The Arts Archives - Public Seminar

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 ...

Politics

Against “Peace and Love”

A review of Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion

July 6, 2026 • by L. Zhang

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein rushed to praise the far-right activist for, he wrote, “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” Klein lauded the Turning Points USA founder’s approach to civil political debate on college campuses. The column brushed over the fact that ...

Body & Mind

Gut Feeling

In Strange Biology, Charlotte Strange digs into the microbiome and lets it spill out on the page

June 29, 2026 • by Colette Estelle

“For me, the curiosity of the microbe rests on the ambivalent outcomes of its extreme connectedness,” says writer Charlotte Strange: “Its capacity to spoil, sour, and upset, and the slipperiness with which it moves through medical and colloquial speech.” In their chapbook Strange Biology (Wendy’s Subway, 2025), a collection of essays, ...

Psyche

Read a Book, Knit a Sweater, Feel Good

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement exalts spending time offline, but is its dogma persuasive?

June 17, 2026 • by Rachel Potter

Amateurs, crafters, operators, gatherers, counter-coders, monkey-wrenchers, gamers and players, parents, epimeletes, bards and reciters, spectators and fandoms, and puzzlers: These are the 11 categories that the Friends of Attention collective use to describe the types of people reclaiming powers of concentration offline. All perform what the Friends call “attention activism,” ...

Art & Design

The Good Word According to Sister Corita Kent

On how a Catholic school teacher became a radical proponent of activist art

June 15, 2026 • by Julie Allan

Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, a monograph first published by DelMonico Books in 2013 and now reissued, after a decade out of print, provides a look back at a Catholic school art teacher’s journey to become one of the most visible activist artists of the 1960s and ...

The Good Word According to Sister Corita Kent

Interviews

Writing Rooted in Community

June 11, 2026 • by Colette Estelle and Giada Scodellaro

Writing rarely ever comes from true solitude. That is the sentiment of author Giada Scodellaro, whose debut novel, Ruins, Child (New Directions, 2026) is a hybrid text on proximity, grief, growth, and kinship told through the interweaving stories of a community living in a dilapidated apartment complex. In a recent ...

Labor

The Artist Status as Managed Retreat

On the Artist Status in Belgium and the underlying issues caused by defunding cultural labor

June 8, 2026 • by Dominick DeJoy

In March last year, several hundred cultural workers gathered at the Place de la Monnaie in Brussels as part of a national strike. They were there because the Belgian federal government was considering whether to limit the Artist Status, a social protection system that provides unemployment benefits to freelance cultural ...

Politics

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger documents neoliberalism’s erosion of the public sphere

June 2, 2026 • by Austin Tannenbaum

I have a friend, let’s call him SJ, who is passionate about social justice. He majored in political science and keeps apace with all the latest goings on domestically and abroad. He parlays this knowledge into a dozen or so savvy Instagram stories per day on topics ranging from, to ...

Interviews

What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

Megan Milks covers everything milky in their new book, Mega Milk

May 14, 2026 • by Cleo Levin and Megan Milks

Megan Milks’s portrait-in-essays Mega Milk (Feminist Press, 2026) has a straightforward premise: It’s a book about milk. But beneath the surface, it’s a multi-dimensional look at American dairy and all its associations. This collection is about transness, queerness, whiteness, family, farming, and much more. It takes the staid category of ...

Literature

Some Random Person in Grand Rapids

In Natasha Stagg’s new novel, a woman reflects on the struggle of telling the truth about one particular teenage summer

May 13, 2026 • by Katie Pruden

The author Natasha Stagg has been described by Bookforum as a “cool person in downtown New York who writes about the same.” Her first novel, Surveys (2016), and her two essay collections, Sleeveless (2019) and Artless (2023), deal with a perception-obsessed internet culture. But her latest novel, Grand Rapids (Semiotexte, ...

The Arts

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

Against “Peace and Love”

A review of Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion

Gut Feeling

In Strange Biology, Charlotte Strange digs into the microbiome and lets it spill out on the page

Read a Book, Knit a Sweater, Feel Good

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement exalts spending time offline, but is its dogma persuasive?

The Good Word According to Sister Corita Kent

On how a Catholic school teacher became a radical proponent of activist art

Writing Rooted in Community

The Artist Status as Managed Retreat

On the Artist Status in Belgium and the underlying issues caused by defunding cultural labor

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger documents neoliberalism’s erosion of the public sphere

What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

Megan Milks covers everything milky in their new book, Mega Milk

Some Random Person in Grand Rapids

In Natasha Stagg’s new novel, a woman reflects on the struggle of telling the truth about one particular teenage summer

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