On CNN, John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Donald Trump and rabid war lover who wants to bomb Iran and North Korea (among others), revealed that he is voting for a write-in candidate in 2024.

“I might as well say it now,” Bolton said, “I voted for Dick Cheney [in 2020]. And I’ll vote for Dick Cheney again this November.”

Why would Bolton do this? “Because [Cheney] was a principled Reaganite conservative, and he still is,” Bolton told the CNN viewers. Bolton then went on to explain that age is no longer a factor, allowing him to vote for a man who is 83 years old. And he continued, in a bit of a joking tone, to say that if he could sway the nation toward a write-in campaign for Cheney to prevent either Biden or Trump from being president, he would. Bolton also noted that someday he might vote for Cheney’s very hawkish, very anti-Trump daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney.

John Bolton: “I might as well say it now: I voted for Dick Cheney [in 2020]. And I’ll vote for Dick Cheney again this November.” pic.twitter.com/RCJGpeJQBJ

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 11, 2024

If you recognize every image that Arthur Jafa has appropriated for his art in the past, you are in need of a digital detox.

Some of Jafa’s pictures are famous: readily available stills from notable films, glamour shots of pop stars, photographs of ugly moments from American history that have appeared in textbooks. But many more of his images are considerably less well-known: the various Instagram Reels and YouTube clips, for example, that Jafa has pilfered from the internet and re-presented for gallery viewers in a string of acclaimed videos, most notably 2016’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, his famed elegy for the tenuousness of Black life that crams more than 100 pieces of footage into less than 8 minutes.

Tracking down the source for all this imagery is a pointless exercise—Jafa’s intent, it often seems, is to let all his pictures run free, reveling in the friction that results from when they rub up against one another, shorn of their initial context, as they might be on social media feeds. Which makes it a surprise that, for his latest video, he has lifted a very recognizable sequence from a very famous movie: the brothel massacre that concludes Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, a character study about Travis Bickle, a lonely cabbie who tries to find his place in New York City through vigilantism. (While the film hasn’t been a core reference to Jafa previously, two years ago, he spoke approvingly of a 1999 Douglas Gordon video that appropriates and modulates a different Taxi Driver scene.)

Travis’s bloody bid for attention is seen, over and over, in Jafa’s 73-minute ***** (2024), which presents the sequence half a dozen or so times. But the video, which recently debuted at Gladstone Gallery in New York, contains a twist: everyone Travis murders is now Black, not white. In a particularly strange gesture, the cops who arrive too late are also now Black.

The fascinating concept is rooted in the film’s mythology. Screenwriter Paul Schrader had initially written Sport, the pimp in control of the film’s bordello, as a Black man. But, according to critic Amy Taubin, Schrader and Scorsese ended up whitening Sport, fearing protests during screenings of Taxi Driver. Now, Jafa has undone that editorial decision, subbing out Harvey Keitel’s Sport for one energetically played by actor Jerrel O’Neal, who has been seamlessly integrated into Scorsese’s original footage by Jafa, a cinematographer by training.

Several museums in the UK have admitted that hundreds of items from their collections have been lost, stolen, or destroyed over the past five years, highlighting a sector-wide issue after the British Museum thefts scandal last year.

Institutions including the Imperial War Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Natural History Museum reported a variety of missing historic items. The information was released in response to Freedom of Information requests filed by The Independent, which first reported the news earlier this week.

Between 2018 and 2023, the Imperial War museum recorded 539 items as lost and one item as stolen. For the same period, the Natural History Museum reported 12 items from its collection had gone missing, while the National Museum of Scotland reported six items lost, one item stolen, and another destroyed in a fire.

The Independent reported that among the missing items from the Natural History Museum are mammal teeth over 65 million years old from the Mesozoic Era, as well as a stomach stone known as a gastrolith from its Dinosaur Gallery assumed to have been stolen. A spokesperson for the Natural History Museum told the Independent that security of its collection was a serious issue, which totaled more than 80 million items, many of them small ecological specimens such as teeth, fish, and frozen animal tissue.

Another item likely stolen from public display in 2022 was a telephone handset from the Havilland Comet 4C at the National Museum of Scotland. The plane was the world’s first commercial passenger jet aircraft, making its first commercial journey in 1952 and officially retired in 1997.

Pace Gallery will globally represent the Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, a company dedicated to managing the Pop artist’s art and legacy. Pace announced the news on Friday, just days before an Indiana show is set to open in Venice around the same time as the Biennale.

