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Jul 03, 2025, 06:28AM

And Now We’re Here

A 2008 The Nation interview with historian Taylor Branch vs. a 2020 Interview Magazine interview with artist Cristina Martinez.

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Taylor Branch: And rather than begin that conversation, people were only interested in who might have insulted whom by not giving proper credit on a larger issue that nobody expressed any interest in.

Cristina Martinez: Probably sending a text to the wrong person.

Branch: That’s all it is. [laughs] It’s kind of atrophied the public sphere.

Martinez: That’s all people should really focus on.

Branch: Well, they talked about it themselves on the phone.

•••

Martinez: So to think that we’re not affected by the placement of the planets, and the stars, and the moons, it seems impossible for us not to be.

Branch: But nobody trusts that we’d be able to keep ourselves away from them.

Martinez: I didn’t always understand how.

Branch: So we’ve gone from movement to spin.

Martinez: And now we’re here.

•••

Branch: These are rich dilemmas and there’s a lot to argue about, about what’s consequential and what’s not.

Martinez: So I do make it a point to sleep.

Branch: And it’s a very complex process.

Martinez: At the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

Branch: But that’s a tragedy for history.

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