‣ Novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his visits with British painter Celia Paul, whose iterative practice and bewitching portraits he captures in a New Yorker piece excerpted from the artist’s new monograph:
In 2020, Paul painted the same chair three times. It stands in an empty room, bathed in the light of a window to the right. Nearly every detail in the room is erased, the only things that can be discerned are the floor and the wall. It is a moment, but nearly all the information it contained has been removed.
The painting seems alive. The chair is not alive, the wall and the floor are not alive, and the light is not alive. And yet the painting seems just that, alive. This is, I think, because the painting consists of encounters. The chair first meets the gaze of the painter, who paints a chair on a canvas. It emerges brushstroke by brushstroke, in a long-drawn-out moment, continually adjusted, and there are two chairs in play, one of them unchanging in a changeable moment, which is the chair in the room, and another changeable in an unchanging moment, which is the chair on the canvas. The painting is alive in the sense that it arises out of a process, led and corrected by the artist’s gaze, but also by her ideas, emotions, and expectations, until she considers the painting finished and it is our gaze it encounters. We see not the chair in itself, as that is for sitting on, but the moment it represents, the here and now it lifts forth. Not the world, but our connection to the world.
‣ Writing for Lux Magazine, Cheryl Rivera gives us a glimpse into the process of creating the New York War Crimes, a guerrilla publication we first covered in November 2023 that counters the New York Times‘s skewed coverage of the genocide in Palestine:
The fact that the New York War Crimes is a physical paper is key, though it introduces some challenges. To make the paper look convincingly like the real New York Times, we needed to find the paper’s typeface. Luckily, we knew someone who knew someone with access to the typeface and layout. This is the benefit of WAWOG: We were the people who made the mainstream press possible, in part, and the divestment of our labor from those publications means that we can bring our skills, experience, and shit we stole from those places over to the New York War Crimes.
Before the paper goes to print, there is a collective review of each piece. Imagine a magazine’s editorial process and then imagine it just a little bit more chaotic. Art is sourced from archives or occasionally created by members or friends of the paper. Once the text has closed, typically one or two designers lay out the issue, which takes about a week or less. After the editorial collective for that issue reviews the proofs, they are sent to a printer in Long Island City, who is able to produce the thousands of copies needed with a one-day turnaround. They leave the papers out on the loading docks for us and we do a typical New York scramble to find a car for the day.
Printing thousands of papers requires cash and we’re lucky to have easily fundraised through our Twitters, Instagrams, and at our magazine job happy hours. For those who are sympathetic to the cause but cannot express their views at their jobs, we always welcome cash donations. Despite the initial relative ease, it remains true for us and all alternative left publications that money is a constraint. One of the ongoing tasks for left media in general is to figure out how to take the profits of the empire and invest them in tools that work against empire.
‣ Poet Will Frazier shares a lovely tribute to David Lynch from his father, whom the late filmmaker once gifted a painting that still hangs in their home. In the Yale Review, Bill Frazier writes:
David lived with his family in a neighborhood full of 1940s and ’50s houses. I lived with my brother and his wife in an apartment complex. I told David that they needed artwork to hang on the walls. I said, “Why don’t you paint a row house scene of Old Town?” I had no idea what he would do. When he’d finished the painting, I remember thinking, Why would you paint something all in blue? But that was David. I was sort of literal-minded. I thought I was going to get a realistic painting of the streets where we spent so much time. My brother paid him fifty dollars for it. I think my brother was very diplomatic about it. It probably wasn’t to his taste, but he hung it on the wall for years.
‣ For Atmos, journalist Paloma Dupont de Dinechin reports on the generational practice of Palestinian olive tree cultivation in the Occupied West Bank, which is increasingly under attack by Israeli settlers:
The next day, when Rabbis for Peace continued its mission of being a “protective presence” in the Arab village of Deir Jarir in Ramallah, about 20 settlers attacked the volunteers with sticks and stones. Images of the assault showed hooded men beating Palestinian farmers and members of the organization.
In other areas of Bethlehem, Palestinians struggle to access land that legally belongs to them. Landowners like Ibrahim Salameh and his family are required to obtain special permits. Their modest plot of land with 100 old olive trees, once accessible on foot in just 30 minutes from their family home, now lies under a bridge linking Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank. This area is off limits to Palestinians without Israeli papers, except on presentation of a special permit—even for the olive harvest.
Salameh, 36, said the permitting process is convoluted. They must place requests to the Palestinian authorities, who then seek permission from the Israeli authorities. This year, he was granted just two days to collect his olives, but because he stayed two minutes later than the permit allowed on day one, he lost his second day of access. “They’re playing with us. Last year, they gave us the permit when half the olives were already rotting on the ground,” he said.
