May 12, 2025
Art
Nature
Kate Mothes
“Torn Spin” (2025). All images courtesy of the artist and Hashimoto Contemporary
Gregory Euclide’s mixed-media collages explore nature through the lens of human experience.
Smeared, flattened, and rough around the edges, Gregory Euclide’s mixed-media collages explore nature through the lens of human experience. Organically meandering outlines suggest shallow reliefs; foraged prairie botanicals complement human-made materials; and abstracted landscapes emerge from drawings, photographs, ripped paper, paint, and more.
“The artist tears and layers these elements to build a new pictorial space which more accurately resembles the way he takes in the land,” says a gallery statement for Assembled Lands, Euclide’s solo exhibition opening later this week with Hashimoto Contemporary.
“Torn: Double Sun” (2025)
Breaking down his observations of nature into its fundamental parts, Euclide merges overviews of trees, shrubs, meadows, and the horizon with the intimate details of leaves or branches. One might approach his subject matter through the lens of the Anthropocene, which describes our present era of accelerating changes to the environment due to humans’ unrelenting impact.
Each collage (previously) merges recognizable forms and terrain with abstract shapes and compositional spirals or whorls. […]
“Torn: Forest Silhouette” (2025)
More: Gregory Euclide Explores the Anthropocene in Verdant Mixed-Media Collages
How seismologist Inge Lehmann rewrote geophysics by discovering Earth’s inner core
From growing up in a progressive Denmark to studying mathematics at a gender-segregated Cambridge University, Inge Lehmann had to power through the shock of cultural change to pursue her love of mathematics. Whilst managing several seismological stations, Inge notices the peculiar readings in the data she was collecting. Was the Earth’s composition actually different to what the experts had thought?
Dr Julia Ravey and Dr Ella Hubber tell the story of Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann who used earthquakes to uncover the truth about the composition of the Earth’s inner core.
Presenters: Ella Hubber and Julia Ravey
Guest Speakers: Dr Lif Lund Jacobsen and Dr Trine Dahl-Jensen
Producers: Ella Hubber and Julia Ravey
Assistant producers: Sophie Ormiston, Anna Charalambou and Josie Hardy
Sound designer: Ella Roberts
Production co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano
Editor: Holly Squire
(Photo: Inge Lehmann Credit: Neuhaus, Even (6.2.1863-20.4.1946) /Royal Danish Library)
Source: BBC World Service – Discovery, Unstoppable: Inge Lehmann
By Regina Sienra on May 17, 2025
Photo: AlejandraACa via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
It’s hard to tell where the landscape ends and the house begins!
Nestled in the crowded slopes of Naucalpan, a suburb west of Mexico City, lies a house unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Designed by Mexican architect Javier Senosiain, the Casa Orgánica (“Organic House”) draws from the shapes of nature and the comfort of the womb to fulfill the environmental, physical, and psychological needs of a human.
Photo: AlejandraACa via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Surrounded by sprawling greenery, it’s hard to determine where the garden ends and the house begins. The structure is covered by a foot-tall layer of dirt from where vegetation grows, making it seem like it’s emerging from the earth. A snail-shaped tunnel and windows facing south welcome all who enter, and the floor has a sand-color carpet to marry the inside with the outside.
Built in 1984, the architect lived in the home with his family from 1985 to 1990. The house originally had a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and one bedroom with a dressing room and bathroom. However, as Senosiain’s family grew, the house was later expanded. With this design, Senosiain aimed to rekindle the bond between humans and nature, recovering the harmony lost to urban environments.
More: Sprawling “Organic House” is Discreetly Nestled Into the Ground
Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.
In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.
Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.
Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
She borrows from political and apolitical Slavic motifs and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture the democratic regression in this American moment.
Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.
“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.
Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.
