A top priority of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the legislation would make it easier to construct homes on smaller lots. A House Democrat briefly killed the bill.
You're listening to CRUK Crook Radio. And we got a special message for all you bad smelling, unshaved scoundrels out there - watchout for that big mouth horse! #CowboyWho
The 1977 Trinity, Courtesy of Wikipedia, Image by Timothy Colegrove
Consider that you have been transported back in time to the heady and hot summer of 1977. You are wanting one of these new "personal computers" that you see advertised in Popular Mechanics and Byte Magazine. Maybe you've seen an ad from Radio Shack. Perhaps you saw a flyer from that pocket calculator company called Commodore. Or you are a hobbyist frustrated with time sharing on the local college's PDP-10 and want a microcomputer of your very own. After you've seen Star Wars for the third time, you want to be part of the computer age. You have three choices, which will you chose? Let's break down the Apple II, Tandy Radio Shack TSR-80 and the Commodore PET 2001 and see how they might factor into a buyer's decision.
WATERLOO, ON – A local self-published “author”, Chaz Wolverton, 25, is extolling the brighter side of plagiarism engines like ChatGPT and Grok. “I’ve always been jealous of the glory authors get,” explained Wolverton, assembling fresh Ikea bookcases to display his newly-published oeuvre. “Actual writing takes time away from surfing for deepfake porn. I just want […]
The New York Times ran a really dumb Tripp Mickle piece yesterday under the headline “Is Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone a Fantasy?” The answer should have simply been “Yes, it’s sheer fantasy”, perhaps with explanations why. Instead, Mickle twists the piece into pretzels to make it seem like the answer is maybe, even though there’s not a single fact to back that up. Not one. The only thing that backs up any answer other than “It’s a fantasy, can’t happen, makes no sense” are comments from analysts — named and unnamed — and the bizarre old-school news media practice of treating as fact any nonsense and/or bullshit that comes out of the lips of anyone with the word “analyst” on their business card.
Could Apple make iPhones in the United States?
Yes. Apple could make iPhones in the United States. But doing so
would be expensive and difficult and force the company to more
than double iPhone prices to $2,000 or more, said Wayne Lam, an
analyst with TechInsights, a market research firm. Apple would
have to buy new machines and rely on more automation than it
uses in China because the U.S. population is so much smaller,
Mr. Lam said.
This is nonsense. The problem isn’t that China has a higher population than the US (about 1.4 billion vs. 340 million, about a 4× difference). Foxconn employs somewhere between 300–500,000 assembly line workers in China doing final assembly for Apple products. It’s that the United States doesn’t have anyone with the necessary vocational skills, who would want to work tedious factory jobs at factory-job wages, and China does. That’s part of the fever-dream mad-king fantasy of this entire cockamamie endeavor by Trump: these are difficult, low-paying, long-houred jobs that Americans don’t want. That these jobs are all in China and India is proof that America is far ahead, not that we’ve fallen behind. (There are nuances to the overall dynamics, like the national security ramifications of our being reliant on Taiwan for leading-edge chip fabrication, but Trump’s tariff nonsense doesn’t address those issues.)
Worse: $2,000 is just a made-up number. Lam doesn’t even say which iPhone would cost $2,000. Would it be the iPhone 16 Pro Max (current starting price: $1,200) or the base model iPhone 16e (current price: $600)? Mickle reports that Lam is saying prices “would more than double” so let’s just say he’s talking about the regular no-adjective iPhone models. Today the iPhone 16 starts at $800. If assembling even some of them would result in a retail price of $2,000, Apple would sell none of them. Like, almost literally zero.
The math here takes a bit of thinking but it’s not complicated. Trump is claiming he’s going to apply 25% tariffs to India-made iPhones sold in the US.1 If Apple passed along the entire 25% tariff on an $800 iPhone to consumers, that would raise the retail price to $1,000. So if stores carried two different iPhone 17 models — same specs, same colors — and one cost $1,000 because it was assembled in India or China, facing 25% Trump tariffs, and the other cost $2,000 because it was assembled in some sort of fantasy factory that somehow popped up in Texas between now and September, how many people would buy the $2,000 US-assembled one? Almost zero. So why even bother? Apple doesn’t even print the “Designed by Apple in California / Assembled in Wherever” small print on the outside of the iPhone any more.
