Educational decay, driven by demographic change, endangers the nation’s future, writes Dan Ben-David.
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Although Hew Locke’s practice revolves around geographically bound objects—superimposed drawings of Guyanese homes and his suspended flotilla among them—the artist traces the reaches of empire that extend far beyond any singular era or point on a map. How people, capital, cargo, and ideas traverse the globe has long been central to Locke’s work, an investigation he continues in The Wanderers on view at P·P·O·W.
Returning to the artist’s Odyssey series, the solo presentation hangs a fleet of miniature ships from the gallery ceiling. The flotilla features a wide array of boats, from tankers and fishing vessels to the towering galleons of the 16th century, which Locke embellishes with tiny pennants strung between the masts, foliage springing from the sides, and coats of colorful paint that appear as vibrantly aged patina. Referencing the global history of trade and exploitation, the ships all journey together toward un undetermined future, the legacy of their pasts in tow.
Conquest and the desire for control and wealth also appear in Locke’s lavish busts, which adorn Parian ware (a porcelain that emerged in the mid-19th century as an economical dupe for marble) with a trove of glittering baubles. Titled as Souvenirs, these mixed-media sculptures depict figures like Queen Victoria and George Washington and revel in artifice and ostentatious displays of power that soar high in the air.
Several skeletons are embedded within the costuming, gesturing toward memento mori and implicating these powerhouses in the afterlives of their colonial projects. The figures appear haunted by death and, as Locke says, are “weighed down by the literal burden of history.”
The Wanderers is on view through October 24 in New York. Find more from Locke on Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article The Legacy of Colonialism Haunts Hew Locke’s Era-Defying Flotilla appeared first on Colossal.
Phrenology, Kevin McNamee-Tweed
We begin bombing in five minutes, Joost Pauwaert
Look through any window, Lotte Lisa Ekkel
If your employees are visiting Chinese-language gambling or adult sites, they may not just be wasting time and money, but potentially encountering serious malware hidden behind domains that look like mostly harmless entertainment at first glance. A report from Infoblox urges the security community to pay closer attention to these websites, because some double as command-and-control (C2) infrastructure for espionage and malware distribution. Zach Edwards, staff threat researcher at Infoblox, suggests security researchers and the media have ignored these sites because the story is complicated and confusing. Infoblox says it tracks about 1.7 million Chinese-language casino websites that facilitate illegal gambling. These support North Korean money laundering and tax avoidance, among other dubious activities. And these casino sites can be difficult to distinguish from one another. They tend to use variations of common templates in terms of design and function. Many operate like a legal casino would, just relying on the advantage of house odds to profit. While these sites provide illegal gambling and adult entertainment for online visitors from China and Asia, some rely on US cloud providers for computing infrastructure. "Major US hosting companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Google) continue to host infrastructure associated with these domains," the Infoblox report explains. "One likely explanation is account theft at those providers, a practice documented previously as 'infrastructure laundering.'" That refers to hosting companies like Funnull that have reportedly rented IP addresses from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft and made those resources available to clients carrying out illegal activities. According to a July 2026 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), disparate crime syndicates increasingly use common infrastructure for cybercrime, while online scams resulted in estimated losses of between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion in 2025 across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. A subset of casino sites offer scam gambling, or "scambling." Visitors place bets but can't get their money out if they win. And then there's a subset of sites used by China-aligned threat groups. "China-aligned APT groups have been running the PeckBirdy framework since 2023, hiding their malware C2 domains inside low-quality Chinese-language casino websites," Infoblox said. PeckBirdy, as noted by Trend Micro researchers in January, is a script-based framework that attackers can load through compromised websites. In one campaign, attackers injected scripts into gambling sites that loaded PeckBirdy and displayed fake software update pages designed to entice victims to download malware. The problem is that each of these three types of sites, though they change frequently, looks similar. Infoblox notes that just over 3 percent of its enterprise customers resolved at least one PeckBirdy C2 domain. "The most important thing for defenders to do is stop ignoring casino domains," Infoblox argues. "An alert on a Chinese-language casino or adult domain that gets closed as an employee browsing violation is precisely the outcome the PeckBirdy operators are counting on. The decoy works because the dismissal is reasonable – these domains genuinely are, most of the time, exactly what they appear to be." Security analysts who review suspicious network contacts are advised to check whether these casino domains include malicious payloads before closing the review ticket. ®
Employers will have to hold face-to-face meetings with staff who ask about shift changes under government reforms
Company bosses will have to sit down with workers who request flexible working and justify their reasons for any refusals under new rights announced by Louise Haigh on Tuesday.
