Cabinet

Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine and editorial director of Cabinet Books. He has also curated a number of exhibitions, including Philosophical Toys (Apex Art), Bubbles (Canadian Centre for Architecture), and The Museum of Testing (Manifesta 7). He is currently collaborating with Aaron Schuster on an exhibition on the theme of levitation, and working on a book on the history of the “naturalization” ceremony in the United States. The first installment of his project Stand-Up Tragedy will be held at Cabinet’s Brooklyn event space later this year.

Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University, and is an editor-at-large at Cabinet. He has written for the magazine on topics ranging from player pianos to quantitative meter to handle theory, and is the author of Take Care, in Cabinet’s series of twenty-four hour books. He is also the editor of Cabinet’s forthcoming collection of psychedelic grammar exercises, The Virtual Sentence.

Founded in New York as a non-profit in 2000, Cabinet is a magazine that uses an expansive definition of culture in order to stage productive encounters—and, at times, collisions—between modes of inquiry that are typically sequestered from one another. Its heraldic shield, featuring a fox and a hedgehog looking at one other, borrows its motif from a pre-Socratic fragment that describes the fox as knowing many small things, and the hedgehog one large thing. The magazine aims to be a home for both animals, one where non-systematic knowledge (found, for example, in some artistic practices) and highly disciplined knowledge (found, for example, in academic research) can rub against, disarm, and invigorate one another.

Louis Block is a Brooklyn-based painter and writer. His writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Full Bleed Journal, and his work has been shown in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Venice.