Issue 6
Spring 2017
Essays
The Beat of Dissent
by Chloé Buire
No city has a music scene like Luanda, where rappers risk jail to rhyme against the regime. Up all night in the most expensive city on earth
Cinderblocks
by Frederick Deknatel
Reconstruction is war by other means. Even before the horrific bombardment of Syria’s largest city, the battle to control its future had already begun
Their Alabaster Chambers
by Daniel Fairfax
The new film A Quiet Passion is as gemlike as any verse by Emily Dickinson. But like all of Terence Davies’ movies, it owes more to painting than poetry
Negatives
We Never Go Out of Style
Interviews
Matthew Barney
“Out west you have a kind of horizontality and openness, but then you come up against a mountain front, and then you go into the ravines of that mountain system, and you’re held. I think it was on that emotional level that I connected with New York, through its extreme landscape.”
Ma Yansong
“Every time I hear people talk about tradition, they fail. All Chinese architects do is keep copying or accepting what they believe to be modern. But the fact is, if you don’t have an origin you will always be stuck.”
Reviews
Negatives
Fortress of Solitude
by Lauretta Charlton
When the National Museum of African-American History and Culture opened last fall, the Obama presidency seemed a kind of apotheosis. In Trump’s Washington, the museum’s mission seems more urgent, and more fragile
An Honest Mistake
by Shivani Radhakrishnan
All politicians lie, but they usually know they’re doing it. The new American president demands a new kind of epistemology, where truth itself has lost its meaning
Don’t Explain
by Michael Kinnucan
Did anyone have a worse election than Ezra Klein? The failure of Hillary Clinton is the failure of Vox — and yet, in this grim age to come, we may come to miss our know-it-all wonkbloggers
The Blazing World
by Tan Copsey
How to breathe in the Trumpocene? With the Paris Agreement in the balance, ecologists have no choice but to give up the conference-center coffee and roll up their sleeves