The gallery without us by Jo Anne Kamansky

One of the stranger developments in contemporary art is also one of its most refreshing, the growing number of projects created not for human audiences but for animals, plants, fungi and even microbes. We are accustomed to treating art as a fundamentally human exchange. An artist makes something; a person looks at it. The transaction seems obvious. Yet a surprising corner of contemporary practice has begun asking a simple and destabilizing question: what if humans are not the intended audience at all?

At first glance, art for non-humans sounds like a conceptual joke. A sculpture designed for bees, a sound installation for dogs, a light environment for plants; these can seem like clever stunts generated by the contemporary art world's endless appetite for novelty. Certainly, some projects deserve that criticism. Not every artwork aimed at a non-human recipient escapes the suspicion that it was actually made for a gallery wall text.

Yet dismissing the entire phenomenon would miss its deeper significance. What makes these works interesting is not whether a dog appreciates avant-garde sound design or whether a tomato plant experiences aesthetic pleasure. The value lies in how these projects force humans to confront the limits of their own perspective.

For centuries, art has operated as one of humanity's most self-centered institutions. Museums are monuments to human perception. Art criticism is the study of human interpretation. Even when artists depict landscapes, animals or ecological systems, the assumption remains that the ultimate viewer is another person standing in front of the work. Non-human art challenges this arrangement by suggesting that our sensory world is only one among countless others.

Consider a flower. To a human observer it is a visual object composed of colours and shapes. To a bee it may appear as an entirely different phenomenon, marked by ultraviolet patterns invisible to human eyes. Which version is the real flower? The question suddenly becomes difficult. Art designed for pollinators highlights the uncomfortable reality that human perception occupies only a narrow slice of existence.

This is where the most compelling projects succeed. They are less about communicating with animals than about humbling humans.

The idea arrives at a curious historical moment. Much of modern society remains devoted to human exceptionalism. We build cities for ourselves, engineer landscapes for ourselves, and increasingly redesign entire ecosystems around our needs. Meanwhile, climate change, biodiversity collapse, and ecological instability have exposed the consequences of treating everything else as background scenery. Art for non-humans emerges as a cultural symptom of this growing discomfort.

Its practitioners often seem to be searching for ways to imagine coexistence rather than dominance. If architecture can be designed for birds, if sound can be composed for whales, if installations can accommodate fungal growth as an active participant, then perhaps creativity itself becomes a shared ecological process rather than a purely human achievement.

There is, however, an irony at the heart of these efforts. Humans still create the work. Humans decide which species deserve attention. Humans define the project's goals and interpret its results. Even the most ambitious non-human artwork remains trapped within a human framework. A gallery exhibition for pigeons is still funded, curated, photographed and discussed by people. But perhaps that contradiction is precisely the point.

The dream of escaping human perspective completely is impossible. What art for non-humans offers instead is a productive failure. It reminds us that there are worlds we cannot fully enter, senses we cannot experience, and forms of life that remain fundamentally alien. In an age obsessed with personalization and algorithmic certainty, this acknowledgment of unknowability feels almost radical.

The greatest achievement of these projects may be that they transform art from a mirror into a window. Not a clear window, but a fogged and imperfect one. Through it we glimpse the possibility that creativity, perception, and even beauty might not belong exclusively to our species.

That realization is both unsettling and liberating. The gallery, it turns out, may never have been ours alone.

Regrets #Poem #Painting by Nikos Laios

 

You have regrets?
I too have regrets,
They’re my regrets,
They’re proof that
One has lived
Richly and deeply.

Loves and losses,
Passions and victories,
Sins and good deeds,
Errors of moral and
Intellectual judgement,
Destruction and decay,
Redemption and rebirth,
And the hollow days
Of the past that are
Lost in the mist
Of memories,
Our regrets
Make us
Human.

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With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

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#eBook The bear cluster by Martha Radcliffe

 

It was an evening in late autumn, and the drawing-room of Miss Eliza Whitmore’s modest yet genteel home bore all the marks of a genteel society gathering.

The low, golden glow of the fire illuminated the faces of its guests, who were seated in a circle upon chairs of soft velvet, their conversation as varied as the changing leaves outside the window. Miss Eliza, graceful and composed as always, sat closest to the hearth, her eyes flicking occasionally toward her guests, noting the peculiar tension that clung to the air.

