Durbin compares Hujar to Diane Arbus, a guest lecturer in Avedon’s master class: “If Arbus’s most recognizable portraits capture the unsettled and even deranged outskirts of American life … often in nagging isolation, then Peter would strive for a more understanding portraiture.” Arbus tends to treat her subjects as specimens, while Hujar sees his as […]
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Transcription pokes holes in this view. Its narrator (a writer, in his forties, lives in New York, went to Brown, etc.) is the obvious stand-in for Lerner, but it’s Thomas who most resembles Lerner’s previous fiction. We are told that Thomas talks in “sudden changes of scale, rapid juxtapositions of images and registers”—an apt description […]
Read MoreI mentioned to Simpson, the curator, the show’s somewhat numinous and supernatural motifs. He said it wasn’t surprising that it would feel haunted. “This is all about death,” he replied, listing the dead: soldiers, political institutions, slavery, the Confederacy, Black teenagers. “It’s never surprising when the religious or the metaphysical enters into the equation,” he […]
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All my assigned readings are about epiphanies. I send myself and my writing students on walks, telling them to track one color, then “write the poem that follows.” I collect green: a gardening hose, Rutland Road, an Astroturf lawn in Ditmas Park. I return to this lawn at night to greet the lawn ornaments; a […]
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She leads him down between walls of water.The pattern of their steps, sooner or later, will makethe shape of a hare. This might take the rest of his life. Her song is of falling water, of bare night. Saltwife,she leads him to where light breaks across the flood.Their other selves are here, shaped and shed […]
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There is an ideal recent precedent for such a case: Last year, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by the Philippine government and transferred to The Hague. Duterte had publicly bragged about personally killing drug-trafficking suspects as mayor of Davao City and overseeing other extrajudicial killings during his term as president in the 2010s. […]
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In Australia, the Millennium Drought began in the mid-1990s and then got worse, particularly in the Murray-Darling River Basin, which holds Lake Alexandrina (pictured in 2008). “There were boats lying everywhere on their sides,” recalled Mike Young, an economist and water policy expert at the University of Adelaide. Photograph by Amy Toensing Other issues have […]
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Unrestrained, unaccountable political violence became a recurring theme of U.S.-backed paramilitary operations. “We see way higher rates of human rights violations in conflicts [involving paramilitary units], and in particular, we have higher rates of violations that are what we call ‘agent-centric violations,’” Erica De Bruin, associate professor of government at Hamilton College, who researches the […]
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Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation by Elliot Williams Buy on Bookshop Penguin Press, 384 pp., $32.00 Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage by Heather Ann Thompson Buy on Bookshop Pantheon, […]
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Infantino’s power is dependent on that money. “The money of FIFA is your money,” he told the organization’s delegates back in 2016. He distributes FIFA’s revenues to its 211 delegations—representatives of the nations that participate in its tournaments—in multimillion-dollar installments that come with few strings. Because Infantino’s power is contingent on his ability to dole […]
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Even as they strive to lure players in, sportsbooks are also perfectly willing to kick people out, to limit bets and arbitrarily reduce payouts. Sports betting is not pure chance, and while amateur gamblers are prone to making ill-informed bets for bad reasons (betting on personal favorite teams is a big one), smart gamblers and […]
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Countries don’t abandon the pursuit of their interests in the face of coercion; they alter their approaches, including, eventually, perhaps even cooperating with one another in opposition to American hegemony. This Darwinian perspective is seductive because its ruthlessness appears superficially realistic in a harsh world. But ironically it is, in fact, deeply naïve. Countries don’t […]
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JFK Jr. used the power of his name to try to build a new American institution with youthful verve and irreverence. As a child, it struck me as a cool idea. But that’s mostly all it ever became. Beset by behind-the-scenes drama and lacking a clear vision beyond its elevator pitch, George flashed brightly and […]
Read More JFK Jr. used the power of his name to try to build a new American institution with youthful verve and irreverence. As a child, it struck me as a cool idea. But that’s mostly all it ever became. Beset by behind-the-scenes drama and lacking a clear vision beyond its elevator pitch, George flashed brightly and […]
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