art

AC’TIV•IST Soup for the Social Justice Soul

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The webseries is an often snubbed medium. It is written-off as sub-par and too easy: any kid can grab a camcorder and some friends right? Webseries has often been viewed as television’s disowned cousin. The truth is that webseries is the future of entertainment and the most honest medium in existence today; it is also so often, due to low budgets and time constraints, a labor of love.
Still, it takes something special for just any webseries to rise above the din of the rest, because anybody can grab a camera and some friends. The internet is for most, though not all, free and easily accessible. No one makes a webseries for the money, because there isn’t much to be made. Even the most well known and frequently awarded series are constantly grasping for sponsorship.

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Exit Through the Pet Shop: On the Potential Environmental Consequences of Actually Finding Dory

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With her bright blue scales, yellow tail, and sleek build, Dory is one good-looking fish, and Finding Dory, Pixar’s latest moneymaker, serves as a 105-minute animated broadcast of constant cuteness about her, a type of Indo-Pacific surgeonfish that is called a blue tang. It may seem harmless enough, but unfortunately Finding Dory has the potential to cause environmental destruction, all because a large swath of consumers in the United States are often incapable of seeing something they like on screen without wanting to possess it. Some marine biologists warn that if people flock to pet stores after seeing Finding Dory to buy blue tangs it could add significant strain to already over-taxed coral reef ecosystems and could seriously harm the blue tang as a species.

General News

Poem on the Murders

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Phliando Castile was an African-American Nutrition Services Department supervisor at a Montessori School in suburban Minnesota. He was shot dead by police on July 6 after being stopped for a broken tail light. His girlfriend, Diamond Lavish Reynolds, immediately began narrating his murder on her phone (sent out via Facebook) as she sat beside him while he was dying in the car. Her four year old daughter, also in the car, witnessed everything.

Earth-based Religions

Lift It

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If God is all-Powerful
Can he make a rock so large he himself
Cannot lift it
Cannot move it
Made up of the stone shavings of
The names
Carved out of the rock
Huddled in a pile
On the ground
The names so large
He himself cannot lift them
From the hearts
Of the bereaved

art

Winter Noon

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A poem by Umberto Saba (Translation by Paula Bohince)

art

Bernie Sanders and Comics Part 4: A Historical Note

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Comic art, the comic strip and the comic art book, owe less to the Jewish tradition than do film or theater (a favorite quip reads: it would be easier to write a history of American Jews without theater than American theater without Jews … because American theater without Jews would hardly be a history at all). But the tradition, continually growing and changing, still owes a lot to the Jewish tradition, and in several interesting ways.

art

The Game of Ones

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Earlier this month, the Guggenheim Museum announced it had received a “a major grant from the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation to support Guggenheim Social Practice, a new initiative committed to exploring the ways in which artists can initiate projects that engage community participants, together with the museum, to foster new forms of public engagement. As part of the initiative, the museum will commission two separate artist projects, one by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and one by Jon Rubin and Lenka Clayton, which will be developed and presented in New York City in 2016 and 2017, respectively.”
The museum curators who conceived and run this initiative join a growing cohort of gatekeepers at institutions and foundations creating programs shaped by the aesthetic and ethic I’ve started to call the Game of Ones. To play it, you create a competition (whether public and visible or private and quiet, the form remains a contest) which richly rewards – with funds and fanfare – a small number of winners from within a large field of practice.

art

Bernie Sanders and Comics Part 3: Why Can’t Bernie Catch a Break from the Talking Heads?

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Everyone knows that television talk shows on mainstream news channels are stacked against Bernie. As Sanders’ victories in state primaries continue to roll in, the Bernie surge is described as interesting but irrelevant, except for as it adds to or subtracts from Hillary Clinton’s supposedly inevitable campaign against Trump.
Meanwhile, social media is flooded with discussions about this notable bias. Is this a contradiction of historic proportions? Or perhaps a return to a little-discussed saga within American liberal history.