Required Reading

At age 85, Gladys Nilsson brings her playful sensibility to new drawings that unravel myths about gender, aging, and intimacy, Lauren Stroh writes for Momus:

I am thinking of Picasso because his prurience usefully counters the critical modalities typically brought to the work of Gladys Nilsson, a Chicago-based artist who began painting in the wake of second-wave feminism and is still all-too-often expected to address the “woman question.” Because her female figures take on unruly proportions—are fleshy and voluptuous, or otherwise unconventionally attractive—critics have framed their sensuality as a disruption of misogynist art-historical norms (though the works also resuscitate classical ideals of beauty, perhaps returning to those embodied by the Venuses of the Upper Paleolithic or the voluptuous muses of the Renaissance). With her typical flair, Nilsson responded to such a framework by advancing it, further undermining the canonical fetishization of women by privileging the quotidian build of the mall-walker. Her contribution to the Menil Drawing Institute’s Wall Drawing Series, Drawing (2025), features a cast of lubberly figures engaged in clumsy gymnastics—a charming sequence of pratfalls that becomes a (seriously sexy!) flirtation, with elders lingering, looming, lusting, and loving.

In the wake of mass layoffs at the Washington Post, the publication's books section was eliminated entirely. Lauren Rothfeld, its former book critic, asks what the brazen move signals about the corporate interests that steer mainstream media for the New Yorker:

“The number and passion of complaints we received were beyond anything we got over other changes in the paper,” one senior editor told Salon. If the outlet’s executive editor had “anticipated this kind of reaction to doing away with the stand-alone section, he wouldn’t have done it.” Book World amassed a dedicated readership, too. Though I took the sanity-preserving step of never learning how to check the data myself, my editor told me that traffic increased in 2023 and 2024, even as the number of visitors to other sections of the paper was stagnating. Our clicks dropped off only after Jeff Bezos’s initial New York Post-ification of the opinion section, when he spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s Presidential candidacy and thereby caused the paper to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

But to defend books coverage in these craven terms is already to concede too much. Popularity is not always a measure of merit, and, in any case, it is not static. What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter of what is available to them. Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations. It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled. It is par for the course that, in a woefully limp statement on the carnage, the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, referred to the paper’s subscribers not as “readers” but as “consumers.” A consumer is a person whose preëxisting tastes you strive to satisfy over and over; a reader is someone you hope to change, convince, and surprise.

ProPublica's Mica Rosenberg gathered testimonies from over 30 children held at ICE's Dilley detention center. They describe inhumane conditions, psychologically damaging treatment, and the pain of being ripped away from their communities in this difficult but absolutely essential read:

Maria Antonia Guerra, the 9-year-old from Colombia, told me that the 10-day vacation to Disney World that she had planned with her mother and stepdad turned into more than 100 days at Dilley. She’d flown into Florida from Medellin, Colombia, where she lived with her grandmother, with a Cruella de Vil costume in her suitcase. Her mother, Maria Alejandra Montoya, was living in New York and had overstayed her visa, but had since married a U.S. citizen and was just waiting for her green card to be approved. Maria Antonia traveled regularly back and forth to the U.S. on a tourist visa, and Maria Alejandra had flown down to meet her at the airport. Immigration agents intercepted them and flew them to Texas. They both told me that it felt like a kidnapping.

“I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside, when I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well,” Maria Antonia, who wears thick glasses, wrote to me. “I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”

The Epstein files have already begun to expose vast networks of power that allow wealthy men to abuse without consequences. For the Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto tracks how even #MeToo didn't stop Epstein from expanding his circle:

Epstein kept track of who he might add to the club. For instance, Charlie Rose — who was apparently close enough that Epstein recommended some women to Rose as assistants — was accused of sexual harassment by more than two dozen women. When the story broke, Epstein emailed multiple people — including Summers — links to the story. Later he wrote to the journalist Michael Wolff, “saw charlie rose at haircutters/ s=ell shocked.” The publicist Peggy Siegal emailed Epstein in 2018 about Steve Wynn resigning from the Republican National Committee because of accusations of sexual harassment, “The witch hunt goes on.” She suggests Epstein should have “double security” and “wear a wig and a baseball c=p in public.” In 2018, Steve Bannon emailed Epstein a link to a Business Insider report about Tom Brokaw, who was accused of sexual harassment. “Make sure Woody sees this,” he writes. “Nobody safe.”