The first secretary of state told the TUC conference that employers would have to “properly consider” requests for flexibility and offer a face-to-face meeting under new rights for workers.
Continue reading...Scandal explodes as country’s election campaign peaks, with polls suggesting dead heat between candidates
Brazil’s supreme court has been thrust into what experts consider the greatest crisis since the return of democracy in the 1980s, as two rival judges lock horns on the eve of the presidential election with unpredictable consequences for Latin America’s largest democracy.
The politically charged dispute exploded into public view on Tuesday as judges traded insults and accusations during a heated supreme court hearing that was livestreamed into millions of Brazilian homes.
Continue reading...Prime minister speaks of strengthening Canada’s economic and political ties to Europe at Canada Investment Summit
Mark Carney said Canada will pursue a “unique security and economic alliance” with Europe as he positions his country as a base to build in the “new global economic order”.
Speaking to investors, company executives and government ministers at the inaugural Canada Investment Summit on Tuesday, the prime minister pitched Canada as a “safe harbour” and lucrative home for foreign capital as his government looks to reduce its reliance on trade with the United States.
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Als je zelf niks te zeggen hebt, waarom zou je social media account dan wel iets moeten zeggen? Nou ja, misschien omdat je wilt laten zien hoe betrokken je bent bij mensen die je hebt gesproken bij een bezoek aan Kamp Westerbork, of omdat je je medeleven wilt betuigen na een immense ramp en je geen idee hebt hoe echte mensen dat doen, of gewoon omdat je op social media een kant van jezelf wilt laten zien die bij zo veel mogelijk mensen zo populair mogelijk is. Allemaal legitieme redenen, dus alleen een kniesoor die valt over AI-gebruik van onze jonge premier, die vandaag zijn eerste troonrede afleverde. Je zou haast zeggen. Wás die maar AI.
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F1 ACADEMY's 2026 Rookie Test took place at the Circuito de Navarra in Spain, offering young drivers the chance to showcase their talent.
Father Country I Do Love You sounds like a doozy of a new exhibition from photographer Taryn Simon. The project focuses on the life and work of an unnamed, retired FBI agent. From the NY Times: She Spent Years on a Giant Project About One Man. The Result Is Monumental.
As it turned out, his work had touched many catastrophes of American life — the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, for example, which the agent helped to inspect, or the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, when the agent was in charge of sifting debris in the immediate aftermath — and also lesser-known events, historical footnotes that were nonetheless telling. What interested Simon were not just the events themselves, but also their reverberations, far beyond any immediate blast radius. What happened, for instance, to the physical ruins from the TWA crash? What became of the woman who tried to take a photograph of the smoldering Pentagon, whose film the F.B.I. agent had confiscated? Or to the Iraqi diplomat who ran the country’s U.S. embassy during the Persian Gulf war, whom the agent had monitored? Or to the child of a couple accused of being Russian spies, whose house the agent had raided?
The piece describes the project, which includes over 1000 photographs and other material, as “a Great American Novel in visual form” and “huge and fractal: biography as butterfly effect”, which sounds fascinating.
Even Jodie Foster makes an appearance; this particular agent had trained Foster at the FBI Academy in Quantico as preparation for her role as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.
Father Country I Do Love You debuts at the Guggenheim in NYC on September 18 and runs through March 14, 2027.
Tags: art · Guggenheim Museum · Jodie Foster · museums · photography · Taryn Simon