Required Reading

‣ New York's rife with hidden artworks, and what better person to guide you through the masterpieces dotting the city than Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian? Check out his 10 recommendations on WNYC’s All of It, hosted by Alison Stewart.

‣ He also spoke with Gothamist’s Arun Venugopal this week about the Turkish government’s global project of Armenian genocide denial, including through bribing New York Mayor Eric Adams:

Vartanian revisited the aerial erasure of history amid allegations that Adams had acceded to pressure from a Turkish official in 2022 and agreed not to acknowledge Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which marks the extermination of more than 1 million Armenians. Prosecutors say this was one of several favors Adams did in exchange for illegal campaign donations and free or discounted travel.

“The day that news (of Adams’ indictment) came out it really did feel like somebody had just deflated everything around me,” Vartanian said. “To think that this is what we have to deal with, and there's this huge machine backed by a government that is ensuring that we're silenced and that the history isn't known.”

‣ Writing in Atmos, Palestinian poet Atef Alshaer reflects on the artists in Gaza whose paintings, writings, and songs immortalize the inextricable link between the people and the land:

Darwish is not alone in the representation of his people as tied—physically, emotionally, socially—to the Earth. Palestinian artists have often painted their land in ways that reflect their innermost feelings; from the paintings of Rashid Anani and Vera Tamari that depict olive and orange trees atop sunkissed hills lovingly attended to by Palestinian men and women, to paintings that searingly reflect the pain and traumas inflicted on them and the landscape by young Gazan artists like Dina Matar. The paintings are a reminder that the Earth’s ecosystems are interconnected and indivisible. Its air, water, fauna, and flora contribute to the health of us all. But in Gaza, the ongoing attack is fueling rising temperatures and explosive substances are exacerbating ecological deformity. 

Time and again, art has remained a safe staple, a secure reference point, that people take refuge in to record their presence and voice their predicament to the world. 

‣ Meanwhile, Naomi Klein examines how art, exhibitions, and memorials to the victims of Hamas’s October 7 attacks exploit trauma to stoke support for the Israeli military. In an astute essay for the Guardian, she writes:

Marianne Hirsch calls this kind of official militarized remembering “monumental memory”. But there is also something that, after Michel Foucault, she refers to as “counter-memory” – expressions of grief and mourning that bubble up from below, and are often connected to struggles for justice, collective healing, and transformation.

Though they will probably be drowned out by the monument-makers, the coming days will also see many such counter-memorials: groups of people who recognize that, despite all the wrenching double standards and dangerous weaponizations, grief is a powerful, insistent and unruly emotion. It needs somewhere to go, and it needs to be held collectively.

So, the kibbutzim will have their private rituals, in their cemeteries, while remembering the hostages they pray are still alive. IfNotNow, an organization of progressive young Jews, is holding gatherings across the US under the banner of “Every Life, a Universe”, calling for a weapons embargo, an end to Israel’s attacks on Gaza and its invasion of Lebanon, and freedom for all the captives. “Our tears are abundant enough, and our hearts are big enough, to grieve for every life taken – every universe destroyed – whether Israeli or Palestinian. It is not either, or. We need one another: Jews cannot be safe if Palestinians are not safe and free.”

‣ China’s boba-industrial complex has ballooned to gargantuan proportions in recent years, Han Zhang reports in the New Yorker, explaining its connection to issues from delivery worker rights to government restrictions on creative expression:

Tellingly, this boom has taken place during a period of increasing government control over cultural and political expression. Fewer literary titles are being published; renowned filmmakers struggle to get their films released; professors whisper about colleagues who have been reported to the Party’s disciplinary committees; feminist, civil-rights, and labor activism have been stifled. The cultural historian Carl E. Schorske observed that, in societies with narrowing political outlets—such as the one he wrote about in his famous study “Fin-De-Siecle Vienna”—the creative class tends to turn its gaze inward, retreating to the psychological and to the pursuit of personal desires. In China, a newly enriched and creatively gifted segment of the population invests itself in commerce to fill the void left behind by a restricted cultural life. And even commercial expression has its limits. A recent HEYTEA collaboration that featured cartoon Buddhas was suspended by the authorities for “using religion for commercial advertising.”

