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The Sculptor Who Made Masks for Soldiers Disfigured in World War I
Any enduring romanticism for war was obliterated by the industrialized brutality of World War I, from which legions of soldiers returned disfigured by facial injuries.
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The Mystery of the Three Hares Motif
An enigmatic trio of rabbits running in a circle appears on centuries of art, from medieval churches in England to Buddhist caves in China.
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A Fictive Psychoanalytic Society Set in 1930s Coney Island
At the raucous Insanitarium with Blowhole Theater, part of early 20th-century Coney Island’s Pavilion of Fun, clowns and dwarfs poked patrons with cattle prods, pushing women over jets of hot air so their skirts blew upward as onlookers gawked.
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Reader’s Diary: Fred Dewey’s ‘From an Apparent Contradiction in Arendt’
Hannah Arendt, an untimely, unassimilable figure, looms ever larger in the life of thought.
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The Good Life
We want things to be simple, but we know they aren’t, probably never were, and chances are will get only more messy with time. What’s a young poet to do, but try and take some control?
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From White Cube to White Panel: Comics Informed by Contemporary Art
Blaise Larmee was a natural choice to edit the first issue of Mirror Mirror, the new flagship anthology from Minneapolis-based comics publisher 2dcloud.
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Photographing a Steinway Piano Being Put Together
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an example of the first 88-key piano model built by Steinway & Sons in 1868, its rosewood case containing an inventive cast-iron frame held aloft by three ornate legs.
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An Alternative Encyclopedia of Birds Categorized by Poop, Art History, and More
The earliest photograph of a living bird may be one taken by William Henry Fox Talbot in the early 1840s.
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Shopping for the Afterlife in China
Chanel shoes, McDonald's french fries, iPhones, cognac, lacy lingerie, and machine guns are just a few of the consumer goods you can purchase for the dead in China.
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Reader’s Diary: Frank Lima's ‘Incidents of Travel in Poetry’
“There are several Puerto / Ricans on the avenue today, which / makes it beautiful and warm,” wrote Frank O’Hara in “A Step Away from Them.” It was 1956, the day after Jackson Pollock’s funeral.
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Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign
Brandon Som’s first book of poems, The Tribute Horse, won the 2012 Nightboat Poetry Prize.
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The Poetics of Embodiment: Elaine Kahn's 'Women in Public'
The poems in Elaine Kahn’s Women in Public are highly self-aware. They’re porous, riven with gaps and fragmentation; at the same time, they’re unquestionably "lyrical" in their concision and fluidity