Cairo, Damascus and the Surface of Things
With photographers risks their lives to photograph the political events of our time, we might take more time to notice the details.
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Bart Starr Meets Starship Troopers Meets Cleopatra: Super Bowl as Cosmic Mashup
Science fiction has always been about the present, and about the relationship between politics and society. The Super Bowl is a relative newcomer, but thanks to the power of spectacle it’s catching up fast.
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Fashion Watch: All Hail the Aristocrats
Even today, bourgeois morality remains alive and well.
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Simeon to Cyborg: Is Anti-Democratic Meme (& "Arresting" Pics) Dooming Progressive Protest?
The photo may be fitting too well with the anti-democratic meme of late that progressive movements are incoherent. Worse, he looks grotesquely simian, as if political demonstrations were a form of devolution.
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Gilad, Benjamin and How it Looks to be Home
There should be no surprise that politics has not had enough of Gilad. This photo nicely captures the subordination of private life to political grandstanding.
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Compassion Bashing
"In a society given over to greed & arrogance, compassion could be a revolutionary idea."
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Beyond Commemoration Sunday: Remembering to Forget
This is how the US should look: a gleaming city. It need not even be a “city on a hill.” Unfortunately, the photograph is not from Milwaukee or Buffalo or New Orleans or Portland or any other American city. Welcome to the Jinzhou New Area on the northern...
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Just Being Myself
If I had to pick one image to represent the human condition, this might be it.
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Let's Play Army Men!
For those of us who spent countless hours of our childhood playing with World War II combat figurines, this molded amputee is a shock to the memory system.
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What's Really Ruining America: Graffiti!
The pairing of two explanations–one where culture harms the economy, and the other where the economy affects culture–is not journalistic objectivity; no, it’s a false equivalence, and one that encourages the reader to believe that the state should be treating symptoms rather than causes.
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A Different Angle on the Shuttle Program
The dream, the image suggests, was to get just one pod through to some unknown egg. Humanity wouldn’t conquer anything, but if it was found by the right host, some version of the species could spread across the galaxy.
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Seeing Double in Afghanistan
If you think about it, this photo may be one answer to the question that hangs over the war in Afghanistan. That question is, what are we seeing, really?
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Chernobyl and the Spirit World
Chernobyl is now a ghost town, which is one reason this mural is so powerful. The photographic record documents one abandoned habitat after another: schools, hospitals, office buildings, homes, everything had to be abandoned. Harder to capture are the many illnesses, deformities, and deaths caused by the...
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Collective Bargaining and Catastrophe
When disaster strikes, we can learn how it is that all bargaining is collective bargaining.
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Fashion Week and the Creative Destruction of Happiness
OK, I get it: Fashion Week in New York is expected to be exotic and excessive, an uber-chic party for only the few and the very few. Even so, I was a bit taken aback by this unexpected display of privilege.
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Egyptian "Stability" (Many Tanks from US)
They are symbols, sure, but they also are real tanks having specific designs and manufacturers. And that’s where some of the “missing” information is actually there to be seen.
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Monuments Deflated: Civilization in Decline?
It doesn’t take long at all for any modern building, city, or society to look rundown, past its best days, trapped now into cycles of decline. All that is needed is enough denial or inattention. Against those tendencies, these photographs suggest how close the present can be...
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When We Decide to Know
Usually I avoid rubbing your face in it, but not today. This image, which has been sitting on my desktop for a few months, is offered out of anger, grief, and extreme frustration with press, public, and the Obama administration--and most of all with the public.
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