(Free this week!)
Eating lunch in the courtyard at the Hammer yesterday, in advance of checking out the very compelling (of course) and sometimes disarmingly beautiful new Patty Chang piece, “Shangri-la”, I was starting to get all prickly about museums and art benefactorship and why isn’t this video piece more widely available (on DVD, perhaps; online; […]

Yahoo News pulls from AP and AFP photos of storm devastation and displays persistent media racism in reporting. See the photo captions
Here and here and here
Or take a comparative view of all the Yahoo News photos featuring folks labeled “looters”
Via Maud Newton, via Metafilter

The purchase of these works makes clear that, under the new leadership of Don Bacigalupi, the Toledo Museum of Art isn’t afraid to make purchases that represent developing ideas.

20 years after John Lithgow outlawed dancing in “Footloose,” you might have assumed that the Bible Belt eventually came to the conclusion that perhaps public recreation is not the primary threat to American society after all.
You would have assumed wrong.
Last weekend, police disrupted a concert in Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah, after undercover agents […]

One doesn’t typically look to former Maine governor Angus King for serious departures from conventional wisdom. King, an Independent whose squishy fiscally-conservative and socially-liberal moderation is more a testament to the collapse of Rockefeller Republicanism than an statement of rugged independence, can generally be counted on for bromides about the need for responsible budgets and […]

Who knew that one settler’s home in the Gaza Bank was worth 7.4 times the life of one Brazilian immigrant murdered by police in England?
The Israeli government has promised a substantial number of shekels to relocated settlers, starting at $200,000. Meanwhile, the London Metropolitan Police have sent a crass letter — […]