The New York Review of Books: Whose Nation? The Art of Black Power

Black art is often characterized as solely a statement of identity, as commentary on blackness in world history, or as a critique of racism. Work by black artists is likely to get lumped together as black, regardless of period, medium, and style. This kind of grouping occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when protests against exclusion prompted white-run museums to attempt to desegregate their collections. Some, like the Newark Museum in New Jersey, had made intermittent efforts to show black work. Others, like the Brooklyn Museum, had a steadier history. Still others had little idea even of where to start. Early museum outreach was prone to grasping at whatever works were easily obtained, then burying them in storage after protests calmed down. What little art criticism there was tended to neglect the visual meanings and value of the art.  [...]

Soul of a Nation answers the complaint that black visual artists have been making since the Harlem Renaissance, that their art suffers from a lack of serious engagement, notably compared with black music. To this day, black visual artists are rarely the subjects of lavish catalogues and lengthy personal essays. Soul of a Nation is certainly lavish, and while the catalogue spends time on individual artists, its strength lies in its acknowledgment of the important part institutions play in art’s creation and reception. Within the racist and sexist history of the American art world, black curators, collectors, and galleries have exerted a crucial countervailing influence. [...]

Near the beginning of the catalogue, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation (a major funder of the project), writes that the “exhibition not only reflects on a particular period in American history, but reaffirms the integral role of art in the fight for social change.” Walker hopes that Soul of a Nation will provide insight into our past and inspire “empathy and action in the days to come.” The exhibition is explicitly intended to serve as a guide to art institutions seeking to desegregate their collections by race and gender, an issue that remains relevant today. Expanding what is seen and accepted as “American art,” then, is a fundamental target of the show. Soul of a Nation itself is an effort, supported by major institutions, to break down habits of exclusion: to reshape American art history by increasing the visibility of black artists then and now. But no single definition of black art can usefully embrace the work of contemporary artists as disparate as Kara Walker, Adam Pendleton, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Charles Gaines, Martin Puryear, and Joyce Scott. Race alone does not serve as a useful category in visual art. Soul of a Nation takes a snapshot of a different time, a moment when the work of black artists was most easily defined by race, and when black work was most frequently and emphatically black. It omits some work from the period that doesn’t fit this criterion, such as the landscapes of Barkley L. Hendricks and Hale Woodruff. Nonetheless, the exhibition surpasses the limitations of twentieth-century museums by including a great deal of work that does not shout its racial identity.

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Vox: Why Christian conservatives supported Trump — and why they might regret it

He argues that religious conservatives knew Trump was flawed but took a chance on him anyway. Tired of establishment Republicans and weary of the Obama years, they were willing to roll the dice on a guy they thought could deliver on a few crucial issues, namely handing over the Supreme Court to pro-life justices. [...]

That’s a great question. I think you have to understand how many religious conservatives perceived Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They felt like they had been traumatized by Barack Obama and his administration. He was stridently pro-abortion; most religious conservatives aren't. His wife and he were strident advocates for the pro-LGBT agenda; most religious conservatives aren’t.  [...]

That then won over prominent clergymen like Franklin Graham and James Dobson. They became apologists for him and used language like, "Well, he's like Churchill. Maybe profane but still ordained.” One of the big positions was that he's Cyrus the Great from the Old Testament, where Cyrus was a vile pagan but still used by God for his purposes. All of this was bandied about. All of this was spoken from pulpits. All of this was said on religious media and secular media like Fox News, etc.  [...]

I think we're going to have a wave of independents. I know many like that. I think many of them are tired of the conservative church being the Republican Party at prayer. They see merits on the other side. Again, they're not gonna go full-on Democrat, because some of these central moral issues like abortion and LGBT and what have you are just not going to let them become Democrats.

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Vox: What the living can learn from the dying

Facing death is considered fundamental in the Buddhist tradition. Death is seen as a final stage of growth. Our daily practices of mindfulness and compassion cultivate the wholesome mental, emotional, and physical qualities that prepare us to meet the inevitable. [...]

I think death is completely unmanageable. Medicine puts a lot of effort into trying to manage this experience, which is too big in a way, too profound for medicine. I think what we do is we help people do the normal things that any other hospice would do. That is, make sure that their pain is well managed, that their symptoms are under control, that they’re not suffering.  [...]

The second is that I think that when we begin to keep death close at hand, we understand just how precarious this life actually is. And when we see that ... then we come to see just how precious it is, and then we don’t want to waste a moment. Then we want to jump into our life. We want to tell the people we love that we love them. We want to live our life in a way that's responsible, meaningful, purposeful. [...]

Death is a mystery, and people who are dying are turning toward mystery, and mystery is this unknowable territory, the land of unanswerable questions. To be a good companion, I have to be comfortable in that territory of mystery as well, and that doesn’t mean that I have all the answers. It means that I’m willing to stay in the room when the going gets tough. That I don’t turn away from the unknown, that I enter with a quality of curiosity and wonder.

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SciShow: Can Dogs Smell Fear?

Vox: Why humans are cruel

But the argument I make in my New Yorker article is that it’s incomplete. A lot of the cruelty we do to one another, the real savage, rotten terrible things we do to one another, are in fact because we recognize the humanity of the other person.

We see other people as blameworthy, as morally responsible, as themselves cruel, as not giving us what we deserve, as taking more than they deserve. And so we treat them horribly precisely because we see them as moral human beings. [...]

