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Last year, an odd piece of news surfaced within the insider world of tennis. It was reported that Jessica Pegula, currently fourth-ranked player in women’s tennis, invited a few lower-ranked players delayed by storms to join a flight to the next tournament on her private jet. Commentators credited her generosity. It might have felt out of place to use her kindness to prompt discussion of the advantage she gained by having access to a private jet. Yet inequality of opportunity and concentration of wealth is especially visible in tennis, reflecting the growing inequality in American society.

It’s a delicate topic: in most other sports, strivers from low-income backgrounds are more common, spurring a stream of human-interest stories about unique talents rising from obscurity. When sports journalists mention Pegula’s wealthy background—her father founded a petroleum fracking company, which he sold for billions of dollars in the 2010s, and he subsequently bought the Buffalo Bills football franchise—they usually emphasize the hard work she dedicates to training. That is unquestionably true: even with the advantages of wealth, you cannot become a top-ranked pro without an incredible amount of perseverance. Yet the crucial aspect of inherited wealth is that it offers players the chance to even be in a position to compete.

@usta @usopen @jonwertheim @tennischannel

Full text at szacks.substack.com
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Pocahontas y La Malinche visitan el Museo Kaluz
Por Yohanna M. Roa @yohannamroa @museokaluz
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Wedged between two large residential towers and two historic buildings on a constrained triangular lot negotiating between low-rise Boerum Hill and rapidly growing downtown Brooklyn, a pair of public schools meeting strict Passive House standards used 1,315 tons of steel and employed smart design, engineering, and construction phasing to create enough space for 850 students. The decision to aim for the highest zero-energy environmental standards added unusual complexity to combining two visually distinct schools in one 146,000-square-foot structure meant to last at least 100 years.

When the project at 80 Flatbush Avenue was announced by Alloy Development in 2017, local residents denounced the scale of the 74- and 38-story mixed-use towers, the tallest originally set to top out at 986 feet. At the center of the block, Alloy planned to partner with the city’s Education Construction Fund, which works with private developers to build public schools accommodating the city’s ever-growing school-age population, issuing bonds to finance construction. But citing the development’s scale, bulk, and proximity to a residential district, the local community board’s land-use committee voted unanimously against the necessary rezoning. Without it, the towers could only reach a maximum of 400 feet.

Four months later, however, the City Planning Commission approved the rezoning anyway. Then, spurred by elected officials mediating between local opponents and the developers, Alloy agreed to reduce the height of the tallest structure by 146 feet, still more than twice as tall as the zoning otherwise permitted. The rezoning quickly cleared the rest of the public review process.

Architect and Alloy co-founder Jared Della Valle led the design of the towers but brought in Architectural Research Office (ARO) to design the school building, having previously collaborated with the firm on a single-family house for Syracuse University’s Near Westside green-home initiative. “We’re good at making complex things not seem complex,” said Stephen Cassell, an ARO principal and the lead designer for the project.

Thanks @cliff.pearson2018 @stephen_cassell @elizabethkubany @jamesewingphoto
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We saw it again when liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg and technofascist billionaire Peter Thiel united against New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The despicable libel of anti-Semitism waged against him—as against leftists like Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and even Bernie Sanders across the West for decades—have so far failed to frighten the public. Their other libel against Mamdani—that his policies are likely to spur wealth to flee the city—also had no effect. It was cheered. Do they think the population is afraid of disorder in financial markets after the lawlessness, chaos, and naked corruption of the fraud billionaire’s second administration? The murder of billionaire class is now the secret wish of the broadest number of people. They are used to the revolting smell of raw sewage in the streets of Washington and New York.

The billionaire class also foisted on the general public the vacuous, pulchritudinous center-right presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, whose government, through their influence, promised to change nothing. She would have continued flowing untold billions of dollars of weapons to a ruthless genocidal war of vengeance in the Mediterranean, along with an endless supply of arms to a frozen war in Europe—but would have done nothing to prevent an even larger genocide in northeast Africa. Even this didn’t satisfy their bloodlust. They wanted more. They wanted a rapacious billionaire like themselves. As the podcaster Van Lathan Jr. @vanlathan recently stated blankly, after watching the current government viciously attack every Black institution, “I’m never voting for someone nice again. I want a killer.”

