Obsidian Odyssey

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Publications

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Andalusia: Where Three Civilizations Learned to Live Together (and Then Didn't) (15/22)

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Andalusia: Where Three Civilizations Learned to Live Together (and Then Didn't) (15/22)

On the greatest multicultural experiment in medieval history, what made it work, what ended it, and what it still has to tell us

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Madrid & Barcelona: Goya, Picasso, and the Art of Bearing Witness (14/22)

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Madrid & Barcelona: Goya, Picasso, and the Art of Bearing Witness (14/22)

On the moral responsibility of the artist with access to power — and why Spain produced the two greatest anti-war images in Western history

Book] Leadership | Classics Circle: Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl (07/12)

Book] Leadership | Classics Circle: Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl (07/12)

A Conversation Across Centuries Reading Time: 14 minutes Classical Period: Published 1946 (based on 1942-1945 in Nazi concentration camps) Core Philosophy: You cannot control what happens to you. You can control how you find meaning in it. Why I'm Reading This After García Márquez showed me inherited futility—

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Bohemia: Longing, Exile, and the Music of Homesickness (13/22)

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Bohemia: Longing, Exile, and the Music of Homesickness (13/22)

How a small, repeatedly conquered nation maintained its identity through art — and what Dvořák, Kafka, and Smetana teach us about the politics of belonging

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Vienna 2: Yesterday's World, Today's Anxiety (12/22)

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Vienna 2: Yesterday's World, Today's Anxiety (12/22)

On the civilization that produced Freud and Klimt and Wittgenstein — and what it tells us about the art that flourishes at the edge of an abyss

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Vienna 1: Empire, Splendor, and the Art of Soft Power (11/22)

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Vienna 1: Empire, Splendor, and the Art of Soft Power (11/22)

How the Habsburgs used music and architecture to hold an empire together for six centuries — and what this teaches us about legitimacy, culture, and the limits of force

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Amsterdam & Brussels: Commerce, Calvinism, and the Art of the Everyday (10/22)

Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Amsterdam & Brussels: Commerce, Calvinism, and the Art of the Everyday (10/22)

How a merchant republic with no kings, no saints, and no appetite for flattery produced the most honest art in Western history