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An Eternal Optimist: The Positive Message of Yoko Ono’s New MoMA Retrospective by Steff Yotka

In keeping with his activist turn on 2016’s 4 Your Eyez Only, J. Cole’s new album, KOD, is an exploration of addiction. The title has three different meanings that all speak to this aim: Kids On Drugs, King OverDosed, and Kill Our Demons. Each feeds into the next in this narcotic odyssey.

If you headed into the West 4th St. Subway Station on March 9, 2014, you may have seen a group of people writing on cardboard, taping it to the walls, and seemingly holding a small class in the underground space. Those were some of the members of Free University NYC, a radical educational project started during May 2012 as a form of educational strike. They hold classes in public spaces like parks and subway stations, and are entirely free.

Voina conducted a wake for absurdist poet and Soviet-era dissident Dmitry Prigov, featuring a table with food and vodka, in a Moscow Metro car. Originally, they had planned an action involving Prigov but he died before they were able to implement it. They later carried out a similar action on the Kiev Metro. As an art collective, Voina is testing the boundaries of performance art. As activists, they are testing the patience of Russian authorities.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the Yippies (Youth International Party) nominated a pig for president, with the campaign pledge: “They nominate a president and he eats the people. We nominate a president and the people eat him.” This porcine political maneuver was the brainchild of sixties activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

In July 1976, prankster and satirist Joey Skaggs, calling himself Giuseppe Scaggoli, appeared before a rabid crowd, dressed in sharp-lapeled finery. He had some unfortunate news: that day’s planned auction of rock star sperm was cancelled due to a mysterious theft. All he could offer in the way of comfort were his assurances that more donations were to be sought as soon as possible.

Wednesday's Free Subway Ride? That Was Occupy Wall Street

By Catherine Porter I spent an hour Wednesday morning talking pigs and Leo Tolstoy on a traffic island outside the Princes' Gates. Anita Krajnc and her group call this “Pig Island.” They come here most weeks to watch and photograph the pigs en route to their death at nearby Quality Meat Packers.

Charged with participating in demonstrations against the Islamic Republic of Iran, Soudabeh Ardavan was held for eight years (1981-1989) in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. She found sanity and solace through the forbidden activities of drawing and painting, secretly producing paint from flower petals and tea, using brushes made from toothpicks and human hair.