Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
This is a curated collection of letters both from Martha Gellhorn and addressed to her from a variety of correspondents, most notably H. G. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt, interpolated with Janet Somerville’s contextual notes. The overall effect is much like a tragic epistolary novel of grand dimensions.
We tend to think the distribution of first digits in any given data set will be equal; there will be as many ones as eights. However, an empirical analysis of data sets demonstrates again and again that there are far more ones in our universe than any other number.
Popular discourse has thought closely about privilege, but is utterly vapid when it comes to suffering. While it’s true that writers almost universally address suffering as an experience, almost none address it as a discursive category.
Barnabas Moynahan woke from his coma. Nurse Lydia was the only person to witness the moment. She was standing at the foot of his bed and was staring at his eyes when they flickered open. Everyone important had gone home for the day, so Nurse Lydia had no one to tell.
It’s hard to say much with certainty about Shakespeare’s life at that point, but there is one fact we know with absolute certainty: in 1607, Shakespeare saw a comet. Everybody saw it and spoke about it. It was Halley’s Comet.
I used to think masks were for badasses, protesters during the G20 summit who didn’t want to get ID’d by police, or graffiti artists trying to hide from surveillance cameras. Now, masks are what sensible people wear, like Birkenstocks or sunscreen.
My understanding is that Karens throughout the American South still assert the right to go maskless. Presumably street photography in places like Houston and Tallahassee has not yet assumed an after-time look. That might change once all the Karens have died…
The requirement that you conform to white expectations as a prerequisite to conversation about racial injustice is itself an enactment of racial injustice.
Ten years ago to the day, I left the safety of Toronto’s suburbs and rode downtown to poke around the billion dollar militarized zone that former PM Stephen Harper authorized to secure the 2010 G20 summit.
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
Thanks to Covid-19, all major Pride events in Toronto (at least those requiring a city permit) have been cancelled. Like the rest of the world, Pride Toronto has gone virtual.
On Color is organized into 10 chapters—one chapter for each colour of the rainbow (arbitrarily set at seven by Sir Isaac Newton) plus a chapter each for black, white, and grey. Each chapter engages us in a wide-ranging, often erudite, and largely aleatory meditation. It is the work of a mind at play.
The task before me—a task which Daniel Blight sets not only for photographers and artists, but for light-skinned people generally—is to decolonize my seeing.
In an initiative called Paint The City Black, 40 graffiti artists from the GTA and Montreal have gathered in Graffiti Alley to support the Black Lives Matter movement with murals
The history of Toronto retail in 2020 will be framed in terms of carpentry (forgive the pun). A threat appears and the immediate response is to cover all the windows with plywood to keep marauding hoards from smashing things.