Required Reading

This elegant pink brick facade by New York architects Robert Marino and Leehong Kim is a five-unit building occupying a narrow plot measuring 18.25 feet (5.56 metres) wide on 130th Street in Manhattan’s East Harlem neighborhood. See more photos by Richard Lee on Dezeen (via Dezeen)

• Tamar Carroll and Joshua Meltzer write about the Village Voice and what they understood about photography that many others didn’t. This passage says a lot:

With its focus on local issues and its tradition of muckraking journalism, the Voice gave social justice movements more coverage—and more sympathetic coverage—than mainstream papers like The New York Times.

As a student activist at New York University in the 1980s, Victoria Wolcott recalled how, after a protest, “you would go and get the Village Voice the next day. We wanted to know what the Village Voice was reporting, because they were progressive and they had really great photographs.”

• This is a must-read thread for artists:

• This is clearly the best Halloween costume of the year:

• Marijuana is legal in Canada now, and the National Post gave one reporter, Marie-Danielle Smith, her dream assignment. She writes:

I couldn’t have imagined one day I’d be smoking grass bought from the government as part of my work day as a political writer. ‘Hey guys guess what I’m high for work’

• Two Classics professors, Mary Beard and Kristina Killgrove, ‏get into a Twitter tiff over the exact date of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Ancient times. Beard comes off sounding like she doesn’t care about Killgrove’s more exacting methods, and then Beard turns around and writes this article for the London Times Literary Supplement and doesn’t even cite Killgrove, who is a younger female scholar in a field dominated by men. Oh, academia. I suggest you read Killgrove’s thread first:

When did Vesuvius erupt?

• Tiffany Cherise Jordan thinks deeply about the Kerry James Marshall essay we published on Hyperallergic a few weeks ago and considers the impact of white intellectuals on black art. She writes:

I do not proclaim that white critics and intellectuals are incapable of critiquing black art altogether, but I strongly believe that in order for their analysis to be one that is accurate without prejudice, they must first study the black experience and the ambivalent ideologies within black culture in order to examine the gravity of black art

• Is anyone surprised?

“Imperial-Hipster Bible VICE Did Paid Propaganda for Saudi Arabia” by Ben Norton for Gray Zone

… Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even personally met with VICE co-founder and billionaire Shane Smith, during his charm offensive in the United States in early 2018 — when the authoritarian de facto ruler likewise rubbed elbows with key figures from the US ruling class, including Oprah, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Thomas Friedman, and Jeffrey Goldberg.

• You need to know this:

Marines Confirm That Yes, They Drew That New Sky Penis Over California

… and kudos to the person who used came up with this url:

taskandpurpose.com/marines-fly-sky-dong/

• Young people aren’t the problem with so-called “Fake News,” old people are. Turns out people over 65 don’t do a good job of differentiating fact from opinion:

Forty-four percent of younger people identified all five opinions as opinions, while only 26 percent of older people did.

• Your laugh for the day:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.