Recently, I had the pleasure of writing an essay for a new monograph on the contemporary Colombian artist Federico Uribe – whose haunting mixed-media paintings and sculptures draw on a difficult childhood, his complex relationship with Roman Catholicism and the violence of his homeland to explore issues of sex/gender, passion and the body, among others. Now the book is set to be released. ...

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In the kingdom of the blind, they say, the one-eyed man is king. And so it is perhaps inevitable that outgoing House Speaker Paul “Paulie PowerPoint” Ryan should be considered a brain by a country as anti-intellectual as the United States. This is based on his fondness for the Objectivist, everyman-for-himself theories of Ayn Rand, a poor philosopher and an even poorer novelist (“The Fountainhead,” “Atlas Shrugged”) whose characters are basically stand-in for her bloated ideas.

Thus Ryan’s not really much of a Brainiac but then, he has always given the appearance of being something he is not. ...

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The United States – using what President Donald J. Trumpet called its “righteous power,” which is an interesting turn of phrase from Stormy Daniels’ alleged one-night stand – has joined longtime allies Great Britain and France in launching 100 missiles at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons depots and research facilities in Damascus and Homs.

Already, El Presidente – who has the attention span of a flea – has declared “Mission Accomplished.” I really wish American presidents would stop using that I’m-a-tough-guy-even-though-I-never-served-in-a-war phrase. Some 15 years after President George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished,” we’re still in Iraq and Afghanistan. You see where we’re going with this. ...

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