Required reading

Ross, who describes herself as a “craftivist,” crafted a handful of paper snowflakes for Trump, tricking the obscene behind seemingly innocuous designs. Over the years, she’s made similar snowflakes for politicians, including former presidential candidate and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) – always taking smiling pictures and showing them his creation.

“Originally, I put mannequins on top,” she said. “But then I realized they couldn’t read them anyway. But, she said, that’s not an insult to a politician. The words are intimately intertwined in the snowflakes like an optical illusion. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what the design is.

Ross started making snowflakes around 2008 while working at a local children’s museum.

For some, what happened inside the green zone came as no surprise. When I first moved to Baghdad in 2018, a military officer who had just returned home from years of fighting ISIS told me that the next war would be fought between Shias. Now that the Sunni jihadists have been defeated, he predicts, it wouldn’t take much for long-running tensions between Shia to rise to the surface. He knew the different factions well, having fought against them in some of the wars in Iraq and with them in others. He clashed with Sadr’s Mahdi Army in 2008, when former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched a campaign to drive the militants out of the southern Iraqi port city of Basra. Years later, he shared the battlefield with the PMF after the paramilitaries were mobilized by religious edict to help defeat ISIS. I asked him which side would win. “The PMF is better equipped, but the Sadrists have experience in urban battles,” he said. “Ultimately it will depend on which side the government takes.”

Indeed, the government’s role in the August clashes merits closer scrutiny, not least because Prime Minister Kadhimi was Washington’s man in Baghdad. This alliance was forged when he was head of the Iraqi spy agency, which enjoys close cooperation with the US government. Kadhimi was appointed prime minister in 2020 following mass protests calling for an end to Iranian corruption and influence. Sadr made his rise to power possible: the cleric had managed to co-opt the protests by positioning himself as a reformist who wanted to respond to protesters’ demands, when in reality he was using the movement to strengthen himself in view of the upcoming elections. Kadhimi seemed like a good choice to help carry out Sadr’s plan. His reputation as a liberal human rights defender would appease Iraqi streets and Western capitals, while his lack of political base made him firmly committed to Sadr’s agenda. Kadhimi’s promises to curb Iran-aligned groups won him plaudits from Western officials, who remained steadfast in their support even as allegations of corruption and abuse of power began to surface. Kadhimi’s office did not respond to interview requests.

The facts back up his argument: 12 years of austerity has seen the UK arts world lose more than a third of its funding, while a new ‘race up’ scheme also sees subsidies diverted from London theaters – a short-sighted plan to undress Pierre to dress Paul. A third of London’s music venues and studios closed between 2007 and 2016, and more than half of London’s nightclubs closed between 2008 and 2016, with another quarter following during the pandemic.

London’s decades-old cost-of-living crisis is manifesting itself as a cost-of-culture crisis, with young people flocking to our capital every year, scared even of trying to enter precarious and poorly paid in the arts, film or even journalism. Instead, our universities spit out swarms of management consultants; more than half of the country’s roughly 100,000 consultants are based in London, despite the capital accounting for just 15% of the UK’s total population.

Here, however, the dramatic gesture is more ambiguous. The splendid colossus addresses the mythologies of land art specific to the West of the last half-century, both celebrating and questioning the much-vaunted legacy of artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Walter De Maria, whose Monumental sculptures reside in remote desert sites from Utah to New Mexico. And it artfully raises the scathing issue that has plagued Desert X since 2019. That’s when the organizers, seemingly indifferent to the state murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, sadly entered into a working relationship with Saudi Arabia. , the vicious and repressive absolute monarchy where free speech is illegal.

IT TOOK TWO more years to fortify the structure, which they named Bayt Yakan (bayt is Arabic for “house”). In the process, they discovered that the residence was a palimpsest that actually dated from around 1640. Thought to be built by a military officer named Hasan Agha Koklian, it was originally designed in the style of his ancestors, who were Mamluks – non-Arabs. , originally enslaved soldiers of various ethnicities, primarily from the Caucasus and Turkish regions, who established a sultanate in Egypt and throughout the Levant. They favored finely carved stone surfaces, geometric patterns and vegetal arabesques. Once Muhammad Ali took over the property and handed it over to his nephews, they masked any sign of the previous owners’ structural and decorative choices, walling in ornate columns and closing off entire rooms where they disliked the wooden ceilings. original painted wood. In other places, above some Mamluk ornamentation, they added European-inspired Baroque detailing then fashionable.