Even the relatively minor “Shitty Media Men” list — a spreadsheet anonymously edited with names of men and accusations against them — makes it into Epstein’s emails. Lorin Stein, the disgraced former editor of The Paris Review who resigned after accusations of sexual impropriety, forwarded to Wolff an email from the writer Stephen Elliott, who intended to sue the list’s creator since he didn’t know who’d made the accusations against him. Epstein promises to “help anyway i can.” Elliott sued Moira Donegan, the list’s creator, six weeks later.

Novelist Naomi Jackson reflects in Curbed on Black Brooklyn culture and the borough's rapid gentrification, which has pushed her and others out of the neighborhoods that raised them:

Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination illustrates how gentrification transforms cities by profoundly restricting the possibilities of what art and ideas are made within them, blocking the creation of “a true avant-garde, a large, vibrant community of people willing to think, fuck, love, live, and create oppositionally.” What is lost in the process of gentrification is not just a Black population but Black culture, communities, institutions, and political power. There are novels that will never be written, music that will never be recorded, innovative ideas that will never be imagined or executed, relationships that will never take flight, policies that will never see the light of day, because these neighborhoods no longer exist. The listening rooms, salons, murals that may have once bloomed in Brooklyn will likely find their roots in other, more affordable cities.

On the corner of Sullivan Place and Nostrand Avenue, for more than 40 years, there was a shoe store where I think my mother once bought my sister or me or both of us shoes that shuttered recently. It’s now a nail salon where I got a gel mani and pedi complete with nail art — hilarious upside-down balloons that looked suspiciously like sperm — for my son’s 5th-birthday party.

With the controversial Wuthering Heights film hitting theaters tomorrow, Jasmine Vojdani asks literary scholars to weigh in on the age-old question of Heathcliff's race for Vulture:

Whether or not Heathcliff is supposed to be Black in the novel, it’s historically viable for him to have been. “He had many real-life counterparts in people of African descent,” says Fowler, referring to a handful of Black people found in Yorkshire archives during Emily Brontë’s lifetime, including farmhands, servants, and child mill workers. Although there’s no evidence in letters or biographical documents to suggest that Emily Brontë encountered them directly, she almost certainly would have read about them, including the escape of one man from a big slave-owning family who lived across the road from the Brontës’ school. Emily also would have been acquainted with debates around abolition; Frederick Douglass spoke in Liverpool in 1846, the year she was completing her book.

The Victorian-literature specialist Catherine Robson has another theory: “The feeling that he should be of African heritage, I think that is interference coming in from her sister’s book. Because we do know that in Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester is born in Jamaica.” (The subject of Bertha’s Creoleness has been taken up by many writers, including postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak and Wide Sargasso Sea author Jean Rhys.)

Yamily Habib of Fierce writes about Toñita Cay, the owner of Brooklyn's beloved Caribbean Social Club, after her appearance at Bad Bunny's historic halftime show:

Latinos in Brooklyn often call Toñita “La Matriarca,” or “the Matriarch,” and for good reason. The gesture of serving a shot of cañita (sugarcane liquor) is symbolic of what Mrs. Cay has been doing for fifty years in the neighborhood: welcoming those who have left home and making them feel at home.

Her club is a vestige of a New York of another era. It is located in a modest building on Grand Street owned by Toñita, which helped anchor Los Sures, a predominantly Latino neighborhood since the 1950s, but now in danger of extinction. In fact, Toñita’s is the last Puerto Rican social club in Brooklyn.

Señora Cay’s bar opened in the 1970s, just as Cuban son, mambo, and the musical traditions of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic were mixing with funk to give rise to the salsa we know today, which plays through the speakers of her bar while people play dominoes, pool, and speak Spanish.

Artist Zahed Taj-Eddin brings us into the enchanting process of crafting faience amulets using Ancient Egyptian materials and techniques:

These Buddhist Japanese clocks mark time through smell (which makes far more scents to me):

@park_hyun_gi

Ever wondered what time smelled like? This is an incense clock (jokoban in Japan), that was used all over east Asia to measure time by burning incense trails 🕰️ To learn more, we host monthly incense workshops at Goyo in LA & NY 💫

♬ original sound - hyungi

New pet peeve unlocked:

@abbyhappel What are we thinkin team? Also pls ignore the camera quality at some spots Imfaoo l was in that storm fr #architecture #design #building #newyork #travel ♬ original sound abby

What came first: Josip Vaništa's 1961 "Infinite Cane / Homage to Manet" or the antics of Carrie Bradshaw?

@karlye.whitt The Rapture is REAL @MoMA The Museum of Modern Art ♬ Sex And The City - Main Theme - Geek Music

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

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