The room was small but not cramped, the furniture arranged to accommodate the circle of friends who had gathered for the evening. Each one had their own troubles, their own thoughts, yet there was something undeniable about their bond, something that could not be severed by time or circumstance.

Martha Radcliffe , a librarian by trade and day and story tale by night who also likes to watercolour nature on all kinds of paper. Loves her three grandkids, her two daughters and occasionally her husband but she has a strong passion about medieval era England.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

The bear cluster

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Marx cousins #029 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Groucho Marx attempts to seduce Karl Marx’s beard,
only to be met with a scathing analysis of capitalism
disguised as a poorly-aimed spittoon.

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One man’s state by Markus Gibbons

USA courts, prosecutors, police agencies and federal departments are designed to serve the law rather than the whims of politicians. Their legitimacy rests on a simple principle; they belong to the public, not to the president. Yet every time a president appears to direct the machinery of government toward personal political objectives, that principle comes under strain.

The reported decision by Donald Trump to order the Justice Department to investigate oil companies over high gasoline prices raises precisely that concern. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the substance of such an investigation is almost beside the point. The larger question is why the Justice Department should be seen as responding to the political frustrations of a president rather than acting according to independent legal standards and evidence.

The danger is not merely the investigation itself. Democracies routinely investigate corporations, industries and powerful interests. The danger emerges when the public begins to view those investigations as instruments of presidential will. Once citizens conclude that federal law enforcement acts because a political leader is angry, annoyed or eager to score points, confidence in institutional independence begins to erode.

Modern democracies survive because they create distance between political power and legal authority. Elected officials make policy. Prosecutors enforce the law. Judges interpret it. The separation is not always perfect, but it exists for a reason. Without it, government becomes increasingly personalized. Institutions cease to have identities of their own and instead become extensions of whoever occupies the highest office.

Trump’s political style has long revolved around personalization. Loyalty to the leader frequently appears more important than loyalty to procedures, norms or traditions. Supporters often celebrate this approach as decisive leadership, arguing that bureaucracies should be more responsive to elected authority. Critics see something very different: the gradual transformation of neutral institutions into political tools.

The deeper problem is that this trend extends beyond any single investigation. When law enforcement agencies are repeatedly perceived as serving presidential preferences, constitutional safeguards begin to look theoretical rather than real. Citizens are told that checks and balances remain intact, yet they increasingly witness a system in which immense pressure flows from the top downward. Formal independence may exist on paper while practical independence becomes harder to recognize in practice.

This is how institutional trust weakens. People stop asking whether actions are legal and begin asking whom those actions benefit politically. Every prosecution, investigation or regulatory decision becomes viewed through a partisan lens. The public no longer sees impartial referees. It sees rival teams using state power against one another.

America’s founders feared concentrated power precisely because they understood human nature. They assumed leaders would be ambitious, self-interested and tempted to expand their authority. Their answer was not to trust exceptional individuals but to build institutions strong enough to resist them.

The health of a constitutional republic is measured not by how effectively a president commands government agencies but by how confidently those agencies can resist becoming instruments of personal rule. When citizens begin to suspect that the machinery of justice serves one man before it serves the law, the problem is not merely political. It is constitutional, institutional and ultimately democratic.

The most stubborn illusion in the universe by Bailey Arellano

Philosophers, who embrace illusionism about consciousness make a provocative claim, qualia the supposedly ineffable “what it is like” aspect of experience, do not actually exist in the way we think they do. The redness of red, the sting of pain, the taste of coffee are not mysterious inner properties. They are cognitive constructions, artefacts of how the brain represents its own activity. Yet this position immediately raises a question that illusionists sometimes underestimate. If qualia are an illusion, why is the illusion so remarkably persistent, universal and structurally stable?

The challenge is not that people merely believe in consciousness. The challenge is that they believe in it in strikingly similar ways. Across cultures, centuries and intellectual traditions, human beings repeatedly arrive at the intuition that there is something it feels like to be them. This intuition survives scientific revolutions, philosophical attacks and increasingly sophisticated neuroscience. It is arguably the most resilient idea the human mind has ever produced.

