🇨🇦 Janet Somerville

Also, when you give an Onion subscription to someone as a gift it’s like you keep giving them gifts in the mail for a whole year without you having to remember to do that.

Embrace Description Two shapes emerge from frozen ground. At first, shimmering slivers against the sand. They move as you do, looming silhouettes against the sun. Colossal hands, reaching out. To hold the horizon. To present the day. An invitation to behold and to be held. Welcome their embrace. Change your point of view. Gain a vibrant new perspective. A prismatic reflection of the warmth and light of the day.

Chimera Chimera engages with the notion of mirage through a twofold perspective. On a material level, it offers a direct, tangible interpretation of illusion, employing fisheye mirrors as aesthetic modules that distort perception. On a sensory and conceptual level, it serves as a dialectical reflection on the fragmentation of physical and digital realities, exposing the delicate imbalance between control and security – two cornerstones that define modernity. From a distance, the installation blends seamlessly with its surroundings, dissolving into space through a cascade of mirrored repetitions. Moving closer – the illusion unravels, revealing the framework that sustains it. In this encounter, the viewer meets their own reflection multiplied and displaced, a shifting constellation of selves that provokes an uneasy awareness of being observed. The viewing platform becomes a temporary sanctuary – a cocoon of quiet detachment – from which the gaze can wander freely into the open expanse beyond.

Self Portrait in Glaciate The lifeguard stand has become the fixed marker of the Winter Stations competition: an element that survives each annual installation, anchoring every design to Woodbine Beach. A series of vertical polycarbonate panels, filled with water from the lake nearby, creates a set of ice lenses that glaciate the stand. As the lake water freezes and thaws, the panels cycle through phases of transparency, translucency, and full opacity. The stand is never wholly visible or wholly concealed; instead, it appears through fragments, outlines, and momentary flashes of red. This collage of visual clarity creates a celebratory mirage of the lifeguard externally, and a mirage of Woodbine Beach from within.

Winter Stations

Art on the Beach! Free! Until the end of March.
winterstations.com
#toronto #winterstations #x100vi

I’ve only met a few of the Epstein survivors but the ones I’ve talked to are amazingly strong. The thing that they’ve said to me, the thing that I’ve not seen reported though I’m sure someone has reported it somewhere is that they face a ton of harassment from people online.

Hanging abstract mobile with white discs

Alexander Calder, "Snow Flurry," 1950 calder.org/works/hangin...

It was 53 years ago tonight that WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? debuted on CBS - edited for language - and my Mom was very concerned that I watch it at only 10 years of age, but I did. My parents didn't keep me from adult stuff, for which I am eternally grateful.

US postage stamp from 2020 showing a stylized image of Arthur Schomburg a man with dark hair and eyes and a thick black mustache. He is wearing a red tie and is in front of a patterned background reminiscent of kente cloth

Arthur Schomburg identified as Afroborinqueño. Using recovery historiography, he collected materials to counter racist narratives. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at NYPL is his legacy. Mamdani was sworn in on Schomburg's Koran #BlackHistoryMonth
www.nypl.org/blog/2024/01...

Fascism is here and yet we insist on continuing to make things. Keep creating. It's so important. Do not let the fascists colonize your imagination or curtail your creativity.

"Politics is bad enough in any shape; but it shouldn’t get around to manhandling the destitute." ~Martha #Gellhorn, 1935 letter

This is why they killed Malcolm X and MLK and took away passports from Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois— all developed increasingly global perspective on how oppression is global and connected so resistance should be as well.

Also, some people lack curiousity or affinity for humankind beyond household..

There's a reason why so many of us writers can't stop watching Alysia Liu's gold medal performance. That combination of confidence, joy, and vision is, indeed, what every artist in any medium aspires to achieve. She is a muse.

Easy automatic block for me for anyone who says Tucker Carlson has a point about Israel. Israel has made itself a genocidal state. I don’t need a babbling fascist to know that especially when he speaks in the service not of antizionism but Holocaust-justifying antisemitism.