Tariffs would have to be 250% for the price of an Indian- or Chinese-assembled $800 iPhone to get to $2,000. And even if Trump were to apply 250% tariffs to smartphones — which isn’t going to happen — it would be far easier for Apple to just sell Indian and Chinese-assembled iPhones for $2,000 than it would be to spin up assembly — factories, employees, training, components — here inside the US. So even though $2,000 is just a number “analyst” Wayne Lam completely made up, and which reporter Tripp Mickle simply quotes as if it had any basis in reality, it still doesn’t make any sense that Apple would do it. No matter how crazily high tariffs go, it only makes sense for Apple to continue assembling iPhones in China and India for now, and passing some or all of the costs along to consumers.2
Of course, raising the price of a base model iPhone to $2,000 would crater consumer demand. And of course it would create a massive gray market bootlegging opportunity where hustlers would smuggle normal-cost iPhones into the US from Canada, Mexico, and overseas. Trump can’t raise the price of iPhones outside the US, and so long as iPhones are priced “normally” everywhere else in the world, the higher Trump’s tariffs might go, the larger and more commonplace bootlegging them will be.
There would be some benefits to moving the supply chain, including
reducing the environmental costs of shipping products from abroad,
said Matthew Moore, who spent nine years as a manufacturing design
manager at Apple. But the upsides would be trivial compared with
the challenges that would have to be overcome.
Again, just utter nonsense. There might be hypothetical environmental benefits to assembling all US-sold iPhones inside the US, but in the real world, many if not most of the most expensive components would still come from overseas. All iPhone displays come from Asian manufacturers. All A-series chips come from TSMC in Taiwan. (TSMC is building out a chip-fabrication campus in Arizona but even if that went according to plan — which it already isn’t — their Arizona fabrication capabilities will remain years behind their leading-edge fabrication technology in Taiwan for at least the next decade, and Apple’s A-series chips are fabbed exclusively on leading-edge technology.)
Supply chain experts say shifting iPhone production to the United
States in 2025 would be foolish.
Perhaps the one accurate sentence in Mickle’s entire piece.
The iPhone is nearly 20 years old. Apple’s top executives have
said people may not need an iPhone in 10 years because it could be
replaced by a new device built for artificial intelligence. As a
result, Apple would invest a lot of money that it wouldn’t be able
to recoup, Mr. Lam said.
“I would be surprised if there’s an iPhone 29,” he said, noting
that Apple is trying to disrupt the iPhone by making augmented
reality products like the Vision Pro.
The Mac is 41 years old and, last I checked, Apple is still making them. I don’t know if Apple will keep naming iPhones with annually incrementing integers, but I’ll gladly wager Wayne Lam (or Tripp Mickle) any amount of money they wish that Apple will release at least one new iPhone in 2037. Name the wager, fellas. “The iPhone is 20 years old” is the dumbest argument in this entire dumb article.
What does China offer that the United States doesn’t?
Small hands, a massive, seasonal work force and millions of
engineers. Young Chinese women have small fingers, and that has
made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they
are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in
the small device, supply chain experts said.
Well, now I have to eat my own words. “Young Chinese women have small fingers” is in fact the dumbest argument in this entire incredibly stupid article. It might even be the dumbest thing I’ve read this year, and with Trump in office, I’ve read a lot of dumb things. For chrissake I just read this morning that Trump claimed his administration is trying to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students because “A lot of the people need remedial math. These students can’t add two and two, and they go to Harvard. They want remedial math and they’re going to teach remedial math at Harvard?” That’s truly profoundly stupid.3 But it’s not as ignorant as saying that Chinese women’s finger-size is the reason Apple makes iPhones in China.
I’d pay good money to know the names of the “supply chain experts” (plural!) Mickle got this one from.
