Required Reading

• Some adjunct professors are turning to sex work and sleeping in their cars to make ends meet. Welcome to the USA in 2017:

Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness. A quarter of part-time college academics (many of whom are adjuncts, though it’s not uncommon for adjuncts to work 40 hours a week or more) are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs such as Medicaid.

They resort to food banks and Goodwill, and there is even an adjuncts’ cookbook that shows how to turn items like beef scraps, chicken bones and orange peel into meals. And then there are those who are either on the streets or teetering on the edge of losing stable housing. The Guardian has spoken to several such academics, including an adjunct living in a “shack” north of Miami, and another sleeping in her car in Silicon Valley.

The adjunct who turned to sex work makes several thousand dollars per course, and teaches about six per semester. She estimates that she puts in 60 hours a week. But she struggles to make ends meet after paying $1,500 in monthly rent and with student loans that, including interest, amount to a few hundred thousand dollars. Her income from teaching comes to $40,000 a year. That’s significantly more than most adjuncts: a 2014 survey found that the median income for adjuncts is only $22,041 a year, whereas for full-time faculty it is $47,500.

• Barâa Arar writes about the portrayal of Algerian women in 19th-century Western art:

In the French Algerian context, the French colonial agenda purposefully and forcibly removed the experience of the collective attachment of the physical space. The unifying aspects of Algerian communities were removed such as expressions of culture, the Arabic language, and visual and musical vocabulary. Those born into a colonial context are born into a milieu void of attachment to Algerian land, culture, and people. The removal of cultural authenticity is in itself a violent colonial act.

• A discussion about Cornell University’s architectural plans for Roosevelt Island in New York City:

On a macro scale, Bloomberg’s vision was to have this be a catalyst for change, spawning companies in an applied research kind of way. It has its limits of growth, physically speaking. The catalyst will happen in a silo at first but then it will spread into Manhattan and Queens and spread out like Silicon Valley.

• Mashable shows us some beautiful “foldable” homes:

• The Stranger points out that Neo-Nazi artist Charles Krafft is back in the news again, and they spotted him in that big undercover report by a Swedish grad student that infiltrated alt-right circles in the US:

The day before the forum I’m invited to an exclusive barbecue in a suburb of Seattle at the house of Charles Krafft, the infamous Nazi ceramicist. His home is a temple to National Socialism. Swastikas cover the walls and Mein Kampf sits on the bookshelf, alongside works by Mussolini, Evola and WW2 paraphernalia.

Most of the people there are men between 17 and 25 and most carry guns. “We’re all about the 14 words” a guy called Kato tells me when I ask about Cascadia, referencing the infamous white supremacist slogan (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”). “Whites are going to be a minority in this country by 2040,” he adds before telling me about the impending “race war.”

• Writer, curator, and founder of ARTS.BLACK Taylor Renee Aldridge reflects on “success“:

Between sessions, I found myself in a brief conversation with artist Beverly McIver. I shared with her my hesitation in celebrating my recent achievements because I struggle with imposter syndrome. I also shared that receiving large unrestricted sums of money for my creative talents has left me some anxiety—simply because I’m not used to having money.

In so many words, she assured me that I am worthy and that I deserve even more. She waxed on about the relationship between artists and money, and the anxieties that come along with receiving large sums of money for work you enjoy doing or plan to do. We exchanged ideas on how to learn how to have money when you’re not used to having it. Knowing that her upbringing was also modest, and also a Black woman artist like myself, her seemingly simple advice created a deep sense of relief, and I felt heard in ways that I had not  felt before. I realized the feeling of unworthiness could be a big hindrance in the success of an artist.

• The story of Christian monks who saved Jewish history:

Some of the most popular Jewish documents that were highly circulated among Jews in the ancient world were preserved in monasteries that thrive to this day: St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai Desert, and the twenty monasteries on the Greek peninsula of Mount Athos. Both St. Catherine’s and Mount Athos were settled by Orthodox Christians in the early medieval period, and both are geographically isolated: St. Catherine’s is surrounded by desert, and Mount Athos’s rugged mountainous terrain, with its sharp cliffs that give way to the sea, is difficult to access.

…  Two of the oldest surviving copies of the Bible were discovered at St. Catherine’s monastery in the 1800s. One is the Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth century CE codex comprising the books of the Old Testament, the books of the Apocrypha, the New Testament, and some other Christian documents called the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, all written in Greek. This codex was first discovered in 1844 by the German scholar Constantin Tischendorf, but it was only in 1859, upon one of his return visits to St. Catherine’s, that Tischendorf discovered the bulk of the manuscripts. Tischendorf would later claim that he discovered the codex as it was about the be consigned to be burned for fuel, but this claim is dubious.

• Enjoy these gorgeous images:

• This is a fascinating interview about how Nazism almost found fertile soil in LA:

And so they called together the secret meeting of 40 of the most powerful figures in Hollywood at the Hillcrest Country Club. They walk into a private dining room not knowing why the hell they’d been called. And in front of every seat were copies of the “Silver Legion,” which is the American fascist magazine, with articles about the Jews in Hollywood and how they’re seducing women and perverting America.

Then he proceeds to tell them two things: that in fact Nazis have penetrated your studios, none of you are paying attention to your below-the-line employees, and that [Nazis] have been firing Jews for the last nine months. And in some studios, including yours, [MGM’s] Louis B. Mayer, there are almost no Jews at all working in craftsman positions.

Then he tells them about German consul Georg Gyssling, who had been sent by [Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels to stop Hollywood from making any film attacking or mocking Hitler.

Originally, Gyssling comes over in June 1933 and immediately goes to both Columbia Pictures and to Warner Bros.thers and demands changes. And the reason the moguls agree — Columbia is the first one to agree — is because the studios have more theaters in Germany than anywhere else on the Continent. And they didn’t want to lose that market. They thought Hitler would be out of office in a short time, so they played along.

• No comment:

Justice Department Demands Names of Thousands Who Liked Anti-Trump Facebook Page

The Department of Justice (DOJ) served Facebook the warrants in February, along with a gag order that prevented the company from telling the activists they were being targeted for searches. But the department dropped the order earlier this month.

One of the warrants was issued for the disruptj20 Facebook page, which was used as a forum for planning Inauguration Day protests. If Facebook complies with the DOJ, then the company would likely have to give lawyers the names of the thousands of people who “simply liked, followed, reacted to, commented on, or otherwise engaged with the content on the Facebook page,” according to the ACLU. The news was first reported by Law Newz and confirmed by CNN, which obtained court documents.

• Wow:

https://twitter.com/colincampbell/status/913381077036740609

• Some people are mourning the passing of Hugh Hefner and this thread is good:

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.

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