The Russian Futurists' "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste"
13.01.2026 20:10
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The Russian Futurists' "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste"
A deeply troubled painter. His friend (my grandfather). A legacy of modern art. A sudden theft; it's psychic reverberations. The great art critic Sebastian Smee wrote about my family's story for the Washington Post:
www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...
Thank you, Ben!
I reviewed Francesca Wade's "Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife" for the New Republic: newrepublic.com/article/2027...
we came to it bc she loved Vanessa Bayer in Freakier Friday (she is, indeed, great in it)
Congratulations, Brian!
THREE POEMS by Jordan Davis @jordandavis.bsky.social
Poetry for BURNING HOUSE PRESS @thearsonista.bsky.social
LANDSCAPE // LABYRINTH
burninghousepress.com/2025/09/20/t...
John Stuart Ill
Highly detailed photorealist painting of an escalator, looking down; with another escalator visible off to the right
"Escalator," a 1970 work by Photorealist painter Richard Estes
I feel attacked
A group of high-profile writers is launching a new magazine called Equator “to challenge the reigning assumption that global events should be narrated by and for the West,” according to a description shared with Semafor. Its founding team includes Pankaj Mishra, Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik, Samanth Subramanian, and Suzy Hansen, with editing by Guardian long reads creator Jonathan Shainin. “In a post-American era, the task of a new magazine is to engage the rich variety of this historical moment on its own terms, without compulsively asking ‘What does it mean for the US?’” the nonprofit outlet, which is primarily based in London, will ask.
Our new magazine, Equator, is officially out in the world — and here @equatormag.bsky.social
Sign up for preview emails, donate, and get tickets to our launch event in London: equator.org
Last year for The Chronicle I wrote about the long history of the first of these, which has been with us since the 1940s
My latest for @chronicle.com: Charlie Kirk's assassination on a college campus is a catastrophe for higher education and will likely only intensify the Trump administration's war on American colleges and universities.
@lareviewofbooks.bsky.social Did you guys spot this, in the latest New Yorker crossword?
My latest for @newrepublic.com: I went back to Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 book “The Denial of Death” to see if it had insights in an age of AI, nightmare tech bros, and the return of Trump in the wake of Covid-19. Turns out it does, though not in the way Becker quite foresaw:
Readers have long been frustrated by Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". Thanks to AI, it is now possible to explore BOTH of the paths described by the speaker
My essay on the tense relationship between authors and AI, as embodied in a major lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now in the Chronicle of Higher Education: www.chronicle.com/article/what...
(I should stop too)
That's nobody's business but the TERFs
I'm more of a constative male
Worst thing to happen to book crit was getting mercilessly synced to pub dates. writer gets 97% of the coverage they're ever getting by the end of week 2, & if the book is widely reviewed (positive or not) in prestige places some of your would-be audience burns out on takes & skips the book itself.
Drank so much coffee that I can feel the Nothing nothinging
Read our blog to get an overview of the Anthropic settlement. There’s an FAQ for authors, too. We hope you find it helpful.
authorsguild.org/news/what-au...
I remember writing a paper for my college Intro to Film course analyzing a sequence from The Magnificent Ambersons. Maybe I'll do the same with these new AI scenes
The Enshittified Ambersons www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...
‘David Lynch had a peculiarly subtractive aesthetic. Just as the more you see, the less comprehensible it becomes, the less you can see (the lower the lighting, the poorer the quality) the more there is to look for.’
Ruby Hamilton on the filmmaker: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Did u guys see the Tesla robot video? I think it's dying
It’s publication day for Matthew Holman’s much-anticipated book on poet Frank O’Hara’s career as a curator
Available now from Bloomsbury at 30% off in paperback
www.bloomsbury.com/us/frank-oha...
Every single quote from the novel supposedly under analysis was hallucinated. Every single one.
