Required Reading

Editor’s Note: The following post contains mentions of self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

‣ We're finally witnessing the demise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which influenced the film industry in more negative ways than we might realize. The Nation's Kyle Paoletta has an eye-opening read for my fellow recovering Captain America stans (no shame):

Over the past 16 years, Feige’s tenure at Marvel Studios has generated $26 billion, making him the most revered Hollywood producer since Robert Evans presided over Paramount in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet while Evans successfully fostered a generation of directorial talent—the so-called New Hollywood of Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, and John Schlesinger—Feige’s innovation has been to wrest control of the creative process from the directors and writers, running movie production from the C-suite down.

Both Evans and Feige were known to exercise the power of final cut on their pictures, but while Coppola once reflected that Evans’s habit of deeply embedding himself within the quotidian churn of a film’s creation meant that, “ultimately, a mysterious kind of taste comes out; he backs away from bad ideas and accepts good ones,” there’s nothing mysterious about Feige’s taste. In an earlier interview with Joanna Robinson for Vanity Fair, Feige called himself “obsessed with deep mythologies.” Though he pays lip service to the idea that each individual film ought to stand on its own, Feige has always been most animated when talking in the lingua franca of the comic book nerd—continuity, or the ability to “bring that experience that hardcore comic readers have had for decades of Spider-Man swinging into the Fantastic Four headquarters, or for Hulk to suddenly come rampaging through the pages of an Iron Man comic…there is something just inherently great about that: seeing characters’ worlds collide with one another.”

‣ Activist and writer William Chan penned a moving personal essay on An American Soldier, an opera based on the story of 19-year-old Danny Chen, who died by suicide after being abused by fellow White soldiers. Chan reflects on racism, his own role in the military, and the conclusion that "maybe the most patriotic thing we can do is be less American" for the Amp:

The reality of my mental health sank in. I had sought mental help before, but never could stay with it. I couldn’t bear the possibility of leaving my son, who was in elementary school at the time, with the kind of baggage and burden that could come as a result of not dealing with myself. I went to the VA for help and committed to it. It took two years of therapy and medication but it changed my life. With their help, I reconciled all the separate compartments into one—no more fighting myself subconsciously.

Life is mostly staying alive and evolving. I’m grateful for who I am today but none of it alleviates my accountability as a soldier in Iraq. I’m not the victim in my story. No one forced me to join the Army or go to Iraq. I did it because I was young and selfish. Like Chen, I wanted to fit in and belong in America. I was happy to overlook all the killings and injustices if it meant I could be seen as more of an American. Like Chen, I was ultimately betrayed by those pursuits. I was lucky enough to survive.

‣ Zara Chowdhary has a new book out about living through the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat, India, during which Hindu nationalist mobs killed hundreds of Muslim people while police and politicians sat idly by. Critic Bilal Qureshi writes for the Washington Post:

The writer now resides and teaches in Wisconsin, and the book is a fierce critique of Modi’s India, but also a requiem for and reclamation of her family’s secular India that contained — and can still contain — multitudes. That past life was interconnected across class, caste and religion, with Hindu deities dancing alongside Sufi songs, and with public servants dedicated to the national state denying the calls of tribalism. Chowdhary’s professional background in film and advertising is reflected in the powerful and flickering scenes that intersperse the narrative. There are brief and potent evocations of sense memory, and the melancholy of a home and country left behind. There is palpable love for the culture and language into which Chowdhary came of age, as she describes the nostalgia-tinged fragrance of neighborhood flowers and her mother’s cooking. But a seething and understandable political rage also courses through the memoir, searching for both catharsis and a kind of literary retribution. In writing into the void where erasure and degradation once reigned, Chowdhary resurrects her family’s lost Indian Muslim dignity to ensure they are accounted for as citizenry.

‣ Following misconduct allegations and notoriously fatphobic and racist messaging, how did Abercrombie & Fitch manage a comeback? Chantal Fernandez investigates its downfall and recent rebrand for the Cut:

“Huh” just about sums things up. The Abercrombie brand, once an easy cultural punching bag, now brings in more revenue than it did when it dominated teen culture in the aughts. (Last year, sales reached $2.2 billion.) Its namesake parent company, which also includes the beachy teen retailer Hollister, is now the toast of Wall Street and a curious case study for business reporters. The stock is one of the best-performing of the last two years, with growth outpacing even AI-chip giant Nvidia.

To get here, Abercrombie’s leaders did something deceptively simple. They killed almost everything the preppy, testosterone-driven brand once stood for — sex, privilege, wealth, good breeding. Today’s Abercrombie has replaced that fantasy with a humble practicality, offering a reasonably priced uniform for the TikTok-adjacent life where every outfit is familiar but unidentifiable, minimalist but just trendy enough. The result is less a rebranding than an unbranding, untethered from any particular aesthetic. And yet this iteration of Abercrombie says just as much about American style today as it did 20 years ago. Because without the logo, what exactly are we buying?

‣ Journalist Sarah Jaffe looks back on the life and work of fierce union advocate Jane McAlevey, who passed away earlier this month at age 59. For the Baffler, she writes:

Raising Expectations is as much tell-all as organizing manual, but it was Jane’s second book, published in 2016—by an academic press, no less—that turned her into as much of a household name as any labor organizer can be in what she called “the new Gilded Age.” No Shortcuts, based on her dissertation, is a distillation of her argument for organizing rather than what she called “shallow mobilizing”; for high-participation, democratic unions; for the value of training and sharing skills; and, though this is less often remarked upon, for the importance and power of care workers’ unions in a world that still too often thinks “real” workers are men in hard hats.

The decline of deep organizing, she argued, is the real cause of the decline of progressive, or left, power. By organizing, once again, she meant building “a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mess of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all.”

‣ Issy Ronald reports for CNN on a new malaria vaccine that was just administered to children in Côte d'Ivoire, an overdue step toward making innoculations available across West Africa:

The vaccine costs less than $4 a dose, making it “realistic to roll out in many tens of millions of doses from now on,” and it has high efficacy levels of around 75%-80% in young children, Professor Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, who led the development of the vaccine, said in an interview with BBC Radio on Monday.

Up to 500,000 child deaths could be saved every year with the widespread implementation of R21, alongside its counterpart RTS,S vaccine, according to modeling by the World Health Organization (WHO).

‣ The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Thomas J. Watson Library celebrated World Emoji Day this week with snapshots from the ~iconic~ 2010 book Emoji Dick; or, 🐳 :

https://www.instagram.com/p/C9hsEiOIRor/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

‣ Life imitates architectural history:

‣ Nobody pulls out receipts quite like a ’90s R&B classic:

https://www.tiktok.com/@alinaswe_._/video/7389970494864248070

‣ Olympics a la Fleabag: 

‣ Not the Titanic Museum gift shop selling "survivor" bracelets ... whatever floats your boat, I guess?

https://www.tiktok.com/@natcox_/video/7391278715713621294

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.

• Art
• Required Reading