Full text link in profile and at szacks.substack.com
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In Kusch’s framing, the revelatory moment of social transformation is a nauseating stench. It is the French Revolution, in which the city’s population barricades the streets, frees the state’s prisoners, executes the aristocrats, cuts off the king’s head, overthrows the monarchy. Urban populations rising up, rioting, overtaking power—like some recent residents of Washington D.C. reacting to extrajudicial troops on their streets—were the French Revolution’s revolting solution to the problem of the aristocracy. The death of the king was not a crime but an act of faith. What was their faith? Like those January 6th rioters who ransacked the capital and murdered a police officer, it was faith that the new order would legitimize their destruction, give it credibility, not only forgive them but convert it into a cause for celebration.
We see this revelatory moment in the popular response to the assassination of the United Health Care executive Brian Thomson. No one dares say the same is true of the recent murder of several employees of the investment company Blackstone, with its trillion dollars in assets. There were, perhaps, innocents. No news networks explained the expropriation of wealth from the average person that the financial markets entail: the insistence that essential goods and services always increase in price, squeeze labor, and threaten public health, lest their profits and stock price sink. We see this revelation in the unspoken reactions of the people after the fake attempted assassination of candidate Trump, which more than half the population secretly hoped had been real and successful.
This is due, probably, to the state of grotesque subjugation the population has experienced in recent years, after a series of elections in which the billionaire class, without embarrassment or apology, sought nothing less than to control and rule the population against its will.They have continually forced their pulchritude on an unwilling public. We saw tech oligarchs line up on stage behind our grotesque subjugation, donating generously to our repression.
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The Argentinian anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch, in his 1962 book América Profunda, used what he called the “stink of America” as a metaphor to describe his reaction to a chaotic scene in Cusco, Pero, as a newcomer approaching the church of Santa Ana. Surrounding him were an assortment of food carts, street venders, beggars, howling babies, and dancing drunks, who regarded him with a cold and distant glare as he arrived after a long and arduous pilgrimage. Inside the church, everything was neat and clean: “pulchritudinous” in his jargon.
The opposition between stench and orderliness, according to Kusch’s theory, goes to the essence of the relationship between “us,” the newcomers, and “America,” defined as the unclean masses across the Americas that preceded the arrival of the white man, more or less. It is also the tourist, the so-called digital nomad, the post-suburban migrant to the city. From the moment we set foot there, the newcomers want to clean things up, install public bathrooms, wash the dirty face of America, imprison the offenders, pass common-sense gun regulations, maybe. “The first solution to the problems of America always point toward remediating the dirtiness and implanting neatness,” he wrote.

Full text at szacks.substack.com
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Excited to get an assignment covering a project in Mexico City for the Architect’s Newspaper. Thanks Jack Murphy!

I have learned a huge amount about the ecosystem and climate living in Mexico City since January. It’s been the rainiest few months in at least fifty years. Almost without exception, the day starts off sunny, possibly with a little fog that clears during sunrise. Between 3 and 7 pm, a storm develops, coming over the mountains to the east from the Gulf of Mexico direction. It pours so hard—sometimes hailing from the hot, humid air hitting the cold mountain peaks—that almost every day there’s a severe flood, with cars being dragged away through flooded streets turned into rivers. It turns out that many of the major roads were built on top of buried rivers in the 1950s, and much of the city’s terrain originally was composed of an extensive lake. This project is recovering a huge part of that original drained landscape.

“At Lake Texcoco Ecological Park in Mexico City, Iñaki Echeverria tests large-scale solutions for stormwater mitigation and improving biodiversity using modest natural tools

Iñaki Echeverria’s office is stationed in a 2-story tropical timber structure overlooking the vast 55-square-mile wetland on the northeastern edge of Mexico City, where he has devoted the last 15 years of his career to developing the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park. At dawn, the view across Nabor Carrillo Lake stretches all the way to the mountains on the horizon—Mount Tláloc, traditional home of the rain gods, and beside it, the once-snowcapped Iztaccíhuatl. For Echeverria, trained at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) architecture school and in Columbia University GSAPP’s urban design program in the 1990s, the whole project is an immense scientific experiment testing what he and Richard Plunz described in a 2001 article for Praxis magazine as using a “gardener’s logic” to strategically replenish a once-desiccated lake.”

