The Arts Archives - Public Seminar

Reviews

When Disintegration Becomes Political Desire

Understanding the far right in Brazil and beyond in Rodrigo Nunes’s Anatomy of Disintegration

October 21, 2026 • by Felippe Ramos

Over the past decade, the rise of far-right movements has unsettled democracies across the globe, from Latin America and the United States to many countries in Europe. In his new book Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right (Haymarket 2026), Rodrigo Nunes argues that the rise ...

When Disintegration Becomes Political Desire

Art & Design

Before Social Media, There Were Postcards

On the first modern media event in fin-de-siècle France

October 15, 2026 • by Karine Macarez

In October 1899, Parisians could purchase a large color lithograph depicting a grotesque human-pig hybrid, complete with spectacles and a curly tail, wielding a paintbrush and smearing a map of France with this brown “caca international”—“international poo." The picture was a caricature of the novelist Émile Zola, or “Le roi ...

Before Social Media, There Were Postcards

Film & Performing Arts

NAZA Gives A Name to the Machinery of Killing

The documentary turns Israeli soldiers’ testimony into an indictment of a system whose victims have been telling its story for years

October 13, 2026 • by Mitchell Abidor

When NAZA, the new documentary on the genocide in Gaza directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival it was reported that it set a festival record for the longest standing ovation ever at 24.5 minutes. When I saw the ...

NAZA Gives A Name to the Machinery of Killing

Activism

Art for the Front Lines

An interview with activist-artist Susan Simensky Bietila

September 25, 2026 • by Julie Allan and Susan Simensky Bietila

A large heron flew over the shore of Lake Michigan at dusk, with cardboard wings spanning sixteen feet—the width of the four activists who held up the puppet’s structural rods. Its wings flapped up and down in the wind. In 2016, demonstrators carried the heron as they marched to celebrate ...

Artificial Intelligence

The End of the Sentence

No one gets to decide how language responds to technological changes, and maybe it is a tease to gather the considerations that might best inform such an imaginary decision. But here we go.

September 14, 2026 • by Jeff Dolven

Here is a definition of the sentence, strict and recent: the minimal theoretical entity required to account for the formal syntactic relationships found to exist among the constituent syntactic units of a language. It is the entity which allows coherent statements about the lower-level constituents of the language, identifying a domain ...

Film & Performing Arts

Why Does Dropping Acid Leave Such a Bad Taste?

What wiping out, Jackass, and Pee-wee Herman reveal about the pleasures of bad taste

September 3, 2026 • by Kayley Cassidy

I’m giving my right foot a pep talk. My left foot has been rolling the skateboard backward and forward over asphalt concrete. I take one deep, confidence-building breath before finally forcing myself onto the board and moving in one slow, straight line. The board creaks loudly as I try to ...

Why Does Dropping Acid Leave Such a Bad Taste?

Prisons and Police

How to Incentivize Justice

The Price of Mercy makes clear the human toll when we employ a criminal legal system that prioritizes punishment over progress

August 31, 2026 • by Emma Robertson

Emily Galvin Almanza is a former public defender and the cofounder of advocacy group Partners for Justice. Her legal career boasts impressive accomplishments and accolades, and yet, as Almanza herself recognizes in the opening pages of her debut book, The Price of Mercy (Crown 2026), her life would likely be ...

Literature

The New Millennium

What might the autobiographical project mean for readers if a published “I” is produced artificially, by a bot?

July 21, 2026 • by Nancy K. Miller

Every style is a means of insisting on something.—Susan Sontag, "On Style" Language expresses and style stresses.—Michael Riffaterre, "Criteria for Style Analysis" Inevitably, in the collective imagination of what developments the new millennium might bring, new social and cultural innovations were anticipated, projected, and marketed. But while such transition from one century ...

Kinships

An Embarrassment of Exactness in Ben Lerner’s Transcription

In forging an interview, Lerner’s narrator must reckon with what an actual recording would have let him avoid

July 20, 2026 • by Elena Rotzokou

Anyone who has transcribed a conversation knows the strangeness of the result: Speech, once written down, often looks less intelligent than it sounded. Repetitions that carried rhythm become clutter; vulnerable hesitations become defects; interruptions that were the life of the exchange become punctuation problems. To transcribe is not to preserve ...

An Embarrassment of Exactness in Ben Lerner’s Transcription

Art & Design

Thinking Technology: New Humans at the New Museum

An exhibition on being human amidst unsettling (and unsettled) technological change

July 15, 2026 • by Yazan Ashqar

The current artificial intelligence boom has birthed an ocean of concerns and considerations about the role of technologies in shaping humanity and its place in the future. The exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, which inaugurated the New Museum’s recent reopening in late March, makes clear: These questions might ...

Thinking Technology: New Humans at the New Museum

Interviews

The Queer Tendency of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

An interview with author Lana Lin on reimagining Gertrude Stein’s modernist landmark

July 14, 2026 • by Lana Lin and Katie Pruden

Upon its publication in 1933, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas launched author Gertrude Stein into commercial success and placed her as a crucial figure of modernism. Under the guise of an "autobiography," Stein wrote about herself and the Paris salon scene through the voice of her lifelong partner, Alice ...

The Queer Tendency of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

Artificial Intelligence

The Silicon Empire’s Interregnum

Nick Srnicek’s new book maps an emergent form of techno-nationalism

July 9, 2026 • by Nolan Young

Military and surveillance tech giant Palantir recently published an unsettling and dystopian manifesto penned by billionaire CEO Alex Karp. Karp’s 22-point document extolls American hegemony and claims that democracies need “hard power” to survive; it also treats one thing as a foregone conclusion—the militarization of artificial intelligence. “Our adversaries will ...

The Arts

When Disintegration Becomes Political Desire

Understanding the far right in Brazil and beyond in Rodrigo Nunes’s Anatomy of Disintegration

NAZA Gives A Name to the Machinery of Killing

The documentary turns Israeli soldiers’ testimony into an indictment of a system whose victims have been telling its story for years

Art for the Front Lines

An interview with activist-artist Susan Simensky Bietila

The End of the Sentence

No one gets to decide how language responds to technological changes, and maybe it is a tease to gather the considerations that might best inform such an imaginary decision. But here we go.

Why Does Dropping Acid Leave Such a Bad Taste?

What wiping out, Jackass, and Pee-wee Herman reveal about the pleasures of bad taste

How to Incentivize Justice

The Price of Mercy makes clear the human toll when we employ a criminal legal system that prioritizes punishment over progress

The New Millennium

What might the autobiographical project mean for readers if a published “I” is produced artificially, by a bot?

An Embarrassment of Exactness in Ben Lerner’s Transcription

In forging an interview, Lerner’s narrator must reckon with what an actual recording would have let him avoid

Thinking Technology: New Humans at the New Museum

An exhibition on being human amidst unsettling (and unsettled) technological change

The Queer Tendency of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

An interview with author Lana Lin on reimagining Gertrude Stein’s modernist landmark

The Silicon Empire’s Interregnum

Nick Srnicek’s new book maps an emergent form of techno-nationalism

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