Required Reading

Just in time for Valentine's Day, a show at the UK's National Archives explores the art and politics of writing love letters, the New Statesman's Zuzanna Lachendro reports:

Before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, gay men and women were forced to seek likeminded individuals using code words in classified advert publications like The Link under the non-matrimonial section: “bohemian” or “artistic” for men, “sporty” and “jolly” for women. A jokey exchange between two male friends separated by the Atlantic, one of which is described as “the campest thing between London and San Francisco” is placed alongside a letter between two men recovered after a 1920s raid of the Caravan Club in London, where many gay men met. In the section dedicated to familial love, a tender 19^th-century letter is addressed to Ernest “Stella” Boulton, a performer who publicly preferred women’s clothing. The letter, sent from Boulton’s mother, challenges our understanding of gender-conformity and acceptance in Victorian England.

As Black-owned bookstores bloom across the country, author Char Adams set out to chronicle their history. Sacramento Observer's Williamena Kwapo reports:

A surprising discovery in Adams’ research comes at the very beginning of the book with the story of David Ruggles, the first known owner of a Black-owned bookstore, who opened his shop in Manhattan in 1834. Ruggles also was a major abolitionist figure who helped free enslaved people through the Underground Railroad.

While studying Ruggles, Adams learned that the phrase “by any means necessary,” often attributed to Malcolm X, was first said by Ruggles more than a century earlier.

“I was really honored to be able to shine a light on him [Ruggles],” Adams says.

A new book sheds light on the Parthenon Marbles in public imagination — apparently it inspired poets including Byron and Keats — and the debate about their repatriation. Nicolas Liney reviews it for the Nation:

Stallings offers a witty account of these early responses and ripostes, but she also works hard to place it within the intellectual history of the period, and it is instructive to see just how widely the Marbles were pressed into the service of various agendas and reflected various anxieties in Europe at the time.

Race theory was one particularly salient topic. Benjamin Haydon, so impressed by the anatomy of the figures in the Marbles, also declared that they exhibited the characteristics “of an intellectual European” and used them to form extraordinarily disparaging comparisons with Black people in the pages of The Examiner, attempting to demonstrate their physical and mental inferiority. He took casts of an African American sailor named Wilson to prove his point, almost killing him in the process, as he cheerfully recounts in his autobiography.

A symbol associated with anti-trans rhetoric appeared on campus at Northwestern University, but the school claims it wasn't a hate symbol. Lisa Kurian Philip reports for WBEZ Chicago:

According to university officials, the student said he is solely interested in the history of the Cross and the Duke of Burgundy — and that he is appalled that his painting was interpreted as a message of anti-trans hate.

But experts who study this iconography say it’s not hard to see why students interpreted the cross as a threat.

Matthew Gabriele, a professor at Virginia Tech University, studies the medieval era and how it is remembered. He said the Middle Ages and especially imagery from the Crusades have become popular sources of inspiration for far-right groups.

The Cross of Burgundy is not a symbol he’s seen a lot in America, he said, but it appears to be a conservative and reactionary symbol that is anti-trans rights.

José R. Ralat, an editor at Texas Monthly who covers tacos and Mexican food, wrote about getting stopped by ICE last month while on assignment:

The inconsistencies in our story that the agent was apparently searching for simply weren’t there. He sighed.

“We’re on assignment. Do you want my business card?” I asked, with the card in my hand. That was a mistake.

He reached for the business card and demanded our IDs.

“Why do you need to see my ID?” Rodrigo asked. He and the agent shared a brief stare before we handed the cards over.

We waited thirty minutes before they were returned. The agent let us go with a warning.

A warning for what? I thought.

Journalist Nora Adin Fares reports for New Lines Magazine on the steady rise of Islamophobia and xenophobia in Sweden:

Since 2022, Sweden has been governed by a center-right coalition that is led by the Moderate Party, but depends on the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), a party that does not hold Cabinet posts but effectively sets policy on migration and law and order. Under this arrangement, the government is pushing through a series of highly controversial proposals, among them a plan to incarcerate children as young as 13 in adult prisons rather than offering them juvenile care. It is also advancing a proposed “Swedish values contract” that would require asylum-seekers to sign a loyalty pledge, and a proposal to deny and revoke residence permits for so-called “social misconduct,” a term that could include exhibiting “disruptive behavior,” or failing to adhere to fundamental Swedish values. 

Over the years, watching the rhetoric harden, I’ve often tried to locate the moment when the trajectory changed. When I ask people to identify the turning point, the answer is almost always the same: the moment the SD entered parliament in September 2010. That was the day Swedish politics shifted, and a party with roots in the neo-Nazi movement crossed the parliamentary threshold, forcing itself into the national conversation. What had long been dismissed as fringe suddenly sat inside the legislature, and nothing was ever quite the same again.

A delightful 1926 time capsule reveal at a Los Angeles library:

Somebody please start a petition to revive the Muppets franchise with this masterpiece:

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