In the mid-1990s, I had many printed copies of the Financial Times in my hands. Probably sometime between 1995 and 1997. I was fascinated by its design, the wan salmon of its pages and Ingram Pinn’s illustrations: its visual identity, basically. As for reading it, very little, I confess. It was an almost purely retinal experience, and little else. But it became clear to me that its texts were written for professionals —people who make decisions on the basis of verified information—
Nine conserved eighteenth-century fans return to view at the Taft Museum, revealing painted scenes and intricate European craftsmanship.
Wave Pool offers four August ceramics sessions with clay, tools, glazes, kiln access, and beginner-friendly hand-building instruction.
FotoFocus closes its inaugural Center exhibition with a free reception for photography and lens-based work by over fifty artists.
FotoFocus launches its 2026 Biennial with free passes, maps, catalogues, and representatives from sixty-five participating venues.
Nine artists examine political, religious, and economic belief systems in a yearlong FotoFocus exhibition at 21c Cincinnati.
Zachary Armstrong, Gina Beavers, Raul de Nieves, and Trey Abdella discuss their work before a Weston reception.
Photography, sculpture, installation, and film examine Latin American representation in a FotoFocus exhibition at Kennedy Heights Arts Center.
The smell of fresh ink on a print just lifted from the press has a remarkable ability to turn devotees into addicts. So do the uneasy intervals built into the process, which forge a very particular bond with the craft. This lies at the origin of nearly every printmaking and screen-printing workshop. Another trait they tend to share is an unusual capacity for endurance...
Since Wednesday, August 12, Annex Gallery has been presenting Tiger Lily: Collective Impressions. Tiger Lily Press is a cooperative printmaking workshop founded in Cincinnati in 1979, conceived as an open space for practice, teaching, and the preservation of artistic printing techniques. Over several decades, it has brought together printmakers from different generations, providing access to presses, tools, workshops, and shared technical knowledge, while establishing itself as one of the...
It’s satisfying to identify the first seeds of what we become, and to what we commit. The mentor who sowed my life into a fertile ground of art and travel is clear: Uncle Bob gave me my first art history book in 1962 upon return from one of his many international adventures. A Renaissance man, he drew and painted, sang, wrote, and acted in theatre at Ohio State University, where he also professed a seminal marketing history...
“The Art of Charlie and Edie Harper in Needlepoint Exhibit” is exactly that. Charming and humorous, exquisitely designed and perfectly executed, each of these renditions of the famous Harper pieces in the clockwork precision of needlepoint seems just what the two artists would have anticipated as a future for their works. The late Harpers’ prints and reproductions may be the most recognizable hometown art in Cincinnati, but good design is ageless...
Emerging Artists Exposed is a film series dedicated to emerging artists from the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky region, offering an intimate look at the experiences, ideas, and personal histories that shape their work. In this installment, the featured artist reflects on her path from business studies to the visual arts and on a deeply social practice centered on the human body, medical histories, vulnerability, and the conversations through which personal experience is transformed into visual form.
Given its scale and significance, I will present my analysis of this project in several installments. These are the ten design proposals shortlisted for the next series of euro banknotes. At this moment, they are under the gaze of millions. Citizens of the euro area have been invited to choose their favorites in a survey that will remain open until September 21...
Designing the banknotes destined to circulate throughout a monetary area such as Europe is among the most prestigious and consequential commissions a professional or design studio can receive. Creating an image to be shared by millions of people, condensing an identity into visual form, and meeting complex demands of legibility, security, symbolism, and instant recognition constitute a task at which even a demigod like Hercules might have failed...
Ai Weiwei's art leaves me with certain reservations. The public figure strikes me as overly polished, burnished almost to excess.
Some years ago he dropped an authentic Han dynasty urn onto the floor. Made sometime between 206 BC and AD 220, its first and only purpose was to shatter. He had bought it in Beijing in the early 1990s, during China's rapid urban expansion...
OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT for Teens on August 18, a version of its chatbot for users aged 13 to 17 that activates automatically when the system predicts someone is under 18. Age prediction reads behavioral signals from conversations and defaults to the safer minor experience when it is unsure. Parents can link accounts, set quiet hours and study hours, and receive safety notifications if the system detects signs of acute distress. Content filters block self-harm, violence, eating disorders, explicit material, and viral challenges. Break reminders encourage teens to step away, Users who believe the prediction is wrong can verify their age through a selfie-based service and unlock full access.
The upgrade looks like care, but it also makes the chatbot an age judge before the first question is asked. The same model that answers a homework query now decides whether you are old enough to hear an unfiltered reply. Parents gain guardrails, but those guardrails come from software that watches for signals of crisis and reports them up the chain. The system never reads conversations in full, yet it monitors enough to decide when to intervene. OpenAI says the work is guided by the American Psychological Association and child safety groups. The real test is whether a chatbot that treats every uncertain user as a child ends up building trust or quietly narrowing who gets to think out loud.
Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, the startup that lets developers send queries to over 400 AI models through a single interface, for a little over $8 billion, Reuters reported on August 19. OpenRouter processes over 10 trillion tokens per day for over 10 million developers and companies, and in May raised $113 million at a $1.3 billion valuation from investors including CapitalG and Menlo Ventures. Stripe, the payments firm, plans to fold the marketplace into its billing tools for AI model consumption. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison calls tokens the central currency for companies building with AI.
OpenRouter sold itself as the neutral door that freed builders from provider lock-in, a place where a prompt could reach any model and fall back to another when the first failed. That door now belongs to the company that meters and invoices every transaction. The exchange where developers compare models becomes a toll booth attached to the payment rail, and the promise of choice narrows into a choice of fares. Stripe will see which models win, which lose, and what each query costs, while OpenRouter's public neutrality is absorbed into a business with its own incentives. Developers still pick from hundreds of models, but the road they choose on is paid for, counted, and owned by a single intermediary. The deal is expected to close in the coming months.
A Futurism review published on August 19, 2026 found dozens of videos filmed with Meta's smart glasses inside American middle and high schools and shared on TikTok and Instagram. The recordings take place in hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms, often without the students' knowledge or consent. Every clip the review located was filmed by teenage boys, overwhelmingly against girls. They copy the scripts of online pickup artists, following a classmate, asking for her number, mocking her when she objects, and posting the interaction for an audience. One account has passed 64,000 followers. Some teachers never notice the recording; in one clip, a teacher congratulates the boy on his confidence while the lens keeps running.
Meta removed several of the flagged videos and states that every pair carries a capture LED that cannot be switched off and that covering it would disable the camera. The review notes that cheap stickers have been used to hide that indicator. The school hallway was one of the last spaces where a teenager could be seen without being recorded. Smartphone pouches manage the phone; the glasses arrive on the nose, disguised as ordinary eyewear. A lens on a classmate's face turns adolescent pressure into a broadcast, and the student filmed cannot tell whether the light beside her is telling the truth. Districts are now banning the glasses from classrooms, drawing a precise boundary around a device designed to look like it had none.
