The Durham-based Institute for Southern Studies is launching a national campaign to stop what it calls “the second invasion” of Iraq. The U.S. government is doling out billions of dollars to private corporations to rebuild Iraq. Multinationals are taking over everything from oil field technology to public transportation to water services to government ministries, as […]
Fiona Morgan
Posted inArt
Bring on the Super 8
Culling through a box in the attic, or a bin at the thrift store, you can find many mysterious things. But none, perhaps, as mysterious as the filmstrip. Old home movies of your own family can be riveting–strangely intimate and inexplicable as the scenes can be. But in an age of digital cameras and CD […]
Posted inNews
Work of art
On a March afternoon earlier this year, three well-dressed men walked through the crisp grass and dusty earth on Duke University’s Central Campus. Bulldozers had begun to clear the wooded area into a building site. Thirty-four years after the Duke University Museum of Art opened in a cramped, renovated science building, the home of the […]
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Art, physics and the plaque of antiquities
A second century Roman tablature is vulnerable to all sorts of hazards: wars, earthquakes, gravity. But even if the object makes it, as this one did, into the loving care of a museum curator, there is one thing that can still ravage it: the air. Calcium carbonate seeps out of marble over time, interacting with […]
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“Not dead at all”
Media C-SPAN is rarely as exciting as it was last week. On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, nearly a dozen lawmakers stood up to voice passionate support for a movement in Congress to override the Federal Communications Commission’s decision earlier this year to further deregulate the media industry. It was a show […]
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The Cuntry Kings
You’ve heard of drag queens, but how about drag kings? The Cuntry Kings are a new Durham-based drag troupe that’s “trying to make a new statement through drag,” says member Kelli DePuy. Drag kings assert that it’s not just femininity that’s performed and put-on–masculinity is also a kind of performance. Gender itself is fluid, and […]
Posted inArt
Absurdity goes pop
Romanian-born, French-educated, Eugene Ionesco was a Baudelaire scholar who decided at the age of 40 to learn English. While copying out the rudimentary, cliched sentences of his English primer, he was hit with the absurd nature of language and the way it creates binaries and paradoxes that seem to dissolve all sense and logic. His […]
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USA Patriot Act
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism This 342-page act was passed by Congress on Oct. 26, 2001, six weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Its stated purpose was to improve intelligence-gathering efforts between federal, state and local law enforcement in order […]
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Dissent is Patriotic
These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine in The Crisis, a pamphlet that stirred the withering revolutionary army to victory in the winter of 1776. In Paine’s day, support for American freedom was an act of dissent. Fearing the same excesses of centralized government that they had experienced under British rule, […]
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Patriot II
The Domestic Security Enhancement Act The content of this legislation was leaked by the Justice Department in January. It was introduced in the Senate that month and currently is before the Judiciary Committee. It has not yet been introduced in the House of Representatives. If enacted: H The government would no longer be required to […]