Born in Tamale and primarily raised in Accra, Mahama chose to base his art studio, Red Clay, in the provincial city rather than in the nation’s capital. Tamale, an important trading hub in northern Ghana, is known for its fugu clothing, a type of smock with roots in the Malian and Songhai empires. Over the centuries, Muslim traders built mosques and schools in sedate Tamale, which was more inland and distant from the direct links of the transatlantic slave and colonial trade. By contrast, Accra, the nation’s capital, with its Parliamentary Building and Black Star Square, is enlivened by streams of mellow banter and commerce. The city’s nocturnal activity creates an electric pulse. Pentecostal revival meeting lights and condominium-sale advertisements illuminate the city, leaving a ruddy glow along the highway. Although both Accra and Tamale have influenced Mahama’s work insofar as he draws from the capital’s marketplace and the provincial city’s scrap metal, his talent emerged against the broader backdrop of the postindependence promise of industrialization and its failure to deliver prosperity to most Ghanaians. Mahama’s installations, which say something about societal deterioration, also dramatize the country’s inability to sustain robust funding in the arts or technology in its postindependence years.
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“The Days of Awe are coming.” Rather than a tagline for a Netflix series modeled on Game of Thrones, the phrase is the literal translation of Yamim Nora’im, or Jewish High Holidays. These awesome days begin with Rosh Hashanah on September 22 and reach a crescendo with Yom Kippur on October.
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Last week, OpenAI released a
Five years ago, I wrote a commentary about the United Nations as it turned 75. The title, “
Cormac McCarthy, one of the greatest novelists America has ever produced and one of the most private, had been dead for 13 months when I arrived at his final residence outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a stately old adobe house, two stories high with beam-ends jutting out of the exterior walls, set back from a country road in a valley below the mountains. First built in 1892, the house was expanded and modernized in the 1970s and extensively modified by McCarthy himself, who, it turns out, was a self-taught architect as well as a master of literary fiction.
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“Now he is scattered among a hundred cities,” W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, “And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.” Auden was ruminating on the recent death of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, but the words could serve as an epitaph for any great author. Poets like to imagine that their creations confer afterlives—for themselves and their subjects—impervious to the assaults of “wasteful war” and “sluttish time” so ruinous to monuments of marble or metal (see Horace’s Ode 3.30 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55). But as Auden recognized, the moment an author dies, his or her legacy is on the loose. Any chance those poems have of a future depends on what readers make of them: “The words of a dead man,” Auden continues, “Are modified in the guts of the living.”
McKibben’s solar revolution has unfurled with startling rapidity. The last two years, he argues, have marked an epochal technoeconomic shift. And yet, despite a lot of solar deployment during that period, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence of a shift in any of the key greenhouse-gas emissions metrics. The vast majority of global energy continues to be produced by fossil fuels, a fact that hasn’t much changed 
They say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.
ENERGY-RELATED CARBON EMISSIONS 
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Remember the last time you visited the doctor? They likely asked you about your medical history.
Here’s a very short, oversimplified history of modern economics. In the 1960s and 1970s, a particular way of thinking about economics crystallized in academic departments, and basically took over the top journals. It was very math-heavy, and it modeled the economy as the sum of a bunch of rational human agents buying and selling things in a market. Although the people who invented these methods (Paul Samuelson, Ken Arrow, etc.) were not very libertarian, in the 70s and 80s a bunch of conservative-leaning economists used the models to claim that free markets were great. The models turned out to be pretty useful for saying “free markets are great”, simply because math is hard — it’s a lot easier to mathematically model a simple, well-functioning market than it is to model a complex world where markets are only part of the story, and where markets themselves have lots of pieces that break down and don’t work.
Before moving to the United States at ten, I grew up surrounded by other Iranians. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends who spoke my language and understood the nuances of my life. Then, in the suburbs of America, I suddenly understood isolation and loneliness. I was the new, dark kid from the country who took Americans hostage, the kid whose name, tastes and mannerisms were easy to mock, who didn’t know the rules to American sports or culture. My refuge from alienation came through stories. I came home from school every day and buried myself in fiction because it felt like the real world had no space for me. But the irony is that the fictional worlds I was most obsessed with had no place for me either.