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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/black-house-now-mansoor-adayfis-dont-forget-us-lost-found-guantanamo/"></div>Surely the most surreal celebration of Barack Obama’s election happened in the military prison camp known as Guantánamo Bay. In 2008, most of its detainees were held in solitary confinement, but they still talked about the election, using what <a href="https://www.mansooradayfi.com/">Mansoor Adayfi</a>, author of <a href="https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/mansoor-adayfi/dont-forget-us-here/9780306923876/">Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo</a>, calls “DNN” — the Detainee News Network. They planned a victory party using every opportunity they had: during 10-minute outings in the neighboring cages that made up the rec yard, while laying on their bellies and shouting to each other through the slits under their cell doors, and, for those on hunger strike, by chatting when brought together to be force-fed under the supervision of medical staff, in a bizarre version of the Kaffeeklatsch.
The detainees were not rooting for Obama because of his campaign promise to close Guantánamo. Most had lost hope of that. Instead, they guessed that the white guards who called them “sandn***er” while beating them would not want a Black president.
Late on election night, a Black guard walked in front of the cells of Adayfi’s block. He didn’t say anything — just caught the eye of a watchful detainee, grinned, and touched his own skin. “Obama won!” the detainee started to scream. “It’s the Black House now!” He then covered his cell’s observation window with his towel — a violation of the suicide-prevention rules that triggered guards in riot gear to stomp through every block in the camp, waking all the detainees. This “Code Yellow” was the prearranged signal for an Obama win.
Detainees called congratulations to the Black guards and taunted the white ones, yelling “How do you like your new boss?” The guards screamed back at them, demanding to know how they had gotten the election results. The detainees jokingly replied “It’s classified” — the same response their interrogators gave them when asked what crimes they were accused of committing.
Adayfi, born in a small mountain village in Yemen, learned English during the nearly 15 years he spent at Guantánamo. He was never charged with a crime, but guessed that authorities had mistaken him, an 18-year-old student who spoke a Yemeni dialect of Arabic, for a middle-aged Egyptian al-Qaeda general. Adayfi, like many of his fellow detainees, had been kidnapped and sold to American authorities to claim the large rewards offered in the wake of 9/11. Years passed as they were tortured by interrogators who believed they had not yet cracked, instead of understanding they had nothing to tell.
Adayfi’s memoir is a powerful record of the absurdities of the hell of Guantánamo. I only wish it came with sound buttons, like a children’s book, that readers could press to hear him laughing. He giggles when he starts telling a Guantánamo story, blasts “ha!” when he reaches a good bit, and then, at the end, dissolves into belly laughs that trail off into a sigh. I know this because we’re friends. It’s probably against the rules for me to review my friend’s book, but hey — Guantánamo is a black hole that warps all rules, including the rule of law, into meaninglessness.
I came to know Adayfi when I was curating an <a href="https://www.artfromguantanamo.com/">exhibition of paintings and sculpture</a> made by detainees in an art class authorized during the Obama administration. Adayfi wrote an essay for the <a href="http://www.postprintmagazine.com/special-edition-ode-to-the-sea-art-from-guantanamo">catalog</a>, also <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/sunday/guantanamo-early-years-sea.html">published in The New York Times</a>, about why the sea reoccurs so often in this art. It was symbol of freedom and a reminder of beauty, glimpsed only through soon-repaired rips in the tarps blocking the view from their cages. Adayfi and I built a friendship through blurry Skype calls from Serbia, where he now lives, forbidden to return home. “You have to write this down!” I would insist whenever we laughed together the hardest. My favorite story, about learning to cook with no food and love with no one to fall in love with, even became a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/style/modern-love-marriage-class-at-guantanamo.html">Modern Love column</a>.
But it was at Guantánamo itself that Adayfi became a writer, beginning in 2007 when detainees were given a pen and paper for 20 minutes a week to write letters. Adayfi, knowing these letters would be scrutinized by the interrogators, took the opportunity to mock them. He wrote to Donald Rumsfeld, claiming he enjoyed being tortured. He invited various congressmen to share a meal of force-fed Ensure. He regretfully informed space aliens that they should not visit Guantánamo unless they wanted to see the worst side of humans. All the letters came back to him stamped “NOT APPROVED.”
Adayfi’s memoir describes the pain and despair of Guantánamo, as when he writes that going on hunger strike “is like entering a dark tunnel, where the light at the end is death.” But the book is also shot through with stories of practical jokes, silly nicknames, and even tales of slapstick humor. The camp authorities could prevent detainees from moving or speaking. But they could not prevent them from laughing. Their laughter was their way of showing, defiantly, that they still retained their humanity. Their laughter refused to accept torture and indefinite detention as serious or rational. Sometimes, Adayfi writes, even the interrogators would start to laugh, “like our collective laughter was an agreement between us of how crazy this situation was.”
On election night, when one detainee joked that they had learned about Obama’s victory from a radio, even more guards poured into the blocks. They violently restrained the detainees and searched every cell, trying to locate this imaginary device. Adayfi, as he often does throughout his memoir, weaves together Guantánamo’s absurdities of pain and laughter:
<blockquote>One thing we had learned about the Americans was that they were really good at overthinking everything. Instead of believing that we were telling the truth all these years, they believed we were trained in special counter-interrogation techniques. Instead of thinking about how the Code Yellow woke up the entire camp, they believed we had somehow built a radio network. Imagine the logic.</blockquote>
Adayfi’s book brings readers a step closer to imagining this perverse logic of Guantánamo, an “upside-down world” where “salt was more valuable than gold, daylight existed only in our dreams, [and] iguanas had more rights than we did.” Adayfi wrote to “capture all the small moments of joy and beauty” that he and his fellow detainees wrung out of their torment.
“Our jokes were the only things we could control,” he explains. “We had to laugh, otherwise we would’ve been paralyzed by fear.” Don’t Forget Us Here is both a record of what was done to detainees and a triumphant boast about how they survived. We should read it to bear witness to what was done in our name — and to gain inspiration for what we need to do to ensure that this injustice never happens again.
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“It’s the Black House Now!”: Mansoor Adayfi’s Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo

