Jay Matthews

I heard this quote that Elie Wiesel, actually, liked, of Hegel — that genuine tragedies are not conflicts between right and wrong, but conflicts between two rights. But I actually feel like the tragedy of our time is so many wounds, so many sufferings that can’t be equated, and yet they’re all so real. And we try to not address the suffering; we... See more

“In 1909, F.T. Marinetti published his incendiary Futurist Manifesto, proclaiming, “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!!” and “There, on the earth, the earliest dawn!” Intent on delivering Italy from “its fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians,” the Futurists imagined that art, architecture,... See more

“ For love is not about merging. I t’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.”

But I don’t hate writing, and I don’t think most writers do either. They hate that an art form that’s all about noticing and feeling has been turned into just another hustle job full of quotas and shame.

But to me, what the Greeks knew and what these other ancient authors, I think, tapped into is something we’re only now finding words to articulate again, which is that betrayal is the wound that cuts the deepest. You can call it whatever you want, moral distress, moral injury, but really, it’s betrayal — feeling abandoned or betrayed, or betraying... See more

Yet when you have created a simulation-like environment that is immune to reality, this is what happens. You refuse to believe what everyone else can easily see. It is sort of like the old folk tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. It is about the power of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias to avoid facing reality. The current obsession of... See more

One to One: On maps, cartography and our relationship with geographical enquiry over time stretching from ancient Babylon to GIS software. With increasingly sophisticated tools to build maps, "we have the means to comprehend the future.

"We are each at the centre of our own map... We are all innate mapmakers... maps [are the] mediators between an... See more