“What a difference a war makes. Four months ago, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy would not have dreamed of supporting Ukraine’s candidacy for EU membership. But this Thursday, there they were in a sunny Kyiv, all emphatically endorsing it. If next week’s EU summit agrees, following the positive opinion just given by the European Commission, this really could be, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy put it after meeting his visitors from luckier parts of Europe, ‘one of the key European decisions of the first third of the 21st century’. ... There are two good reasons for accepting Ukraine as a candidate for membership of the EU: because Ukraine has earned it, and because this is in the long-term strategic interest of all Europeans. The second is even more important than the first. ...”
Open City Mixtape: Short Films by A.V. Rockwell
“Rising director A.V. Rockwell captures life on the streets of New York City in this collection of ten short films—a mix of documentaries and narratives—depicting a cross section of some of the eight million lives whose stories are often overlooked. Shot in luscious monochrome and set to evocatively eclectic soundscapes, they are by turns gritty and transcendent snapshots of the dreamers, schemers, hustlers, and youths who give the cultural capital its singular rhythm.“
Often left alone due to his struggling mother’s work schedule, Jahlil, a precocious young boy from the Bronx, spends most of his time roaming New York City’s transit system.
Mythologies - Roland Barthes (1957)
"Mythologies is a 1957 book by Roland Barthes. It is a collection of essays taken from Les Lettres nouvelles, examining the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths. Barthes also looks at the semiology of the process of myth creation, updating Ferdinand de Saussure's system of sign analysis by adding a second level where signs are elevated to the level of myth. Mythologies is split into two: Mythologies and Myth Today, the first section consisting of a collection of essays on selected modern myths and the second further and general analysis of the concept. ...”
2010 March: Roland Barthes, 2014 March: Semiotext(e), 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2016 December: Can We Criticize Foucault?, 2017 June: The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left, 2017 November: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977)
How to Counter Russia’s Artillery Advantage in Ukraine
“Public accounts make it clear that Russia intends to win the war for the control of eastern Ukraine the old-school way: superior, massed artillery fire using hundreds of thousands of unguided projectiles.Ukrainian armed forces have limited numbers of heavier weapons, around 100 of the American 155 millimeter howitzers, and radars that can track enemy artillery rounds in flight in order to locate enemy guns. This counter-battery fire can be made more effective through the use of precision-guided artillery rounds and, over time, should reduce the effectiveness of the enemy artillery. But so far, it has not. ...”
A security guard walks by the rubble of a police station that was destroyed by bombardment, in Lysychansk, Ukraine, Monday June 13, 2022.
Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to Hardcover – Eric Karpeles
Paintings in Proust (Vol. 1, Swann's Way) “November 14th, 2013, marked 100 years since Marcel Proust published Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, his masterwork written from 1909 to 1922, largely at night in the silence of a cork-lined room. ... We are indebted also to the excellent Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, for helping us greatly in identifying the various mentions of artworks - a highly recommended book. ...”
2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online, 2017 December: The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925), 2018 May: Time Regained (1927), 2018 September: Céleste Albaret, 2018 November: In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust, 2019 February: On the Anxiety and Vanity of Marcel Proust, Debut Novelist, 2020 October: 182 Days of Marcel Proust
Tragedy and triumph: the remarkable tale of Croatia’s first football steps
“Igor Stimac, a 54-year-old Croatian man usually full of laughter and love, begins to cry as his memories grip him in a world darkened again by a devastating war. The fleeting tears of the former footballer fall for Ukraine and its people. They have suffered in a way that reminds Stimac of everything his own country endured during the terrible Balkans conflict that surrounded its independence from Yugoslavia almost 30 years ago. It was a time when football gained a rare real-life significance as, out of bloodshed and carnage, Croatia’s defiant, gifted and fiercely intelligent players lifted their young nation by lighting up Euro 96 and then leading France in the semi-finals of the 1998 World Cup in Paris. …”
World Cup 1998
In Occupied Cities, Time Doesn’t Exist: Conversations with Bucha Writers - Ilya Kaminsky
“’Russian soldiers stayed in our building,’ my friend, the poet Lesyk Panaisuk, wrote to me when the Ukrainian city of Bucha was liberated from Russian occupation on March 31. Some months before, as soon as the war ensued, Lesyk had left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian soldiers. Although the city is now liberated, it is still dangerous to walk around Bucha. Lesyk’s neighbors find mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors return only to install doors and windows. ‘In our neighborhood, doors to almost every apartment were broken by Russian soldiers,’ Lesyk emails.’A Ukrainian word / is ambushed: through the broken window of / a letter д other countries watch how a letter і / loses its head,’ writes Lesyk in one of his poems. He continues: ‘how / the roof of a letter м / falls through.’ While I read Lesyk’s emails, miles from Ukraine, my own uncle is missing. As bombs explode in Odesa, I email friends, relatives. No one can find him. ...”