“It’s the Black House Now!”: Mansoor Adayfi’s Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo

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The Museum as Weapon

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/smashing-statues-building-community/"></div>On February 26, 2015, Aaron Tugendhaft saw his Facebook feed overrun by posts of a video of ISIS members <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/2/150227-islamic-militants-destroy-statues-mosul-iraq-video-archaeology/">smashing pre-Islamic sculptures</a> in Iraq’s Mosul Museum. The video seemed paradoxical. If ISIS wanted to eradicate heretical art, why had they filmed themselves doing so, edited the footage, added a catchy soundtrack, and then uploaded it to the internet so that millions of viewers could catch a glimpse of the antiquities? Why did these self-proclaimed iconoclasts, destroyers of images, create new images that preserved in digital form what they had physically destroyed?
Tugendhaft, a scholar of the art history, religion, and political philosophies of the ancient Middle East, recognized a curious synchronicity of images. The ISIS video featured slow-motion shots of three men attacking a fallen statue with sledgehammers. Tugendhaft recalled a very similar composition in a stone relief from the walls of the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II, showing three soldiers smashing a fallen sculpture of a conquered ruler.
<a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo60920783.html"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-14466 size-medium" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/9780226737560-194x300.jpg" alt="" width="194" height="300" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/9780226737560-194x300.jpg 194w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/9780226737560-768x1187.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/9780226737560-662x1024.jpg 662w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/9780226737560.jpg 828w" sizes="(max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px" /></a>
Tugendhaft has written a book, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo60920783.html">The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet</a> (University of Chicago, 2020) spurred by the similarities of these two images, which are separated by 2,500 years but motivated by similar beliefs about the role of images in our lives. His rich yet readable book puts ISIS’ smashing of ancient sculptures into historical and political context. And Tugendhaft’s analysis of our “persistent drive to destroy images — and to make other images showing their destruction” comes at a time when the media is once again flooded with images of destruction of art — this time, of the statues being <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/06/all-the-monuments-to-racism-that-have-been-torched-occupied-or-removed/">toppled by protestors</a> around the world. Tugendhaft’s book is extremely relevant to America’s current debates about public sculpture, especially with regard to the role of violence in this debate.
Tugendhaft points out that many iconoclasts who have smashed art have seemed to thwart their mission “by commemorating the act of destruction.” Seeking to destroy an image of a fallen ruler, or rebelling against the use of images to teach what they consider false beliefs, iconoclasts have long been unable to resist the urge to create new images showing what it is that they have destroyed. Tugendhaft regards this not as naiveté but as an astute realization that images play a crucial role in our ability to live together as communities.
Drawing on the political philosophies of a range of theorists from Max Weber to Plato to the 10th-century Baghdadi philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/al-farabi/">Abu Nasr al-Farabi</a>, Tugendhaft proposes that communities work only when their members sufficiently agree about what is good and what is evil. Because humans generally think in concrete examples rather that abstract theories, we need images to externalize and shape our communal ideals and fears. Ask us about courage and we see Harriet Tubman; ask us about evil and we see the closing doors of a gas chamber. Such images unite us by glossing over just enough of our individual differences to persuade us to take collective action. (Although Tugendhaft focuses on visual images in his book, his theory covers music, poetry, television shows, memes, and anything else that casts abstract theories of good and evil into tangible, memorable specifics.)
Tugendhaft demonstrates his point about the role of images in politics in a number of crisp examples. He describes Saddam Hussein’s use of ancient imagery, including a <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/28803198@N06/3358310247/in/pool-470256@N25/">billboard</a> showing him dressed like an Assyrian king hunting lions from a chariot. Tugendhaft also visually analyzes ISIS propaganda videos to show that they are constructed to look like first-person shooter video games (modestly noting that he had to hire one of his students to play them for him). In turn, these games were modelled on the images of the Gulf War captured by camera-equipped smart bombs, so that “ISIS videos imitate video games that are themselves imitations of the real world.”