An ordinary illusion is usually fragile. Optical illusions disappear once we understand how they work. Magic tricks lose their force when the mechanism is revealed. But consciousness seems different. Even after reading books arguing that qualia are fictional, people continue to experience themselves as having qualia. The illusion survives its own exposure.

This persistence suggests something important. If illusionism is correct, then consciousness is not a superficial error. It is not a bug in the system. It is a foundational feature of human cognition. The brain appears designed not merely to generate experiences but to generate a model of itself as a subject having experiences. The illusion is woven into the architecture.

In that sense, illusionists may actually be describing something more extraordinary than many of their opponents. The traditional defender of qualia says there is a mysterious inner reality that science cannot fully explain. The illusionist replies that there is no such reality. Yet they must then explain how evolution produced a machine capable of convincing itself, every waking moment of its existence, that such a reality is present.

That is not a small accomplishment. One possibility is that the illusion serves a practical purpose. Organisms benefit from simplified self-models. A brain cannot track every neural event occurring within itself. Instead, it generates a compressed narrative. It represents itself as a unified observer experiencing a coherent world. The feeling of subjective presence may be part of that compression strategy. The brain does not report its computations; it reports their apparent result.

But this explanation only shifts the mystery. Why does the compression take this particular form? Why not represent mental states as information processing without the feeling of an inner observer? Why does the brain consistently portray itself as a conscious subject rather than as a biological computer?

Here the hard problem quietly returns through the back door. Many illusionists argue that the problem arises from conceptual confusion. We are asking for an explanation of something that does not exist. Yet the persistence of the illusion itself demands explanation. Even if qualia are fictional, the fiction has an astonishing depth and coherence. It is not comparable to seeing a bent stick in water. It is closer to inhabiting an entire virtual reality generated by the brain.

My suspicion is that illusionism captures part of the truth but not all of it. It rightly challenges the tendency to treat consciousness as a magical substance floating beyond physics. Yet it risks sounding too dismissive of the phenomenon it seeks to explain. The illusion, if illusion it is, remains the most powerful and enduring construction nature has ever produced. A theory that calls consciousness an illusion does not dissolve the mystery. It merely relocates it. The question is no longer why qualia exist. It becomes why the universe contains creatures unable to stop believing they do.

#eBook Casual Fridays by Manisha Yadav

 

It was a Tuesday morning, and the conference room hummed with the usual routine. The scent of fresh coffee mingled with the faint aroma of glazed donuts, comforting and predictable.

Peter, the HR manager, stood at the front of the room, adjusting his glasses, his palms slightly damp, though no one would have known. His hands always shook a little, a fact he’d long since accepted. He made a point of pretending he wasn’t nervous as he glanced at his notes, knowing that everyone was watching him. Everyone was always watching him.

“We’ve been talking about it for a while,” Peter began, his voice pitched just a little higher than usual. He cleared his throat, cleared it again. “The company’s growing, and we’ve been stuck in this rigid, formal structure for too long. We need to evolve, be more… approachable. Maybe it’s time for a more relaxed approach …casual Fridays, casual everything.” He gave a nervous laugh. “Let’s see if it boosts morale.”

Manisha Devi. A California mom of two whirlwind daughters, spends her days dodging Lego bricks and deciphering the intricate social dramas unfolding at the park. Fueled by caffeine and a healthy dose of cynicism, she channels her observations into witty short stories about the eccentric characters she encounters in her daily life, from the overly-enthusiastic dog walker to the woman who whispers secrets to her bonsai tree.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

Casual Fridays

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Ma-Siri & Co #125 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Ma-Siri is a mother, a grandmother and a very active social life,
searching for the meaning of life among other things and her glasses.

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The invoice nobody needed or wanted by Thanos Kalamidas

History has a peculiar way of assigning blame. Not always fairly, not always accurately, but often with remarkable persistence. Long after generals retire, presidents leave office and governments rewrite their narratives, public memory tends to settle on a single face. A war becomes associated with one leader. A financial collapse becomes attached to one name. A strategic catastrophe acquires a human symbol.

