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The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment

In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.

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Incredible Beauty of the Bicycle Card Aesthetic

I was never a great skill card player growing up. I was quite excellent at War, and at 52 Pick-Up, but other than that, my mastery in card games was more in my mind than in my hand. I never played a dime or a nickel flush where I won any type of pot, but I always enjoyed holding the actual playing cards. The designs were a fascination to my young mind, and today, when I happened upon the Bicycle cards website, I was taken back to a time when a deck of cards lasted for years of regular use around the kitchen table with nickel raises and dime bets; but these cards, these new Bicycle cards, had a right life of their own. The opaque card box was gone; replaced by a lovely translucent plastic that was more welcoming to both hand, and eye.

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The Intemperate Tyrant Twins

We live in a time of Intemperate Tyrants — and the levels of expectation they set for those who elected them — leads us straight into the grave and never above the Heavens. What have we done, as a country, and a nation, to deserve the leaderless examples of the bloodless Donald Trump and the vampiric Chris Christie?

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Into the Insovereign: 2015 Invades 2016

2015 is coming to a close with a bang and a whimper. The bang of violence across the world beckons and the whimper of those right people who prefer to do the moral thing to make the world better, threatens. However, neither bang nor whimper now has a clear path to an endgame that can not only just win a moment, but change the world.

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