But what happens when images collide? Just as we all have differing individual interests, we all have different images that summarize our views of the world. We must reconcile competing images as well as competing interests to be able to live together. One way to get around these conflicts is to trust someone, whether a dictator or a prophet supposedly speaking for a deity, to provide a unified truth we must all follow. Another way is to work out our conflicts to a compromise.
The frustrations of the latter approach mean that people often wish to flee to the certainty of the former — but Tugendhaft is acutely sensitive to the importance of holding space for disagreement within a polity. His grandfather was born in Baghdad, a member of the Jewish community “that had called the banks of the Tigris home since antiquity.” But the 20th century saw the tolerance for pluralism in Iraq shrink. Tugendhaft’s family fled in the wake of <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud">the Farhud</a>, a pogrom carried out against Baghdad’s Jewish population in June 1941. Saddam Hussein and then ISIS carried this urge toward unification still further, seeking to stamp out any dissent. This crackdown on alternate beliefs often included image-breaking.
Smashing statues to change people’s minds is hardly new. Religious texts are full of stories of iconoclastic prophets. Tugendhaft discusses Moses burning the Golden Calf and Muhammed’s adventures in idol-toppling. Ibrahim provides the wittiest example. The Qurʾan <a href="http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=21&amp;verse=52">describes him</a> sneaking into a shrine and smashing all the statues except the largest. When put on trial, Ibrahim claimed the big statue had broken all the rest. He recommends his accusers ask the statue what happened. When they scoff, saying that idols can’t talk, Ibrahim carries the day by pointing out that they should be ashamed for worshipping things that can’t even speak.
Tugendhaft deftly lays out the differences between a community whose members can critically evaluate and change their guiding images and one whose leader seeks a “monopoly on truth,” framing any opposition to the community’s guiding images as insurgence. This theory of images is playing out all too clearly these days. As statues honoring slave-owners fell, Trump issued an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/">Executive Order</a> in June calling the protestors “violent extremists” who want to “erase from the public mind any suggestion that our past may be worth honoring.” Trump, like Tugendhaft, knows that calling for new images is part and parcel of calling for new leaders.
But what new images should fill America’s empty pedestals? Tugendhaft’s theory of the role of iconoclasm in political life can help us understand these protests against statues – and, even more importantly – can give us ideas for what sort of replacement monuments will encourage us to question dictatorial authority instead of merely re-solidifying it in a new form. Tugendhaft points out that ISIS’ images “are purposefully brutal; they seek to compel people to take sides.” But is only in the space between sides, in what Hannah Arendt called the public realm, that we can have the debate that leads to compromise and thus to community action. We need the type of monuments that will encourage debate rather than merely locking in a new certainty about good and evil.
Just as Americans are now arguing, sometimes with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/17/armed-vigilantes-under-scrutiny-after-statue-protester-shot-new-mexico">fatal consequences</a>, about what public monuments should remain standing, we will argue about new monuments. Tugendhaft’s book is an important reminder that, if these arguments are democratic, we will never all be satisfied by their results. A communal compromise cannot fill all individual needs. The best we can hope for are monuments that leave open questions of what exactly it is that we should aspire to. Only a few of our current monuments do this, probably because they leave so many Americans infuriated — remember the <a href="http://magazine.art21.org/2017/03/15/the-black-gash-of-shame-revisiting-the-vietnam-veterans-memorial-controversy/#.XxcNUmpKhKM">vicious debates</a> about Maya Lin’s masterfully ambivalent Vietnam Memorial.
Tugendhaft recommends that we all do what he has done in his book: “To be free citizens, we need to think about how our political images arose, why they were chosen, and what they leave out.” Americans have many decades of such thoughts about our public monuments ahead of us.
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Top image: Assyrian soldiers smashing the sculpture of a conquered king. Drawing of a lost relief from Sargon II’s 8th-century BCE palace at Khorsabad, in what is now Iraq.
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Smashing Statues, Building Community

