It’s no secret that Bard College Berlin has an astonishingly small student body — small enough that I could look around one afternoon in the cafeteria and recognize all but a few faces. But how many of us truly know the people behind them? I sat down one day with the Associate Dean Kerry Bystrom to hear her story.
Pankumenta – Giving Opportunities to Young Artists
We meet early in the morning. I roll in on my bike with breakfast for Danny. He looks sleepy but greets me with a warm smile, and I know we are both exhausted but excited. We unroll some canvases, tape them onto the Ikea painting frames belonging to the café, and hang them up.
Food for Thought From a Robbery in Rio de Janeiro: Who is the Real Victim?
Instead of efforts to combat the root causes of the country’s serious insecurity, Bolsonaro has chosen to address the issue through superficial and violent approaches, such as easing the regulations of gun possession — both for civilians and for the military/police — and relaxing the import restrictions on guns.
First They Came for the Immigrants
Warren Binford, a lawyer who interviewed children in the immigrant detention center in Clint, Texas, reported that this facility was three times over capacity — over 350 children were housed in a center intended for a maximum of 104. The children were malnourished and were given the same extremely processed food everyday.
Empathritis
Naomi did not want a man: she wanted a child for herself, a child raised in the city – running around in the dark alleys and playing in the lush courtyards of her own childhood, munching on sweet, warm challah from the baker on the corner and living on the fifth story…
Frankl’s Burden
The wet thunk of plummeting metal impacting animal matter. The watermelon-ish explosion emanating from the point of impact. The unspeakable splatter. The ghastly silence before the screams. The seemingly endless instant before reflex, the guilty party, the murderer, intervened too late, forcing his eyes from the spectacle, his body back from the edge.
I and the Village
“Give me some valley deep in America, something that freezes over in winter and smells of rotten flesh in summer, or a prairie by a lake, in Romania, a naïve little fishermen’s village where you don’t speak the language, and all the fish have died and the fishermen have gone to work in the nearest city…”