Faith Hahn

For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.

She explains that a young man had once fallen passionately in love with the statue and managed to get locked in with her all night; and that the little stain is the only surviving trace of his lust. The heterosexual and the homosexual both gleefully claim that this proves their point (the one observing that even a woman in stone could arouse passio... See more

We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

In seiner vollen Ausfaltung aber fährt er in überwältigender Wirkung, doch eben überhaupt nicht effektmacherisch in unser Ohr: so, als würden alle Töne der Welt, die bekanntlich im Nichtsklang stecken, auf einmal hörbar. Tausend Farben grellen uns da weiß an. Dieser schneidende Krach ist zugleich vollkommene Stille.

The young would-be feminists flocking to “WitchTok” for advice on how to conjure love and manifest success are hardly atheists. Neither are the young men of the right who, if not crowding back into traditionalist churches, grope for a spirituality of strength, vitality, and meaning among the aesthetic ruins of ancient warrior cults. These are peopl... See more

Karikó spends her time with tremendous care now. Too much of it is taken up with emailing; Susan keeps telling her mother that she doesn’t need to respond to all of the people who write to express their individual vaccine hesitancies. But Karikó feels responsible. “The distance between what the average person is knowing about the vaccine and what t... See more