War with Iran ended not in victory, deterrence or even stalemate, but in unmistakable failure. Furthermore, this failure produced something even more consequential than military embarrassment, a permanent shift in the economics of global trade. In this set-up, Iran emerges from the conflict with enough leverage over the Strait of Hormuz to impose new costs on the movement of energy through one of the most strategically important waterways on Earth. The result would not merely be a regional headache. It would be a global invoice.

Every barrel of oil passing through the strait would carry an added cost. Every economy dependent on imported energy would feel the impact. Shipping companies would pass expenses to manufacturers. Manufacturers would pass them to retailers. Retailers would pass them to consumers. A surcharge imposed in one narrow stretch of water would ripple outward through supply chains, grocery stores, transportation networks, and household budgets across continents.

The most remarkable aspect of such a development would not be the economics. Economies adapt. Markets adjust. Traders find new routes. The remarkable aspect would be the political question that inevitably follows: who pays?

Not who pays in the practical sense. The answer there is obvious, everyone. Citizens pay. Businesses pay. Governments pay. Entire societies absorb the cost. But public opinion rarely settles for abstract explanations. People want accountability. They want a name attached to consequences.

If the chain of events leading to this outcome could be traced directly to the decisions of a single administration, then the debate would become unavoidable. The world would not simply discuss military strategy. It would discuss responsibility.

Donald Trump has often presented himself as a businessman who understands costs better than politicians do. He has spoken the language of transactions, deals, winners and losers. That vocabulary works both ways. If leaders wish to claim ownership of successes, they should expect ownership of failures. The principle is not partisan. It is foundational.

The irony would be difficult to ignore. A leader who built much of his political identity around strength could find himself remembered primarily for creating weakness. A president who promised better deals could be associated with one of the worst strategic bargains of the century. A movement that celebrated disruption could discover that disruption has a price tag.

Of course, nations do not literally send invoices to former presidents. International politics does not operate like a courtroom where damages are calculated and judgements enforced against individuals. Yet democratic societies possess their own mechanisms for collecting debts. Reputation is one. Historical legacy is another. Political influence, credibility, and public standing can all be diminished by decisions whose consequences outlive the decision-maker.

The larger lesson extends beyond any one politician. Modern leaders often speak as though geopolitical risks are temporary and manageable. They treat complex regions like negotiating tables and centuries-old rivalries like business disputes awaiting resolution. Reality is less accommodating. Sometimes a single miscalculation reshapes entire systems. Sometimes the costs continue accumulating long after headlines fade.

In that sense, the true invoice would not be measured in dollars or barrels of oil. It would be measured in trust. Trust lost among allies. Trust weakened in institutions. Trust eroded in the judgement of those who promised they alone could fix everything.

And unlike energy prices, trust is not easily replenished. When history eventually totals the bill, the question will not be whether the world paid a price. The question will be whose name appears at the top of the receipt.

Torture’s long shadow by Flo Schofield

Every year, the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture arrives with speeches, statements and carefully commitments to human rights; yet behind the declarations lies an uncomfortable reality: torture has not disappeared. It has merely evolved, been rebranded, outsourced, hidden and in some cases openly justified by governments that claim to stand for freedom, security and the rule of law.

The most famous symbol of this contradiction remains Guantanamo Bay. More than two decades after becoming synonymous with indefinite detention and abusive interrogation practices, it still stands as a monument to the idea that some people can be placed outside the protections that democratic societies claim to cherish. The arguments used to defend such places are always familiar. Extraordinary threats require extraordinary measures. National security comes first. Dangerous individuals do not deserve ordinary rights. These justifications are repeated so often that they begin to sound normal.

They should never sound normal. Waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, psychological humiliation, and countless other methods have been dressed up with bureaucratic language designed to avoid the word “torture.” Governments learned long ago that public outrage can be softened if brutality is hidden behind legal memos and technical definitions. A prisoner choking on water does not care whether the act has been renamed an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Pain remains pain. Fear remains fear. Human dignity remains violated.

