Hi Friends, here's a opportunity for you to think about:

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant

The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant supports emerging and established writers who write about contemporary visual art. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 in four categories—articles, books, short-form writing, and translation—the grants support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences, from short reviews for magazines and newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies. The program also supports art writing that engages criticism through interdisciplinary methods and experiments with literary styles. As long as a writer meets the eligibility and publishing requirements, they can apply.

Hi Dear ELSEHERE Friends,

As summer gets closer, we wanted to share a quick update and also open the door a little wider.

Over the past week, we’ve published several new articles on STRATUM. Links are below if you’d like to spend time with them:

• When “Cute” Becomes a Boundary: Rabbits, Praise, and the Soft Discipline of Recognition

• Paper Cutting: Warmth of the World Beneath Blades and Scissors

• The Ambiguous Object

A ball has its own logic.

It moves. It repeats. It escapes. It rolls out of line. It refuses to stay still long enough to become only one thing. We are looking for artists, thinkers, movers, makers, and rule-breakers who want to work with the ball not only as object, but as force, symbol, memory, game, control system, absurdity, repetition, choreography, pressure, play, delay, or drift.

In many East Asian families, two things remain remarkably scarce.

One is the phrase “I’m sorry.” The other is tears.

They are not absent. They are simply swallowed. Tears are pushed back down the throat. Apologies are withheld before they can form. Over time, both harden into the same dull ache, a pressure that settles somewhere in the chest and stays there for years. It does not always announce itself dramatically. Most of the time, it lingers as something quieter and more difficult to name.

This is part of why family pain in East Asian contexts can be so difficult to describe. It is not always explosive. It is not always visible. It often leaves no single scene that can be cleanly pointed to as the source of injury. Instead, it accumulates through what is repeatedly denied, interrupted, or left unsaid. A feeling is dismissed. A cry is silenced. A…

Strands woven into eternity.

What becomes of a single strand of fallen hair?

In China, the answer is hair embroidery—a 1,300-year-old intangible cultural heritage stitched from human hair.

Unlike silk embroidery painted in bright colors, it uses only natural shades of hair. Artisans weave quiet beauty into every stitch, creating ink wash textures that feel soft and alive.

Keratin in hair guards these works against time, insects and fading, holding memories steady for centuries. It began with devout prayers in the Tang Dynasty, and now lives in the careful hands of modern inheritors.

This is not about preserving a relic. It’s about tucking life, love and time into every tiny stitch.

The eerie feeling when the familiar becomes strange.

Interesting Explanation:

Have you ever experienced this late at night when you're home alone? In the dim light, you catch a glimpse of that old chair in the living room—the one you've sat in for years. The shadow it casts on the wall suddenly gives you a jolt. It's still the same familiar shape, yet for a moment, it feels like a silent figure watching you. You know it's just a chair, but a nameless unease creeps into your chest.

This subtle discomfort—a blend of "familiar" and "foreign"—is at the heart of the uncanny.

The 29th Tooth

---We all have twenty-eight teeth.

Twenty baby teeth, twenty-eight to thirty-two permanent teeth—the numbers don't really matter. What matters is that everyone carries a fixed arrangement in their mouth. Occlusion, chewing, grinding. Day after day. Silent.

But some things don't fit into that sequence of twenty-eight.

Dance is not only what appears under stage light.

It is also what the body remembers, what time leaves behind, what discipline reshapes, what longing survives, and what life continues to carry long after performance ends.

For this special call, we want to shift the focus.

Away from spectacle alone. Away from applause as the only measure. Away from the finished image of dance as something polished, distant, and complete.

Instead, we want to look again at the dancer as a human being.

At the body behind the performance. At memory, pain, devotion, fatigue, tenderness, contradiction, humor, survival, and daily life. At what remains when the curtain falls, and at what was always there before it rose.