim Morton The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos). In their book on life sciences, Medawar...

From Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Production I.G, 2002 From SKOR: Any work, of art, of writing, in any media, if it is in the least bit interesting, becomes at some point an adventure. Usually, the adventure happens in the making, before the work is finished. “The...

Two Books, Abelardo Morell, 1994 From The Atlantic: When I was young I wanted to write a challenging book of ideas. I had in mind the kind of “deep” book that public intellectuals of the 1950s and ’60s wrote: The Lonely Crowd, The One-Dimensional Man, The End of Ideology. Intellectuals...

Soviet invasion of Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1968 by James Warner A recurring idea in the work of Milan Kundera is that the spirit of totalitarianism lives on in our mass media. In a world without privacy, will we all be perpetually on trial? In his 1994 essay “Blacklists, or Divertimento...

It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing | by Kenneth Goldsmith

The Chronicle Review

In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."...

Bike messenger in New York City by Jeffrey L. Kidder Bike messengers work in the traffic-snarled business districts of major cities. Much of what they deliver is time-sensitive: A legal document signed at 11:45 uptown needing to be filed at a downtown courthouse by noon or an advertising proof...

Oppede, Luberon, France. Photograph by M Disdero  From The Believer: In March 2010, Barry Duncan, master palindromist, was locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet. He was totally absorbed in the completion of a commissioned piece. “It’s draining me of every bit of energy I have,” he explained...

Hugh Dancy as Mortimer Granville and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Charlotte Dalrymple in Hysteria, Informant Media, 2011 From The New Yorker: If the popular perception remains that Victorians were hopelessly mired in repression and prudery, Lutz seeks to capture the shuddering underbelly of Victorian society—what Steven Marcus’s classic 1974 study, “The...

Untitled 1 (At Botany Bay), Boat-People.org, 2006. Image courtesy of the artists.  by Anne McNevin The image above, which fronts the cover of Contesting Citizenship, is an intervention into the politics of what it means to belong in a country like Australia today.  The artist collective responsible for the image have...

Photograph by Francesc Torres, from Memory Remains: 9/11 Artefacts at Hangar 17   From London Review of Books: Long resident in New York, the Catalan artist Francesc Torres was two blocks from the WTC when the first jet struck the north tower, and he witnessed the collapse of both buildings...

Women’s First March Against Porn, Broadway and Columbus, 1977, photograph from San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library by Carolyn Bronstein Beginning in the mid-1970s, many American feminists viewed pornography (and its presumed causal relationship to violence against women) as the single greatest threat to female autonomy.  Ideological changes...