On this day commemorating incomplete emancipation, I offer you this unfinished blogpost in the form of three unanswerable questions: How many Republican sheep does it take to maintain Trump’s regime? How many armed militia statue-protectors does it take to maintain settler colonialism? How many commercial prisons does it take to maintain racist injustice? This blogpost […]
While in the cradle, every parent, grandparent and god-fearing aunt wants the best for the new baby, hoping to keep the Evil Eye at bay. Over the years, their prayers for safety turn into dreams of success as the child grows and starts on the path through school to college. Now, bursting with pride at […]
According to a 2001 House of Representatives committee report, the car above (sic) was “wrecked and abandoned by undocumented aliens.” The report focuses on immigration’s impacts on the environment and infrastructure but does not account for the effects of the drug trade. On June 18, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” This […]
While waiting at the Dubai International Airport after three whirlwind days at the opening of Sharjah Biennial 14 (hereafter SB14), I found myself idly looking back over my Instagram posts from the exhibition. Even though I had taken hundreds of photographs, videos and audio recordings of my experience at the exhibition, I had only shared […]
Last episode I left you with Cornel West. He was speaking about the blues as part of the exhibition Blues for Smoke, which was on show here in Columbus at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2013 at the same time as Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai, with its concluding poetic call for the […]
In our current state of governmental chaos, I hark back to a surprisingly overlooked statement by President Trump’s White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson. After completing his medical assessment of Trump, Jackson stated, and I paraphrase, that Trump was highly unusual in that each day he begins anew, unfettered by memory or attention to consequences […]
As I sit here on the Oval of the Ohio State campus after a day of teaching, I am thinking about a moment in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. During his visit to the Underworld, Aeneas hears of the future heroes of Rome from the shade of his father Anchises. He also learns of the […]
Intellection is of two kinds: one is innate and the other through listening. The innate is like the earth, and the one through listening is like the seed and water: innate intellection does not proceed by itself unless intellection through listening comes to it to rouse it from its sleep, free it from its fetters, […]
Paris-based Vier5 are one of the four design studios participating with documenta 14 (the four others are Ludovic Balland, Laurenz Brunner & Julia Born, and Mevis & van Deursen). Their work could be found across Athens, from the iconic floor-text marble slabs to the Map Booklet insert. My first encounter with their distinctive font was on […]
