Humanities Magazine (October 20, 2024): The Fall 2024 Issue features…
A major exhibition takes us inside the private, busy lives of women by Angelica Aboulhosn
A new digital project looks at the forgotten history of America’s submerged communities by Anna Webb
Humanities Magazine – Spring 2024 Issue:
The great Italian poet, in light of a new documentary
Qui est per omnia secula benedictus are the final words of La Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri’s collection of poetry and prose.
The Latin renders to “who is blessed for ever” and concludes an enigmatic, brief paragraph. First published in 1294, La Vita Nuova is a tantalizing prelude to the Florentine poet’s masterpiece, La Commedia, known today as The Divine Comedy. For centuries, readers and scholars have pored over La Vita Nuova (Italian for, literally, the new life)—convinced, as we often are, that a gifted writer’s nascent work contains the answers to longstanding mysteries.
How I Created a Picture Book About Rome
“Building Stories,” the new exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., explores themes of architecture, construction, and design through children’s books, such as Rome Antics by David Macaulay.
I first met Rome as a student in 1968. Rome is complicated and demanding and can be overwhelming—especially if you are homesick. Eventually, the riches and surprises of the imperial city will render all attempts to keep one’s distance useless. I didn’t realize how attached I had become until a few years later.
Aesthetica Magazine (February 2, 2024) – The February/March 2024 issue features ‘Perception is Everything’. This issue recognises agents of change. Throughout history, art has influenced societies, challenged norms, questioned the status quo, raised awareness and prompted new perspectives.
The artists in this issue embody this notion. We speak with Tania Franco Klein about her distinct style, which is realised through cinematic photographs. She surveys present-day anxieties and effects of media overstimulation. Meanwhile, Cristóbal Ascencio’s work and research focuses on the relationship between images and memory. He looks at how experience can be appropriated between generations. Kaya & Blank is a photographic duo that explores the way that humans inhabit the world, pushing the boundaries of how reality is presented. Tara Donovan, featured in When Forms Come Alive, opening at the Hayward Gallery, London, this winter, is one of 21 artists in an exhibition that reclaims space in an increasingly digitised world. It spans 60 years of contemporary sculpture and shows works that trigger a physical response.
In photography we traverse continents with an extraordinary range of practitioners, including Derrick O. Boateng, Ibai Acevedo, Jonathan Knowles, Tom Hegen and Neil Burnell. Our cover duo, Tropico Photo, offers pop colours and urban cool. Finally, the Last Words go to Yannis Davy Guibinga.
Humanities Magazine – Winter 2024 Issue:
A new exhibition looks at Europe’s earliest societies
As visitors exit “First Kings of Europe,” the gift shop offers a kind of test. Two craft beers were created for the exhibition, a collaboration between the museum and Off Color Brewing: Beer for Kings, made from top-quality rich and ancient grains, and Beer for Commoners, made from the more modest ingredients of the poor. Beneath the racks of beer hang T-shirts with the art for each. Which identity does the visitor want to take home: commoner or king? The answer for most exhibitions celebrating the awe-inspiring treasures of royalty would be easy, but “First Kings of Europe” is a different kind of show, with an ambitious new approach to how we display and envision power, kingship, and history.
During World War II, Axis espionage inspired a media panic, but amateurish German agents turned out to be “underwhelming”
ICELAND REVIEW MAGAZINE (OCT/NOV 2023): The latest issue features ‘Island In The Making’ – A Scientific Expedition of Surtsey Island; Mycological Magic – Foraging with Iceland’s Mushroom Queen, and more…
Humanities Magazine – Summer 2023 Issue
In the 1970s and ’80s, geographer Ken Martis mapped every congressional district and color-coded them by political party, going all the way back to the first Congress.
The Man in Black grew up in Dyess, Arkansas, in a community of poor farmers working government land.
A traveling exhibition explores the underworld
In the captivating survey “Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds,” the damned are boiled alive. Writhing in pain, they are skewered, mauled by dogs, and devoured by ink-black birds. But the show is dotted throughout by charming reprieves: a lush jade-green garden, creamy-white blossoms, and whirling clouds. This is a hell that delights as much as it punishes.
SISYPHUS MAGAZINE (SPRING 2023) – This issue explores the theories in society that subjectify truth, the influence of social media, philosophical pragmatism, the generational representations of societal ideals, the environmental impact of governmental and private sector choices, the factions of progressive arguments, and the evolution of Sisyphus.
In modern society, it’s difficult to discern what’s real and what’s not in news media’s contemporary platforms and discussions.
Truth is difficult to define but having a correct theory or definition is not the problem. We all know many truths and untruths, without knowing what philosophers have said, and without knowing that many still disagree with each other.
Once lost, the laws might be derived again
When necessary, or so you’ve been told.
You’re half asleep in January sun.
Just out of sight, someone starts bugging you
And Steller’s jays. Green hills, blue weather, — noon
To bring out Panpipes, but it’s too damn cold.
Why the progressive movement has stalled.
I. Nominal and Material Progressivism
Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx believed in progress.
The question, therefore, is what do we mean by progress? How do we understand it? How does it operate? How does progress correspond with progressivism? These questions have become important because progressivism has encountered an internal impasse. It has become mired in internal conflict.
ICELAND REVIEW MAGAZINE (APRIL/MAY 2023):
FICTION the dip by Örvar Smárason
When my fingers started falling off, it became harder and harder to put my
From the archive: In this 1971 article from Iceland Review,
Haraldur Sigurðsson delves into the history of Icelandic cartography. Note
Individually, snowflakes are fragile, easily broken, dissolving into droplets of water at the mere touch of a finger or a breath of air, while en masse, they’re capable of wreaking havoc on the city streets and causing catastrophe when avalanching down a mountainside.
Humanities Magazine – Spring 2023 Issue
The artist and his birds continue to challenge us
John James Audubon, dead for 172 years, has been in the news again. Disturbing facts known to his biographers—that, for example, when he kept a store in Henderson, Kentucky, he enslaved people—have gained new currency, although the National Audubon Society has, for now, held on to its name. For many, Audubon has become synonymous with an activity—call it science, ornithology, natural history, birding, love of the outdoors—that has, for the longest time, excluded people of color.
In 1701, in Middletown, New Jersey, Moses Butterworth languished in a jail, accused of piracy. Like many young men based in England or her colonies, he had joined a crew that sailed the Indian Ocean intent on plundering ships of the Muslim Mughal Empire. Throughout the 1690s, these pirates marauded vessels laden with gold, jewels, silk, and calico on pilgrimage toward Mecca. After achieving great success, many of these men sailed back into the Atlantic via Madagascar to the North American seaboard, where they quietly disembarked in Charleston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City, Newport, and Boston, and made themselves at home.
The New Review (April 2, 2023) – How running helped me navigate the strange terrain of grief An extract from @drrachelhewitt’s memoir, In Her Nature @ChattoBooks.
An actor returns to Palestine and joins a local production of Hamlet in this richly layered and elegant examination of memories and oppression
The West Bank town of Jenin: ‘what could offer a more febrile union of the personal and the political than Palestine?’ Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images
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