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THE HEADLINES

MOROCCO PAVILION CANCELED. After the surprise, last-minute replacement of Morocco’s exhibitors at what would have been the country’s first Venice Biennale pavilion, Morocco has now fully canceled their participation in the exhibition set to open in April, and it’s unclear why, according to The Art Newspaper . In January, the artists Safaa Erruas, Majida Khattari, and Fatiha Zemmouri, as well as curator Mahi Binebine, learned in what they called a “nightmare” situation, that the artworks they had spent months completing for Venice would no longer be exhibited, and that a new program would replace theirs, helmed by Paris-based Moroccan curator Mouna Mekouar. Erruas has reportedly said the Moroccan government promised to reimburse them for their production costs, and that their works would be exhibited some time in the future.

LAVA TREASURE CONVICTION. A French court in Marseille has convicted two men of smuggling sunken gold treasure found off the west coast of Corsica, from the Golf de Lava. The so-called “Lava treasure saga” began in 1985, when three men discovered a mysterious hoard of rare Roman gold coins from the third century, while fishing. One of them, Félix Biancamaria , was found guilty of trying to sell a golden plate worth several millions, which the court said was from the same stash, and now faces a 12-month suspended prison sentence. His friend Jean-Michel Richaud was handed an eight-month suspended sentence, and both face a 100,000-euro fine. Their lawyers said they were appealing the decision.

THE DIGEST

While reading Maradona’s autobiography this past winter, I found that every few pages I would whisper or write in the margins, “I love you, Maradona.” Sadness crept up on me as I turned to the last chapter, and it intensified to heartbreak when I read its first lines: “They say I can’t keep quiet, that I talk about everything, and it’s true. They say I fell out with the Pope. It’s true.” I was devastated to be leaving Maradona’s world and returning to the ordinary one, where nobody ever picks a fight with the Pope. 

I started reading El Diego: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Footballer, ghostwritten by Daniel Arcucci and translated to English by Marcela Mora y Araujo. He said reading it was the most fun he’d had with a book. I came to El Diego with basically no knowledge of Maradona or even of soccer. I would have said I hated soccer actually. I hate the buzzing noise the crowds make on the TV. But from the very first page I found Maradona’s voice so addictive and original that reading El Diego felt like falling in love. 

Maradona’s skirmish with the Pope goes the way of much else in the book. Because of his extraordinary talents and global fame, Maradona is invited to the Vatican with his family. The Pope gives each of them a rosary to say, and he tells Maradona that he has been given a special one. Maradona checks with his mother and discovers that they have the same rosary. He goes back to confront the Pope and is outraged when the Pope pats him on the back and carries on walking. 

“Total lack of respect!” Maradona fumes. “It’s why I’ve got angry with so many people: because they are two-faced, because they say one thing here and then another thing there, because they’d stab you in the back, because they lie. If I were to talk about all the people I’ve fallen out with over the years, I’d need one of those encyclopedias, there would be volumes.” 

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Growing up, Anu Põder wanted to be a ballerina. But her small body failed to conform to the discipline’s impossible standards, so she turned to art, where misfit physiques soon became her primary preoccupation. The feminine forms that resulted—made of materials including fat, surgical plastic, and found fashion—comprise the Estonian artist’s retrospective “Anu Põder: Space for My Body” at Switzerland’s Muzeum Susch, a picturesque private institution carved into the side of a mountain. The show is curated by Cecilia Alemani, on the heels of the late artist’s inclusion in Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale.

Anu Poder: Lickers (Limsijad), 2007

Põder’s figurative sculptures can be roughly divided into two camps: porous and plastic. Works of the permeable, penetrable variety include Limsijad (Lickers), 2007—a series of dangling busts made of wire mesh, with holes here and there patched over with aluminum foil. Mostly, the metal is a kind of armature supporting the main event: giant pink satin tongues, flexed and pointed upward. This silly cage-like sculpture feels at once protected and open. It is extremely delicate, but if you touched it, it would hurt you. You’re left unsure whether the viewer or the object has more power to inflict damage. The humor eases this thrilling tension.

Delicacy is similarly pushed to the brink of brutality in porous works Põder made from garments, often excising planes of fabric to leave behind only the seams. Ruum minu keha jaoks (Space for My Body), 1995, overlays just the hems of three shirts—in pink, white, and black—plus some shoulder pads. The lines dangle from a robust wooden hanger that gives them volume. It is easy to envision a torso in the negative space. The harsh contours of this exoskeleton read as protective, like armor or a cage. Yet the soft, torn nature of the fabric exudes an almost pathetic vulnerability.