Civilians in Novoselivka. Russian troops moved through northern Ukraine during the first days of the war.
Lacombe, Lucien – Louis Malle (1974)
Review by Pauline Kael: “Introducing himself to a delicate, fine-boned parisienne, the farm-boy hero of Louis Malle’s new movie does not give his name as Lucien Lacombe; he gives the bureaucratic designation—Lacombe, Lucien. He presents himself name inverted because he is trying to be formal and proper, as he’s been trained to be at school and at work, sweeping floors at his local, small-town hospital, in southwest France. When he meets the girl, France Horn—and falls in love with her—his new job is hunting down and torturing people for the Gestapo. He likes it a whole lot better than the hospital. The title Lacombe, Lucien refers to the case of a boy of seventeen who doesn’t achieve a fully human identity, a boy who has an empty space where feelings beyond the purely instinctive are expected to be. ...”
OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980
“… Music has been affected no less drastically. As Brian Eno points out in his forward to the recently reissued and expanded OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 3xCD box set (now with the addition of a DVD, and re-dubbed OHM+), most of what we listen to is electronic in some fashion, contrary to the entire history of music prior to the 1920s. Whether over the radio, stereo, or amplified speaker, electronic music has all but made ‘natural’ sound obsolete. ...”
Ukraine Says Troops Holding out in Sievierodonetsk After Last Bridge Destroyed
“KYIV—Ukraine said on Tuesday its forces were still holding out inside Sievierodonetsk and trying to evacuate civilians, after Russia destroyed the last bridge to the devastated eastern city in a potential turning point in one of the war’s bloodiest battles. Russia said it would give Ukrainian fighters holed up in a chemical plant inside the city a chance to surrender on Wednesday morning. Fighters should ‘stop their senseless resistance and lay down their arms’ from 8 a.m. Moscow time, Interfax news agency quoted Mikhail Mizintsev, head of Russia’s National Defence Management Centre, as saying. Civilians would be let out through a ‘humanitarian corridor,’ he said. ...”
A satellite image shows a close up view of a damaged bridge, in Rubizhne, Ukraine, on June 11, 2022.
Matepe & Karimba.
“Matepe Music. ... I use this label as a kind of general idea. I've borrowed the words from that article, from his book, from your vid and I go with it, wondering what exactly it is that I reference. At first I mean those mbira instruments with the flattened bell-shaped, cavernous resonators, the right hand octaves that hocket with in-house overtones, saturated with deep and low and growling fundamentals. I mean the conversation between the rattle player's patterns and the improvising mbira, the clipped exclamations of hup! hup! hup! that cut into soaring singing lines and virtuosic yodeling, the gentle clamor of muted fingerpads on the jenje drum, the cupped hand claps, the ecstatic whistles and the dancer's foot stomps. ...”
Layout of a Karimba (left) and Matepe (right) that are tuned together. Karimba made by Jacob Mafuleni and matepe made by Chaka Chawasarira.
