Ashley Dawson, author of EXTINCTION, discusses his thoughts on Bill de Blasio’s energy plan in an article for The Guardian.

Mayor Bill de Blasio just announced an energy plan that would potentially move New York City a big step in the wrong direction. In a little-discussed provision of the city’s latest OneNYC sustainability plan, Mayor de Blasio commits to powering 100% of City government operations with “clean” hydroelectric power from Canadian state company Hydro-Québec. According to the mayor, this would help the city move away from coal and gas, in the process cutting emissions by 40% over the next decade. What’s not to like?

The mayor’s proposal calls for construction of a 330-mile-long underground high-voltage transmission cable, called the Champlain-Hudson Power Express (CHPE), to bring power from Canada down to NYC. The project, which is slated to cost nearly $20bn, would lock NYC into dependence on Canadian hydropower long-term, while diminishing the ability for local offshore wind, solar and other renewable industries to thrive.

Furthermore, there is nothing “clean” about hydropower. Building the CHPE would require excavating a trench down the spine of the Hudson Valley, a costly and environmentally disruptive enterprise. Construction could potentially stir up long-buried carcinogenic PCBs in the Hudson River, the nation’s largest superfund site, threatening a recovery process championed by advocates for decades. And the dams that would generate power for NYC have flooded hundreds of miles of boreal forest, annihilating watershed ecosystems and agricultural potential across the north-eastern US.

Read the full article here.

GREG SHUPAK discussing the NYT’s coverage of apartheid in Israel

Setting aside the troubling assertion that Israelis and Palestinians living as equals would be not only a “disaster,” but as bad a “disaster” as apartheid, Friedman ignored the fact that just two months earlier, the Knesset had passed the Nation State Law that defined Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. The law asserted that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” even though 20 percent of the population living inside Israel is not Jewish; encouraged “the development of Jewish settlement” and vowed that the state will “promote its establishment and consolidation.” It declared that “the state’s language is Hebrew,” deprecating Arabic, the first language of roughly half the people under that state’s control.

The Nation State Law demonstrates that the bad faith, future tense descriptions of Israeli apartheid are overly narrow, in that they focus exclusively on the Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied since 1967. Yet on the Israeli-held side of the Green Line, Palestinians are systematically discriminated against.

It’s not only the occupation that make Israel/Palestine apartheid. It’s the Israeli state’s foundational principles and actions: driving two-thirds of the indigenous Palestinian population from their homes at its birth, subsequently making more than 2 million of them refugees, and then denying their right to return, despite its being mandated under international law.

Meanwhile, Jewish people anywhere on Earth are given the right to immigrate, because Israeli leaders want to maintain a demographic advantage. They pursue this goal—with decisive help from their sponsors in Washington—through their longstanding operational policy mantra: maximum land, minimum Arabs.

Read the full article here.

CATHY OTTEN examines Iraq’s Yazidis struggle with the future of the children of rape by Islamic State fighters.

For Iraq’s Yazidi minority, the defeat of the Islamic State has magnified an existing theological split, with painful real-world consequences. The group’s Spiritual Council, their highest religious authority, announced on Saturday that children born to women and girls who were raped by Islamic State fighters won’t be accepted back by the community, leaving dozens of Yazidi women and their children stranded in eastern Syria. These women must now decide between their faith and their families.

Read the full article here.

HILTON ALS on curating a collective portrait of Queer Black author and activist, James Baldwin for the David Zwirner Gallery

After the Alice Neel show I curated closed in 2017, David Zwirner asked me what I’d like to do next. I immediately said James Baldwin, for some reasons that were clear to me and some that revealed themselves only when I began to meet with artists and see their work. I wanted to give Baldwin his body back, to reclaim him for myself and many others as the maverick queer artist that drew us to him in the first place. It’s difficult to visualize those feelings—complex, almost nonverbal feelings—and, as it turns out, difficult to get the right mix that further articulates those expressions of thought and feeling. But I think what we have here in this show, “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin” (on view through February 16), is exactly as I wanted, which is to say a myriad portrait of a significant figure. And as everyone knows, when an artist is making a portrait, they are also making a portrait of themselves.

So to a very great extent, this is not a group show but, I hope, a new and valuable way of showing artists who are interested in exhibiting aspects of themselves, their thinking in relation to their times and the history that made them. Baldwin certainly helped make me, and in recent years I have been disturbed by the conversations around his work—largely, shall we say, heteronormative conversations that elevate the imitator and plunge the so-called liberal into a very comforting cold bath laced with guilt and remorse. These are reflexes, not thoughts, really, and so in order to help give Baldwin himself, I thought we had to start from the beginning. The first part of the exhibition is rooted in biography, and the second part is about metaphor: artists making the art Baldwin could not make himself.

Read the article here.