Theme: 9/11
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Matt Ruff reads a passage from his new novel The Mirage, an alternate history of 9/11 and its aftermath.Read more
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Does it make any sense today to imagine like Hegel that the future of Latin America will necessarily involve a conflict with the United States, “in the ages that lie before us?” I think the answer is yes, but that this may not be a necessarily bad thing for the United States. Read more
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With every year, the US naval base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay becomes less of a place and more of a concept, one that seems to have sprung from a vacuum on January 11, 2002, when twenty of the earliest detainees in the “war on terror” arrived there in orange jumpsuits, blackened goggles, shackles and earmuffs.Read more
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Consider that during World War II there were fewer than one hundred civilian casualties on US soil. No fire-bombing of Dresden, no London Blitz, no Hiroshima. Read more
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Long resident in New York, the Catalan artist Francesc Torres was two blocks from the WTC when the first jet struck the north tower, and he witnessed the collapse of both buildings from his studio rooftop ten blocks away. Read more
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It is easy to forget that in the months before the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the dominant story in the American media was not terrorism but cloning. The front-page story in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, was, in fact, a report from the National Academy of Sciences urging that cloning and human stem cell research be “publicly funded and conducted under established standards of open scientific exchange, peer review, and public oversight.”Read more
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“We are in a tension between the speed of history—which happens very, very fast—and progress, which happens very, very slowly,” Gilles Peress wrote in 1999. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, history happened fast, and the pace hasn’t let up since. But it was within this calamitous event that, I believe, Peress realized his vision of photography’s democratic possibilities. 9/11 turned out to be a defining moment in Peress’s work, though in indirect and unanticipated ways. And what it showed is that there are no aesthetic answers to the questions he has been posing about photography’s place in the world, only democratic—which is to say, political—ones. Read more
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