Weekly Newsletter
Mona Chalabi, Anne Anlin Cheng and Patty Chang, Miles Greenberg, Betsy James Wyeth, and the hottest memes about the Nvidia honeypot.
Framed by their car’s windshield, and then again by my rearview mirror, a man and a woman who seem to be a couple look like they’d rather be anywhere but together. He’s behind the wheel, doing all the talking; she’s looking straight ahead, motionless like a marble statue. Gradually, her face wears a desperate expression that only grows more hopeless as he continues talking and gesticulating.
In the supermarket checkout line, I pick up a copy of TIME magazine for the first time in God knows how long, drawn to a painting of Jesus Christ on the cover. It’s a special edition promising to tell us “Who he was. Who he is. His miracles, his mission, his love.” I expect to see a lot of biblical sheep inside, but I don’t find any. I buy the issue as an artifact. I stopped believing in TIME magazine a long time ago.
Down the street, a place that pretended to be a legitimate art gallery for a couple of months, showing the worst possible commercial art, has finally given up, and now it’s selling fur coats. A man in a cowboy hat walks past two girls dancing for a social media video. The air is chilly, and I think of buying myself a leather jacket.
And then I see her.
She looks at me with the most loving eyes as she holds a stack of perfectly folded laundry. She comforts me with her wide, auspicious smile, her jet-black hair, and her wrinkle-free, porcelain skin. I feel safe, accepted, and not judged. “Fast service, same day,” she promises because she’s just a model in an ad for a laundromat.
—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
Mona Chalabi Paints a Picture of Class Inequality
“As an adult and as a journalist, I have stared shamelessly.” That refusal to look away is precisely what data journalist, writer, and artist Mona Chalabi has built her deeply principled career on. Known best for her indelible data visualizations, from the obscenity of Jeff Bezos’s wealth to the Israeli government’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and the racial and gender biases in museum collections, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraqi-British journalist tackles the subject of wealth and economic inequality in America in her first book, Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are (2026). | Lakshmi Rivera Amin
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News
- Meg Onli and Zack Winokur are the co-curators for the 2028 Whitney Biennial.
- The only handwritten manuscript of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech will be up for auction at Christie’s in January 2027.
- French authorities discover six stolen Pablo Picasso prints under a pile of clothes in a home on the French Riviera.
- Ohio State University calls off the school’s review process to consider removing billionaire benefactor Les Wexner’s name from campus buildings.
- President Donald Trump proclaims the White House’s Oval Office, Outer Oval Office, and Cabinet Room a joint national monument.
- Anonymous Was A Woman, a nonprofit supporting women, trans, and non-binary artists above 40, names 15 artists to receive unrestricted $50,000 awards in recognition of their practices.
- Prominent Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Egypt’s independent news outlet Mada Masr, is facing a one-year prison sentence among other penalties in a targeted crackdown on press freedom.
- Ahead of MoMA’s annual benefit for its Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center, protestors assembled outside the institution to call on the gala’s honoree, Steven Spielberg, to reject the recognition over Black’s Epstein ties.
- Print Center and Women’s Studio Workshop name new leaders, SITE Santa Fe’s artists are announced, Lorna Simpson and Wolfgang Tillmans win major art awards, Penske Media partners with Amazon, and more in Art Movements.
Features
Books
The Zen Mona Lisa
A review of an ancient Chinese ink painting takes an art critic on a journey through his own past. | Will Heinrich
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The Art World’s Neoliberal Capture
In “The Battleground of Art,” curator and activist Marco Baravalle dissects the art establishment’s co-optation of radical politics and uplifts the stories of collectives that resist it. | Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain
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