Tag
War
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The Treachery of Machine Realism
“The bombed elementary school in Iran appears to have become a target thanks to satellite imaging. In this case, what the image represented — and to who — was a matter of life and death.”
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Reflecting Absence: An Interview with Michael Arad
Michael Arad’s winning design for the World Trade Center Memorial has created a landmark for New York City and for design. “Reflecting Absence,” the theme and title of Arad’s winning entry, raises questions about loss and memory, but also about bringing life to city streets. In conversation with Harel Shapira, Arad discusses the democratic uses…
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A Heike for the Ages
The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), often referred to as Japan’s “epic,” is the subject of a lively new translation by Royall Tyler, the preeminent translator of Japanese classics. A work on par with the early 11th-century Tale of Genji for its national cultural significance, the Heike is an account of the Genpei War…
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War Stories
Today anyone with a computer or smart phone can access videos of armed conflicts from around the world. Battles that would once have been shared days, years, or even generations after the fact, via newsreels, books, or folksongs, are now available for immediate consumption anywhere, anytime. But is anyone watching? Recent wars have proven to…
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To Lose Everything (To War)
“What is it like to lose everything?” the young protagonist of Stephen Dau’s first novel, The Book of Jonas, is asked again and again by those hoping to fathom his experience of losing his entire family and village, in an unnamed Muslim country, to an American attack. And one day, writes Dau, “sitting in plastic…
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Landscape with Corpses
Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room is a stunning and disturbing novel of and about nightmares. Early on, the protagonist, Elinor Brooke, slashes off her hair in an act of vengeance against her femininity, then falls asleep: “she dreamt she was on her knees in a corner of the room, trying to vomit without attracting the attention…
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The Whole World Blind
To experience the full effect of the installation please use a blindfold, or at the very least close your eyes and do not open them until you are done listening. Listen in a gallery-like space or library (where you will be safe while blindfolded) through an mp3 player or on a computer. And use the…
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Nuclear Graphics
One of the most challenging aspects of nuclear politics today is the simultaneous invisibility of nuclear things and their ever-presentness. Radiation, of course, is invisible to human senses, but nevertheless presents a constant challenge to health and safety at all nuclear sites. Similarly, while the atomic bomb is hidden behind elaborate systems of state secrecy,…
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When the Past is Past
Set sometime in the early 1950s, Toni Morrison’s latest work of fiction centers on a 24-year-old black veteran of the Korean War named Frank Money, recently returned from the frontlines and showing signs of psychological disturbance. Home opens with Frank escaping from a Seattle mental hospital and making his way by bus across a still-segregated…
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Soldier Exposures and Technical Publics
In this collaborative visual essay, we consider an idiosyncratic assemblage of pictures of American soldiers. These are not iconic images that “speak for themselves” but less conventional ones that suggest both the technical expertise involved in producing and managing war’s violence and the vulnerability of soldiers at the heart of war. In considering these images…
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Spain’s Unending War
The best seller El lector de Julio Verne (The Reader of Jules Verne) by Spanish author Almudena Grandes is the second novel in a planned series of six, Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes of an Unending War), a large-scale narrative project that will aim to convey the devastating trajectory of the first twenty-five years…
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Comics Journalism, Comics Activism
It has been a good fifteen years now since our cultural gatekeepers collectively patted themselves on the back for having discovered that comics were “not just for kids anymore,” and in that time several remarkable achievements in the form have found their way into the critical spotlight. But for every Persepolis and Fun Home that…
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Errol Morris, Forensic Epistemologist
Earlier this year I was contacted by the editors at Zum, a new Brazilian photography quarterly, who explained how they’d lately taken …
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The Janus Face of Conscience
Throughout the summer of 1938, Paul Gruninger was in charge of policing a small section of the Swiss border. A captain in the canton of St. Gallen, his job was to prevent entry from Nazi-controlled Austria. Germany had annexed Austria a few months previously, and thousands of Jews were by now trying to flee, but…
