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“It just came down to not having enough money,” said Terence Trouillot, a senior editor at Frieze, a contemporary art magazine . He spent nearly three years on the AICA-USA board, resigning in 2022. He said that initiatives to re-energize the group “were just moving too slowly.”

According to Lilly Wei, a longtime AICA-USA board member who recently resigned, the group explored different ways of protecting writers in the industry. There were unrealized plans of turning the organization into a union; others hoped to create a permanent emergency fund to keep financially struggling critics afloat. She said the organization has instead canceled initiatives, including an awards program for the best exhibitions across the country.

Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories.

“It’s crazy that the ideal job nowadays is producing catalog essays for galleries, which are basically just sales pitches,” Dillon said in a phone interview. “Critical thinking about art is not valued financially.”

Noah Dillon, who was on the AICA-USA board until he resigned last year, has been reluctant to recommend that anyone follow his path to become a critic. Not that they could. The graduate program in art writing that he attended at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan also closed during the pandemic.

David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who knows about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.”

While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking. Over the years, newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald have trimmed critics’ jobs.

In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. Its sister publication, Bookforum, was not acquired and ceased operations. Through the pandemic, other outlets have shuttered, including popular blogs run by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as smaller magazines called Astra and Elephant.

The need for change in museums was pointed out in the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, published by Artnet News in December, that analyzed more than a decade of data from over 30 cultural institutions. It found that just 11 percent of acquisitions at U.S. museums were by female artists and only 2.2 percent were by Black American artists

(National newspapers with art critics on staff include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. )

Julia Halperin, one of the study’s organizers, who recently left her position as Artnet’s executive editor, said that the industry has an asymmetric approach to diversity. “The pool of artists is diversifying somewhat, but the pool of staff critics has not,” she said.

the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished.

The White House told reporters on Thursday that, despite the imminent passage of NSA reform, they still believe Edward Snowden still belongs in prison (presumably for life, given his potential charges), while at the same time, brazenly taking credit for the USA Freedom Act passing, saying that “historians” would consider it part of Obama’s “legacy.”

even those in Congress who were campaigning for stronger NSA reform than the bill that passed the Senate are afraid to directly credit Snowden and, in many cases, still condemn him. Some cling to the erroneous belief that Snowden should come back to the US if he’s really a whistleblower because he could “tell his story to a jury.”

Without Edward Snowden, there would be no debate about the mass surveillance of Americans by the NSA. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals would not have ruled such surveillance illegal, tech companies would not encrypt our phone calls and text messages, and Congress certainly would not have passed the USA Freedom Act - no matter how meager its reforms actually are

Migration is a key component of the American story. Successive waves of migrants have reshaped the U.S. socially and politically from the 16th century to the present.

public opinion toward immigration has also polarized along partisan lines.

Respondents – including both Democrats and Republicans – who were randomly assigned to think about their family history before telling us their immigration preferences expressed more favorable feelings toward immigrants.

Negativity toward migrants, stoked by factually inaccurate threat narratives – that migrants steal jobs and overrun schools and hospitals – is the norm in many countries. But reminding people what they share with immigrants can help build support for more inclusive policies.

"I've been known as the player that doesn't want anybody to come to their events," she told The Inquirer. "It's not a superstitious thing, it's just something that works for me. In order for me to be at my best -- and if I'm at my best, that essentially helps the team -- I just want to go over there and do my thing."

Co-captain Alex Morgan likes to go against the grain, so it's no surprise that she's made 13 her lucky number. In a video for Team USA, Morgan said she found the superstitions toward the number strange and decided to make it her own.

Rapinoe told POPSUGAR that her diet is something she makes sure is consistent. According to the publication, she said there are certain things she absolutely must eat in order to get ready for a game, and her special diet is something she just can't deviate from.

The Rapinoe diet:Breakfast: She has a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich consisting of two eggs, sauteed onions and spinach on an English muffin.Lunch: Avocado toast with a chicken thigh and a side of fruit.Dinner: Two chicken thighs, sweet potatoes and asparagusPregame snack: Energy bar or a handful of almonds.

Every player has their own ritual for preparing for game day: For some it may be relaxing and focusing on the game -- for Christen Press, it's yoga and shopping.

