Call Them America
A poem dedicated to the children of Gaza by South African poet and journalist Gershwin Wanneburg.
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An Interview With Jen Orpin: Markers of Time
“When you’re looking at the paintings, it’s your view, it’s your journey.”
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November 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.
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The Ghost in White: Edo Horror and the Birth of Sadako
In the age of endlessly reproducible digital images, the deeper metaphor feels even more familiar:
The haunted image no longer needs a well, a cassette, or even a television. It only needs somewhere to be seen—and someone willing to pass it on.
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Useless Reportage: Notes on Helen Levitt’s In the Street
“If in the film the streets seem to be mostly battleground, her photographs construe it more as a theatre. Levitt was after the epiphanic universal that might emerge from the quotidian.”
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Three Stops
“The cemetery stood on an island. People said that one day the island would disappear beneath the water. My father wanted to record the place before that happened. So we began keeping notes and drawings of everything we noticed there.”
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Snake Journey
A beautiful meditation on personal and communal memory, art, and an unfathomable landscape from poet Michael Ladd.
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Fiction: Moving Day
The sixth trip up the stairs I see them. Sometimes you can go the whole day without seeing anyone, and I thought it was going to be like that. Little did I know.
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Raven Season: Karen Clarkson
“The mischievous Raven existed at that time because he always had.”
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The Apocalyptic Image
I use the term here deliberately to recover this older semantic association with disclosure, rather than using it in the narrower modern sense of apocalyptic cinema as a genre concerned primarily with catastrophe, end times, or eschatological judgment. At the same time, the term should not be detached from the longer history of apocalyptic discourse,…
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Repetition, Resistance, and Remembering in the Prints of Elizabeth Catlett
“Through appropriation, the vitality of Black history, literature, and poetry—and the importance of preserving and propagating this legacy—are interwoven into Catlett’s imagery, serving as both an expression of resilience and a force for resistance.”
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October 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.
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The fire tells a cloud story: Letter from the editor, October, 2026
Trying the strength of the thin yet oddly strong threads that connect my thoughts like spider webs.
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Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge
“Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need.”
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Fiction: Every Dream Come True
“And though it’s always sweet sorrow to part, you know you’ll always remain in my heart, Good night, sleep tight and pleasant dreams to you, Here’s a wish and a prayer that every dream comes true.”
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Being or Living
In a world that constantly pushes us toward speed, replacement, adaptation, and whatever comes next, perhaps the most meaningful form of resistance is not to stop time. It is to commit enough time to something that it can begin to matter.
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Why Human Painting still Matters in the Age of AI
“A human painting is produced inside a life. The painter gets tired. Attention shifts. A hand hesitates. A decision made in the morning may be reconsidered at night. A mark can be the result of confidence, frustration, correction, discovery, or fatigue. Some of these conditions are visible in the final work and some are only…
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Thirty Minutes After Thunder: a Poem
“Maybe that is what a life is: learning which deadlines are real, which are merely printed, which walls deserve a name, which storms are not asking to be overcome.”
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Magpies Mix Tape: Working on Something Good
This playlist celebrates the joys, sorrows, doubts, and soul-nurturing importance of the labor of creation.
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Gendered Contempt and the History of Language
“In the end, gendered insult reveals that language is one of the most durable carriers of inequality. It stores contempt in ordinary forms. It turns hierarchy into shorthand. It allows long histories of valuation to survive in single syllables and familiar phrases.”
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September 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.
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When I Go Back Home
“I came back because there are places that do not merely exist on maps; they exist inside the blood. I came back because no matter how far a person travels, there is a particular dust that remembers his feet. I came back because the village that raised us deserves more than nostalgia. It deserves attention.…
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The Mā-hua-tsìng & The Strait
Set between the muddy paddy fields of Taiwan and a cold college room in California, this story weaves together Taiwanese bird ecology , traditional Taiwanese street delicacies and a linguistic misunderstanding. It explores how food, nature, and intergenerational love can cross geographical and historical oceans when words fail.
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The Heptagon Project
Heptagon is an audio project exploring social, cultural, and artistic avenues within the limitless genre of electronic music.
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The West 79th St. Laundromat
“Sometimes I wonder, perhaps naively, if all the problems of the country could be solved by sitting the folks in Washington down at a table with a lump of clay and some encouragement. They can bring their dirty laundry if it helps them find the time.”
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Judith Scott: Uncovering innate talent
“Her work is an abstract reflection of her life. The colourful, idyllic childhood, the loneliness and isolation of institutional care and, above all, the connection with her sister Joyce.”
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“The Child in Me”: How Tomi Ungerer’s Childhood Informed His Books
“He grew up in Strasbourg, Alsace, and when he was eight years old the city was taken over by the Nazis. Tomi and his family spent the war under occupation, and although they were spared the worst effects of war, the saturation of Nazi propaganda and the reports of what was happening further afield left…
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Criticism in World Literature and Cinema: A Unified Perspective
At its core, criticism asks a fundamental question: how do artistic works produce meaning?
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August 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.
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Do you like to dance for free? Letter From the Editor, August, 2026
Midsummer ramblings.
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The musical conquests of Goopy and Bagha
“Warmth and empathy are qualities found in all of Ray’s movies, but this genre allows him to display them in their rawest, least guarded form.”
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