Põder excised other garments in the ’90s, too: bags, coats, shoes, all found and worn. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she became fascinated by consumer culture, which was new to her, so she turned to such mass-produced goods. Before that, while working in the Soviet Union, she had preoccupied herself with the various ways that bodies resist conforming to standards of the idealized laborer. It helped that during this time she was not an official artist working for the state: instead, she made her income as a teacher, allowing her some creative freedom. A single mother of three children, she maintained a studio in her state-provided apartment, where she avoided materials she could not lift and transport on her own.

n the afternoon of January 6, 2021, as election deniers armed with Tasers and tomahawks overran the US Capitol, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) handed his colleague and close friend Eric Swalwell a pen. “Here,” he said to the California Democrat. “Stick this in their neck if they get close to you.”

The Marine veteran, who’d seen combat in Iraq, leaped on a table and began issuing instructions to other panicked lawmakers, showing them how to don the gas masks secured under their chairs: “Tear gas will not kill you. But it’s important to remain calm. If you hyperventilate, you may pass out.” If necessary, Gallego told himself, he could use his own pen as a weapon to take a more lethal one from a rioter.

Three years later, the battle for American democracy continues, and Gallego, locked in one of the most pivotal contests of the 2024 election, is again attempting to hold the line. Along with close matchups in Ohio and Montana, his Senate race in Arizona for the seat Kyrsten Sinema is vacating could be one of a handful that decide control of the upper chamber and, with it, the future of our republic. Donald Trump, facing 88 criminal counts, has promised to usher in MAGA on steroids if reelected, including mass deportation and sweeping bans on gender-affirming care. A Democratic-­led Senate would be one of the last fortifications against his agenda.

As if to further underscore the stakes, Gallego’s opponent is the former TV news anchor turned Trump sycophant Kari Lake. A prolific purveyor of conspiracy theories, Lake claims not only that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump but also that she was robbed of the Arizona governorship in her 2022 race. If Trumpism is akin to a religion, Lake views herself as one of its martyrs. “You can call us extremists. You can call us domestic terrorists,” she declared during one campaign event in 2022. “You know who else was called a lot of names his whole life? Jesus.”

Lake’s loss two years ago is just one indicator that Arizona is turning away from Trump-style conservatism. Though Trump won the state by 3.6 percent in 2016, he lost it in 2020 by about half of a percent. In 2022, all of the major statewide candidates Trump endorsed were defeated. But the state is certainly not a Democratic stronghold, either. Of roughly 4.1 million registered voters, there are some 236,000 more Republicans and 197,000 more independents than there are Democrats. To win, Gallego “has to appeal to a cross ­section of voters,” says former Arizona Democratic Party Chair Jim Pederson, “particularly moderate Republicans.”

At the start of a slickly produced 19-minute YouTube video titled “How T.Rex Arms Got Started,” Lucas Botkin, the company’s 30-year-old founder, runs through an obstacle course. A guitar-­heavy soundtrack plays as Botkin, decked out in tactical gear and filtered through overwrought video effects, picks off targets with a variety of handguns and rifles. We briefly see the course from his eyes, first-person-shooter style.

When the drums bang to a halt, the video cuts to an interview where Botkin explains his company’s mission. “We try to produce thought-provoking content and educational content that inspires people to understand their obligations to God and country and their responsibilities,” he says, over more shooting footage. “Then we equip them with the equipment necessary so they can fulfill those obligations and those responsibilities with maximum effectiveness.”

T.Rex Arms, a Tennessee-based, family-­run, Christian firearms accessory company—think holsters, body armor, and the like—is at the forefront of what extremism researchers call GunTube, an ecosphere of gun influencers whose videos peddle a wide range of conservative content. The company has more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers; its origin story video has been viewed more than 900,000 times. Botkin, who can cut a nerdy presence when digging into gun minutiae, has nearly half a million Instagram followers and enough right-wing cachet to have been an ambassador for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and have earned an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show the month before he left the network.

