Mark Krotov

For my part, I knew that I had fallen in love with Dry Leaf when another cow—or was it a horse?—ambled through the frame enfolded in a pixelated outline distinct from the rest of the sky behind it. I understood that what I was looking at was the byproduct of a ringing artifact, a ghost at the meeting point of cow and sky.

Like Critical Race Theory before it—but with a supercharged intensity, since each new campaign of right-wing hate has been more aggressive than the last—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has come to stand in for efforts and programs that have nothing at all to do with these words’ putative definitions or implications. The DOGEistes, in combing through personnel data on the hunt for “women,” “historically,” and “status,” have made it very clear that they’re not particularly concerned with workplace training programs or low-stakes capitalist proceduralism. Instead the claims made by Musk and Project 2025 are far more expansive: for them DEI refers to any effort that acknowledges the reality that people other than cis white men operate in society.

Some of Trump’s voters—namely the rich and the superrich—will get exactly what they wanted out of the deal. Most will not.

The US’s biggest infrastructure project—bigger than the New Deal–era dams and the Erie Canal—was the highway system, which destroyed the American city and, arguably but I think not that arguably, American society itself. The country’s midcentury racist spatial self-destruction is a crime that will never be sufficiently atoned for. Whenever a child walking along a four-lane exurban road is killed by a driver who swerves into the shoulder, whenever someone is simply able to drive 98 miles per hour in a 55 zone, whenever a family of seven in an ostensibly safe minivan is killed despite the self-evident technological ability to limit speeds, redesign roads, and enforce existing regulations, it seems reasonable to infer that what car culture is really about aren’t sexy concept cars or futuristic taillights. What car culture is really about is death.

The tagline of the magazine in question, Popular Western, was “Complete Quick-Trigger Stories,” which could apply to Ruscha’s photographs but not to his paintings. Even his silliest paintings are stately and brooding, often to a fault. The character of the brooding evolved over time. If the later paintings are—often but not always to their detriment—more explicit about our world on fire, the ’60s work prioritizes pleasure: the laid-back loops of the gas pump hoses, the blocky, confident reds, the crisp fluorescents, and the light and shadow on the glass façade provide little indication of the crises to come.