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Erica X Eisen on Muck Rack

Erica X Eisen

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Tales of the Catfish God: Earthquakes in Japanese Woodblock Prints (1855)

Tales of the Catfish God: Earthquakes in Japanese Woodblock Prints (1855)

Public Domain Review — A new genre of artwork flourished amid the rubble of disaster-stricken Edo in 1855: a type of woodblock print known as namazu-e and rooted in a myth that earthquakes were caused by the movements of a great catfish.
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Masters of the Ice: Charles Rabot's Arctic Photographs (ca. 1881)

Masters of the Ice: Charles Rabot's Arctic Photographs (ca. 1881)

Public Domain Review — A self-styled glaciologist, Rabot undertook four expeditions to the Arctic in his lifetime, taking stunning photographs that capture an abiding sense of stillness.
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Language is at the heart of Indigenous community health | Aeon Essays

Language is at the heart of Indigenous community health | Aeon Essays

Aeon — For First Nations people, health is not a matter of mechanical fitness of the body, but of language, identity and belonging.
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Ikkyū in Hell: *Skeletons* (1692)

Ikkyū in Hell: *Skeletons* (1692)

Public Domain Review — A Japanese collection of poetry and prose includes illustrations supposedly replicating a lost manuscript by a wine and women-loving Zen monk.
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Aftershock of the New: Woodblock Prints of Post-Disaster Tokyo (1928-32)

Aftershock of the New: Woodblock Prints of Post-Disaster Tokyo (1928-32)

Public Domain Review — After the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, a group of modern Japanese artists sought to capture the rapid modernization of the rebuilt city around them.
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*A Careful Selection of Whisk Ferns* (1837)

*A Careful Selection of Whisk Ferns* (1837)

Public Domain Review — A curious two-volume illustrated book on bonsai from the nineteenth century dispensed not only with vessels but with the trees themselves.
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The Department of Preparation: Thomas Smillie's Photographic Survey of the Smithsonian

The Department of Preparation: Thomas Smillie's Photographic Survey of the Smithsonian

Public Domain Review — When Thomas William Smillie (1843–1917) was designated “custodian” of the Smithsonian Institution’s photographic “specimens” in 1896 — a position we might now call curator of photography — it was the first such appointment at any museum in the United States, and perhaps in the world. Until his death, the Scottish-born chemist would dedicate his life to building and presenting the Smithsonian’s collections, whose far-flung gamut, as Merry Foresta described it, included such categories as “ethnological and archaeological, lithological, mineralogical, ornithological, metallurgical, and perhaps the most enticing category of all, miscellaneous.”
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Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm

Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm

Public Domain Review — From 1907 until its relocation in 1953, the area of Lincoln Heights was home to what the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the city’s most exotic residents”: a thousand-strong collection of alligators that welcomed visitors every day of the year to see, pose with, and even ride them.
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Everything Is Open

Everything Is Open

Hazlitt — People tend to notice when you say, "I can open your front door in thirty seconds."
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Beetle Carapaces in Basohli Miniature Paintings (ca. 1660-1700)

Beetle Carapaces in Basohli Miniature Paintings (ca. 1660-1700)

Public Domain Review — Rising to prominence in the seventeenth century, the Basohli School of painting is particularly known for its vibrant use of color and inventive textural elements - including iridescent beetle carapaces.
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John H. White's Photographs of Black Chicago for DOCUMERICA (1973-74)

John H. White's Photographs of Black Chicago for DOCUMERICA (1973-74)

Public Domain Review — As part of the DOCUMERICA project, which sought to produce a visual record of the 1970s US, John H. White took stunning photographs of Black Chicago.
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In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky's Flawed Images

In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky's Flawed Images

Public Domain Review — Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky's vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography.
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Cruel and Unusual Nourishment

Cruel and Unusual Nourishment

The Baffler — In the midst of all that was horrible and strange in 2020, a disturbing story about a court case in New York's Montgomery County got lost in the shuffle.
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Lower-Caste Life in India Is Illustrated in a New Short-Story Collection

Lower-Caste Life in India Is Illustrated in a New Short-Story Collection

Jacobin — There's a scene near the end of the short story "Jambava's Lineage" where a woman named Ellamma notices that something has happened to upset a group of children who are standing nearby as she chews betel.
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Memories of the Metaverse

Memories of the Metaverse

New York Review of Books — ­­"Yes, you can fly," said one of the moderators. "We'll be doing that in a minute." There was scattered laughter in the theater of the Harvard Film Archive, where what appeared to be a role-playing video game was projected on the screen behind a live panel.
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Blog Editors' Highlights: Spring 2022

Blog Editors' Highlights: Spring 2022

Asymptote — Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries.
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Exploring the Politics of Masks beyond COVID

Exploring the Politics of Masks beyond COVID

Hyperallergic — Though masks are popularly conceived of as limiting expression, they allow their wearers to access a range of emotionality, of which the human face alone is incapable.
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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature - Asymptote Blog

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature - Asymptote Blog

Asymptote Journal — The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire.
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Death of a Citizen

Death of a Citizen

Hypocrite Reader — Let us begin with an execution. Of all the lurid scenes that compose the fragmentary novel Satyricon, perhaps the most disturbing comes at the very end: the poet Eumolpus, sensing his last days drawing near, announces to those around him that he will bequeath his earthly belongings to anyone who promises to eat his dead body.
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The Kept and the Killed

The Kept and the Killed

Public Domain Review — Begun as part of the alphabet soup of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), under the aegis of which Evans' ill-fated photo was taken, had been tasked with resettling struggling farmers onto more fertile ground, providing education about agricultural science, and giving loans for the purchase of land, feed, and livestock.
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Blog Editors' Highlights: Winter 2022

Blog Editors' Highlights: Winter 2022

Asymptote — Asymptote 's Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine's eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.
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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Asymptote — The Kazakh film Akyn (The Poet) has been selected for screening at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival, which will begin on February 10th. Directed by Darezhan Omirbaev, the film takes inspiration from the Hermann Hesse story “Author’s Evening.”
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Women and the Cowpox Vaccine

Women and the Cowpox Vaccine

Lady Science — Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the figure of the "anti-vax mom" has loomed large in the public consciousness and the popular press. She is the monster emblematic of our moment: She attends rallies maskless, pulls her children out of public schools to dodge state-mandated vaccinations, and takes to her blog to pen screeds that are at best ill informed and at worst deliberately manipulative.
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This Constant Becoming: An Interview With Mithu Sen

This Constant Becoming: An Interview With Mithu Sen

hypocritereader.com — Each issue, we highlight an artist whose work is thematically resonant with the written pieces. For TEETH, we spoke with Mithu Sen, a multidisciplinary artist for whom attempting to distill her work into a short biographical description would be out of keeping with her desire to evade the strictures of the art world.
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