Heidegger’s Notebooks Renew Focus on Anti-Semitism
“It has long been one of the most contentious questions in 20th-century intellectual history: Just how much, and what kind, of a Nazi was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger? To his strongest detractors, Heidegger was a committed National Socialist whose hugely influential ideas about the nature of being and the dehumanizing effects of modern technology and much of the modern philosophical tradition itself were fatally compromised by his membership in Hitler’s party from 1933 to 1945. To his staunchest defenders, however, he was a Nazi of convenience — a sometime personal anti-Semite, perhaps, but a philosopher whose towering intellectual achievements are undiminished by temporary political dalliances or everyday bias. ...”
Who Will Remember the Horrors of Ukraine?
“For many, Babyn Yar symbolizes the horror that largely preceded the gas chambers, the local Holocaust in which victims were shot at close range. Before the Nazis retreated, they had the corpses exhumed from the ravine and burned, an attempt to destroy the evidence of their crimes. The remains of their victims were dispersed throughout the land, mingling with the air, earth and groundwater. The full story of what happened to them went untold for decades, submerged and banned by Soviet authorities. For the past six years, a group of historians, activists and designers has been working to correct the narrative and commemorate all that occurred. They hoped to build a series of museums on the site, to definitively bring to light what happened at Babyn Yar, to make the memory of its successive horrors inextricable from the land itself. ...”
Visual evidence and reconstructions like these aid the investigation by Forensic Architecture and Center for Spatial Technologies into the destruction of a theater in the city of Mariupol.
“Moniker: Identity Lost and Found” Documents and Celebrates Hobo Railroad Art and Underground Moniker Writing
“In June 2018, Ohio’s Massillon Museum hosted ‘Moniker: Identity Lost & Found,’ an exhibition featuring a distinctly remarkable documentation of mark-making and monikers, a grassroots movement which began in rail yards in the late nineteenth century. An exhibition catalog published at the time sold out almost immediately. This month heralds the release of a second edition in softcover format of Moniker: Identity Lost & Found in conjunction and cooperation with the Black Butte Center For Railroad Culture and its current exhibit, End Of The Line. ...”
Hacker ethic
“The hacker ethic is a philosophy and set of moral values that is common within hacker culture. Practitioners of the hacker ethic believe that sharing information and data with others is an ethical imperative. The hacker ethic is related to the concept of freedom of information, as well as the political theories of anti-authoritarianism, socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and libertarianism. While some tenets of the hacker ethic were described in other texts like Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) by Ted Nelson, the term hacker ethic is generally attributed to journalist Steven Levy, who appears to have been the first to document both the philosophy and the founders of the philosophy in his 1984 book titled Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. ...”
Today 80% of smartphones, and 80% of websites run on free software (aka. Linux, the most famous open source operating system).
Russia hands out passports in occupied Ukraine cities
“The Russian occupation authorities in southern Ukraine say they have started handing out Russian passports to locals in two cities - Kherson and Melitopol. Ukraine condemns the creation of Russian citizens on its territory as ‘Russification’. President Vladimir Putin is fast-tracking the procedure. Russia's Tass news agency says the first 23 Kherson residents got Russian passports at a ceremony on Saturday. Tass says thousands have applied for them, but its claim cannot be verified. The Russian-appointed military governor in Kherson, Volodymyr Saldo, said ‘all our Khersonite comrades want to receive the passport and [Russian] citizenship as soon as possible’. ...”
Café de Flore
“The Café de Flore is one of the oldest coffeehouses in Paris, celebrated for its famous clientele, which in the past included high-profile writers and philosophers. It is located at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 6th arrondissement. ... Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Léon-Paul Fargue, Raymond Queneau were all regulars, and so was Pablo Picasso. ... In his essay ‘A Tale of Two Cafes’ and his book Paris to the Moon, American writer Adam Gopnik mused over the possible explanations of why the Flore had become, by the late 1990s, much more fashionable and popular than Les Deux Magots, despite the fact that the latter café was associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and other famous thinkers of the 1940s and 1950s. ...”