Valparaiso, a Lutheran university in northwest Indiana struggling with declining enrollment seen at many schools, plans to sell several works from the collection of its Brauer Museum of Art to raise $10 million for renovations. of two freshman dorms, which she sees as key to securing her future.

The announcement angered many arts organizations and divided the university: last week, the faculty senate approved a non-binding resolution to stop the sale and identify other ways to fund the renovations.

Richard Brauer, a retired art professor who served as director of the museum that now bears his name, told university management he wanted his name removed if the school went ahead with the sale.

I have recognized the art of addiction in various ways in my own life. I have learned to fully recognize those who have helped me along the way and to pierce the triumphant and false line of individual achievement. I think of my grandparents, who cared for me most weekends of my childhood, providing unequivocal care, much of it non-verbal. (They owned a little shoe store in the Bronx, which sometimes meant that I literally played—my interest in using the term “bootstraps” is probably no coincidence—with boots and shoe horns on the floor of their apartment.) Or the creative writing teachers who helped and praised me during my teenage years, including author Frank McCourt, one of my English teachers at Stuyvesant High School; he and others led me to become a writer.

More recently, I have been dependent on my daughter’s caregiver, Kylie, for intermittent afternoon pick-ups, and friends who call me and whom I call in states of stress or boredom, and hundreds of people who have been involved in supporting the nonprofit media that I lead. Everyone depends on the support of others – be it family, friends or the state – and coming to terms with and appreciating this should help us identify with those who are more obviously dependents, including people who depend on government assistance.

In August, according to the note, Eden was contacted by a man offering to help her mend her fractured relationship with her parents. Hayden told VICE News it was a phone call he overheard because Eden put him on speakerphone; the man on the phone, he said, complimented the semi-nude photos of Eden he had found online.

“I remember it felt really weird and that was my first red flag with the guy,” Hayden said. “He was a fucking moron.” Hayden and Bailee said the man did not bring them into his conversations with Eden, despite the fact that she lived with them.

This man, according to Eden’s note and direct messages she sent at the time and reviewed by VICE News, was Michael Pocalyko, CEO of Special Investigations, a government contractor for the Washington region specializing in “investigations, intelligence and cyber”. as well as a novelist and former Republican official whose website describes him as “combat aviator, navy commander, political candidate, venture capitalist, and global corporate president.” In a private message, Eden described him as “famous”. Neither Pocalyko nor the chairman of special investigations responded to requests for comment.

• Kenyon Review announcement “Fish Tales” by Karen Kaoas the winner of its 2022 Non-Fiction Contest, which was judged by Maggie Nelson. By choosing Kao’s entrance, Nelson wrote“’Fish Tales’ has a lot of rhythm and dynamism. It’s pretty, then gross, then sad, then disturbing, then exciting. It slips in and out of strange synecdoches, zigzags gracefully between divergent forms of address. He walks on cultural faultlines, family discord, sensory experience, the passage from childhood to adulthood, without wasting time explaining. I would read a book about it. You can read the piece online; here’s how it starts:

1.

Today, we avoid the swing. Forget the crabgrass lawn and its gravel path. The green ball is too soft for fun.

We rather run on the retaining wall, high waisted and two sneakers wide. We start with the Indian brush, circle the cypress, grip the ice plants for balance. Purple streaks run through our hands. We skip the lava rock mound and tear for the chain-link fence. We land hard and the fence presses diamonds into our soft palms.

Again!

We laugh too much. Our sneakers become smooth. My left foot wants to swap places with my right. I slip, but I don’t fall.

A sneaker hangs from the retaining wall. The other falls until I’m a flamingo standing on a bloody paw.

My first scar is in the shape of a fish. Silver, streaked, swimming.