The South China Sea is politically contested from its surface to its bed. China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei all make claims on the volume of this sea — known variously (the list is not exhaustive) as “the South Sea (南海),” “the East Sea (Biển Đông),” “the Luzon Sea/the Philippine Sea,” and “the Natuna Sea.”

Gyalpo and I walk across the aftermath of an avalanche, as the debris continues to shift beneath and around us. Three years later, the compacted ice is still melting. He is trying not to think of his parents, whose home was here, whom I stayed with the night before the earthquake. I can’t imagine his position.

Although the photographic scenes claim to tell a story of what it is like to experience homelessness during severe weather, the images that coalesced around this encampment in their very representation–ironically–rendered the subjects experiencing homelessness, absent. Like the center of a vortex, the photographs performed the operation of presenting a replete image all the while absenting its alleged content.

The years-long legal battle between British musicians Robbie Williams and Jimmy Page over Williams's intention to build a swimming pool in his basement has recently come to a close, conditionally in Williams's favor. Page had reason to be concerned: since the late aughts, the super-basement craze among the more well-heeled that has flooded council planning committees and inspired a gimmicky BBC documentary has also wreaked havoc on neighbors.

‍An enduring image associated with the recent “fracking” boom in North Dakota’s Bakken region is a 2016 nighttime photograph of North America taken by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite. In the image, an enormous swath of illumination as bright as major cities covers the sparsely populated northern Great Plains.