“They are jacks of all trades,” says Meghan Conroy, who monitors extremist influencers for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. What separates T.Rex Arms from the rest of the gun community, she says, is its “masterful ability to create content that appeals to so many different people.” While some of its most popular videos offer product reviews and shooting tips, they are accompanied by a wide range of political content, including interviews with conservative officials and activists. In weekly “T.Rex Talks,” Lucas and his brothers sit in a dimly lit studio to discuss America in decay, and how like-minded, God-oriented people can save it. They often reference the end times and urge their viewers to seize control before things get worse. “They’re selling products,” says Max Rizzuto, another Atlantic Council researcher, “and the product is ideology, too.”

The Botkins “were pushing every single one of the narratives that we’ve seen emerge out of the right-wing space.”

For example, in the days following the 2020 election, Lucas and his older brother, Isaac, a designer at the company who frequently appears on T.Rex Talks, discussed journalism. “We’re at a place right now where a lot of people don’t trust the mainstream media,” Isaac said, to which Lucas quickly replied, “Reasonably so.” The brothers argued reporters should be held accountable for their coverage of topics like Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter protests. “I’m starting to wonder when a news network will be actually prosecuted for things that they say that result in the death of people, which I think has happened in the past four years,” Lucas said. “It results in people getting killed, or businesses just getting burned, looted. Theft. And they’re not being held responsible for it.” Lucas went on to predict that economic collapse was “very likely” in his lifetime: “The way we live can be radically different 30 years from now.” In another stream, he warned of the “apocalyptic” prospect of a nationwide gun ban.

One month after releasing a line of gilded high-tops for $399, Donald Trump revealed on Tuesday a new item: the Bible. “All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many,” the former president explained in a video promoting the country singer Lee Greenwood’s version of a King James translation, the “God Bless the USA Bible.”

“It’s my favorite book,” Trump added.

Throughout the rest of the clip, as if daring us into a collective disgust, Trump swerved through random opportunities to rail against bureaucrats and a country under threat—all while hawking a holy text.

But his latest sales pitch also prompted some legitimate questions. Such as: What the hell is going on? And: Excuse me? Here, we try to answer some of the queries.

So, that first question—what the hell—but more formally: What exactly is Trump promoting and how much will it cost me to shell out for this? 

On Tuesday, Alabama provided even more evidence of what we already know to be true: Abortion rights win elections. 

Democrat Marilyn Lands won a special election for an Alabama state House seat, flipping a Republican-held seat by campaigning on abortion rights in the deep-red state that bans abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. Lands won 62 percent of the nearly 6,000 votes cast, while her challenger, Republican Teddy Powell, won 37.5 percent, according to the unofficial election night results from the Alabama Secretary of State. The candidates were running to replace Republican David Cole, who resigned last year after he was arrested on a voting fraud charge. (Lands ran against Cole in 2022 and lost by just under 1,000 votes, or about 7 percentage points—making her win last night all the more significant.)

Lands—a licensed professional counselor whose website says her “Christian values deeply influence her life and work”—campaigned on repealing the state’s abortion ban, as well as expanding Medicaid, investing in community mental health resources, and improving the local economy and education. Days after the state Supreme Court‘s decision threatening IVF last month, Lands released a campaign ad in which she and another Alabama woman, Alyssa Gonzales, each shared their personal stories of getting emergency abortions following nonviable pregnancies. For Lands, it happened 20 years ago; for Gonzales, it happened after the Dobbs decision was handed down in 2022. 

“We will not stand by and watch our most basic human rights be stripped from us,” Lands says in the ad.  

I’m sharing my abortion story because Alabama's no exceptions abortion ban is putting lives at risk. We must repeal this legislation, and if I'm elected on March 26th, I'll work tirelessly to do just that.

A black-and-white photograph, three and a half by five inches, shows a figure in profile—a silhouette in suit and hat, alone on a giant heap of demolished buildings far above the cathedral tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. I found it in a stack of photos stored inside a small envelope with a handwritten label: “NY Downtown, Summer 1971.” The man’s expression is hidden, but his stooped posture and tiny scale against the massive pile make the picture feel lonely. His eyes are fixed on something beyond the frame, but the longer I studied it, the more I could see him staring at the Twin Towers, which, though unfinished, had reached their full height.

