Benjamin B. Wilcox
Latest Articles
Leaving a Legacy of Equal Access
Harvard suggests that legacy preference is at once a non-factor in admissions and a driving factor behind alumni generosity.
Conflict on a Bridge
With each new incarnation of the bridge, one senses the parties’ hope that if they just use the right image, the right color scheme, the right slogan, their art will mobilize the legions of followers they have long sought.
Space for Warped Memory
Today, visitors who pass through ESMA’s doors are greeted by a set of glass doors that muffle the thumping rhythm of a subwoofer. Inside, a cavernous white chamber houses a makeshift jail cell dotted with steel-barred windows. Feel-good music from the 1970s blares from a speaker system overhead, and pulsing neon lights shoot from corner to corner. Overhead, a projector beams out a single word in bolded, multi-colored script: “Indifference.”
A Past within the Present
Ulises de la Orden, an Argentine documentary filmmaker, would rather not forget. In a country struggling to bury the recent past, de la Orden is obsessed with excavating the crimes of the fledgling Argentine nation-state from the midst of the 19th century. His latest film, “Tierra Adentro” (“The Land Within”), focuses on the little-known Desert Conquest of the 1870s, a campaign that extended Argentina’s borders into the depths of South America, uprooting and largely extinguishing entire indigenous tribes in the process.