Nor is this problem limited to one country. Around the world, allegations of torture and abuse continue to emerge from prisons, military facilities, intelligence operations, and police stations. Israel faces persistent accusations regarding the treatment of detainees. Pakistan has long struggled with allegations of abuse in custody. Russia has repeatedly been criticized for reports of torture and mistreatment within its detention system. The details vary, but the underlying logic is often the same: authorities insist that exceptional circumstances require exceptional actions.

History repeatedly demonstrates where that logic leads. Torture is not simply a crime against an individual. It is an attack on truth itself. Under extreme suffering, people will often say whatever they believe their captors want to hear. False confessions become evidence. Fabricated stories become intelligence. Entire policies can be built upon information extracted through terror rather than facts. Torture corrupts institutions as much as it damages victims.

Perhaps the greatest danger is how quickly societies become accustomed to it. What begins as a temporary emergency measure gradually becomes an accepted feature of governance. Secret prisons become routine. Legal loopholes become permanent. Public concern fades. Citizens are encouraged to believe that torture happens only to others, somewhere far away, in the shadows.

But the shadows never stay contained. A state that grants itself the power to torture ultimately weakens the moral foundation on which its authority rests. The question is not whether the victim is popular, innocent, guilty, foreign, or feared. The question is whether human rights are universal or merely convenient slogans repeated on commemorative days.

The United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture should not be treated as an annual ritual of concern. It should be a reminder of a simple principle that remains surprisingly controversial in practice: torture is wrong, regardless of who commits it, who suffers it, or what excuse is offered in its defense.

The limits of gratitude by Edoardo Moretti

The decision to send Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko rather than President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to a major recovery forum in Poland has inevitably invited speculation. Officially, it appears to be a practical effort to prevent a diplomatic disagreement from overshadowing a conference devoted to reconstruction and investment. Unofficially, it serves as another reminder that the relationship between Ukraine and Poland has never been quite as simple as the popular wartime narrative suggests.

From the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Poland emerged as Ukraine’s most enthusiastic advocate. Millions of refugees crossed the border. Polish households opened their doors. The Polish government became one of Kyiv’s loudest supporters within NATO and the European Union. In much of the Western press, the two countries were presented as partners united by a common threat and bound by a shared vision of European security.

Yet history has a way of refusing neat storylines. The assumption that Russian aggression erased every disagreement between Warsaw and Kyiv was always more hopeful than realistic. Beneath the remarkable solidarity of the past few years lies a relationship shaped by centuries of competing memories, territorial disputes, and unresolved historical wounds. These tensions did not disappear when Russian tanks crossed the border in February 2022. They merely became less visible.

The most difficult issue remains the legacy of the Second World War, particularly the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. For many Poles, these events are not distant historical footnotes but defining national traumas. For many Ukrainians, the figures associated with those events occupy a far more complicated place in national memory, often intertwined with narratives of resistance against Soviet domination. Neither side has found a language that fully satisfies the other.

History, however, is only one layer of the problem. Economic interests have repeatedly collided despite declarations of friendship. Disputes over grain exports exposed how quickly strategic solidarity can encounter domestic political realities. Polish farmers, concerned about competition, demanded protection. Ukrainian officials argued that wartime circumstances required flexibility and support. Both governments spoke the language of partnership while defending their own constituencies. Neither was willing to absorb significant political costs for the other.

This is not hypocrisy. It is politics. The romantic notion that nations permanently transcend their interests during moments of crisis rarely survives contact with reality. Poland sees itself as a frontline state carrying substantial burdens for regional security. Ukraine sees itself as a nation fighting for survival and expects understanding from its allies. Both perspectives contain truth. Both can also generate resentment.

The current diplomatic friction should therefore surprise no one. What is remarkable is not that disagreements exist, but that they remained relatively contained for as long as they did. The extraordinary cooperation of recent years was real. So too are the differences now resurfacing.

Relationships between neighboring nations are rarely defined by a single emotion. They are mixtures of gratitude, rivalry, admiration, frustration, memory, and self-interest. Ukraine and Poland exemplify this complexity. They need one another strategically, yet they continue to view parts of their shared past through fundamentally different lenses.

The recovery forum may proceed more smoothly without presidential-level tensions dominating headlines. But the gesture also acknowledges a deeper reality: alliances forged by necessity do not automatically erase history. They merely postpone the moment when history asks to be heard again.