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/susan-stewarts-ruins-lesson-looking-unswept-stone-besmeard-sluttish-time/"></div>Search Instagram for Michigan Central Station and you’ll find <a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/michigancentralstation/">thousands of photographs</a> taken by trespassers to this most spectacular ruin of Detroit’s city of ruins. The Central Station, abandoned in 1988, stands like a gritty cathedral <a href="https://wdet.org/posts/2018/08/13/87149-in-detroit-ruin-porn-acts-as-a-proving-ground-for-young-photographers/">at the center</a> of the current taste for images of urban decay, often called “<a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/leary_1_15_11/">ruins porn</a>.” Susan Stewart’s new book, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo43058141.html">The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture</a> (University of Chicago Press, 2020), details the long history of Western fascination of contemplating what Shakespeare describes (in <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46455/sonnet-55-not-marble-nor-the-gilded-monuments">Sonnet 55</a>) as “unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.”
Through examinations of works of poetic and visual art, including Wordsworth’s visits to the roofless Tintern Abbey after the French Terror and Eliot’s invocation of a wasteland in response to World War I, Stewart argues that ruins have special interest in times of conflict and financial collapse. Stewart contends that the immediate emotional impact of looking at a ruin is a reminder of our own deaths, since, unlike a heap of rubble, a ruin bears some traces of what it once was before its fall. When we see how “age under-ate” the stones of a Roman monument, we think about how we, like its builders, will soon vanish into “gravesgrasp” (as did an Old English poet in a fragmentary poem known as “The Ruin,” probably from the 8th century, in Michael Alexander’s translation).
In a ruin, as Stewart puts it, “we are meeting presence on its way to absence.” Stewart, a Princeton professor and former MacArthur fellow, alternates between writing works of cultural criticism and books of poetry. This book’s arguments are weighty but its phrases, like this one, are often poetically deft.
Ruins help us imagine not only the “certainty without particulars” of our own deaths, but also lead us to thoughts of the death of our societies. Thus, Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, the Comte of Volney, when visiting the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Palmyra in what is now Syria, in the early 1780s, imagined a future traveler sitting on the banks of the Seine, looking at the “silent ruins” of Paris. Volney’s memoirs of Palmyra, <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1397">The Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires and the Law of Nature</a>, written in the form of a <a href="https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/03/07/ruins-and-revolution-volney-palmyra-and-isis/">treatise of political philosophy</a>, attracted such interest that they were translated by Thomas Jefferson. Stewart points out that they are one of many examples of the use of ruins not to present a vision of the past but rather to give “a glimpse of future ruin viewed through an intact present.”
Discussing ruins means discussing Rome: the remains of whose ancient buildings have long been the prototype for ruins in the West. Roman ruins are the source imagery for everything from picturesque fallen columns in the background of countless landscape paintings to the Tower of Babel, which has often been represented, as by Breugel, as a hyperextended Colosseum.
Rome may be the Eternal City, but Stewart reminds us, it has never been a permanent one. It has endured many cycles of destruction and rebuilding, from the 410 sack by Alaric onwards. Even in times of peace, the city has had a complicated relationship with its ancient monuments. Manuel Chrysoloras, the Byzantine Greek scholar who visited Rome in 1411, remarked on the contrast between Roman appreciation of classical learning and their use of ancient buildings as quarries for stone for new construction. He wrote that Rome “both nourishes and consumes itself.” It was not until the artist Raphael complained to Pope Leo X in 1519 that Romans were finally prohibited from dismantling ancient buildings to produce lime for mortar by burning their marble.
Despite centuries of neglect as well as deliberate destruction, the bones of the past still lie thick in Rome. But anyone who has made their way up to one of the panoramic viewpoints over the Roman forum knows that its jumble of architectural fragments may speak of empire, but looks like an untidy builder’s yard. Even Goethe complained that Rome’s ruins, seen at last, did not live up to their representations in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s engravings.
We need guidance to know what to think about ruins beyond our initial emotional reaction. Thus, artistic representations of ruins, with their labels, potted histories, and neat moral lessons, are often more satisfying than direct encounters with the ruins themselves. Artists give us not only theories about what the ruined buildings once looked like, but also about what caused their ruination. These messages about the causes of the downfall of architecture and societies are the lessons of Stewart’s title.
