Daniel Burston: 'In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts'
If Americans re-elect Trump, he will shatter what little is left of American democracy, rendering the whole system of governance completely dysfunctional or irrelevant, and all American citizens ever more vulnerable to corruption and manipulation by anti-democratic powers abroad, imperiling the lives of virtually everyone on this planet in the not too distant future.
Danusha Laméris: Omens
I wish I could make sense
of the child’s empty bed,
the bullet hole though my brother’s heart.
Video: The Watchmaker
Finding chaos and precision in all things – a philosophy of watchmaking.
Olga Tokarczuk: The Tender Narrator (Nobel Lecture)
I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it.
Doug Anderson: One More Morning
Let me say that love will not
let me alone. If it has let you alone, go back
and find it where you hid it under a scrim
of scar-tissue.
Video — Falling Lessons: Erasure One, a poem by Beth Copeland
. Director Anh Vu, working with the organization Motionpoems, created this video of Beth Copeland’s poem which interweaves images of the natural world with books, papers and other evidence of … Continue reading
Margot Mifflin: Ink Sessions
When a tattoo marks a personal transformation, or the reclaiming of an abused body, the tattoo artist becomes a healer.
Michael Simms: Re-reading Christina Rossetti's 'In an Artist's Studio'
The value of Rossetti’s poem lies in both the expert use of the Petrarchan sonnet, a particularly challenging form to master in English, and in the poet’s complex stance on the role of art in creating and re-enforcing images of women.
Charlotte Turner Smith: Sonnet Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex
She saw herself as a poet first and foremost, poetry at that period being considered the most exalted form of literature. Scholars now credit her with transforming the sonnet into an expression of woeful sentiment. Although an important writer and poet, Smith had a difficult family life and died in poverty, largely forgotten.
Mandy Smithberger: How The Military-Industrial Complex Gets Away With Murder in Contract After Contract
Washington has already spent at least $2 trillion on its war in Afghanistan alone, and the corruption, waste, and failure associated with those expenditures was (or at least should have been) mindboggling.
Jose Padua: Prelude to a Highly Personal Confabulation of Zen and the Art of War
how I could one day live in New York City
with half my mind in a flame-like state
of absolute intensity
Nick Engelfried: How Generation Z is leading the climate movement
From the rise of organizations like Zero Hour to Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future, the youth climate movement is only just getting started.
S. B. Merrow: A Becoming Place
A pop-up wilderness west of the Piedmont,
folded land of sudden impediments
scored by creeks and runs
Emma Parker: This young woman created 784 paintings while hiding from the Nazis
Together these sequential images tell a family history, focussing on a central character called Charlotte Kann, a semi-autobiographical version of Salomon herself. They document Charlotte’s development as an artist, her struggles against madness and her first love affair, all painted against a backdrop of increasingly violent Nazi rule.
Marco North: After the Circus Left Town
There is nothing like the righteous anger of a true New Yorker.
