Front Cover
Jewish Museum, Berlin. Photo by Cricket Vauthier Roemer.
Painful Remembrance
Berlin, Intersecting Traumas
The preponderance of overlapping historical markers of the city is not new. Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire (1987) narrates the visible and invisible coexistences of different layers of time. Different pasts and presents intertwine in the celebrated movie.
A Tale of Two Memorials: Dallas and New York
The “twin voids” possessed the most concentrated form of emptiness I had ever experienced. They made the night sky with its planes, planets, stars, planets, and city light, seem abuzz with life by comparison. Even Rothko’s furry blacks or Reinhardt’s all-over pictorial blackness seem friendlier and less empty than these did.
Blinded
The sunshine of Tel Aviv never reached the Hausmans’ grocery store on Sirkin Street. Even though our rented apartment shared a courtyard with their shop, our place was sun-filled in the mornings, while the Hausmans’ store stayed perpetually dark.
Exile At Home, or At Home in Exile
In my thirty years of life, my time has been split among one year in New York, eleven years in São Paulo, and nineteen years in Dallas. After this experience visiting Brazil, I finally understood that I feel most at home not in a physical location, but when I’m surrounded by people who have accents in English.
Mythremembering: Memory and its Fictions
Given the fallible—or creative—nature of remembering, every story based on memories will inevitably depart from a superficially accurate description of “what happened,” that is, portray an alternate reality. Shaping the memory into a story exerts pressure to change and augment it.
Current Affairs
The Modern Memory Hole: Cyberethics Unchained
Should society move toward the goal of “efficiency,” driven by transhumanist considerations and technological changes in the mechanical storage of information—at the expense of the ability to express a wide variety of thoughts and retain them in some form from which they can be retrieved by succeeding generations?
A Somewhat Reassuring Defense of Populism
Is any defense of populism, even a modest consoling one, an apology for demagoguery, xenophobia, racism, paranoia, and other evils associated with the term? This question goes to a deeper question: is populism a destructive force in a democracy, one that leads to dictatorship, messianic leadership, and uncontrolled passions of citizens willing to relinquish their liberties for social stability?
Immigration and Decency
We are looking for the right vocabulary to think about DACA children. The language of rights does not fit the bill. Neither does the dominant language in political theory for the last half-century, the language of justice, as derived from John Rawls’s book, A Theory of Justice.
Treasures Better Hid: The Making of Our High-Energy World
By the early nineteenth century, the power potential of the pre-industrial world was just about maxed out. It was a world powered by animal muscles, windmills, and water wheels. And it was a wood-powered world with rapidly disappearing forests.
The Past is Present
Does Turner Still Live? Considerations on the Popular Afterlife of the American Frontier
Turner began by noting a fact: that the official report of the results of the 1890 U.S. Census observed that it was no longer possible to draw a “frontier line” between the Canadian and Mexican borders, east of which was settled territory and west of which was unsettled. The “frontier line” had, up to then, demarcated the two regions.
The Americans and the Nazis: Who Copied Whom?
The sources make clear that two distinct strands of American law, the second class (Jim Crow) citizenship imposed on African-Americans in the South and the exclusionary rules applied to nonwhites in American immigration law, were known to the Germans and directly influenced the drafting process.
Originalism Then and Now
Neither recourse to illusory historical specificity, nor ex cathedra decrees from five of nine Justices, can in the long run substitute for self-governing citizens and legislators who accept the responsibility of deliberating and compromising with one another.
Folio
Works of art by Susan kae Grant, Darryl Lauster, Annabel Daou and Stephen Lapthisophon.
Download a PDF copy of the folio.Objects of History
Diamonds in the Rough: Synthetic Gems from Pliny to Lightbox
By the first century CE, the Roman author and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder took on the question of “rampant” fake gems in ancient Rome’s markets in the mineralogy section of his famous Historia Naturalis.
Managing Our Darkest Hatreds and Fears: Witchcraft from the Middle Ages to Brett Kavanaugh
As more and more of us live in vast conurbations, we have forgotten and are able to forget our own ultimate ends. It’s this sense of taboo and apprehension that modern paganism wants to omit. Instead of reuniting us with the dead and helping us to manage our fear of death, modern paganism proves to be another form of denial; this in itself makes its claims to historical revival hollow.
The Substance of Sicilian Puppet Theater: Past and Present
In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II, a Mafia boss walking through New York City’s Little Italy stops in front of an outdoor puppet theater performance to watch two knights wielding swords, then quickly turns away, remarking that the action is too violent for him.
Archaeology’s Cutting Edge: Far Beyond the Science of Rubbish
Alone among all students of humanity, archaeologists study human biological and cultural change over the entire span of human existence. Our research extends from 2.5 million-year-old hominin camps in East Africa’s Rift Valley to a 19th-century pickle factory in Victorian London.
Literary Lives
Interwoven Fates: 20th-Century German History and the European Refugee Crisis
Erpenbeck’s language is measured and restrained, devoid of preachiness; she writes primarily in the present tense, leading her readers to comprehend the complexities of history and fate, without succumbing to emotion.
The Resurrection of a Language and the Language of Resurrection
Lewis Glinert observes that “an Israeli teenager today can open a three-thousand-year-old chapter of biblical prose and understand it almost unaided… By contrast, no English speaker today could open a one-thousand-year-old ‘English’ text and make sense of it unaided; it’s another tongue.”
The Last Call
Provocations is the last call to a society that “can barely survive the anxieties of freedom.”
Art Worlds
The Best Painting in Naples
In Caravaggio’s painting there is not even an apparent connection between heavenly and terrestrial worlds. The heavenly observers look down, but no one looks up to them. The long outstretched right hand of the lower angel descends, but he, unobserved by anyone below, does not act on the human world.
Binaries, Buddhism and the Art of Reminders in the Work of Jacob Hashimoto
In one sense, there is something straightforward about what Hashimoto does with his materials and the visions he produces. What you see is what you get: translucent geometric solids that aggregate into a meandering whole.
The (Syn)Aesthetics of Conspiracy
Since con-spiracies, imagined or true, (etymologically) presuppose the ‘breathing together’ of their wicked wire-pullers, it does not surprise that the artistic response is to picture or craft toxic togetherness, outrageous overlaps and acid amalgamations.
