Disability, shame, and the hidden violence of a culture that equates productivity with value
I sometimes think disabled people are forced into a more honest relationship with reality than the culture around us. We cannot endlessly pretend our bodies are machines. We cannot always override pain through discipline and positive thinking. We are confronted, over and over again, with the fact that human beings are fragile.
Maybe this is part of why disability makes people uncomfortable. We interrupt the fantasy capitalism sells us: that worth can be earned and optimized through enough effort.
The next decade is unlikely to collapse the university system. But it will bring a lot of change to higher education.
If the university is no longer just the place you go to get a degree that gets you on a job, what is it? As far as I can tell after my inquiries during the past six weeks, almost no one has a particularly good answer to that question.
How about not having to live in a stupid society riddled with fascism and fucking measles.
Through the use of monumental relics, commemorative infrastructures, and architectural interventions, Zuzanna Czebatul's installations exami
Well, what does it mean for an artist to join up with a brand or be commissioned by a state? Infiltration works both ways. If the Trojan Horse is a useful metaphor, then brands probably assume they’re smuggling visibility and relevance into culture — while artists are quietly smuggling critique, ambiguity, and their own agendas back into the brand. Ideally, everyone leaves slightly contaminated.
I don't know that this is ideal but I like this idea of contamination.
"Once she had decided to leave, it was as if she could have left all along. In purgatorial time, like insurrectionary time, the present is a mirage of punishment hiding an open door."
Don't read anything about this film before watching it. All you need to know is that sirat refers to an Islamic concept of a bridge over hell, one that is a hair's width. Only the righteous can cross this bridge in order to reach paradise.
All of us are increasingly aware of how institutions measure artistic success, which enforces precisely the kind of labor system many of us initially went into art to escape...
The value of the curator now depends not on the curator themselves, but on holding a position within the corporate structure of the mega-museum. First, the artist took a step back, then the curator.
"I think there is a temptation to leave room for plausible deniability when you write, to protect yourself, but when I did that I found I wasn’t really saying anything."
Canada is perhaps the worst hit. The median waiting time for specialist treatment was 29 weeks in 2025, more than a third higher than the 2019 baseline, according to the Fraser Institute, a think-tank in Vancouver. That is the second-worst result since the survey began in 1993; the record of 30 weeks was set in 2024.
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Experts differ on the reasons why hospitals, as big, complex systems, have never fully recovered. One explanation lies in the hospital workforce. About half of the growth last year in the operating expenses of American hospitals came from inputs such as labour costs, which grew by 5.6% in nominal terms. Pandemic-era stresses increased churn as doctors and nurses resigned, or retired early. Those who stayed have reduced their “discretionary effort”, voluntary overtime work that helped frail health-care systems surge in peak periods. Burnout remains high, says Dr Margot Burnell of the Canadian Medical Association.
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... patients are sicker now. Long waits for treatment have made patients’ conditions more complex. Some diseases, such as cancers, stayed undiagnosed for longer because people avoided hospitals and clinics during the pandemic. (In America this effect was compounded by a rising avoidance of treatment due to expense.) In addition, populations are older than they were a few years ago. All this has seen chronic conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and liver disease rise as a share of hospital workloads. Death rates, not adjusted for age, are higher than before the pandemic.
Just putting it out there that fundraising powerhouses (unis and hospitals with multiple $5M+ donors) abandoned galas so, so long ago. Smaller orgs have since followed suit. This is because galas and events in general are well understood by professionals to be one of the most inefficient ways to raise funds. Yes, some orgs still cling to the splashy gala - that doesn't mean they're defensible and it's no accident that it's almost always going to be an arts org doing it lol.
