Avital Balwit

I was in the Musée d'Orsay in 2016 and I was hopelessly sad. I had just split from a boyfriend when neither of us had wanted to because he was moving away. I was on a three-week immersion program in France, being perfectly rotten: too cool for group activities and fairly depressed. I found myself in front of “Vue de toits (Effet de neige)” (essentially view of roofs tops, snow effect) by Gustave Caillebotte, which is, by the standards of the Musée d'Orsay, an extraordinarily

On Hyper-Optimized Content, Memetic Viruses, and the Theft of the Self I have had the uncanny experience of opening Pinterest lately and finding, amidst the tiles on wedding aesthetics and garden design, lurid short videos playing automatically. Werewolf love stories feature prominently. As do romances with mafia bosses. Evil sibling rivalaries, revenge stories against bullies. I am learning a lot about the collective unconscious of the Pinterest user. Some are clearly AI gen

Goya's The Madhouse Every week, I bike through the worst neighborhood of San Francisco and then get into the manual elevator at the historic, decaying building that holds my ballet studio. There, I spend a few minutes with the operator who is clearly and visibly insane. I enter some monologue that has been running for a long time. It doesn't necessarily involve you, it’s just whatever is on his mind: the need to go with the flow, the warranty on his phone, the changes these d

I feel profoundly American when I travel to Germany. I was only a few hours off the plane when I started to notice it. Someone in our group at Don Giovanni had to sit next to a stranger, a big conundrum for my German party. I couldn't care less, so I left my clump of conferring Germans and took my seat, gave him a smile, and forgot about it. Then we had questions about the second half of the program. The group went back to conferring over this difficult problem. I strode over