Brackett's diaries are a good read. They include the story of Wilder tearing up an angry letter from one of his lovers, but keeping one fragment. Brackett asked him why. He said he wanted to show it to his wife as the blue of the notepaper was the exact colour he wanted for their sitting room wall.

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

So I kind of figured it’d be amazing to watch but man this really is different. She’s so relaxed. She’s visibly having so much fun. She’s not fighting for a medal here. She’s just playing her favorite game

No one has flopped harder at being a Catholic than JD Vance.

Gisèle Pelicot on rape, courage and her ex-husband: ‘He was loved by everyone. That’s what is so terrifying’ The case against her former husband shocked the world, while her response inspired awe. As she publishes a memoir, she discusses chemical submission, the abuse hidden within her apparently perfect marriage – and why she decided to go public At Gisèle Pelicot’s new home on Île de Ré off France’s Atlantic coast, she likes to take bracing walks along the beach in all weathers, play classical music loud, eat nice chocolate and, as a gift to each new morning, always set the table for breakfast the night before. “It’s my way of putting myself in a good mood when I wake up: the cups are out already, I just need to put the kettle on,” she says. But one of her most treasured possessions is a box of letters she keeps on her desk. The envelopes from across the world – some sent on a prayer, addressed only with her name and the village in Provence where she once lived – piled up at the courthouse in Avignon in southern France in late 2024, when she became famous worldwide as a symbol of courage for waiving her right to anonymity in the trial of her ex-husband and dozens of men he had invited to rape her while she was drugged unconscious. Continue reading...

Gisèle Pelicot on rape, courage and her ex-husband: ‘He was loved by everyone. That’s what is so terrifying’

If you're an e-reader, my #memoir about #grief, HOW MIDSUMMER NIGHT, is deeply discounted @barnesandnoble.com.

Please consider adding it to your queue. @pstnyc.bsky.social

www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-midsum...

Pritzker’s invoice to White House:

(via @nbcnews.com) @govpritzker.illinois.gov

Just signed up for a shift!

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled Trump’s tariffs are illegal, he should give back the money he stole from the American people.

Instead, he's hard at work trying to find legal loopholes to keep taking your money.

There is a kind of smug, dull-minded "We're just here for the show" complicity in that room. During the press conference, Trump announced, not for the first time, "I don't talk to CNN, it's fake news." Why didn't the reporter immediately leave? Why does CNN still invite his stooges on its shows?

"I wish I could see you, but you wouldn't like me much. I've gone angry to the bone." ~Martha #Gellhorn, 1939 letter to #EleanorRoosevelt

It would be a great Black History Month present to me if we launched him into space without a suit

If you can’t draw the line at genocide, then how can voters trust you to draw the line anywhere?

"I wish I could see you, but you wouldn't like me much. I've gone angry to the bone." ~Martha #Gellhorn, 1939 letter to #EleanorRoosevelt

The need is bottomless, unfathomable, and our leaders do nothing to help. Tens of thousands of families are one breath away from disaster.

Alysa Liu’s Olympic run came with terms. Her choreographer helps her express them Liu is the best U.S. hope for an Olympic medal in women's figure skating, which would be the country's first in the competition since 2006.

“When Liu, 20, decided to return to skating, she did so with conditions. She’d wear what she wants. Dance to the music she wants. Eat what she wants. Take breaks when she wants…. [Skating] would be the vehicle through which she displayed the real Alysa.”

she did it! her! way!!

Arrested on "suspicion of misconduct in public office."
He raped children. And worse.

No punishment is sufficient for the crimes these entitled fucks committed & continue to commit against children. #EpsteinFiles

The End of Books Coverage at the Washington Post Becca Rothfeld, a former critic at the Washington Post, on the death of the paper’s books section.

This eulogy is so keen, and heartbreaking. I’m scared for us, y’all. It’s not just the Washington Post (or even just books coverage); across the board, incisive and productive coverage of the arts is being erased.