- Oraib Toukan on visibility: “It’s clear that visibility does not presuppose anything. Many struggles are hypervisible, and yet we still cannot see them, let alone hear their claims exactly as they are uttered. Why is it that we still cannot see what we’re actually seeing?” (From an April interview in Artforum
)
- Timothy Messer-Kruse on propaganda: “The Yale University psychologist and War Department researcher Arthur A. Lumsdaine observed that ‘two-sided’ propaganda, which exposed the listener to contrary information but ultimately arrived at its intended conclusion, was far more effective than propaganda that did not acknowledge counterarguments at all. This was because the listener had been ‘given an advance basis for ignoring or discounting the opposing communication and, thus inoculated, he will tend to retain the positive communication.’ But “two-sided” propaganda is still propaganda.” (From “The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns”
)
- Julian Baggini on calling people liars: “The case against overuse of epithets like ‘liar’ is not based on upholding norms of politeness. Rather, it is a principled argument against attributing guilt without evidence and a practical call to make sure than when we do need to say clearly, plainly, even angrily that someone has lied, that accusation has all the power, force and serious that it should.” (From “The philosophical reason you shouldn’t call people liars
”)
- Percival Everett on guitars: “I played guitar for a long time, but it wasn’t until I started repairing instruments that I had a real understanding and appreciation of the construction of guitars and the differences in the woods and the different sounds of old guitars and new guitars—things I wouldn’t have been exposed to enough to see until I was working with them.” (From a December 2021 interview
)
- “What does it mean to be human? To be the opposite of a machine, of course.” (KB, from “Shot #2”
)