The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative bills itself as the primary organization responsible for maintaining Indiana’s art and archives. It was formed by dealer Simon Salama-Caro in 2022, not long after the estate settled a complex and long-running legal conflict over Indiana’s legacy.

“This is the start of an exciting next phase of Robert Indiana’s illustrious legacy,” Salama-Caro said in an email to ARTnews. “For Bob’s work to be globally represented by Pace Gallery provides wondrous opportunities for a distinctly American artist to be further introduced to new audiences around the world, where his art can continue to influence and inspire artists and creatives for years to come.”

Indiana remains famous for his bold use of numbers and letters in sculptures, paintings, and prints. His iconic 1964 LOVE image, for example, has appeared as sculptures, prints, and more, and is widely known.

After hitting it big in New York alongside the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Indiana left for the remote island Vinalhaven, off the coast of Maine, in 1978. Unlike his Pop colleagues, Indiana had a rough time in New York and wasn’t receiving big retrospectives. His luck changed in the 1990s, however, when Salama-Caro began representing him. Indiana sold the rights to LOVE to the Morgan Art Foundation, providing him with a financial lifeline. In the meantime, Salama-Caro helped get Indiana’s work into major museums and galleries.

The Review was thrilled this year to honor Tobias Wolff with the Hadada Award, our annual prize for lifetime achievement in literature. At this year’s Spring Revel on April 2, Wolff spoke to a gathering of writers, artists, and friends. We are pleased to publish his remarks here.

When Lady Astor was breathing her last, a large group of family and friends gathered around the bed to see her off. Just before she departed this life, she snapped awake and looked around and said, “Is this my birthday, or am I dying?”

Well, don’t tell me.

The scene here bears some resemblances to hers. I look out and see my dear wife, Catherine, and my oldest and best friends, and others who’ve come into our life in later years, even as I still vividly recall the laughing, never-to-be-forgotten faces of two beloved friends who left our company too soon, George Crile and Edward McIlvain. I have been lucky, blessed, really, in family and friendship, and in too many other ways to describe here.

Everyone seems to be talking about saving democracy this year. “American democracy, that’s what the 2024 election is all about,” Joe Biden has emphasized, painting the threat of Donald Trump’s return to power as the central issue in the 2024 campaign. “We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of history.”

But the crisis facing American democracy is much older and deeper than Trump and it is, indeed, a relic of a very different time in US history.

In a new video companion for Mother Jones, based on my forthcoming book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, digital producer Sam Van Pykeren explores how the US political system was created to restrain democracy, not protect it. The founders essentially placed a ticking time bomb at the heart of our political system—and this could be the year it explodes.

As I explain in my book, it all dates back to the birth of American democracy, when the Founding Fathers created political institutions within a system that concentrated power in the hands of an elite, propertied, white male minority. More than 200 years later, the series of compromises the founders made have increasingly vested the majority of political power in the hands of a minority of the population—a reactionary conservative white minority that is seeking to entrench and hold onto power through a wide variety of anti-democratic means.

You can pre-order Minority Rule here, and find the exclusive Mother Jones excerpt here.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

With just two weeks left until the Democratic primary for western Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional district, climate and environmental groups have overwhelmingly endorsed the anti-fracking incumbent, Rep. Summer Lee. 

One of the only contested Democratic congressional primaries in the state, the race between Lee and Edgewood Borough Council member Bhavini Patel has drawn attention, with the candidates clashing over the Biden Administration’s continued military funding for Israel and the GOP-funded Moderate PAC bankrolling advertisements targeting Lee on behalf of Patel, who supports continuing military aid. 

On Wednesday, the Lee campaign said it has received a slate of new and existing endorsements from 14 prominent climate and environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Sunrise Movement, Sunrise Pittsburgh, Zero Hour, the Sierra Club of Pennsylvania, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Jane Fonda Climate PAC. The endorsements shift focus away from Israel and Palestine to Lee’s environmental justice platform, which advocates for bringing jobs and money to a district mostly made up of Pittsburgh that has spent decades under the thumb of the fossil fuel industry.

A local union’s business manager says that Lee’s challenger, Bhavini Patel, “would work with US Steel and help create jobs here.” 