Stewart is especially interesting on the obsession with ruins after the conquest of Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1527. The Emperor quashed an alliance between France and Pope Clement VII with the help of German troops. These troops, long unpaid and largely Lutheran, sacked Rome in a frenzy after the death of their commander. In the following decades, many visitors from Northern Europe came to look at what the poet Giovan Francesco Vitale called Rome’s “corpse of greatness.” Printmakers both in Rome itself and in the North, especially Antwerp, also sold thousands of images of Roman ruins to armchair travelers. These viewers, trying to decide whether to remain Catholic or convert to Lutheranism, saw in Rome’s ancient ruins reminders of the fate of heretics. Perhaps Rome had been struck down, like Sodom and Gomorrah. Looking at ruins was also a prompt to consider the destructive outcomes of the ongoing wars of religious conflict that viewers of these ruins images were living through.
Stewart writes that “ruination happens at two speeds: furious and slow.” Furious stories, like the near-instant ruination of Pompeii, capture our attentions more than those of gradual weathering and decay. Stewart describes these destructions as being like unnatural deaths, cutting short the process of aging.
One recent surge of interest in ruins, which Stewart does not mention, fits this model: the <a href="https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2017-julyaug/selections/erin-l-thompson-656342/">2015 destruction</a> of the ancient Roman temples of Bel and Balshamin in Palmyra, Syria, by the Islamic State. The ruins caused by war have long been fascinating to non-combatants. The Frenchman Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who visited Dresden after its bombardment by Prussian forces in 1760, described the shards of mirrors, gilding, and torn Chinese wallpapers he could see in the exposed rooms of palaces whose facades had been torn off by bombs. He rejoiced that he could think this spectacle melancholy but picturesque, since it was not his country. This reaction to ruins, which Stewart traces to Lucretius’ theory in De Rerum Natura about the way that representations of things that would terrify us if we encountered them in real life, like an attacking tiger, produce pleasing feelings of security when we see them in art, since we are not ourselves in danger. As with Dresden, the spectacle of of Palmyra’s ruined ruins carried a very different emotional charge to Western observers than to those involved in the conflict that destroyed them.
Stewart’s book is wide-ranging. Besides architectural ruins, she also includes a long consideration of “ruined” women. For example, she takes the opportunity of examining the erotic scenes sometimes included in 16th century prints of Roman ruins to assert that “fornication” comes from the Latin “fornix,” arch, since the Colosseum’s crumbling arches were notorious as sites for prostitution. But ruins can also provide a setting for the celebration of virginity, as in the many Renaissance Nativity paintings in which Mary cradles the infant Jesus in a stable built into a ruined ancient monument.
At times, the wealth of subject-matter pushed together in this book can feel as jumbled as a ruin itself, with readings of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili cheek-by-jowl with an analysis of the sociology of vestal virgins. This far-reaching erudition is characteristic of Stewart, whose influential 1984 book, <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/on-longing">On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection</a>, also looked at how we use objects to shape our understandings of society, and ranged from miniature books to tall tales. Stewart expects much of her readers, but her writing is also forceful and clear enough that anyone should be able to make it through, with a few side trips to Wikipedia for refresher lessons in, say, the politics of Emperor Constantine.
Stewart points out that the attitude towards antiquity has always been different in North America than elsewhere. We prefer our antiquity “newly polished,” and thus make our references to the ancient past in terms of pristine neoclassical courthouses rather than paying much attention to the deep time represented by Native American archaeological sites and traditions. It is well worth thinking about what our current fascination with ruins signals about the path our futures will take.
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Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson: Looking at “unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time”

Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson: Looking at “unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time”

The Magnificent Boat: The Colonial Theft of a South Seas Cultural Treasure

Erin L. Thompson is a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. Her book, <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300208528/possession">Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors</a> (Yale, 2016), looks at the reasons people collect antiquities, and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, and others. For more, find her at <a href="http://www.artcrimeprof.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">www.artcrimeprof.com</a> and on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/artcrimeprof">@artcrimeprof</a>.

Erin L. Thompson

Dubiously Acquired Objects: On Götz Aly’s “The Magnificent Boat”

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice

Musket on Your Shoulder and No Bread at Home: On Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s “The Families’ Civil War”

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

Erin L. Thompson is a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. Her book, <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300208528/possession">Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors</a> (Yale, 2016), looks at the reasons people collect antiquities, and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, and others. For more, find her at <a href="http://www.artcrimeprof.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable">www.artcrimeprof.com</a> and on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/artcrimeprof">@artcrimeprof</a>.