Presumably the tariff would be applied to all India-assembled phones sold in the US, because it would be plainly illegal, even in Trumpworld, to put a tariff on the iPhone alone. Tariffs apply to classes of products, not specific brands. But, in practice, a 25% tariff on all Indian-assembled phones sold in the US would, effectively, be a tariff targeted at iPhones alone. ↩︎
Spitball idea: Apple could start assembling a completely insignificant number of iPhones in, say, Texas. A complete farce. A few hundred US-made iPhones per day, in a country where they sell 150,000 iPhones per day. Make a big show of it. Invite Trump himself down for a dog-and-pony-show photo op like Tim Cook did with the Mac Pro plant back in Trump 1.0 in 2019. Have Cook emphasize that they’re just getting started and Apple looks forward to ramping up the endeavor. Give Trump the first US-made iPhone off the assembly line. Hope that that’ll satisfy the dumb bastard, he’ll take the tariffs off their backs, and he’ll thereafter start bragging about how he got Apple to start making iPhones in the US even though everyone said it would be impossible, even though, under the scheme I’m spitballing here, Apple would only ever assemble a fraction of a single percent of US-sold iPhones domestically. Trump is so dumb, so prone to succumbing to flattery and the mere illusion that his word is others’ command, and so motivated to declare victory regardless of what’s actually going on, that I bet it would work. ↩︎︎
A bill that would make it illegal to sell THC products could soon head over to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk. For a cannabis store employee, lawmakers don't know enough about the industry they're trying to shut down.
The Houston Parks and Recreation Department continues to face a lifeguard shortage but expressed optimism that all 36 of its operational pools can be open at the same time this summer.
The Houston-area district announced this week that trustee-elect Brittnai Brown is ineligible to serve on the school board because her voter registration did not contain an address within the district before the required deadline. A losing candidate in another race requested a recount that will begin Tuesday.
ALDINE — At least three parked vehicles were damaged after a car filled with robbery suspects and the police unit pursuing it crashed into an Aldine area driveway. ...
Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, the handy bookmarking tool used
to save articles and webpages for later. The organization
announced that Pocket will stop working on July 8th, 2025,
as Mozilla begins concentrating its “resources into projects
that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”
Following the shutdown, you’ll only be able to export saves
until October 8th, 2025, which is when Mozilla will permanently
delete user data. Mozilla says it will start automatically
canceling subscriptions as well, and will issue prorated refunds
to users subscribed to its annual plan on July 8th.
This feels in line, somewhat, with Mozilla shutting down their Mastodon instance a few months ago. When Mastodon took off, I know some people thought a Mozilla-hosted instance would have a good shot to stand the test of time. Instead, they gave up after just a few years.
“The Trump administration on Thursday said it would halt Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.” – New York Times
- - -
Dear “PRESIDENT” Garber,
As you KNOW, it has ALWAYS been a priority of this Administration to foster greater VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY at Harvard. Particularly on days when the STOCK MARKET is on a BUSINESS TRIP to SUCKTOWN. This is why, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, we hereby BAN Harvard from enrolling ANY FOREIGNERS, thereby halting the ILLEGAL flow of non-diverse viewpoints from NOT AMERICA.
The same goes for ANTISEMITISM. We want it GONE. Harvard must once again be a place where people from all walks of life can come together to SHOUT INCOHERENTLY about how best to gift wrap the ENORMOUS BOMBS we send to Israel. Just make sure NO PALESTINIANS are there. Also, weirdly, NO ISRAELIS. Just red-white-and-blue-blooded AMERICANS. And the very occasional HOT SLOVENIAN. But really, no, just AMERICANS. We MEAN it. Just not the ones from either coast, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, or ANYONE who has ever SEEN OR TOUCHED the inside of a PRIUS. Only REAL Americans. Americans who LOVE THEIR COUNTRY, love CYBERTRUCKS, and love the word DIVERSITY if—AND ONLY IF—it’s immediately preceded by the word VIEWPOINT.
