On the day he was killed, Mexican journalist Javier Valdez had just come from a meeting with the Riodoce newspaper staff about his security situation; he should leave Sinaloa, at least for a while, everyone agreed. He was intercepted by gunmen on his way home.
bookreview
How He Used Facebook to Win
There are many ways that the Democrats lost the election, starting with the foibles of the candidate herself. If the Republicans had lost, that would have been the prevailing story about them and their candidate as well. That the Republicans didn’t lose can be attributed in large measure to their expert manipulation of social media: Donald Trump is our first Facebook president. His team figured out how to use all the marketing tools of Facebook, as well as Google, the two biggest advertising platforms in the world, to successfully sell a candidate that the majority of Americans did not want.
How to Imagine Consciousness
To the Editors: I agree with Thomas Nagel, along with probably 99.9 percent of humanity, that we really do experience “color, flavor, sound, touch, etc.” We don’t just say we do. But, probably along with 99.9 percent of neuroscientists, I don’t think “the trouble [with Daniel Dennett’s claim] is that…nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a ‘version’ of the neural machinery.”
The End of an Artist
Few filmmakers meant as much to his country as Andrzej Wajda did to Poland. Both a world-famous director and a national conscience, Wajda—who died last October at age ninety—was a singular artist. It is appropriate then that his final film, hauntingly titled Afterimage, would be a drama concerning the last years of another Polish artist, the abstract painter Władysław Strzemiński.
Will Ukraine Ever Change?
Walk around Rivne, a town of a quarter-million people in western Ukraine, a four-hour drive from Kiev, and you could easily get the impression that things are going far better than the country’s official statistics indicate they should be. To a certain extent this is not surprising: economists calculate that between 40 and 50 percent of Ukraine’s economy is off the books, because so much of it is cash-based and it is easy to evade taxes. But a closer look at Rivne tells another story. Along with lots of new houses, one sees fancy new SUVs driven by beefy, shaven-headed men who are accompanied by glamorous high-heeled girls—one of many indications of the extent to which the town has been taken over by organized crime.
The Bruegel of Bendel’s
There is a larger cultural dimension to much of what we see in Florine Stehttheimer’s paintings at the Jewish Museum: the skyscrapers, the department stores, the African-American jazz, the shifting gender roles. Viewers in search of the perfect counterpoint to the Stettheimer retrospective need only walk a block south to the razzle-dazzle show “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.”
Syria: Stories from the Barrel of a Cannon
The short fiction of the Syrian writer Osama Alomar uses animals that are also recognizable types (his ants tend to be hard workers too), but the effect isn’t usually charming or edifying. Instead of a comedy of manners, his non-human characters are, like their human models, stuck in a nightmare of dictatorship and social paranoia.
A Parliament of Owls
Humans have always noticed owls. One of the earliest examples of Paleolithic art is an owl engraved on the wall of the Chauvet cave in France. Among the peculiarities of owl physiognomy is that owls have both eyes facing forward, unlike most birds. They can also turn their heads 270 degrees (making up for their inability to move their eyes). It has been easy to imagine that these creatures of darkness, mostly experienced as an ominous cry in the night or a disconcerting stare during the day, have personalities, and malign ones at that.
The Autocrat’s Language
Donald Trump has an instinct for doing violence to language. Using words to lie destroys language. Using words to cover up lies, however subtly, destroys language. Validating incomprehensible drivel with polite reaction also destroys language. This isn’t merely a question of the prestige of the writing art or the credibility of the journalistic trade: it is about the basic survival of the public sphere.
The Universe in a Nutshell
The gothic boxwood miniatures currently exhibited at the Cloisters—thought to be in large part the work of a single individual in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century—are so breathtakingly intricate, the minuscule scenes in prayer beads and altarpieces rendered so exquisitely, that any viewer should be prepared to gasp, “How did they do it?” These diminutive objects have an impact for which the viewer who expects merely to marvel at technical virtuosity will be unprepared.
Sig Nordal 