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Time, the Press, and the Smell of Fresh Ink

Tiger Lily Press: A Story of Continuity, Craft, and Community in Cincinnati

August 15th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodríguez

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...

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Tiger Lily Press and the Physical World

August 13th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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...

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Can a New Iconography Recompose a Shared Identity?

July 30th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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...

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International Artists Exchanges, a la mode “Sister Cities”

September 15th, 2011 | By Jan Brown Checco

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...

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Pointedly Perfect

September 15th, 2011 | By Fran Watson

“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...

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Sara Corley: Film Interview

September 15th, 2011 | By Shawn Daniell

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.

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Can a New Iconography Recompose a Shared Identity?

July 25th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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...

art review

That Big, That Long

July 19th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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...

art review

A Stateless Man's Dream

July 17th, 2026 | By Ahmel Echevarría

Call Me Ahmel
January arrived, and so did 2025. Halfway through the month it will pierce my head and my body in much the same way 2024 did—with hypersonic calm. Be careful. In Miami everything happens too fast, a good friend warned me, sounding more alarmed than concerned. Another good friend, one we have in common, calls him my fascist friend. Cuba, the way tango does to the men—and to the women—in Borges's magnificent story The Man on Pink Corner, has its own way with him.

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The Tollkeeper
August 20th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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.

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A pair of smart glasses resting on a school desk in an empty hallway, its indicator light hidden by a sticker
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The Loop in the Hallway
August 19th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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.

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A diagnostic console with monitors and a clinical chair in an examination room
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The Machine Takes the Medical Exam
August 18th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a discussion paper on August 18, 2026 proposing how to regulate medical devices powered by generative AI. It outlines a two-axis framework for risk assessment, a premarket evaluation built on a concept it calls competency assessment, and risk-proportionate postmarket monitoring. The novelty is the reference point. A generative device would face non-clinical benchmarking and clinical confirmation before reaching patients, a sequence modeled on how physicians are trained and evaluated. The agency invites device makers, clinicians, and the public to respond under docket FDA-2026-N-7874 by October 19, 2026.

The medical exam has become an object of regulation. For years a machine read scans and passed suggestions to a doctor who signed the report. Now the agency proposes grading the software itself as if it were a resident sitting for boards. A competency assessment treats the device as a professional subject, with benchmarks standing in for years of training, and that substitution carries a specific risk. Benchmarks measure what the test covers, a fixed set of tasks, a curated distribution of cases, and little about the patient who does not resemble the training set or the decision made in a hallway at three in the morning. The machine can pass and still fail where a physician's judgment would have hesitated. The docket must decide where that gap is measured, and what happens when the certificate holder is software that no one examined in a body.

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