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0:00 Intro
0:48 Enter Milkman
2:32 A Milk Glass Half-Empty
4:37 Pour No More
9:16 The Years of Confusion
12:47 The Person Behind This
Interview shot by @henryhopkin
Thanks to John Morris
Thanks to the Sainsbury Archive for allowing me to licence their images of what I’m going to call “pre-Morris” milk bottles
https://www.sainsburyarchive.org.uk/
Music by Little Tin Frog, used with permission
/ @littletinfrog
Little Tin Frog – Just a Baby
Little Tin Frog – Bodies in Emotion
Little Tin Frog – Unaware
Little Tin Frog – Complex
Little Tin Frog – Waiting to Be
Milkman clip
• The Milk Man | 1970s Milk Float | 1970’s B…
The Milk and Dairies (Milk Bottle Caps) (Colour) Regulations 1973
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1…
Regulation (EEC) No 1411/71
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/197…
Michael English’s semi-skimmed milk speech in the House of Commons
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons…
Gastrointestinal infections caused by consumption of raw drinking milk in England & Wales, 1992–2017
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles…
[…]
Salford was born on the opposite side of the Irwell to Manchester, one bridge apart. But while Manchester still has a ‘medieval quarter’, there’s nothing left on the Salford bank except a mish mash of modern apartment buildings, offices and hotels. What did Salford lose then, and why did both cities put so little effort into their riverside developments?
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May 13, 2025
Books
Climate
Nature
Photography
Kate Mothes
‘Out of Africa’ champagne picnic experience during a Masai Mara luxury safari, Kenya. All images © Zed Nelson, courtesy of Guest Editions
Zed Nelson’s ‘The Anthropocene Illusion’ takes us on a global journey owning up to our skewed view of nature.
In the 1985 film Out of Africa starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, a picturesque scene highlights the pair on a romantic picnic high above the sweeping Masai Mara National Reserve. Today, tourists are invited to recreate the iconic moment in a colonial-inspired, hillside champagne picnic experience for which “local Masaai tribesman are employed to provide picturesque authenticity to the experience,” photographer Zed Nelson says.
In his new book, The Anthropocene Illusion, Nelson takes us on a global journey that lifts the veil, so to speak, on what we think of as “wilderness” and our progressively uneasy relationship with the environment. “While we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature—a reassuring spectacle, an illusion,” he says.
The Anthropocene defines the ever-evolving, rapid changes to the environment due to humans’ unyielding impact. Many scientists place the epoch’s origin during the Industrial Revolution, but some consider 1945—the year humans tested the atomic bomb—to be the true beginning. Yet others suggest that the Anthropocene was initiated even earlier, during the advent of agriculture.
At that point, we entered into an increasingly uneasy relationship with the natural world, relying on ever-more extractive processes, heavy manufacturing, plastics, and advancing technology—all of which depend on the earth’s resources. Our societies’ colonialist tendencies also apply to nature just as much as other human-occupied territories.
We’re depleting entire aquifurs, forever altering the composition of the land, and irretrievably damaging delicate ecosystems. All the while, Nelson shows, we subscribe to a nostalgic view of untamed wilderness while at the same time expecting it to mold to our lifestyles.
In Kenyan national parks like Masai Mara, wildlife is provided sanctuary, “but the animals living within them are allowed to survive essentially for human entertainment and reassurance,” Nelson says. “These animals become, in effect, performers for paying tourists eager to see a nostalgic picture book image of the natural world.”
Snow cannon producing artificial snow at Val Gardena ski resort, Dolomites, Italy
Nelson’s illuminating series taps into the absurdities of the illusion that nature is still thriving as it once was. Artificial snow shot from a cannon in the Italian Dolomites, for example, nods to warmer winters. A result of the climate crisis, leading to little snow, the powder is manufactured so holidaymakers can ski.
From vine-draped brutalist buildings to overcrowded national park lookouts to half-tame lions walked out like entertainers during a safari, he shares moments that feel skewed and incongruous, indicating looming and ultimately inescapable problems behind the veneer.
The Anthropocene Illusion series took first place in the professional category of the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards, and the book, which comes out this month, is available for pre-order in the Guest Editions shop.[…]
More: In His New Book, Photographer Zed Nelson Lifts the Veil on ‘The Anthropocene Illusion’
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