Details from photos by Luis Gordoa @gordoafotografia

Full story link in bio or at archpaper.com and stephenzacks.com
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La oficina de Iñaki Echeverria se encuentra en una estructura de madera tropical de dos pisos con vista al vasto humedal de 14,000 hectáreas en el extremo nordeste de la Ciudad de México, donde ha dedicado los últimos 15 años de su carrera al desarrollo del Lago de Texcoco Parque Ecológico. Al amanecer, la vista del Lago Nabor Carrillo se extiende hasta las montañas en el horizonte: el monte Tláloc, hogar tradicional de los dioses de lluvia, y junto a él, alguna vez cubierto de nieve, el volcán Iztaccíhuatl. Para Echeverría, formado en la escuela de arquitectura de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y en el programa de diseño urbano de la Escuela de Posgrado de Arquitectura, Planificación y Conservación (GSAPP) de la Universidad de Columbia en la década de 1990, todo el proyecto es una inmenso experimento científico que pone a prueba lo que él y Richard Plunz describieron en un articulo de 2001 para la revista Praxis como el uso de la “lógica del jardinero” para reabastecer estratégicamente un lago antaño desecado.

Iñaki Echeverría’s office is stationed in a 2-story tropical timber structure overlooking the vast 55-square-mile wetland on the northeastern edge of Mexico City, where he has devoted the last 15 years of his career to developing the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park. At dawn, the view across Nabor Carrillo Lake stretches all the way to the mountains on the horizon—Mount Tláloc, traditional home of the rain gods, and beside it, the once-snowcapped Iztaccíhuatl. For Echeverría, trained at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) architecture school and in Columbia University GSAPP’s urban design program in the 1990s, the whole project is an immense scientific experiment testing what he and Richard Plunz described in a 2001 article for Praxis magazine as using a “gardener’s logic” to strategically replenish a once-desiccated lake.

Full story at archpaper.com July/ August 2025 under Digital Issues
Thanks
@archpaper @inakiecheverria @yhprumkcaj
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TODA LUNA. TODO AÑO.
TODO DIA, TODO VIENTO, CAMINA Y PASA TAMBIEN.
TAMBIEN TODA SANGRE LLEGA
AL LUGAR DE SU QUIETUD.

EVERY MOON. EVERY YEAR.
EVERY DAY, EVERY WIND, ALSO WALKS AND PASSES.
ALSO EVERY BLOOD REACHES
THE PLACE OF ITS STILLNESS.

— CHILAM BALAM
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Read about Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the rise of the neo-fascist city in the July 2025 issue of the Japanese architecture magazine A + U, posted on my portfolio site (stephenzacks.com) "The Legend of Avant-Garde Architecture and the Rise of the Market-Fundamentalist City," A + U, July 2025.

“But magical thinking about its beauty shouldn’t overwhelm our critical understanding of history . . . . Diller collaborated with the poet Anne Carson, playwright Claudia Rankine, and the composer David Lang on the Mile-Long Opera. . . . the flow of urban society, the power of person-to-person interaction in public space as a mediating force for the democratic values of civic life. . . . missing from the corporatized, privatized city colonized by tech billionaires, financial capitalism, and the now-predominant market-fundamentalist ideology of the US underlying the Trump fascist regime.”
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Con el orden mundial arruinado,
al menos puedo reparar pequeñas cosas.
With the world order in ruins,
at least I can repair small things.
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Check out the summer issue of Oculus, the magazine of the American Institute of Architects, New York, with a feature on small architecture offices, including Jeremiah Russell of Rogue Architecture @rogue.architect Yalda Keramati of ReFrame Architecture @yalda.keramati.architecture Ziad Jamaleddin and Makram El Kadi of L.E.FT Architects @leftarchitects J. Yolande Daniels of studioSUMO @yolande_daniels Ioannis Oikonomou of Oiio Studio @oiiostudio Pablo Castro and Jennifer Lee of OBRA Architects @obra_architects and Michael Bell and Eunjong Seong of Visible Weather @visible_weather_bell_seong

"It is generally assumed within our financialized world that unending growth is an absolute, essential good, desired by everyone. Yet declining growth or merely staying at the same level of output does not necessarily have to threaten the entire economic system. Apart from its potential ecological benefits (mitigating global warming, land-system change, and biodiversity loss), limiting growth and remaining small has certain underacknowledged advantages. According to a handful of New York City architecture offices, running a small studio can help offer greater attention to clients, enable better project management, enhance personal well-being and satisfaction, and encourage a profound sense of engagement in the work at hand. And being part of a small team can have a big impact in terms of producing influential ideas."

Full story at aiany.org.

