AuthorElysium

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat on the Supreme Court bench on August 10, 1993, she became the second female to serve on the country’s highest court, joining Justice Sandra Day O’Connor(nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981). In the court’s group portrait from RBG’s first term, the nine justices, posed in front of red velvet curtains, wear flowing black judicial robes. The...

We’re supposed to think that Jackson Pollock invented drip painting, and with it the American branch of Abstract Expressionism. He did, didn’t he? So say Life and Time magazine and countless art history books and professors in dimly lit lecture halls, their brows tinted by the light from the projector, their words backed by the windy hum of its motor. The first drip, or all-around painting—made...

Former president Trump lashed out from the witness stand prompting judge Arthur Engoron to ask Trump’s lawyers “can you control your client? This is not a political rally.”

Roz Chast, Like All of Us, Has Recurring Dreams

The simplest way to make a globe is to construct a sphere and paint it. The earliest globes would have been made of wood or metal, with the celestial or terrestrial map painted directly on by hand. Later, in the sixteenth century, hollow globes were made of thin sheets of metal which were then hand-painted. Mapping doesnt lend itself to painting and lettering by hand, and cartography was in its...

Id been in practice as a conservator of art and architecture for about twenty-five years when I had my first big, bona fide failure. Before then Id made only minor errors that could be easily fixed and disclosedas our profession requires us to dowith little fanfare or consequence. My irreparable blunder came in 2009, when the world was in economic freefall and there was little work to be had. I...

In 2009 I started making poems in dialogue with the visual art and writing of Agnes Martin. I was at the beginning of what my friend the writer Miranda Mellis called a healing crisis, the most acute physical symptoms of which would last for five years. In the foreground of this healing crisis were chronic illness and pain, exacerbated by economics. Id lost a full-time teaching job to the Great...