The Future of Cities

June 15, 2016
On cities grimed by human hands—by pollution and greed, by corruption and terrorism, by neglect and artificiality, by colonization and apartheid and war—and places of hope, with humanism as their foundation.

The Boundaries of Nature

September 15, 2015
On the natural world: wondrous, ineffable, and indifferent to us, adhering to its own laws even as we behold it with awe or fear, even as we seek to understand it through physics and art, even as we impose policies of plunder or protection.

The Boundaries of Taste

June 15, 2015
On that nebulous space between love and what we think we love, primal pleasure and learned appreciation, gut revulsion and reasoned dismissal, and taste as performance and a projection of our selves into the world.

Freedom of Expression: The Gray Areas

February 3, 2014
On the forces that obstruct expression in an age when writers, activists, and others find themselves visibly, violently, and systematically surveilled and silenced, and where—whether geographically or intellectually, in memory or in cyberspace—we might actually be free. Guernica and Free Word in association with Article 19 and English PEN.