Art and the Homeless

NASA has selected SpaceX to build and deploy a dedicated deorbit vehicle to safely guide the International Space Station (ISS) out of orbit after its planned decommissioning in 2031. The contract, valued at $843 million, involves developing a spacecraft that will attach to the ISS and use controlled propulsion to lower its altitude until it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. The ISS, roughly the size of a football field and weighing about 400 metric tons, cannot simply be left in orbit indefinitely. Without intervention, it would eventually decay unpredictably, potentially risking populated areas. The SpaceX deorbit vehicle will perform a carefully timed maneuver to ensure that the majority of the station burns up during re-entry, while any surviving debris is directed toward a remote, unpopulated region of the Pacific Ocean. This mission is not only a feat of orbital mechanics but also serves as a real-world test for planetary defense strategies. The precision required to guide such a mass...

Chapter 5 Columbus Circle was a whirl of headlights and horns, a vortex of traffic that spun endlessly around the monument. K. was looking for the advertised mega store sale, but before getting very far in his search, he felt a tug from across the plaza, a magnetic attraction to the dark, pallid entrance of Central Park. It was late, a night when no one in his right mind is on the street.  He glanced warily at the entrance. A sign warned of closing hours, but the entrance was wide open, an irresistible temptation to skip common sense. He thought to turn back, to come back another day, in the bright sunshine. Immediate satisfaction overcame deferred reward. The emptiness of the park drew him in like a vortex. He was stepping across a threshold, a border between worlds, so he thought. The rain had stopped at day's end, leaving the pavement slick and shiny. The trees still dripped rain water at random intervals, producing a distinctive echo effect, as if in a cavern. K. noticed that h...

The Cage of Guilt: An Anti-History of Performance Art "In the last decades interest in hunger artists has declined considerably." This opening line from Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist (1922) serves not merely as a fictional observation, but as a prophetic epitaph for the trajectory of postmodern performance art. Written long before the rise of the current, contemporary "safe space" -or, the era of noncommittal, morally relative artistic statements, Kafka’s story presciently narrates a drama where the spectacle of suffering has lost its power to captivate. The decline Kafka noted was not just a shift in taste, but a fundamental failure of the artist’s contract with the audience. Decades later, his "cage artist"—the performer who utilizes their own confinement and bodily austerity as a medium—is often misread as a protesting martyr.  This lecture argues the opposite: the postmodern cage artist is a would-be criminal, incapable of committing an actual crime of...

The recent allegations against Alibaba regarding the "distillation" of Anthropic’s models, coupled with the media frenzy surrounding Dario Amodei’s supposed "demotion," present a narrative that is more theatrical than substantive. At its core, this situation is less about a security breach and more about the aggressive, albeit clumsy, realities of global AI competition. The "Hostile Takeover" Analogy Refined Alibaba’s strategy is best understood not as a cyber-attack in the traditional sense, but as a corporate hostile takeover executed via API consumption. In a traditional hostile takeover, an aggressor acquires a competitor’s undervalued assets by buying up shares on the open market, often bypassing the board's approval. Alibaba has done the functional equivalent: instead of buying Anthropic’s stock, they "bought" its core asset—its intelligence—by purchasing 28.8 million API queries. This was not an act of malice intended to destroy Anthro...

Mock Grad Thesis: Titorelli and the Lawyer’s Art in Kafka’s “The Trial” Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial offers an insightful perspective for a thesis on the nature of institutional power: the legal system is not a mechanism for discovering truth, but a performative art form that constructs its own reality, indistinguishable from the fabrication of a painter working from hearsay. Through the character of Titorelli, a court painter, Kafka argues that the "art" of the lawyer and the "art" of the painter are mirror images of the same corrupt endeavor.  Both professions in the novel are reduced to the production of illusions designed to sustain a system that operates on fiction rather than fact. 1. The Convergence of Roles: Painter as Lawyer, Lawyer as Painter The central conceit of the novel is the collapse of boundaries between the artist and the legal professional. Titorelli explicitly admits, "Have you noticed I sound almost like a lawyer? It's constantly inte...

The Blockchain Trap: Why Crypto Kidnapping is a Criminal Dead End By Leo The recent media frenzy surrounding the Nancy Guthrie abduction case has highlighted a critical, yet often misunderstood, aspect of modern crime: the fatal flaw in using cryptocurrency for ransom. While the New York Post recently drew attention to the FBI's $152 (yes, that's three digit) test deposit strategy, the conversation was unfortunately derailed by the use of the Yiddish slang term "farkakta" to describe the kidnappers. This choice of words was not only inappropriate but also distracting. It reduced a serious investigative failure to a punchline and, unintentionally, tapped into harmful ethnic stereotypes. To truly understand what happened, and to ensure such crimes are never repeated with any misguided hope of success, we must strip away the slang and look at the cold, hard mechanics of the blockchain. The lesson here is not that the criminals were amateurs (farkakta) in a comical sense,...