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I disagree that those things are “required.” I think a lot of mass killings unfold the way you described it: People do it because they don’t believe they’re killing people. This is what some call instrumental violence, where there’s some end they want to achieve, and people are in the way, so they don’t think of them as people. [...]

But our desire to do well socially can have an ugly side. If you can earn respect by helping people, that’s great. If you can earn respect by physically dominating people with aggression and violence, that’s destructive. So a lot depends on our social environment and whether it incentivizes good or bad behavior. [...]

Again, I think the banal answer is that we’re swayed by social circumstances in ways that might be good or bad. You and I would be completely different people if we lived in a maximum security prison, because we’d have to adapt. There are powerful individual differences that matter, though. People can transcend their conditions, but it’s rarer than we’d like to believe.

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Deutsche Welle: The Berlin Wall is gone — but is it really?

It does not surprise me at all that many East Germans feel as much like second-class citizens now as they did before. I never understood replacing most GDR elites with people from the West. It made sense for politically sensitive positions, but in business, academia, science and culture it went beyond the necessary for my taste. In 2018, Germans from the former East remain underrepresented in leadership positions across the board. [...]

It is clear to me: Those who still reject a political camp because of its historical roots lack democratic maturity. This is how psychological walls are cemented in a country where the concrete Wall fell 28 years, two months and 27 days ago. The point we have now reached, at which the length of time it existed is equal to the time it has not existed, is a new chance to tear down the last of the walls in the mind. [...]

Fortunately, stories like this are normal for the generation of my younger relatives, to which my own children also belong. Many older people could follow this example, even if it can be, in part, understandably difficult. For political leaders, I wish that the last of the Cold War warriors would finally recognize the signs of the times and live up to their responsibilities. And then, the last walls can really fall.

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Al Jazeera: Tens of thousands of Greeks protest Macedonia's name

Hundreds of busses transported demonstrators from across the country for the "Macedonia is Greek" demonstration. Tens of thousands assembled in the city centre with organisers claiming more than one million people would take to the streets. [...]

The demonstration comes two weeks after an estimated 300,000 people gathered in the northern coastal city of Thessaloniki to voice their opposition to the negotiations. [...]

As that rally came to a close, anarchist counter-demonstrators clashed with police, and far-right protesters lit an anarchist squat on fire.

Assailants later vandalised a Holocaust monument.  [...]

In Skopje, former prime minister Nikola Gruevski oversaw a programme to erect statues of Alexander the Great, and name highways, buildings, sports venues and the country's international airport after Greece's historical heroes.

Current Prime Minister Zoran Zaev has expressed his willingness to rename the sites and bring down the monuments that have sparked outrage in Greece. [...]

For its part, Golden Dawn leaders have accused the Syriza-led government of national betrayal. On Saturday night, party leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos urged a crowd of 600 supporters to topple "the anti-Greek government".

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Quartz: World history would be very different without the blood moon eclipse of 1504

That’s what happened in 1504, in the place now known as Jamaica, when Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus performed a deception that would alter the world’s future, as Duncan Steel explains in his book Eclipse: The Celestial Phenomenon that Changed the Course of History. Without this illusion, colonization of the Americas as we know it—with all it entailed, including the massacres of an incalculable number of indigenous people—might not have been.

Columbus was on his fourth trip to the Americas when, in June of 1503, he ran into some trouble. A shipworm epidemic destroyed two of his four ships, forcing him to land the remaining two on a Caribbean island inhabited by the indigenous Arawak people. This was fine for a time. But after six months of providing food for the strangers who had landed on their island, the Arawak were annoyed. Columbus’s sailors were aggravated, too. [...]

Three days before a lunar eclipse was to occur on the night of Feb. 29, Columbus set up a meeting with the Arawak chief. Columbus told the Arawak that his Christian god was angry because the locals were no longer offering cassava and fish to the visitors. Evidence of god’s rage, Columbus said, would be shown in three days’ time, when the moon would disappear from the sky and turn red with fury.

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Social Europe: The Neoliberal Roots Of The New Austrian Right-Wing Government

Soon after the newly elected Austrian government was formed as a coalition of the conservatives and the far right in December 2017, an appeal to boycott the far right Austrian ministers was published in Le Monde in France, while the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, received the new Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz most warmly. This was very different from the unfriendly reaction of the EU to the first conservative-far right Austrian government in 2000. It is too simplistic to say that Europe has meanwhile moved much more to the right. Rather, the omnipresent neoliberal – more accurately, market-fundamentalist – ideology has swallowed up all political parties, from the social democratic left to the Christian democratic right, and has now found its true political destination.  

The programme of the new Austrian government illustrates well this political evolution, and the current Austrian social democrats in opposition could have subscribed to three quarters of this programme – indeed, some of them even discussed the possibility of a left/far-right coalition. Market-fundamentalist doctrine rejects any intervention of politics in the market forces which apparently operate independently from human interference according to supposed natural laws that economists seek to describe mathematically. So, the core duty of any government – implementing economic policy along the lines of its ideological convictions – is taken away. Governments now see themselves as managers who administer and protect a free and unrestrained development of markets and analyse their changes and moves, like zoo-keepers commenting on their growing animals. Governments are expected to facilitate, not to govern, and so it increasingly matters little whether the ruling political party is named socialist, liberal, conservative or far right.

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