Thanks to editors @jkrichels and @lraskin !
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Acknowledging today the loss of my dear friend, mentor, and, as I like to say, spiritual guru, the wonderful artist Phyllis Yampolsky. Among the many gifts of knowing her over the past twenty years, at first through her participation in my early Greenpoint community activism and later to interview her several times for my book on the birth of cultural capital in New York City in the mid-to-late 20th century, I remember the evening that we sat in her living room, crosslegged on the carpet, and she taught me how to breathe. I had come by, I believe, for one of the I Ching readings she periodically gave me in exchange for helping her with her archives, or simply to console me and help me understand an experience of loss. She taught me how to read the I Ching on my own as well. Inhale, inhale to the top of your lungs, to the top of your head, now hold it, and breathe out slowly. It’s an exercise that I can always rely on to create calm, tranquility, reduce anxiety, and find peace and serenity in moments of stress. She was a devotee of Swami Satchidananda, who had offered her a similar spiritual guidance many years earlier. Later, I stumbled onto a book of Ram Dass’s lectures at a friend’s house in the Hudson Valley and became compelled by the simple lessons relating Western concepts of self-worth, acquisition, status, and getting hung up ridiculously on symbolic values—private airplanes, careerism, comparing oneself to others—to Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish concepts of spiritual enlightenment. Her prophesy was that I would get through it and transcend so far beyond that kind of trivial malaise, reaching a higher level of consciousness, and that it would show outwardly in my demeanor, composure, presence of mind. I’m still working on it. So grateful for her sharing of her urgent, joyful artistic vision with us. And most of all, as Phyllis always liked to say, it is important to have a good time. Much love and gratitude to Phyllis, her family, and friends. 🙏
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A Fire in the Forest of Possibilities. Is ‘What If’ Now ‘What Was’? A Walk through the Utopian Loisaida Past and Present, 5:00 - 7:00 PM, EHF
A key work in the 1980 “Real Estate Show” was Peter Fend’s proposal to replace Con Ed’s electric power with natural gas generated from algae cultivation in New York harbor. The Lower East Side has long been the focus of utopian dreams and projects. What are the prospects for that radical progressive urban change today?

Presenters: Peter Fend, Stephen Zacks, Paul Bartlett, Felicia Young, Robby Herbst, Emily Rubin

Artists who have worked and made ABC No Rio the iconic Lower East Side cultural center over these many decades will reassemble to exhibit work in this historical survey exhibition.

ABC No Rio 45 is an exhibition of the artists and activists who have contributed to ABC No Rio over the decades and built it into an iconic Lower East Side cultural center. They will reassemble to exhibit work in this historical survey presenting artworks old and new, and documents that explore the many facets of ABC from the founding Colab years, during which artists of that group and others mounted politically charged theme exhibitions, to the movement in the mid-1980s towards experimental performance, film, and queer subjectivity.

As a collectively-run nonprofit arts organization on the Lower East Side, ABC No Rio’s approach to political and aesthetic concerns continues to resonate today. As a plaque on its now-demolished building proclaimed, « The Culture of Opposition Since 1980, » ABC No Rio has been a precious hub for DIY arts and activism and a sanctuary for activists, artists, and musicians, fostering a rich sense of community and collaboration. This exhibition honors the generations of collective struggle that built and sustained ABC No Rio, it will function as a workspace and gathering place for past, present, and future members of the ABC No Rio community. The sub-theme « GayBC No Rio » will offer insight into the undercurrent of queer culture that has existed as a foundational and binding element in the history of radical art and activism.
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The extraordinary life of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who lived in exile in Mexico City from 1937 to 1940 with the help of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

La extraordinaria vida de León Trotsky, el revolucionario ruso que vivió exiliado en la Ciudad de México de 1937 a 1940 con la ayuda de Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo.
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The fascists needed to be able to pretend antisemitism was a real threat to Jewish people. Their victory—if they really won the election, to the extent that they managed to depress turnout and suppress the vote in key states, probably also hacking voting machines in select districts—depended on Israeli fascist Netanyahu and his genocidal alliance of Jewish bigots pursuing a one-sided war of bombing, starvation, human rights crimes, expulsion, systematic murder of journalists, and violence against Israeli domestic opposition. Hamas offered the perfect foil for this end of civilizational battle, having so severely violated the laws of war and norms of the international order that any level of violence would be excused by the ideological allies of Israel: Christian conservatives, right-wing fascists, and conventional middle-class Jews—the closet fascists of US democracy. Ostensibly liberal adherents to all of the basic norms of the US constitutional system, ardent believers in the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, freedom against unreasonable search and seizure, and due process—they would easily discard any and all safeguards against fascism if called to defend the purportedly threatened Jewish people.