‣ In true Atlantic fashion, a recent article rehashed an argument about the crisis of reading among college and high school students — you know the one. But in a new Substack post, educator Carrie M. Santo-Thomas (who was a source for the story) rebuts this reductionist line of thinking:

Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Frustratingly, despite the numerous examples I provided of students reading books cover-to-cover in my class, Horowitch opted to include only the unit that, like the original rhapsodes of the bronze age, I excerpt and abridge. Equally frustrating is that her article implies that I was forced into that decision in order to pacify floundering students or submit to the demands of standardized testing. 

Rather, my experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they’re rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made. Luckily, we are living through a literary renaissance. Publishers are flourishing amid a profusion of stories, books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom. There is no shortage of engaging texts that students can and will read cover-to-cover. But if we insist that quality literature must come from old dead white men, we are consigning ourselves to irrelevance before we even begin. 

‣ Once again, editors come to the rescue! Emanuel Maiberg writes for 404 Media that a group known as WikiProject AI Cleanup has taken it upon themselves to shield Wikipedia from inaccurate, insidious AI-generated content:

Other instances are harder to detect. Lebleu and another WikiProject AI Cleanup founding member who goes by Queen of Hearts told me that the most “impressive” examples they found of AI-generated content on Wikipedia so far is an article about the Ottoman fortress of Amberlisihar. 

“Amberlihisar fortress was built in 1466 by Mehmed the Conqueror in Trabzon, Turkey. The fortress was designed by Armenian architect, Ostad Krikor Baghsarajian.^[7] Construction of the fortress was completed using a combination of stone and brick materials, with craftsmen and builders being brought in from the Rumelia region to work on the project. The timbery for the fortress was sourced from the forests along the coast of the Black Sea. The duration of construction is not specified, but it is known that the fortress was completed in 1466. It is likely that construction took several years to complete.^[7]”

The more than 2,000 word article is filled with cogent paragraphs like the ones above, divided into sections about its name, construction, various sieges it faced, and even restoration efforts after it “sustained significant damages as a result of bombardment by Russian forces” during World War I.” 

“One small detail, the fortress never existed,” Lebleu said. Aside from a few tangential facts mentioned in the article, like that Mehmed the Conqueror, or Mehmed II, was a real person, everything else in the article is fake. “The entire thing was an AI-generated hoax, with well-formatted citations referencing completely nonexistent works.”

‣ The United Kingdom just returned its last African colony to Mauritius, Karla Adam reports for the Washington Post:

Britain’s empire once stretched over large swaths of the globe. And even though it has relinquished control of many countries, largely during the 20th century, there are still a handful of places where Britain’s sovereignty claims are contested, such as Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.

As part of the agreement, Mauritius will now be able to resettle people on the islands of the Chagos Archipelago, with the exception of Diego Garcia. Britain and the United States evicted the island’s population in the 1960s and 1970s so the base could be built.

Chagossians have argued for decades that their rights were violated in the forced displacement, which Human Rights Watch has described as a “crime against humanity.” In 2019, the International Court of Justice said in an advisory opinion that Britain’s continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago “constitutes a wrongful act.”

‣ Lizzie Bennett may be the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, but most of us have at least a little bit of Mary in us. The long-overlooked middle child of Jane Austen's classic novel is finally getting her own BBC series, K.J. Yossman writes in Variety:

“I’m thrilled to be telling the story of Mary – the other Bennet sister – exploring what it is to come of age when you’re the odd one out,” said Quintrell. “It’s a joy to be adapting Janice Hadlow’s brilliant take on such a beloved classic with the team at Bad Wolf, and to have found our home at the BBC. I grew up (an awkward, anxious teen, getting everything wrong…) watching the BBC’s wonderful Austen adaptations. It’s the stuff every writer dreams of and I can’t wait to bring this beautiful story to screen – not least, for all the Marys out there.”

‣ Reason 68,382 why dachshunds are my favorite dogs:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DArCyx5xfzQ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

‣This is literally feminist praxis:

https://www.tiktok.com/@deskanekii/video/7421002706656972062

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.

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