Some of the earliest illuminated manuscripts featured “maniculues” in their margins—cute emoji-like hands with extended index fingers to mark significant passages in a text for subsequent readers. The first book I ever read also pointed outwards. Its title—Look!—was also its dominant word, appended caption-like to illustrations of a young girl pointing her finger at a variety of domestic scenes and objects. Though the lexical monotony of Look! was before long eclipsed by more exhilarating fare, its lesson was instructive for a young person embarking on a reading career: keep your eyes open, stay attentive, look!

This eighth issue of the e-flux Index explores the fragmentary complexity of the current moment through pointing out eleven emergent themes drawn from texts commissioned by e-flux throughout the spring of 2025. These indications for reading refuse the xenophobic illogic of the us/them, friend/enemy strategies of categorizing, and instead seek to index multiple temporalities and positions simultaneously—in a non-linear way. They bring together exhibition and film reviews, in-depth theoretical and historical essays on contemporary art, architecture, and design, interviews with artists, theorists, and filmmakers, journeys into the archive of film history, and shorter missives on sociopolitics and contemporary culture. They are titled: Dont’s, Othercare, Chance Operations, The World of Interiors, Bone Alphabets, The One Who Waits, The Day Is the Barricade, Sentimental Educations, Marking Territory, [gesticulating], and Sedimentology.