Robert S. Duncanson: Only Paint on His Mind
Duncanson’s skill established him not only in this county, but in England and throughout Europe as America’s first internationally renowned African American artist.
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
“In a prose style that is accessible and credible, it dissects with scalpel-like precision all the hypocrisy of the totalitarian mindset and sounds a clear and timeless warning to us all about the dangers of placing ideology before humanity.”
Fiction: The Brothers
“The boys were never apart, from the earliest they were inseparable. They slept in the same bed, ate from the same plate, fought the same fights.”
Cinema as a Memory of Nature
“Cinema becomes an unofficial archive—not of triumph, but of evidence. It records not what we achieved, but what we allowed to disappear.”
February Issue, 2026
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Letter From the Editor, February, 2026: Elegy for a Dark-Eyed Junco
And here we are.
The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great: Rediscovering artist and political activist Chuzo Tamotsu
His art was “One small way to express my love for peace and hatred for war … is to do what I can for any victims of aggression, wherever they may be.”
The children are always ours
“The empire never intended that this testimony should be heard, but, if I hold my peace, the very stones will cry out… neither the citizen-subject within the gates nor the indescribable hordes outside it believe in the morality or the reality of the kingdom anymore — when no one, any longer, anywhere, aspires to the empire’s standards.”
John Heartfield, photomontage as a political weapon
“He inscribed the slogan ‘use photography as a weapon,’ which underlines his faith in the impact of this new medium and its ability to denounce the perversities of the modern world: fascism, war and its atrocities, Nazism or capitalism.”
A Short Anti-Fascist Playlist
“To them, popular culture mattered, it was vibrant, and it was politically up for grabs.”
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