Posts in Journalism
Reality Ender: The Hits & Misses of Avery Singer’s NYC Premier

In 1988, artist Lynn Hershman Leeson told an interviewer to “imagine a world in which there is a blurring between the soul and the chip.” When it comes to humans and technology, I always thought the blurring would be physical. Humans would reproduce with robots, or we’d get chips implanted into our brains. After eighteen pandemic months in which I’ve spent so much time on the internet that I can’t tell the difference between my own inner monologue and that of the people I follow on Twitter, I realized there’s no robot sex necessary. The Internet has insidiously taken over our visual and verbal language.


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Pioneer Works Exhibits Legendary Photographer Alex Harsley

His portrait may be on the back wall of the gallery, but the heat of blues legend John Lee Hooker’s stare in Alex Harsley’s portrait of John Lee Hooker (1980) is enough to make a viewer think they did something to piss him off. Everything about the composition makes Hooker seem poised for a fight: the downward angle of both his gaze and hat, how he sits at a slight diagonal, his fist raised over his guitar. That fist’s intensity may be slightly dulled by motion blur, but I still hoped the photographer wasn’t on the receiving end of it.

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‘A Nameless Ghost’: One Mother’s Reflection on Life Cleaning Houses on Minimum Wage

lthough the relationship wasn’t supposed to last, it wasn’t supposed to end the way it did. Stephanie Land was 28. She and her boyfriend were working in cafes in Port Townsend, Ore., living together and saving up until they could part ways to fulfill separate dreams. She planned to move to Montana to study creative writing. Then she got pregnant, the boyfriend got abusive, and she left him. “My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter,” Land writes of what happened next, in “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive.”

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The Koch Brothers Are Even Worse Than You Think

The phrase “The Koch Brothers” has become a shorthand for the insidious spread of radical right-wing power in America. But even those of us who devoured Jane Mayer’s book “Dark Money,” as well as the work of other journalists who illuminated the reach of billionaires Charles and the recently deceased David Koch, including their massive network of conservative and libertarian Political Action Committees and the lobbying efforts of those PACs, might have only a glimmer of an idea of the size and scope of Koch Industries. The business is headed by Charles (David was a shareholder, but not involved in day-to-day affairs), and it’s what gave the brothers their money and influence.

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