Read full text in profile link.
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Profiteering off of the government is seen as a virtue in itself, not a reason for criticism. Right-wing toadies think billionaires are right because they are rich, ipso facto. This is the cult of market extremism. This is the reason why boycotts, strikes, divestment in US companies, reducing consumption, and anything that brings about market failure is the best way to fight the Nazi Republican fascists. Do not buy US products under this government.

See link in profile.
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I have read a few recent articles published in mainstream US newspapers, written by expatriates cautioning Americans against going into exile in response to the atrocious US presidency. It’s worth exploring the other side: at what point would it be better to abandon the failed US state, to distance oneself from the constant stream of bullshit occupying the airwaves, to take a leave from the unending flood of anger necessarily experienced by anyone with common sense looking at the news: the nonstop human rights violations, the systematic destruction of liberal institutions, the efforts to undermine forms of governance providing any insulation against total control of our lives by market-fundamentalist extremists and the ruling party that I call, with precise accuracy, the Nazi Republicans. Their tendency to embrace the Hitler salute only confirms the overwhelming evidence offered by their words and actions. They told us who they are. Under no circumstances should this behavior be excused and rationalized.

See link to full article in profile.
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Museo Soumaya, capital accumulation, fascism, and redistribution
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Un débat sur le capitalisme, l’anthropocène, et l’impérialisme à Ville de Mexico. Un debate sobre capitalismo, anthropoceno, e imperialismo en Ciudad de México. A debate on capitalism,the anthropocene, and imperialism in Mexico City.
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Ruido en Casa en la Bestia Radio . . . @fryturama @puzzdepiedrapreciosa Puzz Amatizta @dkanils Duncan Pinhas @lavidadelabismo Sindicato Domina . . . La mejor actuación que visto hace mucho tiempo . . . amo a la gente de la Ciudad de México. @labestiaradiomx
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Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle does not require abandoning all other groups and issues harmed by extremist Republican policies and governance. It imperatively demands that we build a coalition to empower a governing majority of Democrats in all branches of government, and strengthen the House’s progressive caucus to overcome conservative coalitions and enact a green social democratic human rights agenda. Link in profile
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Refuse to participate in the going fascism.

Negarse a participar en el fascismo actual.

@abramovicinstitute @lacuadrabarragan
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What an exciting time to be outside of the United States and watch the failed government of Nazi Republicans from afar. Viva Mexico!

¡Qué momento tan emocionante para estar fuera de los Estados Unidos y mirar desde lejos el gobierno fallido de los republicanos nazis! ¡Viva México!
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Many thanks to Juan Puntes for the invitation to review this most recent show at @whiteboxny in @whitehotmagazine

WhiteBox’s current exhibition, Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology, on view through August 10, pitches itself as “a symbolic space that addresses issues like food sovereignty, rewilding, ecofeminisms, hydrofeminisms, and restorative aesthetics” and “researches, experiments, and builds knowledge around the Democracy of the Air, Earth, and Water.” That sounds like a lot. Yet the method, in the hands of Puntes, is modest, personable, and intellectually engaging. Puntes’s earnest openness, along with staff curator Yohanna Roa, to conversations with everyone who gazes through the window and walks through the door—untutored neighborhood residents and art history PhDs alike—means the level of discourse stays personal, one to one, meeting others where they’re at, even when Puntes is spinning out a dozen references and associations for every idea, as he often does.
. . .

Sometimes, when it’s furthering our thinking or challenging received ideas—and not merely repeating unquestioned ideas stagnating among us for lack of a will to think—artwork can be a form of communication that offers a combination of aesthetic delight, intellectual excitement, and glimpses of hopeful possibilities. Attending these exhibitions can give a sense of community and belonging, and a degree of solace at times when the discourse and functional operation of actual democratic electoral politics seems utterly impossible to influence positively, such as the perpetually frozen conflict in the Middle East. Maybe with a piece like Stefano Cagol’s Far Before and After Us, which captures images of the artist on Norway’s Golta Island, lit as if the craggy rock formations are bubbling out of volcanic lava—the individual human against fire—we can feel a slight primal connection to the time-scales in which that which is sedimentary and seemingly unchangeable is still in a process of creation.

@n_o_a_h_fischer @marymattingly @yohannamroa @stefano_cagol @blanca_dela_torre @eugenioampudia