“Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. ... Big lessons out of the war in Ukraine about ‘how the world really works’ are showing up on the ground, not in theory class. They’re what you can learn just by watching. Example: it’s almost a rule now that invasions don’t work—not Putin’s in next-door Ukraine any more than Americans landing on faraway Afghanistan or Iraq. Second, that economic sanctions can work like poison when they take Russia’s central bank out of play and tie up trillions in Russian assets overseas. Third, specially for Americans, it appears that a great power can strengthen its hand by declaring it does not have a vital strategic interest in the fight and will not be sending its troops into battle. ...”
Burnside: ‘It’s Not Much Over Here’
“It only makes sense to arrive in Burnside by train, at the Metra Electric’s Chesterfield stop, on 91st Street. Burnside is defined by railroads: the Illinois Central to the west, the Rock Island Line to the south, the New York Central to the east. They form a triangle of tracks so compact that Burnside is the smallest of Chicago’s 77 community areas: 970 acres in size, with a population of 2,000. ... St. Mark’s copper dome is topped with a Ukrainian cross, two straight cross beams, one crooked. A cornerstone on the church’s addition is marked with another such cross, and the date 1962. The church was built in 1913, as Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Church, to minister to immigrants from Dobra, Ukraine, who arrived in Chicago to labor on the Illinois Central. ...”
Crossing Paths with the Spirit of Sylvia Plath – Helen Humphreys
2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956, 2019 January: Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story, 2021 June: The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, 2021 July: Sylvia Plath’s Tarot Cards, 2022 January: Foreword to Ariel: The Restored Edition written by Frieda Hughes
Bide denounces Russian invasion, casting it as part of a decades-long attempt to crush democracies.
“WARSAW — President Biden delivered a forceful denunciation of Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Saturday, declaring ‘for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power’ and casting the military clash in Europe as the ‘test of all time’ in a decades-long battle to defend democracy. In a speech from a castle that served for centuries as a home for Polish monarchs, Mr. Biden described the face-off with Mr. Putin as a moment he has long warned about: a clash of competing global ideologies, of liberty versus oppression. ‘Russia’s choice of war is an example one of the oldest human impulses — using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control,’ he declared before a crowd of hundreds of people in the courtyard of the Royal Castle and several thousand more outside its stone walls, watching on a large screen. ...”
****ARTFORUM: Letters from Kyiv - A wartime diary by Yevgenia Belorusets, KYLV: THE WAR DIARY
Exiles - Max Richter (2021)
‘Like a Weapon’: Ukrainians Use Social Media to Stir Resistance
“KRAKOW, Poland — A peace activist in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv rolled 109 baby strollers into a square last week to represent the children who had been killed in the war with Russia. Hours later, the image was available to millions on their phones. A little girl sheltering in a basement in Kyiv sang a haunting rendition of ‘Let it Go,’ from the movie ‘Frozen,’ and the clip sped around the world. A cellist performed a somber Bach suite on a street in Kharkiv, with debris and the windowless facade of a damaged building serving as his backdrop, and thousands watched. These heart-wrenching glimpses of life in Ukraine since the Russian invasion have become powerful ammunition in an information war playing out on social media. For some, the messaging has become a crucial battleground complementing the Ukrainian military’s performance on the physical front lines, as images and information ripple out on Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and TikTok. ...”
Ahmed Abdul-Malik pioneering Arabic jazz
Russia’s Attacks on Civilian Targets Have Obliterated Everyday Life in Ukraine
Hegemony Changes Everything
“... The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) would argue that it was precisely through the proliferation of such norms in our culture—wherein the inequalities of capitalism appear natural, as ‘senso comune‘ (common sense)—that the ruling classes stay as such. This concept would become known as ‘cultural hegemony.’ In his early writings for socialist newspapers like Avanti! and later in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci analyzed folklore, serialized novels, theater, devotional literature—anything he could get his hands on in the prison library—to search for the ways that capitalist logic appeared as a self-evident truth (not some secret hiding in a remodeled bathroom). ...”
2013 July: Gramsci Monument, 2018 January: The Fate of the Party, 2020 December: Gramsci in the postcolony, 2021 June: Bringing Antonio Gramsci Back to Turin
The History of Venus in Air, Rock, and Water
As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin’s Leadership
“In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be ‘pointless and extremely dangerous.’ It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten ‘the existence of Russia itself as a state.’ To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. ...”
Worm Moon - Nina MacLaughlin
“What is the moon? The moon is a natural satellite, and it reflects the light of the sun. The moon is 4.5 billion years old. The moon is, on average, 240,000 miles away from this Earth. The moon is the fifth largest of the 210 that swing around the planets in this solar system, and the second densest, after Jupiter’s moon Io. The moon is made of iron and nickel at its heavy metal core; lighter crystals of solidified lava, like olivine and pyroxene, make up its mantle; and the lunar soil that makes up the surface crust is an even lighter mix of minerals and metals known as regolith, including anorthositic plagioclase feldspar, dusty and granular. Leave a footprint in it. ...”
