Gorgeous Gorey!

How does a deeply read, supremely pyrotechnic wordsmith, pioneer of cyberculture who popularized culture jamming and first articulated the notion of Afrofuturism...
Read MoreHow the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat

Wombats captured the attention of English naturalists as soon as they found out about them from early settlers, explorers, and naturalists at the time of first contact...
Read MoreColin Raff: Torpid Slivers #25-29

Even the best of us, in our tender years, were at some moments cruel to other children. But did you also instruct those you bullied to transform...
Read MoreDreamlessness by Joseph Spece

In Bacon’s Studies of the Human Body (1970), a panel pays skewed homage to Caravaggio’s Narcissus or a Narcissus by the Caravaggisti.
Read MoreSober Seers

A prevailing notion of the lives of artists holds that hedonism is a meaningful part of production. The slide projector on the subject has no shortage of famous faces: There’s boozy Faulkner, banging out novels and screenplays while pickled...
Read MoreElephants, Horses, and the Proportions of Paradise

What does a perfect elephant look like? This was a question that occupied the Flemish artist Crispijn van de Passe II in the years around 1620. By then, several elephants had visited the European continent...
Read More‘Can we live ethically in a cursed world?’

I brought a friend with me the first time I saw Princess Mononoke in an American movie theater. He had no experience with Miyazaki or with Japanese culture or animation...
Read MoreColin Raff: Torpid Slivers #20-24

There was a nice breeze going, and the footpost-knot was nodding more rapidly than usual, and maybe tonight it appeared more malevolent than it ever had before.
Read MoreUnsentimental Vistas

When the American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York in 1929 after nearly a decade away in Paris, she came back to a city transformed...
Read MoreErica X Eisen: Paint It Black

Possibly because the current global political landscape resembles less a plausible point on the universe’s long arc towards justice than the dread outcome of a Koch brothers blood-pact with the Lord of the Flies...
Read MoreSlenderraff

Manufacturers of candy and fireworks often employ this method for the exact measurement of radial stress in hypothetical cylinders.
Read MoreCam Scott: Writing Drawing/Drawing Writing

If thought consists in circularity, we could begin where we propose to end, with a question in two directions: how is writing drawing? And how is drawing writing?
Read MoreColin Raff: Torpid Slivers #15-19

We have ascertained that the tail of Subject X can indeed work in conjunction with the test membrane and produce an apparition that will generate a modicum of fear in Subject A.
Read MoreColin Raff: Torpid Slivers #11-14

Upon reaching the foot of a rocky cliff, a travelling hare saw that a goat was readying to climb up its face, and said to him: “O goat, I see how your long horns, that curve and point forwards
Read MoreColin Raff: Torpid Slivers #6-10

A child must say to her playmate, “I love you as I would a timber marmot, because your house is sturdy and filled with hallways. I love you as I would a polar razorback, because your bristly coat matches the driven snow.
Read MoreBharat Azad: Sculpture in Mexico

"Mexico is a surrealist country", my host tells me in the living room of his Centro Historico apartment as we ponder over his collection of works by Alan Glass. I'm in Mexico City...
Read MoreAs Vast as Space and as Timeless as Infinity

The planet has been knocked off its elliptical orbit and overheats as it hurtles toward the sun; the night ceases to exist, oil paintings melt, the sidewalks in New York are hot enough to fry an egg on...
Read MoreEverybody Draw the Dinosaur

What colour was a Tyrannosaurus rex? How did an Archaeopteryx court a mate? And how do you paint the visual likeness of something no human eye...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.
Read MoreI was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,
Read MoreIt’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”
Read MoreFrom the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.
Read MoreThat Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.
Read MoreOn the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.
Read MoreIn the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.
Read MoreI was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,
Read MoreIt’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”
Read MoreFrom the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.
Read MoreThat Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.
Read MoreOn the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.
Read MoreIn the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule
Read More