Required Reading

Summer Moraes reflects on the legacy of late trans artist Greer Lankton, whose hauntingly beautiful dolls offer companionship to the misfits, in Dazed:

For Lankton, dolls were more than just kitschy objects – they were powerful, emotional extensions of herself. “(My dolls) are all freaks. Outsiders. Untouchables,” she once said. “They’re like biographies – the kind of people you’d like to know about. Really interesting and fucked up.”

Lankton’s dolls were born as much from necessity as from imagination. “She wasn’t allowed to have a doll as a kid,” Monroe tells Dazed. “So, she made them – first with flowers, then with socks. Then she realised she could bend hangers to create arms so that the dolls could move. Mostly, she just found objects like empty bleach bottles or soda bottles, which became parts of the dolls’ throats.” 

When Lankton worked on her dolls, she became completely consumed by the process, often forgetting to eat or sleep. Her dedication was obsessive. In just a few months, she could create dozens of them, each carefully hand-painted with surgical precision.

In the London Review of Books, art crime professor Erin L. Thompson recounts the downfall of a notorious antiquities smuggler who recently passed away:

By his own estimate, Tokeley-Parry smuggled three thousand antiquities out of Egypt in 65 trips over six years. His success was down to his skill as a ‘fabricator’. He made genuine antiquities appear fake by covering them in layers of conservation plastic, plaster, gaudy paint and gilt. His goal was to make a piece ‘look as much as possible like a kitsch bazaar thing, the sort that idiots buy in hotel shops’.

As long as he could convince the antiquities police guard at the airport X-ray machine that his suitcase contained a plaster souvenir instead of a stone artefact weighing ten times as much, Tokeley-Parry was in the clear. Given that he risked a long sentence with hard labour, his trips through the airport were so nerve-wracking that Tokeley-Parry described them as ‘a brown trouser job’.

Our favorite Regency-era Sagittarius has a big birthday coming up! Sarah Lyall has all the details about how readers are marking Jane Austen's 250th birthday this winter, writing in the New York Times:

Austen was born 250 years ago, which makes this a particularly exciting year for her admirers — not that they need an excuse to throw a party. Perhaps uniquely among the great novelists of the English language, Austen lends herself to broad-based in-person fandom. You don’t see people getting worked up like this over, say, Dickens or Twain.

Partly it’s because, as layered as her novels are, she completed just six of them: works of near-perfection written in a burst of creativity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

“You can be a Jane Austen expert very quickly,” said Gill Hornby, the president of the Jane Austen Society U.K. and author, most recently, of “The Elopement,” a novel based on the lives of Austen’s extended family. “To read everything that Jane Austen wrote is utterly possible.”

Communities across the country are mourning the loss of Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest survivor of the Tulsa Massacre. She spent her 111 years advocating for racial justice and reparations for her fellow survivors, reports CNN's Omar Jimenez:

In June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit from the survivors, arguing they should be compensated by the city for damages — dealing a blow to their ongoing fight for reparations more than 100 years after the attack.

“When I think about Mother Fletcher, I don’t just see a historic figure or a symbol. I see a woman I sat with, prayed with, laughed with, and went to court with,” Damario Solomon-Simmons said as part of a statement to CNN. He was the lead attorney representing the survivors in their lawsuit.

Thanksgiving, as we know, is already a cursed and genocidal holiday. The only thing that could possibly make it worse is here: AI slop recipes. Davey Alba and Carmen Arroyo have the story for Bloomberg:

Recipe bloggers like Gargano said it’s the first holiday season where consumers are starting to trust AI answers in search and chatbots, as well as recipe content remixed by AI, which can be hard to distinguish from the real thing. That’s not just bad for business; it’s potentially ruinous for a holiday dinner table if home cooks, inspired by pretty AI-generated photos, try recipes that turn out unappetizing or that defy the laws of chemistry. In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.

Help, they're telling women to be "low maintenance" by spending hundreds of dollars on regular beauty treatments again ...

It's called art using FOUND MATERIALS:

Kinda hate that even "chronically offline" as a trend is subject to commodification, but it's a start, and perhaps a good sign for 2026:

Born to dilly-dally, forced to host your friends every holiday:

She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment:

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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