July 1952
The stone and iron turtles decorating New York City
“Colonial New Yorkers hunted them in estuaries and salt marshes, putting turtle soup on every restaurant menu. Contemporary city residents know them as the scaly native reptiles who occasionally pop their heads up while feasting in city waterways. Considering the role they’ve played in Gotham’s history and their presence in the modern city, it’s no wonder that images of turtles can be found on building facades, fence posts, and the sculptures in Manhattan parks.You would expect a neighborhood called Turtle Bay to have its fair share of ornamental turtles. You would expect a neighborhood called Turtle Bay to have its fair share of ornamental turtles. ...”
Ukraine war in photos: Women at war
“In this curation from Ukraine, women at war. Or at least — a dozen women at war. Even in that small number, you can get a sense of the range of contributions women have been making to the Ukrainian resistance — women serving in the military and civilian defense forces, women checking for land mines and weaving camouflage for soldiers, women caring for the wounded and covering the war as journalists. Here you will also see women in government ranks: Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereschuk, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova and — speaking this week to the European Council — the country’s first lady Olena Zelenska. Among other things, Zelenska told her audience that there are 37,000 women serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and that more than 1,000 of them have become commanders since the war began. ...”
Ukraine's Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova
Up in the Old Hotel - Joseph Mitchell (1992)
"The publication of his book Up in the Old Hotel in 1992 ended Joseph Mitchell’s 28-year silence. Strictly speaking, though, Mitchell didn’t break his silence as much as he reopened a long-closed door and then shut it again. Up in the Old Hotel contains no new writing; it is a collection of four of Mitchell’s five previously published books—McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943); Old Mr. Flood (1948); The Bottom of the Harbor (1960); and Joe Gould’s Secret (1965). All of the pieces originally appeared in The New Yorker, where Mitchell has worked for more than 50 years. ..."
2014 August: Joseph Mitchell, 2015 May: Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel, 2020 January: "The Mohawks in High Steel" (1949)
Cooking with Cyrano de Bergerac By Valerie Stivers
“In the opening scene of the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, first performed in 1897, ‘orange girls’ at a Parisian theater in the 1640s make their way through an audience of soldiers, society ladies, noblemen, and riffraff, selling orangeade, raspberry cordial, syllabub, macarons, lemonade, iced buns, and cream puffs. The handsome soldier Christian de Neuvillette and his friends sample their wares, drink wine, and eat from a buffet. A poet and pastry cook named Ragueneau banter-barters an apple tartlet for a verse. ...”
‘We Are Still in Shock’: A Month Trapped in a Basement by Russian Forces
“YAHIDNE, Ukraine — More than two months after the residents of Yahidne kicked down the bolted basement door where the Russian army had held them hostage, the village is being rebuilt but the memories remain fresh — and deeply painful. On March 3, eight days after the full-scale invasion began, Russian forces swept into Yahidne, a village on the main road north of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. For nearly a month, until March 31, when Ukrainian troops liberated the town, more than 300 people, 77 of them children, were imprisoned in several rooms in the dank basement of the village school — a human shield for the Russian troops based there. Ten of the captives died. Among those held inside were a baby and a 93-year-old, Ukrainian prosecutors said. ...”
Trenches dug by Russian soldiers outside the school they used as a base, while holding more than 300 civilians prisoner in its basement throughout most of March.
‘Trump Was at the Center’: Jan. 6 Hearing Lays Out Case in Vivid Detail
“The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol opened a landmark set of hearings on Thursday by showing video of aide after aide to former President Donald J. Trump testifying that his claims of a stolen election were false, as the panel laid out in meticulous detail the extent of the former president’s efforts to keep himself in office. Over about two hours, the panel offered new information about what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by Mr. Trump that culminated in the deadly assault on the Capitol. The panel’s leaders revealed that investigators heard testimony that Mr. Trump endorsed the hanging of his own vice president as a mob of his supporters descended on Congress. They also said they had evidence that members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. ...”