Some have suggested that this ban is nothing more than a brazen act of political extortion designed to SILENCE anyone with the audacity to speak out against the obvious hallmarks of authoritarianism; that if we ACTUALLY CARED about things like VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY, or ANTISEMITISM, we probably would’ve told Elon to COOL IT with the Nazi salutes. This couldn’t be FURTHER from THE TRUTH. The part about us not having principles beyond a CRAVEN HUNGER for ABSOLUTE POWER, that is. Just ask Columbia. They PLAYED BALL and look how GREAT things are there AGAIN.
Should Harvard wish to resume enrolling FOREIGNERS, the Administration hereby DEMANDS the following VERY REASONABLE reforms:
1. Get Someone from the Astronomy Department to GIVE A SPEECH About the HEALTH BENEFITS of staring STRAIGHT INTO A SOLAR ECLIPSE It’s time to MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN.
2. STOP Telling People that Christopher Rufo Didn’t Go to “THE REAL HARVARD” The ABOUT US page of the HARVARD Extension School CLEARLY states, “We Are Harvard.” It says this rather POINTEDLY. Right at the TOP. This one’s on YOU.
3. Make the MINOTAUR GUY from January 6 the NEW MASCOT He has NOT been the same since he got out of PRISON. He USED to be so FULL of LIFE, you know? This could be HUGE for him. We’re starting to get worried he’s just going to RANDOMLY CHARGE INTO THE WHITE HOUSE one of these days since we’ve NOW RULED that’s TOTALLY LEGAL.
4. Make It ILLEGAL for Alumni to Say They “WENT TO SCHOOL OUTSIDE OF BOSTON” We KNOW that you don’t mean TUFTS. Just SPIT IT OUT, you SMUG S.O.B.s.
5. Affirmative Action for WHITE SOUTH AFRICANS Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a WHITE South African? Have you ever even SEEN Blood Diamond? Leonardo DiCaprio DIES at the end of that movie. He fucking DIES.
6. UN-CANCEL the Law Professor from Legally Blonde Who Made a Pass at Reese Witherspoon Whatever happened to “BOYS will be BOYS”? You should make this guy the FACE of VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY on campus. Him and the MINOTAUR GUY.
7. While You’re at It, Change the Motto from “VERITAS” to “HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?” Now THOSE were men. Latin is for PUSSIES.
8. Identify and Train an Elite Cohort of “SKY GENIUSES” to Pursue FULFILLING CAREERS as AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS Obviously, our FIRST CHOICE was MIT, but we will TAKE what we can GET. I am GENUINELY AFRAID of trying to land the NEW QATARI JET anywhere NEAR the NEWARK AIRPORT.
9. Enroll BARRON and put him on the STARTING FIVE of the BASKETBALL TEAM The kid can DUNK without LEAVING THE GROUND. It is an INCREDIBLE SIGHT to BEHOLD. His BODY is truly SO LONG.
10. Keep PUSHING That New “INTELLECTUAL VITALITY” Initiative Actually, no notes on this one. We see what you’re doing here, and we couldn’t be happier.
Carla Gannis: To the Max, at Ro2 Art, April 12 – May 17, 2025
Carla Gannis, “Garden of Emoji Delights,” 2014
Carla Gannis, “Mona Lisa Overdrive,” 2025
At Ro2 Art in Dallas’ Tin District, Carla Gannis’ exhibition, To the Max, pulls viewers into a fully saturated world where digital technology and physical craft cohabitate in uneasy harmony. This is maximalism with grit. Gannis, a New York-based transmedia artist and professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, has long worked at the bleeding edge of media experimentation, blending drawing, painting, digital video, and internet vernacular into densely layered visual experiences. Her work resists categorization and instead flourishes in the liminal space between pixels and paint, history and speculation, prettiness and grotesquerie.
Across the exhibition, Gannis presents a kind of digital baroque: beaded portraits that read like glitchy devotional icons, altered sculptures adorned with wig hair and costume jewelry, and mannequin heads transformed into avatars of a speculative future. Everything is theatrical, and everything is built to be read on multiple frequencies. Digital renderings are overlaid with tactile additions of acrylic paint and glued-on beads, which slow down what she calls “the frictionless production of digital imagery,” asserting the artist’s body within the algorithmic process.