Edith Abeyta, an environmental justice organizer and air quality advocate in the district, said she is an enthusiastic supporter of Lee’s re-election campaign. “For me, it’s this intersectionality that Lee upholds within her district,” Abeyta said. “She represents a lot of people that live in environmental justice zones and frontline communities, and I think she gets it…she’s a voice for the people.” 

Despite Elon Musk’s enshittification of Twitter, to borrow a term from the novelist and culture critic Cory Doctorow, his rebranded social media platform is still useful to journalists like me to communicate with certain people and to promote good stories, even if its algorithm now seems to further reward clickbait, disinformation, and right-wing trolls.

But Musk has transformed the company’s comms apparatus into a scorched hellscape governed by mindless, nonhuman decision-making—which is ironic given the antipathy Musk has expressed about bots on his platform. I experienced the rot myself recently, after X locked up my account for “unusual behavior” that supposedly violated its rules. That was all the explanation I got.

Hours before, interestingly, I’d quote-tweeted a post from Musk wherein he mocked the notion of Americans living on land stolen from Indigenous people. At best, it was a really dumb joke, not the sort of thing most people would want to share with 180 million people—which is how many followers Musk has.

We live on stolen land.

By “we”, I mean us mammals.

In 2007, after Paul Ross Evans pleaded guilty to leaving a bomb outside of a women’s health clinic in Austin, he assured the judge: He never meant for anyone to get hurt. “Except,” he clarified, “for the abortionists.”

For almost two centuries, the moniker “abortionist” has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence. Before Roe v. Wade, the label turned midwives and doctors into criminals to be cracked down on by the state. After the 1973 decision, right-wing movements continued to deploy the term to imply only back-alley doctors performed abortions.

In 2022, the sobriquet showed up once more in the halls of power: “Abortionist” was used four times in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, channeling a fraught history.

Until the late 1800s, abortion and reproductive health were primarily handled by women—midwives, many of whom were Black, Indigenous, or immigrants. As medicine professionalized, male doctors viewed this skilled group as a threat to their business. Birth, they argued, ought to take place in a hospital. “The midwife is a relic of barbarism,” Dr. Joseph DeLee, a prominent 20th century obstetrician, proclaimed, “a drag on the progress of the science and art of obstetrics.”

The restructuring of gynecological medicine went hand in hand with a budding movement to criminalize abortion. In 1860, governors of every state received a letter from the president of a young organization, the American Medical Association. Ghostwritten by Horatio Storer, a Harvard-educated surgeon, the letter was part of an AMA campaign touting a new idea: Abortion should be illegal because life begins at conception—not, as previous laws considered, at “quickening,” when fetal movements are first detected. Under this logic, as Storer made it his mission to convince the masses, practically all abortions should be a crime.

Anyone can lay a funerary GIF at one of the 238 million virtual tombstones at findagrave.com. A rose JPEG accompanied by the words “im sorry the world did not treat you well” is laid on Kafka’s grave page amidst various uploaded photos of tombstones; “Your statue was unveiled in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol today,” reads a post for Willa Cather. Someone leaves an update on Federico Fellini’s page that tonight they “will watch La Strada in your memory.” Many of these messages seem to have come after a pilgrimage to a physical site. They read like confirmations of an encounter: as though their writers, unsatisfied with what they’d found in the material realm, had taken to virtual channels to yoke a final closeness with the dead.

The playwright and actor William Gillette’s online grave is littered with notes from recent visitors to his house museum, updating him on his property: “Interesting man, a shame he did not have children to enjoy the castle and train ride,” or “when i vist [sic] i always notice something … deer in your yard, the fawn was nursing from its mother.” Another: “Went to your home today… You would be proud that it is in impeccable order.”

Gillette Castle lies up a coily road in East Haddam, Connecticut. I visit on the first hot day of May. An elaborate stone pathway leads me from the parking lot to a gray, cobbly estate that overlooks the Connecticut River. A rabbit passes the entrance sign and disappears into the forest.

I live nearby, and have developed a chronic wandering habit in my final semester at divinity school. The more direct and pursuant my inquiries of God have become, the greater my conflictual desire to roam has grown. Perhaps my proclivity to wander is a symptom of my frustration with the jigsaw splodge of academia, or of my desire for a single, quiet path of pilgrimage. It has become increasingly apparent to me that one of the key tenets of the spiritual life was imitation: of Christ, of the saints. And so, rather serendipitously, I show up to this castle made by a man whose life was defined so completely by imitation.