Rachel Ossip at n+1:
New image-making technologies — whether the printing press, the camera, or satellite imaging — change our perception of the world, which in turn changes our behaviors. The question at hand is: What are these algorithmic images teaching us to see, say, and do?
As of January 2024, GenAI text-to-image tools produced about thirty-four million images per day. This number is still dwarfed by the daily count of digital photographs, but for how long? From here on out, it’s safest to assume that any image you encounter might be generated. What differentiates these images is not their lack of humanity but their intense abundance of it: all the alienated intelligence, historical strata, and linguistic tics embedded and reproduced within them. Each prompter sets off a huge chain of networked collaboration with artists and academics, clickworkers and random internet users, across time and space, engaging in one massive, multicentury, ongoing game of Eat Poop You Cat. Like it or not, we all — whether pre-algorithmic image makers or self-described AI artists — will have to learn to play.
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If last month’s announcement by Microsoft and Constellation Energy that they planned to restart Three Mile Island was a potent symbol of nuclear energy’s changing fortunes and importance to efforts to decarbonize the US electricity system, this month’s announcements by 
Trump is symptom, not cause, of the “crisis of democracy.” Trump did not turn the nation in a hard-right direction, and if the liberal political establishment doesn’t ask what wind he caught in his sails, it will remain clueless about the wellsprings and fuel of contemporary antidemocratic thinking and practices. It will ignore the cratered prospects and anxiety of the working and middle classes wrought by neoliberalism and financialization; the unconscionable alignment of the Democratic Party with those forces for decades; a scandalously unaccountable and largely bought mainstream media and the challenges of siloed social media; neoliberalism’s direct and indirect assault on democratic principles and practices; degraded and denigrated public education; and mounting anxiety about constitutional democracy’s seeming inability to meet the greatest challenges of our time, especially but not only the climate catastrophe and the devastating global deformations and inequalities emanating from two centuries of Euro-Atlantic empire. Without facing these things, we will not develop democratic prospects for the coming century.
I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room.
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Palm reading, also known as palmistry or chiromancy throughout history, has been far more than a party trick for centuries. Dating back to classical antiquity, the idea that a soothsayer can tell something about a person’s health, disposition, or destiny from the lines on their palm has long fascinated seers and scientists alike.
Nicolay makes these gangs sound like a lot of fun, while also demystifying them. Some band people prefer hierarchy and assertive decision-makers; others aspire to a more chaotic kind of democracy. Some envy the star; others feel sorry for him. Jon Rauhouse, a musician who tours with the singer Neko Case, is glad not to be the one that interviewers want to speak with—he’s free to “go to the zoo and pet kangaroos.” Band people are often asked to interpret cryptic directives in the studio. The multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns recalls one singer who, in lieu of instructions, would tell him stories about the music—he might be told to imagine a song they were working on as “a cloud in the shape of an elephant, and it’s trying to squeeze through a keyhole to get into this room.”
Gary Indiana, who died on October 23 at 74 years old, was a brilliant and scathing critic of contemporary 
Approaching the age of twenty, Mondrian painted his most impressive painting to date. It was a still life of a dead hare. The animal hanging from its right hind leg is a feat of verisimilitude. The setting—the space above a wooden plank that recedes into a black background—is a triumph of austere elegance. The contrast between the luminous subject and the rich black presages Mondrian’s later abstractions.
The dawn of annoyingly massive satellites is upon us, shielding our views of the shimmering cosmos. Five of the largest communication satellites just unfolded in Earth orbit, and this is only the beginning of a Texas startup’s constellation of cellphone towers in space.
You can predict the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election by tracking the laughter in the room. Laughter glides on the edge of the unspeakable. It flirts with taboo obscenity and unbearable trauma while toeing the line and somehow lightening the tone. When Donald Trump absurdly accused Haitian migrants in Ohio of eating people’s pets, silly videos of