One video, projected in Ro2’s corner screening room (a staple of their programming), hums with early-CG nostalgia — psychedelic textures and amorphous polygon forms tumble in space to a bouncing synth soundtrack. The clip wouldn’t feel out of place in a 1990s tech demo or a vaporwave remix of Fantasia. This piece is part of a video playlist curated in partnership with New Media Contemporary, a welcome context for Gannis’ work that reinforces her role within a growing network of artists navigating new media in experimental ways.
Gannis’ broader projects, like wwwunderkammer, reimagine the museum itself as a porous, networked space, one where excluded narratives might find room to breathe. She also directly critiques the aesthetics of generative AI through works like Uncanny Female Objects, a series of digital-feminine forms warped through the insertion of strange and synthetic materials. In pieces like Love and War and Origins of the Universe, Gannis brings web-native imagery into sculpture, offering mythic commentary on technological mediation and humanity’s cycles of aspiration and collapse.
A standout piece in the exhibition, also on view at the Thoma Foundation’s Dallas headquarters, is her reinterpretation of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, overlaid with blinking and morphing emoji forms that correspond to figures in the original tableau. It’s an iconoclastic move that feels both irreverent and reverent: Bosch’s hellscape becomes a 21st-century emoji theater of our own collective subconscious. The result is at once absurd and deeply pointed.
If there is a throughline to Gannis’ practice, it’s a fascination with mediation, as in how meaning mutates across platforms, through time, and between materials. Her work invites us to unlearn the conditioned ways we consume visual culture and to consider, instead, the strangeness at the edges. She calls it “the punctum amongst all the algorithmic studium,” a poetic turn of phrase that sums up her mission: to make digital art that evinces feeling.
In To the Max, Gannis mythologizes the present. She creates a visual language that is equal parts carnivalesque, cybernetic, and deeply human. Her world is speculative, chaotic, and densely referential — but always alive with possibility.
****
Jiab Prachakul: Sweet Solitude at The Contemporary Austin, January 31 – August 3, 2025
Jiab Prachakul, “Night Talk,” 2020
Jiab Prachakul, “Purpose,” 2022
The Contemporary Austin is currently host to Sweet Solitude, a quietly compelling exhibition of portraits and landscapes. Jiab Prachakul, an artist who gained significant recognition after winning the prestigious BP Portrait Award from London’s National Portrait Gallery, offers viewers an intimate look into her world through a series of acrylic on linen portraits and scenes that explore themes of memory, connection, and the introspective self.
Stepping into the gallery, one is met with a consistent visual language. Prachakul’s technique involves a washy application of acrylics, where even shadows hint at an airy underpainting, lending a gentle luminosity to her canvases. Many works feature figures, often set within dining scenes or moments of quiet reflection. The figures themselves are typically rendered with a distinctive milk-and-coffee palette for skin tones, with deeper values carefully traced to define musculature and facial features. The rendering is direct and approachable, and effectively conveys the emotional weight of her subjects. Light, a clear influence, bathes most scenes evenly, creating a sense of calm and clarity that resists pure flatness, allowing subtle depths to emerge.
A standout example of local resonance is Barton Creek, where the iconic Austin locale is translated into strokes of green for the water, reminiscent of rhythmic, almost lawnmower-like application of color across the linen, grounding the exhibition with a touch of the familiar Texas landscape.
The heart of the exhibition lies in its exploration of personal narratives, available to read in the catalogue provided in the galleries. Prachakul herself offers candid insights into several pieces, as well as notes that are directed to the subjects in some of the works. Purpose is a self-portrait born from a moment of self-reflection after her award win, which brought on a pervasive realization that all eyes, known and unknown, now saw her through the heavy lens of “success.” “That’s how people see me,” she notes in the catalogue, “Then I thought, what about me, how do I see myself?” The resulting painting, set in her living room with an art bookshelf and a cherished aloe vera plant, becomes a mirror not just of her physical self, but of her influences and growth.