‣ Modi ally and religious leader Sadhguru’s thinly veiled fascism has the internet buzzing again, this time sparked by a visit from Sza. But she’s far from the first person to be taken in by his use of Hindu spirituality to mask far-right politics (yoga-washing, if you will). Simran Thapliyal breaks down India’s “wellness to alt-right pipeline” for Prospect Magazine:
Jaggi Vasudev, more popularly known as Sadhguru, is a guru cashing in on spiritual healing. After claiming to have attained enlightenment at 25, he has expanded his acquired wisdom into a multi-million-dollar business with 1.7bn views on YouTube.
In 2017, Modi unveiled an 80ft statue designed by Sadhguru and funded by his spiritual and educational foundation. He has also been the chief guest in the guru’s various environmentalist campaigns.
In turn, Sadhguru extended support to the Modi government’s controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which discriminates against Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan by making them ineligible for citizenship, thereby introducing religion as a criterion for citizenship for the first time in the history of independent India. This, along with a series of other policy changes, plays into Hindutva’s overarching aim to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra (in other words, a theocratic or semi-theocratic Hindu polity or state).
‣ Nikki Marín Baena writes for Teen Vogue about the history of ICE neighborhood watch programs, how to start one, and how to run it responsibly:
In 2017, following a previous set of Trump executive orders, immigrant families in North Carolina were inundated by misinformation and rumors about ICE agents hidden in grocery store parking lots and supposed substations near after-school facilities, leading some people to avoid leaving home. There was no Spanish-language rumor verification hotline here in Greensboro, so our organization — which was just a handful of volunteers at the time — created one, giving more people the ability to talk to a live human and ask whether an undated Facebook post they’d seen shared by someone else was real. We also trained hundreds of volunteers with driver’s licenses to participate in an ICE Watch neighborhood watch program, giving immigrant parents a way to verify the rumors people forwarded them in WhatsApp.
‣ Orphan tropes dot American film and TV, but as Kristen Martin explains in her new book, the history and present of orphanhood couldn’t be more different. Speaking with Heather Radke for the Baffler, she describes the harm these imagined narratives cause:
There’s a fantasy of individualism where Annie makes money for herself and helps other people at the same time. For example, Annie inspires Daddy Warbucks’s rich friends to adopt her friends from the orphanage. There’s this idea that if people who have more are taught to have more goodness in their hearts, and they’re willing to help, that they will fix everything for the people who don’t have enough. Meanwhile, the residents of the Hoovervilles in the musical aren’t getting shit.
In the book, I also write about all of these 1990s and 2000s television shows that totally sidestep the existence of foster care. This absence promotes the idea that foster care is something so horrible that we can’t even talk about it. It also suggests that the solution is to keep kids out of it. The shows depict unbelievable scenarios like having a teacher take care of a child after his parents abandon him on Boy Meets World or having a child be adopted and saved by his public defense lawyer, who whisks him off to a massive mansion, like on The OC.
The reason why this is so pernicious to me is because we don’t have accurate portrayals of the way that orphanages worked, or the way that foster care works now. We have this idea that things are okay, or we don’t think about or question how the systems may have worked in the past. We’re very much attached to this myth of benevolence, which is spread by pop culture and media. If you live in a part of American society that is not touched by Child Protective Services or foster care—and many people are not touched by these things—then you have no reason to question what might be true based on what you’re seeing in pop culture.
‣ Laughter — the hearty kind you feel in your belly — is more than healing, writes anthropologist Kristen Bell. It can also be disruptive. Bell explains its curious history for Sapiens:
Notably, Erasmus singled out the “neighing sound that some people make when they laugh” for particular opprobrium—an impulse evident in the contemporary tendency to compare unrestrained laughter with the cries of animals: “howling” with laughter, “hooting” in delight, “snorting” with amusement, and so on. Indeed, while the term “guffaw” might not be borrowed from animal noises, it certainly sounds like it could be.
These characterizations reveal an attempt to draw laughter into the realm of taste and civility—categories that are strongly tied to gender and class strictures. For instance, in an 1860 etiquette guide titled The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Hand Book for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society, readers are counseled to moderate their laughter during a dinner party so that it’s neither too loud nor too soft: “To laugh in a suppressed way, has the appearance of laughing at those around you, and a loud, boisterous laugh is always unlady-like.”
‣ Naomi Klein shrewdly assigns language to the root causes of political violence, and her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine is a prime example. She expands on this idea and what makes Trump and his cronies different in a must-read Bluesky thread:
‣ It’s giving “noooo, I dropped my feminist literature books”:
‣ Finally, bask in the glory of the incredible fits of cabbage grandpa …
‣ And Year of the Snake grandma:
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.
