Michael Dango at Artforum:
The Neo-Concrete movement was famously short-lived, essentially moribund within a couple of years of the manifesto’s publication. When a US-backed coup deposed Brazil’s leftist president in 1964 and installed a military dictatorship that lasted twenty-one years, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, and other artists central to the movement fled. Pape remained. Among her peers, Pape always stood out for being left behind. During the Neo-Concrete years, she devoted herself to a seemingly passé medium with which she’d been engaged since the early 1950s: the woodblock. Newspapers singled her out, often simply calling her the gravadora, or printmaker. Pape would later theorize these works as the basis for her whole oeuvre, which came to span film, installation, and participatory performance. As the art historian Adele Nelson explains in her book Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil (2022), Pape “conceived printmaking as a conceptual foundation for her artistic practice. . . . She refused to view her early prints as mere preludes to participatory works of art” and instead proposed that “prints—that is, stationary works of art—can activate an experiential, phenomenological experience for the viewer.”
more here.
O
Things get especially interesting every weekend night about two and a half hours into the show, when Swift diverges from her otherwise precisely orchestrated set to perform two “surprise songs” from her catalog acoustically, never to be repeated at a later show, or so she says. The number of viewers in the live streams increase threefold, and fans on TikTok broadcast their feral reactions to Swift’s choices, which become ripe for close reading. “If I hear ‘friends break up’ I’m gonna kill myself,” one user watching the Cincinnati show 
This week, the much anticipated movie Oppenheimer hits theaters, giving famed filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s take on the theoretical physicist who during World War II led the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, is known as a charismatic leader, eloquent public intellectual, and Red Scare victim who in 1954 lost his security clearance in part because of his earlier associations with suspected Communists. To learn about Oppenheimer the scientist, Science spoke with David C. Cassidy, a physicist and historian emeritus at Hofstra University. Cassidy has authored or edited 10 books, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century.
Climate anxiety is understood by psychologists to be a form of ‘practical’ anxiety as it is considered a rational response to the threat of climate change and can lead to constructive behaviours. At a Melbourne Writers Festival panel in 2022, Else Fitzgerald described her debut short story collection, Everything Feels Like the End of the World, as an attempt to work through her own climate grief, a sorrow that has its roots in the successive periods of drought and flooding she experienced growing up in East Gippsland. This, surely – writing a book – is the kind of ‘constructive behaviour’ the psychologists have in mind. But what of climate anxiety that clamps down, that debilitates and immobilises? The anxiety I feel in relation to the climate crisis leaves me swinging wildly between maniacal bouts of information gathering and long periods of psychic paralysis, during which I work equally hard to avoid any mention of climate change and its attendant calamities.
A powerful storm system that hit the U.S. Northeast on July 9 and 10, 2023, dumped 
Especially in northern cities, Blacks were boxed into lives of poverty, redlined into areas of concentrated poverty and further isolated when the federal government built interstate highways that separated them from their white neighbors. Their neighborhoods were patrolled by police departments who moved like occupying forces, with extreme prejudice and impunity. In these places — Los Angeles, New York, Newark, Detroit, and other cities — police brutality was a regular occurrence.
‘And so it was that, on the evening of August 4, 1982,’ writes Mark O’Connell halfway through this gripping portrait of double killer Malcolm Macarthur, ‘the Irish government’s most senior legal official had his housekeeper prepare the spare room for his friend, a man who had just days previously murdered two strangers, and who had that very evening botched an armed robbery at the home of an acquaintance.’
Even in December 2019, when he announced his disease in a long, devil-may-care New Yorker essay, he did it with a dynamite lede: “Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise.” The diagnosis wasn’t the only startling thing about these sentences: Schjeldahl was writing about his personal life for once, and doing so in the same chiseled prose in which he described Giacometti’s bronzes and Manet’s oils. No matter what his subject happened to be, he treated it as an invitation to write beautifully.
I
The scientists want the 
On the phone from his home in Princeton, N.J., on an unseasonably warm day in April, McPhee stresses that Tabula Rasa, which gathers the 92-year-old New Yorker writer’s reflections on projects he once contemplated but never wrote, is not an autobiography. It was, however, done according to Twain’s instructions for “how someone ought to do an autobiography—in a totally random miscellaneous way.” McPhee continues, “Twain’s point is just to jump in anywhere, anywhere at all, and start talking. And if something distracts you, if it seems more interesting, leave the first thing, and go to the second or the third. You can always go back to the first thing next week.”
In 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow delivered a scathing assessment of the state of television to the National Association of Broadcasters, famously dubbing their collective output—from vapid and violent programing to the clamor of endless commercial breaks—a “vast wasteland.” Today, decades into the digital age, signs of this wasteland’s demise abound. Broadcast viewership has fallen by a third since 2015. Millions are pulling the plug on their cable subscriptions. Most adults under the age of thirty say they don’t watch TV. But is what Minow called “the television age” truly over? Or does the wasteland endure?
After you die, your body’s atoms will disperse and find new venues, making their way into oceans, trees and other bodies. But according to the laws of quantum mechanics, all of the information about your body’s build and function will prevail. The relations between the atoms, the uncountable particulars that made you you, will remain forever preserved, albeit in unrecognisably scrambled form – lost in practice, but immortal in principle.
It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers; even the obsession with so-called nepo babies suggests a cultural bloodline without disruption. The internet, meanwhile, tends to both homogenize art and silo audiences by algorithm. We’ve begun to wonder if we’re overlooking experimental movements, or if they’re going extinct.