Collections & Recollections

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A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird

Once you learn what the "uni-context" is, you won't stop seeing it everywhere

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Manifest Man

“At Manifest, though, there is a certain existential loneliness, a specifically sexual strain of angst, that did not lift once in the three

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Why does Odysseus have a Boston accent?

The American accents in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey have a lot to tell us about power.

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The Idea That Reshaped Identity Politics Has a Complicated Backstory

Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us the terms “intersectionality” and “critical race theory.” Her new memoir shows that she isn’t done fighting over w

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How Middle Management Made the Modern World

Late nineteenth-century American machine shop foreman Frederick Winslow Taylor had a problem: his friends didn’t like him. Rather like Samue

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Why Japanese companies do so many different things

The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations

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On the Superiority of Latin American Literature

Earlier this week, Andras Kisery responded to a note by Naomi Kanakia about W.G.

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Want to Organize the Working Class? Learn Spanish.

Millions of workers in the United States are Spanish speakers. Socialists who can’t talk to them can’t organize them.

Spanish speakers, then, are much more likely to understand, even if only on an unconscious level, that their belonging in a society is directly related to the labor they conduct for it. They are also more likely to have some memory — either through family members or their own experiences — of more radical approaches to labor struggle in Latin America than what has existed in the United States for the last half century. In short, there is huge political potential in this population, not just for how we can organize them but how their struggle can organize our own. Yet it’s just sitting there, largely untapped.

[grupaok]

Julian Myers's essay on the messy demise of California College of the Arts appears in the new issue of October, as part of its series Art Communities at Risk. The drawing here is by Metel Musles (misspelled on purpose). If you have access to JSTOR, please download it here. (This matters for bean-counting purposes, we reckon.) For anyone that doesn't have access, we're sharing it here.

Anyone that cares about art schools should read and share.

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Zhao Gao was a man who was hungry for power. After declaring Huhai Qin Er Shi the second emperor of the Qin Dynasty, he decided to control the entire government. The man brought a deer to a meeting. He showed that deer to the emperor and the officials, and said it was a great horse. The emperor, who regarded Zhao Gao as a teacher and therefore trusted him completely, thought it was a horse, and many officials thought so too. Some were afraid of Zhao Gao, but seeing that Qin Er Shi also regarded it as a horse, said nothing. Others agreed to its being a horse. Zhao Gao murdered the officials who remained silent or called it a deer. Zhao Gao later killed Li Si with the method of execution that Li Si invented himself. Then Zhao Gao killed Qin Er Shi and declared Ziying emperor when Liu Bang arrived at the capital. When Xiang Yu arrived, Ziying killed Zhao Gao and surrendered, thus ending the reign of the Yings as well as Zhao's rule. In its traditional and modern usage, the idiom 指鹿為馬 is widely used to describe a situation where a person falsely identifies a situation in order to deceive others or saying the opposite of the truth to justify an action. This is an example sentence: 如果一個污敗之人講解自己的財富和支出為老老實實，通過咬牙困難以賺來的, 有多少人會不同意; 有多少人會控訴這為指鹿為馬之虚話? Which translates to: If a corrupted individual tries to explain his riches and expenditures as the result of honest and gruelling difficulties, how many would disagree; how many people would call his words a deception of "calling a deer a horse"?

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American Flag Blue, also known as Japanese Stop Light Blue.

[thephotoregistry]

Matthieu Litt

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Version's of Constantin Brancusi's sculpture 'Princess X', made after the vanity of Princess Marie Bonaparte, whom he detested

1 - 'Princess X', marble, limestone, 1909-1916, Sheldon Museum of Art, Nebraska

2 - 'Princess X', polished bronze, limestone, 1915-1916, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950

3 - 'Princess X', polished bronze, limestone, Pompidou, donation Brancusi Estate, 1957

4 - 'Princess X', plaster, 1915-1916, Pompidou, donation Brancusi Estate, 1957

5 - 'Princess X', patinated plaster, 1915-1916, Pompidou, donation Brancusi Estate, 1957

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Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

“It's making me dumber for sure.”

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Twin brothers wipe 96 gov't databases minutes after being fired

A case study in why credentials are revoked before firings.

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I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI

For screenwriters like me—and job seekers all over—AI gig work is the new waiting tables. In eight months, I’ve done 20 of these soul-crushi

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Takashi Homma on His Photobook Philosophy

Since the 1990s, Homma has chronicled the vagaries of fashion and youth culture, suburban life, and radioactive mushrooms, amassing more tha