Required Reading

‣ Mosaic artists are filling potholes, sidewalk cracks, and other urban fissures with burts of color. Sumaiya Motara reports on these bits of "unexpected joy" for the Guardian:

Tessa Hunkin, leader of the Hackney Mosaic Project, has been bringing people with mental health and addiction problems together to create murals around east London since 2012. “A lot of people carry a huge burden of shame,” says the 71-year-old. “They feel they’ve messed up their lives. It’s great for them to have something to be proud of and to show their families.” Her new book, Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project, showcases these colourful installations, often featuring detailed motifs of plants, animals and historical figures. “Walking through the city is endlessly interesting, and the more interesting things that you can add, the more fun the city becomes,” she says.

Another London mosaic artist who goes by the name of Florist once received 300 hours of community service for graffiti as a teenager. He stopped soon after, but his love of art was rekindled when, nine months ago, he began installing pixelated designs on buildings he considers eyesores. “To come back full circle and do it now is quite a beautiful thing for me, because it was always what I loved. I was obsessed with colour and shapes.” His work features his pseudonym Florist alongside 8-bit-style flowers, made out of glass – “because it dances in the sunlight”.

‣ Mosques in India have long been under attack by the growing Hindu fascist movement, which also extends into the diaspora. Nikita Jain and Nayla Khwaja investigate the demolition of these sacred sites for Polis Project:

In March this year, Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s tomb in Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar had to be put under heavy security after Hindu outfits like Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal threatened a “Babri Masjid-like fate” if their demand to remove the structure was not met by the state government. VHP and Bajrang Dal members also staged a protest in front of the Nagpur District Collector’s office over their demand to remove Aurangzeb’s tomb. Hours after, clashes erupted amid rumours that a cloth bearing the Islamic declaration of faith, or Kalma, had been burned during the protest, prompting stone-pelting at the police. This eventually led to the arrest of around 100 people, including several Muslims.

The spate of mosque and mazar demolitions across India in early 2025 — from Bet Dwarka and Ujjain to Bahraich and Dibrugarh — reflects a distinct pattern of religious structures being targeted by encroachment drives.  There is no concrete data available for incidents of mosque demolition or attempts at the same. To present a rough idea of the scale, The Polis Project recorded 15 cases from media reports in the first six months of 2025.

‣ For New Lines Magazine, William Gourley reports on a trove of nearly 300 photographs of Iraqi Yazidi communities from the 1930s and what its rediscovery, some 90 years later, signifies about Yazidi cultural reclamation amid ongoing persecution:

Nadia Murad, who escaped slavery under the Islamic State and won the Nobel Peace Prize, recently lamented that genocide “reduces human beings to lists and numbers.” The Sersal Project works against this: It puts human faces on the Yazidis. Marin Webb explained that the exhibition raises awareness of the precarious plight of the Yazidis, but also of their cause and their identity: One of his Yazidi contacts celebrated that the photographs “show who we are.”

This, in turn, plays a part in a wider embracing of Yazidi traditions and identity among the younger generations. As has happened the world over, the fast pace of modern life, rife with trends, fashions and fads, saw young Yazidis distancing themselves from their folklore, music and history. Marin Webb’s Yazidi contact told me that hate campaigns against Yazidis during the upheavals in Iraq after the U.S. invasion accelerated this, prompting some to conceal their identity and heritage. But he noted that the tide has turned since 2014, and there is now a growing appreciation for traditions and the patterns of life as it used to be. It is not just older generations who have enjoyed seeing photographs of their forebears — Yazidi youth have also flocked to the exhibitions, recognizing that they are testimony and affirmation of their traditions, culture and presence in Iraq’s sociopolitical landscape.

‣ Beloved disability justice advocate Alice Wong passed away at 51 this week, 19th News's Sata Luterman writes:

As her disability progressed, Wong acquired more mechanical support. She conceptualized herself as a “disabled cyborg” and the advancement of her condition as “cyborg turning points” in her 2022 memoir, “The Year of the Tiger.”

“I am a disabled cyborg that has gone through another series of augmentations that extended her life until another system fails,” she told The Guardian earlier this year. 

One of Wong’s more recent cyborg components was the use of text-to-speech software, after she lost the ability to speak. She became an advocate for people who use augmentative and alternative communication through her work on the advisory council for CommunicationFirst, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting and advancing the rights of nonspeakers, as well as others who cannot rely on speech alone to be understood.

‣ With the Epstein Files back in the news, critic Jeet Heer writes about the trafficker's troubling influence on warmongering and global policy in the Nation:

The Jeffrey Epstein story makes no sense unless you realize that he was deeply entrenched in the foreign policy elite, a fact that gave him much of the impunity he enjoyed for most of his life. Powerful people felt comfortable around Epstein because he was one of them. He had the same neoliberal worldview that has dominated the US elite since the end of the Cold War. He was a believer in the Washington Consensus, US military hegemony bolstered in the Middle East by the alliance with Israel, globalization, the privatization of government functions, STEM-dominated education, and male-centered sexual hedonism—an ethos he took to sickening extremes.

In a 2015 e-mail to Barak, Epstein reflected that “many corporations are looking for a new military like perspective on mgmt.” This fusion of the corporate culture with militarism is one of the hallmarks of the neoliberal era. Epstein was at the forefront of this development.

‣ Maia Wyman — aka YouTuber Broey Deschanel — has a fascinating personal essay on reckoning with vocal fry and its misogyny-mired history in Majuscule:

In most cases, the voice is not “put on” at all, but rather one of many vocal registers slipped into, unknowingly, at different moments in time. The popular podcast This American Life dedicated an entire episode to the subject of vocal fry after receiving a barrage of angry feedback about the voice of one of its hosts, Hannah Joffe-Walt. Much to her surprise. On TikTok, comedian Delaney Rowe parodies “insufferable female characters,” her comments littered with quips like: “painful watch as always!” or “this made my skin crawl, you’re so good.” Under one video someone said, “the vocal fry is so accurate!” “That’s just my voice,” she responded.

When it comes to vocal fry, we’re all confused. But stringing together our cultural response towards this irksome “habit” is an accusation of falseness on the part of the woman. That vocal fry is a tool she uses (intentionally or not) to conceal what she really cares about or wants, so irritating as to render null and void whatever thoughts had been floating around in her brain before arriving at the opening of her mouth. With widespread reports that vocal fry has no particular semantic or grammatical content, that there’s no real meaning behind it, philosophers Monika Chao and Julia R. S. Bursten observe in Hypatia, “a common reaction to it […] is a reaction that refuses to engage with the said content of women’s speech.”

‣ A new study dates the first kiss to 21 million years ago, BBC's Victoria Gill reports, ft. some absolutely adorable photos of smooching primates:

In this study, scientists found behaviour that matched their scientific definition of kissing in wolves, prairie dogs, polar bears (very sloppy - lots of tongue), and even albatrosses.

They focused on primates - and apes in particular - in order to build an evolutionary picture of the origin of the human kiss.

The same study also concluded that Neanderthals - our closest ancient human relatives that died out around 40,000 years ago - also kissed.

‣ Yet another reason to protect queer art:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRNJRqcCR6j/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

‣ Ah yes, the newspaper of record ...

https://www.tiktok.com/@xiandivyne/video/7571559454316006687

‣ As soon as the sun starts setting at 4pm:

https://www.tiktok.com/@zzzachariah/video/7574570456330587406

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises 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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