Required Reading

Scholar Rachel Cohen considers Joan Mitchell's paintings in the context of letters and the written word, offering a refreshing perspective for the Yale Review:

I stood for an hour and a half before the two-panel Preface for Chris (1973), in a state of uplifted contemplation with absolutely no idea who Chris was. It was a sunny, cool day in July. At the Cranbrook Art Museum, my Mitchell studies were again being helped by others: Madlyn Moskowitz, the museum’s registrar, who had recently supervised the diptych’s reframing, and Caitlin Haskell, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the left panel of Preface for Chris, vertical rectangles of dark blue and mint green are clumped together with a periwinkle cloud and calligraphic dark marks. On the right, space is more open. Each dark rectangle has its own area, and a similar periwinkle cloud, calligraphied through with oxblood, hovers at the top of the painting. Seen in person, the oblongs of deep blue and oxblood seemed book-shaped, or possibly like the clustered shape of a poem, floating in the sustained atmosphere of whites and pale yellows. I thought the two panels could be two pages, the join a spine. Or they could be letters sent back and forth across the breakages: Vétheuil to New York, Los Angeles, or Paris. Or, again, the correspondence could be interior, different states of talking to oneself.

A film about five-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed by the Israeli military in Gaza in January 2024, has just hit theaters. Vulture's E. Alex Jung explains the choice to use the recording of Hind's call to emergency aid and how the filmmaker tells the heartbreaking story of her murder with sensitivity and conviction:

The Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania first heard Hind’s voice while she was waiting for a flight at LAX in February 2024. The Red Crescent had released snippets of the call in the days after it lost contact with its colleagues and before it would be able to discover their bodies. Ben Hania had been on the road campaigning for her film Four Daughters, which had been nominated for Best Documentary at the Oscars. After the awards-show circuit was over, she was preparing to shoot her next feature, Mimesis, a film about beauty, poetry, and Islamic art that she had been working on since 2014. But she heard Hind’s plea as if it were directed toward her. “I thought she was asking me to rescue her because her voice was so immediate and strong,” Ben Hania remembers. What was the artist’s responsibility in a time of genocide? She called her longtime producer, Nadim Cheikhrouha, and told him Mimesis would have to wait again. “My first thought was, That film is cursed,” he says. “But when she told me she wanted to do something about what is happening, I thought, I totally understand.”

In the wake of the recent shooting at Brown, sophomore Zoe Weissman told the Cut about the unconscionable reality that many students in the United States — including her — have survived more than one school shooting:

The school went on lockdown for the next 12 hours. I was on the phone pretty consistently with my parents. They were trying to stay calm for me, but I could tell they were freaking out. It felt exactly like the reaction they had during Parkland, but because I’m older now, I was more aware of it. I felt really bad for them, having to go through this all over again. Once they knew I wasn’t in the building, their concern became how I was doing mentally.

I was just in shock. I was also really angry. Not only did this happen to me again, but up until this point, surviving a shooting felt isolating in part because no one else has really been through it. Now, at Brown we all share this experience, and I hate that.

The famously unfunny Zarna Garg recently spewed pro-Trump nonsense that echoes the beliefs of conservative, casteist swaths of South Asian America, Yashica Dutt writes in her Substack:

Families like Garg’s, 1. who harbor these conservative views, 2. prefer their ‘handsome sons’ to their daughters who wait endlessly to move up on the list to be their mother’s best friends, 3. believe that becoming a doctor or an engineer should be the apotheosis of their children’s existence, 4. conform to unhealthy family dynamics where the only recourse to a poor relationship with your mother-in-law is to make her nucleus of your business plan, 5. are convinced that Indians back home don’t care about misinformation (!), 6. paint Hinduism ‘as the most liberal religion’ (like it it does not posses the founding of intense caste hierarchies) and 7. whole-heartedly support Trump, certainly don’t represent ALL Indian Americans. But they do represent a huge majority of the current Indian American population, especially ones that wield immense, wealth and power in the United States.

What would the fashion industry look like if each garment had a passport? Daphne Chouliaraki Milner considers a proposal in the works in the EU for Atmos:

“It’s still early days, but at the moment it’s not that much more than a digital hang tag,” said Tina Wiegand, lecturer at Hof University with a focus on sustainability, circular economics, and digitalisation in the European textile and clothing industry. “What I hope for is a passport that shows me as a consumer the whole supply chain, so that I can make informed decisions and compare two T-shirts on their sustainability impact.”

For these passports to live up to their promise, they must work for everyone: regulators and consumers, yes—but also for the people who make our clothes, as well as those who repair and recycle them. As the industry approaches a critical inflection point, one that will determine whether this tool drives real accountability across the supply chain or simply reinforces existing blind spots, what happens next depends on whose voices are heard. There’s still time to get this right, and the people who live and work inside the system are already pointing the way.

In Iceland, a tradition of gifting books every Christmas began amid World War II import blockades and continues today. Katherine Cooper reflects in the New World:

This also forms an important part of the national story of Iceland – keeping alive a language which is only spoken by a relatively small number of people is very difficult in a globalised publishing world. The Icelandic government works hard to support writers to keep the Icelandic language vibrant and to support the smaller print runs of Icelandic books. They offer a living wage to a select number of writers each year to support their work and make publishing in the Icelandic language more economically viable.

But as well as supporting local talent, readers in Iceland are naturally outward-looking in their book choices too. Kjartan says: “The tradition kind of sits at the intersection of those two impulses: sustaining our own literary life while staying curious about the rest of the world. We are, after all, a very small island stuck in the middle of nowhere between two continents.”

Karoline, evidently, was not ready for her close-up:

@lizzieloupp Such an interesting artistic choice #karolineleavitt #vanityfair #photoshoot #joke #fypage ♬ Fashion show sound that enhances the model!(221809) - UNchan

As if we needed a clearer sign:

WATCH: Replica of the Statue of Liberty topples due to strong winds in Guaíba, Brazil

[image or embed]

— BNO News (@bnonews.com) December 15, 2025 at 4:26 PM

Can we please agree to leave clunky two-factor authentication in 2025?

@ethanforyou Two-factor authentication will be my downfall #corporatelife ♬ original sound - Ethan Judelson

POV: You’re in my room the week before Christmas and I’m still determined to hand-make all my gifts (sorry to all of my family members):

@nataliejeng.art RIP my celllphoneeee 😭 she has so much paint on herrr #art #painting #realisticart #artstudio #artaesthetics ♬ original sound - _meltingflower

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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