The man in the photo is the writer Joseph Mitchell, who was then in his early sixties, or “well past what Dante called the middle of the journey,” as he wrote in his notes. From 1938 to 1964, he published legendary profiles as a staff writer at The New Yorker, mostly portraits of ordinary people in disappearing worlds on the edges of the city. By 1971, he was a stranger to himself. Increasingly he wandered the city by day and at night, surprised by the intensity of his emotion. The beauty of commonplace images—“a sunflower growing in a vacant lot”—had become almost unbearably moving to him, and sometimes he stared for a long time at certain old buildings in the city, trying to understand why he felt so drawn to them.

For more than three decades, the story goes, he went to his office at The New Yorker on West Forty-Third Street almost every day, worked behind his closed door, and never submitted another story. But unpublished fragments—notes, drafts, letters, photographs, and found objects—attest to another Mitchell, one who would leave his desk to visit an old cemetery or enter a demolition site, where, he noted, he worked as hard as he ever did. In his published stories, he preserved lives that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, then he gathered objects from their threatened worlds. Mitchell couldn’t find one single way to describe what had changed—he called it “living in the past,” “living with the dead,” “living as in a dream, or, I might as well say it, as in a nightmare”—but he claimed to know the exact moment when he metamorphosed into an obsessed collector.

It was 4 A.M. on the Friday of October 4, 1968. Mitchell woke from uneasy dreams, then got out of bed as quietly as he could, so as not to disturb his wife, Therese, and set out from their 44 West Tenth Street apartment for the Fulton Fish Market, where “the smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness,” as Mitchell wrote in his 1952 profile “Up in the Old Hotel,” always gave him a feeling of well-being. But urban renewal projects had doomed much of Lower Manhattan, and the wrecking ball was destroying whole blocks. (In the previous year, more than sixty acres of buildings were demolished.) The piles of rubble depressed him, so he went to the Paris Café at Meyer’s Hotel, which afforded a good view of the East River. He ordered coffee, found a spot at the bar, and as he observed people cooking fish on the riverbank and box fires built against the blackened posts of the elevated highway, he saw his oldest friend in the city, Joe Cantalupo.

The fictional Pittsfield, Massachusetts, native Mack Bolan first appeared in Don Pendleton’s 1969 novel The Executioner #1: War Against the Mafia. A self-righteous vigilante (“I am not their judge. I am their judgment”), the by-now-lesser-known Bolan was the inspiration for the popular Marvel ­Comics antihero Frank Castle, also called the Punisher, who made his debut in 1974’s The Amazing Spider-Man #129 and who has been played by Dolph Lundgren, Thomas Jane, and Ray Stevenson in three movies and by Jon Bernthal in a recent Netflix television series. (Season one, episode one: Castle is reading Moby-Dick.)

Bolan’s and Castle’s origins are not the same. Castle’s family was murdered by the mob—that’s how the red wheel cranks into motion, that’s his permission to kill. But Bolan’s story is different. His father gets in debt to the mob, gets sick, and falls behind on loan payments. His sister, Cindy, starts turning tricks for the mob to help pay off her father’s debt. When Bolan’s little brother finds her out, he tells their father. Their father shoots his son, Bolan’s brother, wounding him, then kills his wife and daughter, Bolan’s mother and sister, before killing himself. War Against the Mafia begins with Bolan turning away from the fact that it was his own father, not the mob, who murdered his family.

Given that Bolan was from Pittsfield, where Herman Melville lived from 1850 until 1863, and given that Castle in 2008’s Punisher: War Zone snarls in a church, “I’d like to get my hands on God,” and given that “War Against the Father” could be another name for the satanic Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby-Dick as a murderous revolt against God the Father, it was no surprise to me that these overlapping references filled my head as I drove toward Pittsfield through blinding sleet. “You Are At 1724 Feet Highest Elevation on I-90 East of South Dakota,” said a brown sign near Becket, Massachusetts. Hence my elevated thoughts.

I have been to that even more elevated spot on I-90 in South Dakota. The year was 2016. I saw the sun rise as I drove through the Fort Pierre National Grassland on US 83. Then I turned east on I-90 at Vivian, ate breakfast in Presho, and drove through Kennebec and Lyman and Reliance and Oacoma (1,729 feet above sea level, five feet higher than the roadside sign in Becket) and Chamberlain and Pukwana and Kimball and White Lake and Plankinton and Mount Vernon and Betts and Mitchell and Alexandria and Hartford on my way to Sioux Falls, where I stopped at Bob’s Cafe for a dynamite two-piece fried chicken plate with beans and slaw.