News

Google Maps finally does a better job hiding Tel Aviv

Israel’s many satellite image “parks” change their colors

Diabolik fumetto ‘Il Morto che Ritorna’, Italy, 1995

Italian comic books await a Quentin Tarantino to make them cool again

More evidence the China building boom is ending

But here are the astounding numbers on what they’ve built


The Times’ Roberta Smith explains Ryan Trecartin’s art

Roberta Smith at least makes a case for Trecartin’s merits, unlike Peter Schjeldahl

Is artist Ryan Trecartin any good? Who can tell?

New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl claims he’s great but doesn’t say why

Twenty weeks of WWII at The Atlantic

All sorts of visual surprises remain of one of the most documented moments in history


Chocolat Pupier Asian cultures album, France, 1936

A 1936 collectible album for children, embedded with the politics of its age

Philippe Petit’s new act and a Keralan puppeteer

A Keralan puppeteer, the last known practitioner of her art, performs a high wire act of her own

Macau’s architectural legacy

A schizophrenic policy of sacrificing new land to preserve old buildings


The unlikely face of hip-hop

Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop explored the boundaries of sound

‘Sheikh’: a spelling manifesto

Finally, one Middle East conflict that can be settled: it’s not pronounced like ‘chic’

President Ali Abdullah Saleh finally leaves Yemen

It is a shame for Saleh, and Yemen, that it took violence to get him out


Newsreel: ’67 War and party balloons for Red China

Newsreels declare: US neutral in ’67 War in the Middle East and Red China fears party balloons

What wartime propaganda looked like

How atrocities radicalize moderates and create social unity

Letter from Japan the day WWII ended

My grandfather’s firsthand account of the destruction of Japanese cities


Visiting the land of ethnic cleansing

The triumph of Sarajevo: cosmopolitanism survives the nativists’ war

Mubarak on trial: should the past be prosecuted?

Forgetting the past is unacceptable, but so too is shelving it through superficial justice

French diary from WWII

The cramped hand suggests a shortage of paper, the mysterious letters and numbers hint at a code


Salvador Allende and ‘The Battle of Chile’

‘The Battle of Chile’ is one of the greatest records of a revolutionary political moment ever filmed

How my journey to Beirut ended up on an art gallery wall

I had become a migratory subject for the artist Walead Beshty

The disorder of Spanish politics

Spain is up in arms, again, with revolution in the air


An art opening at Experimenta in Hong Kong

Unusually for Hong Kong, something unexpected might happen

On Obama’s second big Middle East speech

There has been a revolution in the Arab world but, thus far, no revolution in American thinking

You are not alone

Artist Corinne Vionnet captures the banality of seemingly unique travel experiences