The Arts Archives - Page 6 of 37

Literature

Rabbit Heart

An excerpt from Gina Chung’s short story collection, Green Frog

May 13, 2025 • by Gina Chung

When I am eight years old, I am a girl who would rather hide than seek, a girl who fears bullies and teachers and loud noises and speaking in public and God. I am overweight for my age group, friendless, and known for thick glasses and dark overalls, which I ...

Prisons and Police

Cooking Noodles on Rikers Island

In their new book, City Time, former inmates David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan take a sociological look at life inside

May 6, 2025 • by Carina Filemyr

Not only is Rikers Island geographically isolated—a landmass situated on the East River between the Bronx and Queens—but what happens there is kept out of the public’s sight. Journalists are given limited entry into day-to-day life on the island, which houses the city's largest jail. Now, in City Time: On ...

Climate & Ecology

The Islandization of Miami

Stephanie Wakefield’s new book explores what “urban resilience” programs get wrong about our future

April 22, 2025 • by Lily Chishan Wong

Do cities have a place in our future? Geographers such as Stephanie Wakefield have identified urbanization as both driver and product of the Anthropocene, the “geological time impacted by human activities.” The uneven capitalist productions of urban spaces, along with operational landscapes required to sustain urban life—such as global supply ...

Literature

Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime

In the 2025 William Phillips Lecture, Salman Rushdie discusses freedom, defiance, fame, and the lesson of the ham sandwich

April 15, 2025 • by Luis Jaramillo and Salman Rushdie

In March, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie visited The New School to deliver the 2025 William Phillips Lecture, a talk titled “Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime.” Rushdie, the author of 15 novels, including the Booker Prize–winning Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, and nonfiction books including, most recently, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, ...

Film & Performing Arts

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Political engagement must not preclude the fullness of life

April 9, 2025 • by Sonali Chakravarti

Put on earrings. Go out for ice cream. Swim. Expose the conditions of torture. For Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, the fight against dictatorship has a rhythm. After being interrogated about her association with communists and terrorists, she must now try to find out where ...

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Fashion

At Parsons, Getting Dressed Is Extra Homework

“What should I wear?”

March 10, 2025 • by Hannah McIntyre

In my first semester at Parsons School of Design, I sat in the library, dazedly looking around at other students’ outfits. I noticed someone wearing a denim beret with a long-sleeved white shirt that had images of bones, forming a skeleton laid on their back. They wore a long black ...

At Parsons, Getting Dressed Is Extra Homework

Activism

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Chris Gilbert’s Commune or Nothing! places Venezuela’s communal movement as a key moment of working-class self-emancipation

March 6, 2025 • by Gant Roberson

In the central western region of Venezuela, a vast scenery of fertile land blends with the llanero (herdsman) culture of the people of Simón Planas township. Adults make use of children's bicycles (received as Christmas gifts from the government) to meet the exigencies of day-to-day life, evoking “a forgotten episode ...

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Art & Design

Rethinking Empathy

A review of Imperfect Solidarities by Aruna D’Souza

March 4, 2025 • by Elide Vincenti

A deceptively simple question animates Imperfect Solidarities (Floating Opera Press, 2024), a short new book by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza: “What would it mean if our politics were based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness ...

Middle East & North Africa

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

A new book by Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

March 3, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025) is a book that will cause much outrage among some of its intended audience: fellow Jews. If there is one thing to which many Jews cleave, it is to our history of victimhood, and the purity that ...

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

Art & Design

In Search of the Sublime … Underground

How far can art carry us through New York City’s broken subway system?

February 26, 2025 • by Mary Karmelek

Weekday mornings, as I walk to the 36th Street subway stop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I quicken my pace, anxious that if I miss the train, I’ll be late for work; worried that if it’s too crowded, I won’t get a seat on the 40-minute commute that lies ahead. As ...

Literature

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence

Under the author’s microscope, the affectations of the literati come into focus

February 20, 2025 • by Madeleine Adams

It’s difficult to write about The Rest Is Silence (trans. from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, New York Review Books, 2024) without sounding like Eduardo Torres, the puffed-up literary critic and protagonist of Augusto Monterroso’s metatextual satire—but I will do my best. The novel, originally published in 1978, is the ...

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence

Literature

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television Isn’t So Funny

And maybe that’s the point

February 12, 2025 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa

I was prepared to laugh my way through Danzy Senna’s sixth novel, Colored Television (Riverhead, 2024), after reading review after review touting the book as a comedy. In this period of intense political and social divisiveness and strife, I hoped a fun satire (I like ridicule!) about a biracial (I’m ...