Memory and familial ties are tenderly explored in Love From Three Continents (NKP), a painting inspired by an old photograph of her parents. “My years from one to six were a carefree joy… My mother passed away just a few years after the photograph I used for this painting was taken,” Prachakul shares. The piece becomes an act of remembrance, a way to hold onto a love that shaped her: “I am here because someone fell in love with someone.” This sentiment, coupled with her washy technique, evokes the feeling of cherished, perhaps slightly faded, family snapshots.
The theme of connection extends to friends and peers. Postcard from Bangkok captures a poignant moment of seeing friends, masked, during the 2020 lockdown. “Seeing everyone from so far away, so close to each other at that particular time gave me a strange-comforting-consolation,” she writes, evoking the universal experience of maintaining bonds across distance. These dining or group scenes, like A Conversation with Apichatpong, hint at a web of relationships, leaving the viewer to sense the personal connections woven through Prachakul’s life.
One of the more intriguing pieces is Instilled (diptych). Visually, light streams in from a window, yet the overall even illumination of the scene remains consistent with Prachakul’s style. This piece is accompanied by a sound recording of a crackling fire and a male voice, adding an atmospheric, albeit enigmatic, layer to the viewing experience.
Night Talk marks a slight departure in mood. Here, there’s a tinge more darkness, the skin tones are more richly painted than in the rest of the show. The figures seem introspective, perhaps unconcerned in their quiet moment, and a subtle shadow behind them hints at a more dynamic play of light than in other works. This piece, notably framed, unlike many others in the show, carries a distinct moodiness that is quite captivating.
Prachakul’s work, as revealed in her writings, often touches upon the diaspora experience and the formation of identity. Speaking of Pype Manoharn, the sitter for Stand-by, the artist reflects on their shared experience as “educated Asian” women navigating different cultural landscapes, finding a “sense of legitimacy” and existence in these cross-cultural encounters. This idea of a “stand-by moment” as a period of reflection is a key to understanding the quiet strength in many of her portraits.
Sweet Solitude offers a journey into Jiab Prachakul’s inner and outer worlds. With their lucid color and gentle rendering, her paintings invite viewers to pause and consider the connections that shape us, the memories we hold dear, and the quiet spaces where we find ourselves. It’s an exhibition that speaks with a soft but resonant voice.
Lawndale, a Houston-based nonprofit, has announced Candice D’Meza, Guadalupe Hernandez, and Amanda Kerdahi as its Artist Studio Program (ASP) participants for the 2025-26 season.
According to a press release, the three artists, each based or schooled in Houston, will receive “dynamic support to develop their creative practice” and a public platform for new work, to be accompanied by commissioned scholarly writing. Participation in the nine-month program, running September 1, 2025, through May 31, 2026, includes a $750 monthly stipend and $2,000 in direct support for project development and materials, with 24-hour access to a private studio.
Candice D’Meza. Photo courtesy of the artist
Ms. D’Meza works across theater, performance, film, ritual, social practice, and creative writing to engage themes of grief, liberation, and intergenerational memory. Her work explores Black futurism, ancestral technologies, and speculative world-building. She is a four-time Houston Press Theater Award winner including a 2018 win for Best Utility Player, and 2024 Cal Arts Herb Alpert Award in Theatre nominee.
She has been commissioned by Houston’s Catastrophic Theatre for Miss LaRaj’s House of Dystopian Futures (2025) and A Maroon’s Guide to Time and Space (2023). Ms. D’Meza’s projects have been commissioned, presented, and exhibited at institutions including Latinx Playwrights Circle, DiverseWorks, the Blaffer Art Museum, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Guadalupe Hernandez. Photo: Jakayla Monay, courtesy of Weingarten Art Group and Houston Endowment
Mr. Hernandez employs the Mexican folk art tradition of papel picado to explore themes of family, labor, and cultural practices, blending time-honored techniques with contemporary imagery and narratives. He received the 2024 Houston Endowment Jones Artist Award and a Los Angeles-based 2023 Nest Heritage Craft Prize for his commitment to sustaining and evolving the art of papel picado.