Press said she likes to start her day by meditating, having a good breakfast, doing some yoga and she prefers to wrap it all up with some shopping at the mall.

Press said she also likes to make "a really big purchase" on game day "maybe like a fancy pair of shoes or a purse I would not normally splurge on." She says if she plays well, scores, or it's a good game, she gets to keep it.

The thing about Trump’s comments about Mexicans and his clumsy attempts at clean-up since is that they don’t just hurt him directly, in the loss of earnings from the Miss USA contest or any of those ties and shirts; they also degrade the value of his brand and reputation. So even if you take Trump’s self-valuation at face value, you can see how his comments about Mexican immigrants have been costly.

And now he has validated his own point in an unfortunate way: By any measure, the campaign has been terrible for his brand.

said it was capable of miniaturizing its nuclear weapons and attaching them to rockets, meaning it would feasibly be able to blast them at all its imperialist pig-dog enemies in the USA—but obviously, these claims haven't yet been verified.

Mothers are desperate to have their children vaccinated; patients with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes struggle to get medicine; and there is “huge anxiety in the population,”

On Aug. 21, the group got word from some of its “silent partner” hospitals of a flood of patients with “neurotoxic symptoms” — roughly 3,600 in a period of three hours, including 355 who died.

The debate over whether doctors should expose human rights abuses has long been “one of these inside baseball arguments within the humanitarian community,” said Len Rubenstein, an expert on human rights and medical ethics at Johns Hopkins University. While Doctors Without Borders has a culture of “bearing witness,” he said, not all humanitarian organizations do.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, for instance, adheres to a strict code of political neutrality;

nd this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90 percent in the deep South.

But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy.

The first, by the political scientist Larry Bartels, analyzed the move of the white working class away from Democrats, a move made famous in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of cultural issues.

The second paper, by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, was titled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?”

Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal — explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People:

you might wonder if things have changed since then. Unfortunately, the answer is that they haven’t, as you can see by looking at how states are implementing — or refusing to implement — Obamacare.

states were being offered a federally-funded program that would provide major benefits to millions of their citizens, pour billions into their economies, and help support their health-care providers. Who would turn down such an offer?

The answer is, 22 states at this point, although some may eventually change their minds. And what do these states have in common? Mainly, a history of slaveholding

it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy.

Every once in a while you hear a chorus of voices declaring that race is no longer a problem in America. That’s wishful thinking; we are still haunted by our nation’s original sin

Froese and Bader's research wound up defining four ways in which Americans see God: •The Authoritative God. When conservatives Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck proclaim that America will lose God's favor unless we get right with him, they're rallying believers in what Froese and Bader call an Authoritative God, one engaged in history and meting out harsh punishment to those who do not follow him. About 28% of the nation shares this view, according to Baylor's 2008 findings. "They divide the world by good and evil and appeal to people who are worried, concerned and scared," Froese says. "They respond to a powerful God guiding this country, and if we don't explicitly talk about (that) God, then we have the wrong God or no God at all."

•The Benevolent God. When President Obama says he is driven to live out his Christian faith in public service, or political satirist Stephen Colbert mentions God while testifying to Congress in favor of changing immigration laws, they're speaking of what the Baylor researchers call a Benevolent God. This God is engaged in our world and loves and supports us in caring for others, a vision shared by 22% of Americans, according to Baylor's findings. "Rhetoric that talks about the righteous vs. the heathen doesn't appeal to them," Froese says. "Their God is a force for good who cares for all people, wee

•The Critical God. The poor, the suffering and the exploited in this world often believe in a Critical God who keeps an eye on this world but delivers justice in the next, Bader says. Bader says this view of God — held by 21% of Americans — was reflected in a sermon at a working-class neighborhood church the researchers visited in Rifle, Colo., in 2008. Pastor Del Whittington's theme at Open Door Church was " 'Wait until heaven, and accounts will be settled.'

•The Distant God. Though about 5% of Americans are atheists or agnostics, Baylor found that nearly one in four (24%) see a Distant God that booted up the universe, then left humanity alone. This doesn't mean that such people have no religion. It's the dominant view of Jews and other followers of world religions and philosophies such as Buddhism or Hinduism, the Baylor research finds.