Building to Inspire
Some of the most important spaces on campuses are the spaces in between the buildings, the walkways, plazas, green spaces. For the buildings within the Athenaeum to be successful, they need to be connected to these exterior spaces.
The Dragon’s Pearl
Unlike the dragons of the West, the dragons of East Asia are benevolent, compassionate creatures, combining the best attributes of several animals: the talon of the eagle, the head of the lion, and the body of the serpent.
Damn Lies and Statistics: A Critique of Probability
The threshold (the present moment) of the past (all that might be known for certain) abuts upon the radical otherness of the unpredictable future.
Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism
Men and women like Marsden imagined themselves in an international, millennial battle for the spiritual salvation of everyone, enslaved and free. The activism of black Christians appeared to them a distraction for the more holy work of expanding salvation for all.
NFTs: The Afterlife of the Aura
NFTs are liable to physically attack the artworks they represent as long as there is a financial incentive for them to do so—and such an incentive is hard-wired into their blockchain nature.
President Biden, Langston Hughes, and the Expansion of the American Dream
Once treated as tangential to American politics, Hughes’s “dream deferred” is now being imagined as a means to guide and expand political approaches to “the American Dream.”
Digital Art NFTs: The Marriage of Art & Money
The real ethical objection to the rise of NFTs involves the elimination of aesthetics itself as a discrete sphere of human experience.
Britten’s Albert Herring
An artist needs to have inspiration upon which to draw beyond being told what to do on stage—, the kind of inspiration that might arise from having thought seriously about the novel.
The Inceptions of Deception
Deception is exceedingly speedy, a masterpiece of succinctness, propulsion, and focused kinesis; it races like a film helmed by a director notorious for quick shoots.
Dealing with Disappointment in Democracy
Healthy democracies deal with the disappointment they continuously generate by keeping “winners” and “losers” fluid, always open to reconstitution, not hard-and-fast divisions.
From Laboratory to Museum
Many of the notes written on the pages provide mundane details of the experiments—things a researcher would write as a record for future reference—but across the top of the left page in large, all-capital letters are the words: “TOLL, TOLL, TOLL.”
Voyaging with Charles Darwin on the Beagle
We have to imagine the father of evolutionary science clambering over volcanic landscapes, reeking of sweat, covered in dirt and beetles, like some kind of animistic shaman communing with the wilderness.
Endless
These five poems tell the story of a life. Written between January and April of 2020, they explore my desire to understand the reverberations of physical trauma on me and those I love.
The Ancient and Future Art of Terraforming
Human art, human fiction, human invention, human technology, are not unnatural forces that have suddenly erupted into nature, but are the natural continuation of nature’s own evolutionary process.
Please, Mr. Judge Man
In the townships, where there were few social activities besides drinking and sports, and until the early 1990s, gatherings of men were politically suspect. Belonging to an Isicathamiya group was one of the few ways to socialize after a long day of labor.
A Silent Fool
Lear cannot abide silence. He is unable to “hear” the truth of silent testimony about the way things are.
