The Interested Story-Teller Alexander Hamilton walked down the ladder carrying a book in one arm and a sac in the other, curious and thrilled. He just finished the journey from an obscure Caribbean island to New York. He walkedRead more…
German Requiem: An Inquiry into Life Through Death
To Accept Death as Part of Life When Grandpa passed away, the family took out the battery from the clock, and sat at the table in front of it for twenty-four hours until they restarted it. To me, it wasRead more…
No Contemporary Art, Only Contemporary Interpretation
Con: together with Tempus: time Three years ago when I was a freshman taking my first history course, Professor Melissa Macauley talked about one moment she recalled from 1989, China, when she was a visiting student at Beijing: “IRead more…
You Can Put Marx Back into the Nineteenth Century, but You Cannot Keep Him There: On Our Relationship with Works of the Past
On October 10, 2016, New Yorker talks about “putting Marx back” in his nineteenth century surroundings.” (Louis Menand, “Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today”) On October 17, 2016, New Yorker talks about “modernizing” Shakespeare into the twenty-first century. (Adam Gopnik, “WhyRead more…
The Two Times When Tseng Kwong Chi was Not in the Mao Suit: A Re-examination of Labeling Through Appearance
Tseng in His Mao Suit The Mao Suit is almost always the first thing you notice in the hundreds of pictures that Tseng Kwong Chi took. It stands out from the crowd who were in extravagant Chinoiserie outfits, fromRead more…
Keep the shadow, Ere the Substance Fade: On the Keeping and Making of Relics
What to remember a loved one with? Something he used. His hat. A black leather hat, wears make it old but do not bring it down. Two metal chains run from the left side to the right. At the topRead more…
Between Humans and the Universe: All We Have are the Connections We Make
What Do We Do with the Universe? We Gaze “Wonder is the beginning of all wisdom,” says Aristotle in Metaphysics. “And looking into the starry sky is the beginning of wonder,” say I. Andrew Yang starts his Interviews withRead more…
The Critics: With the Power of Words
1. “[…] an extended use of the adjectival form [cultural] in more specialist and academic languages. And whole fields of knowledge are now described as cultural. If cultural studies and cultural critique led the way here, the fields of culturalRead more…