2021 May: What Color Is the Sky?, 2021 June: Strawberry Moon, 2021 August: Sturgeon Moon, 2021 September: Harvest Moon
The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone
“In destructive power, the behemoths of the Cold War dwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington’s biggest test blast was 1,000 times as large. Moscow’s was 3,000 times. On both sides, the idea was to deter strikes with threats of vast retaliation — with mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The psychological bar was so high that nuclear strikes came to be seen as unthinkable.Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable. ...”
H-O-R-S-E
How Surrealism Has Influenced the Animation Industry
“The surrealism movement was founded in Paris by some writers and artist who wanted to use people’s subconscious minds to unlock their imagination. The movement was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud. The surrealists themselves thought that the unconscious mind blocked people’s imaginations. By the surrealists basing their ideas on the power of the imagination, this indicated that they were influenced by the traditional Romanticism movement, whose key ideas were based on emotions and intuitions. However, the surrealists were radically different to the romantics because they had the theory that the revelations may be found to be on the streets and in everyday life. ...”
How Russia’s mistakes and Ukrainian resistance altered Putin’s war
“The snarled up 65km Russian convoy that was stuck for days outside Kyiv neatly illustrated Moscow’s misplaced belief that it could achieve a lightning-fast victory in Ukraine. Western military analysts say Russia’s leadership initially thought its ‘special military operation’ would reach the capital and other big Ukrainian cities in days, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to capitulate and allow a puppet administration to be installed. ‘It’s clear that Russia was pursuing regime change in Ukraine,’ said Michael Kofman, Russia studies director at CNA, a US think-tank. ‘Regime change operations are often derived of hubris and bad assumptions — and they usually go terribly wrong.’ ...”
This 1899 Gilded Age fairy-tale mansion on Fifth Avenue has had only 4 owners
Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War
“In the tense weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian officials denied that it planned anything of the sort, denouncing the United States and its NATO allies for stoking panic and anti-Russian hatred. When it did invade, the officials denied it was at war. Since then, the Kremlin has cycled through a torrent of lies to explain why it had to wage a ‘special military operation’ against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addled neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters sheltering children. Disinformation in wartime is as old as war itself, but today war unfolds in the age of social media and digital diplomacy. ...”
William Parker Quartets: Meditation / Resurrection (2017)
2022 January: A Guide to William Parker, 2022 February: Raining On The Moon – Corn Meal Dance (2007)
Russia’s Brutality in Ukraine Has Roots in Earlier Conflicts
“As Russian artillery and rockets land on Ukrainian hospitals and apartment blocks, devastating residential districts with no military value, the world is watching with horror what is, for Russia, an increasingly standard practice. Its forces conducted similar attacks in Syria, bombing hospitals and other civilian structures as part of Russia’s intervention to prop up that country’s government. Moscow went even further in Chechnya, a border region that had sought independence in the Soviet Union’s 1991 breakup. During two formative wars there, Russia’s artillery and air forces turned city blocks to rubble and its ground troops massacred civilians in what was widely seen as a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population into submission. ...”
Aïda Gómez Sculpts Housing for Squirrels and Birds in Roma Verde MXCD
Laurent Bardainne & Tigre d’Eau Douce — Hymne au Soleil
Citizens of Kyiv
“In the weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv, the capital, became a city transformed. Much of its population evacuated. New defense units gathered and took up arms. Impromptu social support — field kitchens, aid stations, bomb shelters, evacuation convoys — sprouted into functional shapes. The city endured intermittent bombardment throughout. This altered streetscape became the uneasy milieu of Alexander Chekmenev, a Ukrainian documentary and portrait photographer who since the 1990s has visually chronicled his country’s post-Soviet life. ...”
Copyright is colonialism - Boima Tucker
George Inness - Green Landscape (1886)
2009 August: George Inness, 2008 August: Hudson River School
Russia Is Destroying Kharkiv
“Last month, Dmytro Kuzubov put on his headphones and walked around Kharkiv for hours. He felt that the war would start soon and he wanted to visit some of his favorite places. Kharkiv is his hometown: a vibrant, youthful city of nearly 1.5 million people steeped in academia, art and literature. The attacks started a few days later. Unable to take control of the city, Russia has resorted to destroying it. As in Syria and Chechnya, Russia aims to demoralize the city’s inhabitants with overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower. It is following a similar plan in other Ukrainian cities, such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv. ‘The most horrible thing was the whistle of jets. I will remember them all my life,’ said Mr. Kuzubov, who has since fled Kharkiv, along with hundreds of thousands of others. ...”
Using Thoreau’s Notebooks to Understand Climate Change
“Walden was more than a thought experiment. During Henry David Thoreau’s contemplative time by the pond, he recorded countless observations on spring flowering and bird arrivals. These notes are the backbone for a recent study that examines how the area surrounding Walden Pond has been gradually impacted by climate change. In a 2016 study, a team of scientists from Boston University examined Thoreau’s records and compared them to their own leaf-out (dates on which leaf buds begin to open) and spring flower notes from the same area, showing how citizen science can help scientists better understand how climate change is impacting ecosystems worldwide. ...”
2020 April: Henry David Thoreau - I, 2020 May: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal - II, 2022 January: Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom