Required Reading
This week: Street art memorializes Sonya Massey, the history of women’s athletic clothing, an Olympic cheese sponsorship, women rule BookTok, plucky astronauts, and more.
‣ Beyond their architectural and social history, it turns out porches played a key role in early American epidemiology, the New Yorker’s David Owen explains:
In warm weather, flies and other insects complicated the efforts of almost anyone trying to keep cool or to gain the putative health benefits of exposure to outside air. One defense, beginning in the late eighteen-hundreds, was flypaper, sheets of which were coated on one side with an oleaginous substance that lured flies, then permanently trapped them. A leading brand, invented by a pharmacist in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was Tanglefoot, a trade name that at one time was as familiar to American consumers as Kleenex and Xerox were later. Tanglefoot and similar products were used so widely that Allied soldiers during the First World War were told that they could identify the poison gas chloropicrin because it “smells like flypaper.”
‣ For Smithsonian Magazine, Dina Gachman looks into the long tradition of telling female athletes what they can and cannot wear — and the ways women Olympians have rebelled over the past two centuries:
The Olympic Charter lays out a specific set of guidelines for athlete clothing, mainly focused on corporate logos and symbols, down to the centimeter. This year’s Paris Olympics will be the first in history to have full gender parity, meaning an equal number of male and female athletes will be competing. The Paris 1900 games were the first to include female athletes, who competed in tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism and golf.
Female athletes have fought back against the governing bodies of their sports to protest things like white shorts, which caused “period anxiety,” and hijabs, which will be a closely watched issue at this year’s Olympics. France has banned the head covering in public schools for 20 years, and it is also prohibited by the French Football Federation.
“If athletes want to change [the rules], they have to go through a governing body,” says Susan Sokolowski, an expert on sports product design at the University of Oregon. “The rules come from deep-rooted histories.”
‣ Journalist Tariq Mir reflects on the five years since India revoked Kashmiri's constitutional autonomy, escalating its occupation and the constriction of Kashmiri people's freedom. He writes for the New York Review of Books:
Modi said that the revocation of Article 370 would “integrate” Kashmir into India. In fact it marks the onset of a settler-colonial project. After decades of suffering under army occupation and violent counterinsurgency, the region is now exposed to Indian settlers and industrialists. Kashmiris justifiably fear being turned into a minority in their own homeland and eventually driven out. In November 2019 Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s consul-general in New York City, told a gathering of expatriates that settlements have “happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.”
‣ My fellow tiramisu fans and I are mourning the death of the dessert's inventor, Italian chef Roberto Linguanotto. Sofia Andrade writes about his legacy and decades-long career for the Washington Post:
Friends and colleagues remember Linguanotto as a humble “man of few words,” which is perhaps why he didn’t publicly acknowledge himself as the creator of tiramisu until later in life, long after the dessert’s popularity had spread.
He wouldn’t have considered himself a baker, either. According to Francesco Redi, founder of the Tiramisu World Cup (an international baking competition) and a frequent collaborator with Linguanotto, the chef was much more in love with gelato, which he learned to make at a young age before briefly immigrating to Germany for work and finally coming back to Treviso. After Le Beccherie, he even opened his own gelateria where tiramisu was a menu fixture. But it was his signature no-bake dessert, and not his ice cream, that made him a known figure in some culinary circles.
‣ This Olympian is officially sponsored by parmesan cheese, and I am extremely jealous. Koh Ewe takes a look at the partnership and its truly priceless promotional photoshoots with wheels of cheese for Time:
Parmigiano Reggiano says parmesan is “suitable for a sports diet,” and Villa is not the only Italian athlete it has sponsored—others include tennis player Jannik Sinner, fencer Matteo Neri, basketballer Nico Mannion, and paralympic swimmer Giulia Ghiretti. (Health experts agree that the hard cheese is “highly nutritious,” being protein-rich, energy-dense, and naturally lactose-free.)
Villa, for her part, clearly dedicated herself to the (cheese) grind—or, should we say rind?
Across at least 20 posts on Instagram/Facebook and TikTok between April 2021 and December 2022, she’s posted sponsored content showing off wheels, blocks, and bite-sized packets of parmesan.
‣ This isn't news to any regular BookTok spectators, but we love to see statistical proof of the romantasy genre's reign:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C-DYgovTsl4/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
‣ An unreal shot of a Brazilian surfer posing mid-air:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C-DiaFXPdTt/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
‣ These two plucky astronauts are stuck at the International Space Station ... in the words of Jennifer Aniston, "I love your confidence":
https://www.tiktok.com/@thenewsmovement/video/7390472065058426143
‣ If only every landlord were this lax:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-D0bYYyRyU/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
‣ Looks like someone forgot to engage their core!:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9-CP2NsAp-/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
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.
