‣ Jon Schwarz of the Intercept says what lots of us are thinking, namely that progressives should not be defending the current Harvard administration because it is the opposite of meritocracy. He writes:
Then, after Harvard has been razed, we must salt the earth, Carthage-style, so a new Harvard does not grow in its place. Next we have to destroy the rest of the Ivy League. Finally, anyone with enough energy left over should sail an emissions-free ship through the Panama Canal to California and obliterate Stanford.
‣ Writing for Technology Review, Will Douglas Heaven says that “these six questions will dictate the future of generative AI“:
- Will we ever mitigate the bias problem? Bias has become a byword for AI-related harms, for good reason. Real-world data, especially text and images scraped from the internet, is riddled with it, from gender stereotypes to racial discrimination. Models trained on that data encode those biases and then reinforce them wherever they are used. Chatbots and image generators tend to portray engineers as white and male and nurses as white and female. Black people risk being misidentified by police departments’ facial recognition programs, leading to wrongful arrest. Hiring algorithms favor men over women, entrenching a bias they were sometimes brought in to address.
‣ In the wake of writer Conrad Sweatman’s Walrus report exposing former Winnipeg Art Gallery director Ferdinand Eckhardt’s Nazi ties, the Canadian institution announced it’s dropping his name from its website, entrance, and elsewhere. Darren Bernhardt has the story for CBC:
“Eckhardt’s public endorsements of Nazism include signing an oath of allegiance to Hitler and producing several polemics in far-right and Nazified journals in the early 1930s, urging, among other things, that Germany’s cultural arena align itself with the goals of the Nazi state,” the article says.
“Eckhardt went to work for one of the most notorious players in Hitler’s war machine, IG Farben, the same company that built the Auschwitz concentration camp and manufactured Zyklon B, used in the gas chambers,” Sweatman wrote.
WAG-Qaumajuq director and CEO Stephen Borys downplayed the link between Eckhardt and the Nazis when asked by the Winnipeg Free Press about Sweatman’s article the day it came out.
“The only surprising thing is so many things are missing and not substantiated or provided without citations or references, so there are a lot of big gaps,” he told the newspaper.
In a follow-up article in The Walrus on Dec. 7, Sweatman said the WAG minimized the findings but didn’t fully deny them.
‣ Writing for the Forward, Arno Rosenfeld explains that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has changed its criteria for what constitutes antisemitism so that, well, I’ll let him explain the absurdity (yes, this means any pro-Palestine protest is being labeled as antisemitic):
But the ADL acknowledged in a statement to the Forward that it significantly broadened its definition of antisemitic incidents following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack to include rallies that feature “anti-Zionist chants and slogans,” events that appear to account for around 1,317 of the total count.
Overall, a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization has focused on in previous years.
‣ As anti-BDS bills progress across the US, Naomi Klein contextualizes the movement’s history and makes a compelling case for its importance in combatting Israeli occupation for the Guardian:
Meanwhile, across the US, lobbyists for oil and gas companies and gun manufacturers are taking a page from the anti-BDS legal offensive and pushing copycat legislation to restrict divestment campaigns that take aim at their clients. “It points to why it’s so dangerous to permit this kind of Palestine exception to speech,” Meera Shah, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, told the magazine Jewish Currents. “Because not only is it harmful to the Palestinian rights movement – it eventually comes to harm other social movements.” Once again, nothing stays static, impunity expands, and when the rights to boycott and divest are stripped away for Palestinian solidarity, the right to use these same tools to push for climate action, gun control and LGBTQ+ rights are stripped away as well.
In a way, this is an advantage, because it presents an opportunity to deepen alliances across movements. Every major progressive organization and union has a stake in protecting the right to boycott and divest as core tenets of free expression and critical tools of social transformation. The small team at Palestine Legal has been leading the pushback in the US in extraordinary ways – filing court cases that challenge anti-BDS laws as unconstitutional and supporting the cases of others. They deserve far more backup.
‣ Andrew Keh writes about the unusual, moving story of a woman who requested to be buried amongst animals at a pet cemetery for the New York Times:
Mr. Martin himself experienced this sort of disorienting grief not long after Ms. Chaarte’s ashes arrived at the cemetery, when his family’s cocker spaniel, Violet, had to be put down. He held her as she died and struggled for weeks afterward with the loss.
But there was no one around to grieve for Ms. Chaarte. So on an unseasonably warm March day, Mr. Martin walked her ashes himself to a vacant plot in the cemetery. He watched as the foreman and supervisor plunged their shovels into the hard ground. In half an hour they had a grave, no more than three feet deep.
Mr. Martin had no idea who this woman was, but he grew emotional as her urn was lowered into the earth. The men stood in silence, and Mr. Martin, so accustomed to comforting others, whispered some words of comfort to himself. It was not quite a prayer, more like a meditation — on relationships, on companionship.
What if this were a member of my family? he thought. What if this were me?
The soil was restored. A small, gray headstone was installed. As a business matter, Ms. Chaarte’s file was closed.
And yet his questions about her — about who she was, what she was doing there — still hung in the air.
‣ There are life stories and then there are life stories, and this teen on TikTok has got a doozy:
‣ An art writer in the making! Van Gogh Immersive, you’re next:
‣ An important PSA for anyone thinking of moving to Brooklyn:
‣ The real winners of the Golden Globes … er, Globs:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