Ukraine war: Five ways Russia's invasion may play out
“Wars ebb and flow. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is no exception. Early fears of a swift conquest were succeeded by Russian retreat and Ukrainian resistance. That has now been met by a more focused Russian offensive in the east. But 100 days on, where might this war go next? Here are five potential scenarios - they are not mutually exclusive, but all are within the bounds of plausibility. ...”
Residents look for belongings in the rubble of their home after a Russian strike in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas
Jan. 6: The Story So Far
“Like 9/11, Jan. 6 needs no year attached to convey its dark place in American history. On that Wednesday afternoon, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump assaulted the Capitol, resulting in what Vice President Mike Pence had refused to do: disrupting the ceremonial certification of the electoral votes confirming that Joseph R. Biden Jr. would be the next president of the United States. ... Over the past year and a half, much has come to light about how they went about it, embracing one tactic after another in a way that led a federal judge to conclude that elements of it likely amounted to a criminal conspiracy. ...”
A crop that changed the world
“In the last pages of her debut book, Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History (2022, New), journalist Jori Lewis breaks the fourth wall to bring readers into the present and share a story from her reporting process. The archives she had mined were rich with stories of a village called Kerbala—an outpost of French control on the westernmost coast of Africa which thrived at a time when France controlled all of what is now Senegal and much of West Africa. Kerbala had been a haven for freed slaves who had escaped bondage further inland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But more than a century after its heyday, the village had very nearly disappeared into the landscape. ...”
The Fight to Survive Russia’s Onslaught in Eastern Ukraine
“Russia’s war in Ukraine is not the same conflict that it was earlier this spring. The Russian Army’s initial campaign, in February and March, was a three-front invasion with little coherence or military logic. Ukrainian troops mounted small-unit ambushes and used rocket-propelled grenades, antitank weapons, and drones to destroy Russian troop formations and armor. Viral videos show their direct strikes, with tanks disappearing in flame and smoke. Now the Russian military has regrouped its forces for a more targeted assault in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, drawing on its advantages in artillery and airpower. ...”
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits a position of Ukrainian service members, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues in Soledar, Donetsk region, Ukraine, June 5, 2022.
Soccer in Sun and Shadow - Eduardo Galeano (1993)
"Eduardo Galeano — the famous Uruguayan writer, journalist, and political activist — passed away Monday at the age of 74. He was most widely celebrated (and defamed) for his incisive critiques of Western imperialism and capitalism, as well as his lilting, graceful prose. ... Soccer fans will know him as the author of El fútbol a sol y sombra, or Soccer in Sun and Shadow. The book offers a cultural history of the beautiful game, using his trademark poignant verse to shape history and politics and economics and personal experience into a sort of paper sculpture— beautiful, unexpected, and somewhat transient. There’s a lot of darkness in the story Galeano tells—the 'shadow' in the book title, as it were—yet he unfurls and shares his joy and love for the sport throughout. ..."
2015 April: Eduardo Galeano (3 September 1940 – 13 April 2015), 2018 August: The Pan American, 2019 April: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1971), 2021 July: Memory of Fire: Genesis (1985)
Karl Jaspers
“Karl Theodor Jaspers (... 23 February 1883 – 26 February 1969) was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept the label. ... Most commentators associate Jaspers with the philosophy of existentialism, in part because he draws largely upon the existentialist roots of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and in part because the theme of individual freedom permeates his work. ...“
Plan to ship grain out of Ukraine dealt blow due to mines
“A plan mediated by Turkey amid a global food crisis to open shipping corridors out of Ukrainian ports has been dealt a blow as officials in Kyiv said it would take six months to clear the coast of Russian and Ukrainian mines. As Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov arrived in Ankara on Tuesday, Turkey’s defence minister, Hulusi Akar, said in a statement that his government was making progress with the UN, Russia and Ukraine on reopening ports under Russian blockade in the Black Sea. The ships leaving Ukrainian ports would potentially be given safe escort by Turkish naval vessels under the proposal under discussion. ...”
