In 1895, after China’s exhausted empire was defeated by Japan in a war over the Korean Peninsula, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (“Willy”) sent a letter to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (“Nicky”). He warned about the dangers posed to white nations by the “yellow races.” Willy enclosed a print by a German…
Marcel Duchamp’s work is untouchable. That’s no surprise. He didn’t want to touch us. The chilliness of the Duchamp retrospective that opened last spring at the Museum of Modern Art in New York mirrors the artist’s own attitude. His work is a refusal — of avidity, energy, empathy, everything that makes art art. In the…
What does history have to do with prophecy? Or to put it less cryptically, what does our imagination of the future, and of the actions (which is to say, the politics) necessary to take us toward that future, owe to past debates between Muslims, Christians, and Jews over the meaning of divine teachings? This question…
There exists a mode of cultural production that cuts across every medium and answers to no single art. It is found in the philosopher who offers complexity as a kind of balm, in the historian who narrates the whole of the species in an afternoon, in the essayist who dispenses the canon as emotional consolation,…
I tore open my hand when I hit the gravel. A dozen Italian cops were behind me — one drove his boot into my back. Ahead, a pack of journalists crushed into one another to capture the shot. I had locked arms with Nadya Tolokonnikova, the leader of Pussy Riot, to try and block the…
Paul Onditi lives and works in Nairobi, in a high-ceilinged studio with a corrugated iron roof located just a few feet behind his house. He paints there obsessively, surrounded by the sound of barking dogs, Afro-pop from the neighbor’s radio, and matatus honking in the distance. Onditi often wears a brown newsboy cap and black-rimmed glasses — a bit of an old school presentation…
During the war, water became something special. It didn’t come from a tap anymore. You had to go out and look for it. This ritual did not end when the bombing slowed down. I still do the same thing. Usually twice a day, every day, I take a bucket and start walking, sometimes about a…
The painted curtain, with its great swags, is not the greatest of illusions on offer here, the first being: that this is an opera house. Once it was. Now it only brags of brief ballet seasons. Behind glass, the headgear of Aïda, Isolde’s robe, a mask from Die Fledermaus. Take this plaster horse’s…
Let me begin with a declaration of my intention to avoid all euphemism. The standard term for medically facilitated death is “euthanasia,” and that is the term I will be using. We should always be wary of efforts to render more palatable any given proposal for social change by means of innovative new terminology to…
They would tell me they had forgiven. Then, without lowering their voices or altering their tone, they would add, “If he comes back here, we will kill him.” The sentence was not whispered. It came without irony, without threat. I heard it while sharing kola nuts in shaded courtyards, after Friday prayers as sandals lay…
On the sun-kissed afternoon of November 7, 1945, a clear but frigid autumn day, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw — the first such organization founded in the rubble of the destruction — dispatched a convoy of seven men and one woman, all of them Polish-Jewish survivors, to the destroyed extermination camp at Treblinka. Bundled…
Aphrodite In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder records the legend of an ancient traveler who, sometime in the fourth century bce, voyaged to Knidos, a city on the western tip of the Datça peninsula in modern-day Turkey. The young man came specifically to see the statue of Aphrodite in the temple that the Knidians…
