Front Cover
Maedeh Asgharpour, ‘ Two Ministers and Anis Al-Jalis.’ From the series 1001 Nights, 2010. Linoleum print, 9.5 x 13 inches. Copyright © Maedeh Asgharpour 2010.
Summary of Frame 2 (front cover): Anis al-Jalis said to the sheikh Ebrahim, “Do you allow me to light one of these candles?” The sheikh said, “Get up and light a candle.” She lit all the candles and sat down. They sat down and sang poems and drank wine. The Khalifa climbed the tree and reached a branch that overlooked the porch of the palace. He saw a boy and a girl like the moon, who were sitting while Sheikh Ibrahim was holding wine in his hand and talking to Anis Al-Jalis.
The Past is Present
Dismantling Living Legacies of White Supremacy
Inspired by student outrage and global anti-racist activism, faculty, staff, and students at UT Dallas have organized a series of teach-ins organized around the theme of “Living Legacies of White Supremacy at UTD and Beyond.”
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.”
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.
Literary Lives
A book arrives to readers already finished. If we allow ourselves to be mystified as we age, we might wonder at the object in our hands. Reading opens us up to a topsy-turvy, funhouse-mirror, Alice in Wonderland universe where we follow in wonder every hint of the hero, intermittently puzzling over what our author is doing. French departments do not stop teaching French literature after Moliere and Racine, Italian departments do not stop teaching Italian literature after Dante and Petrarch, so why do almost all classics departments feel they have no duty to study and teach Latin literature after Juvenal, Martial and Seneca?
Like Magic
Better Lives Through Reading
Aeneid Wars
Folio
Maps of Meaning
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.
Religious Heresy, Liberalism, and Political Philosophy
By not knowing, the recent positions taken by political philosophers over the nature of justice repeat, but superficially so, those much earlier theological arguments over sin and free will.
Objects of History
The Evolution and Extinction of Lady Liberty
Abstracted women as symbols of liberty on U.S. coins contrasted starkly with the personification of British and Spanish monarchs on their coins.
How To Think Outside, Around, In Between, and Beyond the Box
From metaphor to material, humankind has used containers of some sort for the past 200,000-400,000 years.
Art Worlds
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.
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.
Four Images of a Neapolitan Rebellion
Visual representation of a rebellion like Masaniello’s is tricky, because an artist needs to choose to present just a moment of a temporally extended action.
Love, Envy, and Revenge
Titian invites us to empathize with antiquity and to humanize it.
Recent String Quartets
The stillness of Shulamit Ran’s high harmonics, and fragments and sequences of unrelated materials, seem to represent the disjointed, depleted nature of mind when confronted with the destruction of the bodily self.