He was selected as one of six artist pairs for the 2022 US Latinx Art Forum Mentorship Program, and has participated in artist residencies with the Art Students League of Denver, Asia Society Texas in Houston, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and Project Row Houses. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Blaffer, the Chicano Park Museum in San Diego, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio.
Amanda Kerdahi. Photo courtesy of the artist
Ms. Kerdahi works with sound, video, installation, and performance to examine object-based visual culture through a queer Egyptian-American lens. She received a BFA in Digital Media, a BS in Psychology from the University of Houston in 2005, and an MFA from the University of Plymouth, UK in 2013. Ms. Kerdahi and has exhibited at Raw Material in Dakar, Senegal; the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo, Egypt; and the Queer Lisboa Film Festival in Lisbon, Portugal.
Working with Eto Otitigbe of eo Studio, Ms. Kerdahi received a 2023 Creative Capital award for Tankugbe Incubation Lab. In 2018, she co-curated Topophilia, a video art exhibition with 16 international artists in an abandoned farmhouse in Nees, Denmark, and in 2014 received a grant from The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture for Filtered Conversations at Round Table. In 2012, she co-founded Benefsigy Studio in downtown Cairo and organized Pop Up on the Nile, a series of queer, women-centered dance parties on feluccas (popular motorboats on the Nile), serving as resident DJ Purplpitch.
The artists were selected from among 141 applicants by a panel that included Lawndale ASP round 16 participant Alexis Pye, scholar and educator Dr. Rachel Afi Quinn, Lawndale Advisory Board member and past exhibiting artist Angelica Raquel, Lawndale Operations and Exhibitions Manager Jeremy Johnson, and Executive Director Anna Walker.
Since 2007, the ASP initiative has provided support to more than 57 Houston and Gulf Coast region artists. For more on the Lawndale studio artists and upcoming programs, check the organization’s website.
I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their
iPhone’s [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America
will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or
anyplace else. If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25%
must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your [sic] for your
attention to this matter!
Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York
Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent
of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.
I mean, duh, right? But there it is. The influence peddling is just right out in the open. I’m guessing someone at the event last night put it in Trump’s ear that Tim Cook is making a jerk out of Trump, by trying to shift production to India for most iPhones to be sold in the US. (Why stop with the iPhone? How about iPads and MacBooks and AirPods and everything else? I’m guessing it’s because the iPhone is the only Apple product Trump personally uses and thus that’s as far as his imagination can stretch.) And I’m sure in private, Cook has tried — and will now try again — to explain to Trump that it’s simply not possible to produce in America all iPhones sold in America, and really not even feasible to assemble any of them here, at any sort of scale. Trump saying he wants to see them all assembled here in the US is only slightly more realistic than saying he wants them assembled on the moon.
But Trump wants it to happen so he believes it can happen. It’s utterly fantastical thinking, true mad-king nonsense. Apple sells a mind-reeling 150,000 iPhones in the US every single day. Not at launch — they sell millions a day then — but just on regular days, like now, in the middle of May. 150,000 per day, every day. Even if Apple tried its best to make US production happen, it would take years and a veritable fortune to build out the infrastructure — not mere factories, but literal city-sized campuses, full of highly-skilled employees who would somehow be convinced to take these tedious repetitive jobs at relatively low wages. So by the time Apple pulled it off, if they could manage to pull it off, Trump would either be out of office or democracy would have ended in the US. So there’s no real point to even trying.
The whole stock market is down today — Trump also announced, on a whim, 50 percent tariffs starting next week on all imports from the EU this morning — but Apple’s stock is “only” down about 3 percent, suggesting that the market is starting to factor in how little faith they should have in Trump’s erratic tariff threats.
I’ve also seen folks cracking wise, wondering if Cook still feels his million dollar contribution to Trump’s inauguration slush fund racket was worth it. In all seriousness, you have to consider that even with threats like today’s polemic against Indian-assembled iPhones, Tim Cook and Apple might be getting highly favored treatment from Trump. That this is what you get when you’re on his good side.
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