Required Reading

• Happy Pride Day! Let’s start this week’s Required Reading with a “coming out” story of sorts. This one is written by Shannon Keating and it’s titled:

The Time I Went On A Lesbian Cruise And It Blew Up My Entire Life

• Everyone is talking about E. Jean Carroll’s excellent essay about the time President Trump sexually assaulted her. You must read it:

So now I will tell you what happened:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

• Daisy Alioto writes about the “gentlefictation” of graffiti:

In 2016, a study by Warwick Business School used Flickr uploads to analyze the relationship between photos of street art and London property values. “[T]he researchers’ analysis revealed that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of ‘art’ photographs also experienced greater relative gains in property prices.”

And in America, as crime dropped in the 1990s and affluent college graduates enacted a great migration from the suburbs to the country’s cities, graffiti became the literal poster board for the “authentic” urban culture they were seeking—driving up prices along the way. It was only a matter of time before the artists themselves got wise.

• Raquel Salas Rivera and Carina del Valle Schorske discuss “Latinx poetics and what it means to be a Puerto Rican poet and translator after the devastation of Hurricane Maria”:

I found you when I was actively searching for poetic predecessors on the island, out from my mother’s profound disillusionment with the misogyny of the Nuyorican poetry scene in which she participated in the ’70s. I had just begun translating Marigloria Palma’s work from the same period as a kind of evasion or alternate route, depending on the day. Google took me to you through her: I found you reading her poems about New York on YouTube—“Nueva York con paloma.” Spanish doesn’t lie about the fact that “doves” and “pigeons” are the same birds, so the shared word is able to embrace both romance and contamination, an urban intimacy.

• Wondering why the Hong Kong protesters are still on the streets? Jason Li has a helpful guide for you:

• Rashid Khalidi calls out the arrogance of the Trump/Kushner vision, if you can even call it that, for the Middle East:

These are only some of the ways that the administration of which Kushner is part has made its contempt for the Palestinians apparent. In recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, it has unilaterally taken an issue Israel is treaty-bound to negotiate with the Palestinians off the table, and reversed seventy-plus years of US policy, while ignoring an international consensus that the city’s final status would be subject to a mutually acceptable peace agreement. The Trump administration has also explicitly avoided endorsing a two-state solution or any form of Palestinian sovereignty, positions Kushner reiterated in his interview. It closed the Palestinian mission in Washington, D.C., and cut off US aid to the Palestinian Authority. It claimed that, contrary to the status of all other refugees since World War II, the descendants of Palestinians, declared refugees in 1948, are not themselves refugees. Finally, in endorsing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, the Trump administration has cleared the way for the annexation of whatever parts of the West Bank Israel should choose to swallow up.

• Over at Mother Jones, Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery explain to us how Facebook screwed everyone:

In the case of social platforms, their power is over the currency of democracy: information. Nearly 70 percent of American adults say they get some of their news via social media. That’s a huge shift not just in terms of distribution, but in terms of quality control, too. In the past, virtually all the institutions distributing news had verification standards of some kind, no matter how thin or compromised, before publication. Facebook has none. Right now, we could concoct almost any random “news” item and, for as little as $3 a day to “boost” it via the platform’s advertising engine, get it seen by up to 3,400 people each day as if it were just naturally showing up in their feed.

• Did you know slaveholders were given reparations? Tera H. Hunter opines at the New York Times:

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill emancipating enslaved people in Washington, the end of a long struggle. But to ease slaveowners’ pain, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act paid those loyal to the Union up to $300 for every enslaved person freed.

That’s right, slaveowners got reparations. Enslaved African-Americans got nothing for their generations of stolen bodies, snatched children and expropriated labor other than their mere release from legal bondage.

• Gillian Brockell writes about how Oklahoma’s Fort Sill, which is scheduled to house migrant children, was the site of the incarceration of 350 Japanese Americans during WWII, in addition to being the longtime prison for Apache leader Geronimo, from 1894 until his death in 1909:

In fact, Fort Sill has a long history of holding children.

It was established in 1869 for U.S. soldiers fighting Native Americans. In 1894, eight years after Apache leader Geronimo had surrendered, he was transferred to Fort Sill. He was joined by nearly 400 other Apaches, including women and children. They could move freely inside Fort Sill’s large area, and some, including Geronimo, were allowed to leave to perform in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. But they were still considered prisoners of war.

• Sometimes history repeats itself:

• I have no idea but OMG:

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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