Knocking At The Gate

Goin. (2022). "PɇaceMaker" at Maison de la Paix (House of Peace), Geneva, Switzerland. Artist site: https://goin.art/

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist (2024) is one hell of a ride: Sweeping but clunky, overflowing with injustice but inspiring, stupendously long but always attention-seizing. The cinematography, acting, music, production design, and direction are all triumphs but there's more going on here there it might seem. First, let’s be clear about the word “brutalist.” That adjective is almost exclusively used to describe an architect or a building that is associated with a mid-20 th century art movement known as Brutalism. That word does not refer to “brute” or “brutal” or as commonly used in English, but instead refers to a French term for “raw concrete.”   Concrete is cheap, plentiful, quick to use, and long-lasting and that’s why it is one of the most important building materials of all time. It is commonplace to try to hide that buildings are made of concrete by cladding them in something that’s pretty such as glass or stucco or stone or by detailing them with flourishes made of wood...

For state regulators (a) to commission a study which showed that Florida insurers were shoveling billions of dollars in excess payments to their parent companies then claiming to be unable to cover claims without hiking rates or closing up shop, (b) to then keep that study from state lawmakers seeking to calm Florida's hurricane-drenched insurance market, and (c) to then take two years to release the study in a public records request might be one of the most Florida things ever. In this article, Tampa Bay Times staff writer Lawrence Mower explains how this happened and provides a link to the "draft" report.

 Sarah Hagale on Instagram.

Writing in the News-Press , Dr. Robert Hilliard —the noted educator, author, playwright, and veteran who won a Purple Heart fighting Adolf Damn Hitler — explains how to recognize and respond to fascism .

In keeping with the current craze of abusing workers and vilifying the work of public employees, Utah has decided that they shouldn't be able to bargain collectively with their employers . That's a low blow, and a hateful one, and a grotesquely anti-American one. Every single worker everywhere should be able to organize their workplace, period. Anything else hurts us all.

The U.S. Department of Education has long used a series of “Dear Colleague” letters sent to state and local education officials to outline the Department’s broad policy goals and to explain the Department’s interpretation of federal law and court decisions. Along with the law itself, with non-regulatory guidance issued by the Secretary, with the Code of Federal Regulations, and with findings of the Inspector General, these Dear Colleague letters are a fundamental component of federal, state, and local education governance in the United States. Unfortunately, this most recent letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of CivilRights is horrifyingly anti-American. Along with the purges of public employees, this letter is a function of ongoing hostile takeover of federal agencies with the intent of destroying them from within and preventing them from implementing the laws enacted by the Congress. Here are my notes based on my first reading. LETTER (p. 1): “Discriminatio...

  I would like to review RaMell Ross' "Nickel Boys" now that I'm done sobbing, but I hesitate because explaining a major part of why the film is so powerful might spoil it a bit. Let me just say that: 1. This is a film about Black struggle, about Jim Crow, about institutional abuse, about corruption, and about child slavery in 1960s Florida. 2. This is a film about selfless love, about sacrificial love, about friendship, about family, about trust, about truth, about identity, about agency. 3. This is a immensely confident film that asks a lot of its audiences, in that it is told in first person, that faces are often not shown, that it treats Florida's infamous Dozier School for Boys in a fictionalized and sometimes dreamlike manner, that many critical narrative sequences — including one at the heart of the story — are not performed at all but instead are described by still shots of exhumed artifacts and clips of documentary films, and that its one of those movies...

 J.F. McCullers. (2025). "Now The Serpent Was More Subtil." [Digital collage.]

  This article by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards in Pro Publica reveals that t he raids on federal agencies have come to the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, unlawfully "canceling" millions of dollars of in research contracts. The AI-slinging team of course has no idea what they're doing — not only do they not understand the policies they are undermining, but they don't even seem to understand the data they are feigning to analyze. Snatching a gigantic database with elements coded for machine tabulation and then running it willy-nilly through language-based LLMs will inevitably produce nonsensical results, but the team doing it are hooting and hollering because they think they've accomplished something. It would have been efficient to simply ask the data scientists in charge of those databases what they wanted to see, but the new administration has committed itself to ignoring experts. What the team of invaders almo...