Required Reading

‣ Late poet June Jordan played an essential role in pushing Audre Lorde and other fellow Black feminist writers to commit to anti-Zionism, even to her personal and professional detriment. Scholar Marina Magloire explains for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Jordan is lesser known nationally and internationally than Lorde, and it seems to me that her decades of unwavering support for the Palestinian people is partly responsible. Jordan’s vocal anti-Zionism hamstrung her career for nearly a decade, resulting in death threats, a loss of writing opportunities, and social ostracization within multiracial feminist circles. Even in the time since her death, Jordan’s pro-Palestine stance has made her less co-optable into a neoliberal diversity narrative in which Palestinian liberation has been taboo for decades. Lorde is famous for the maxim “Your silence will not protect you,” but in this case, Lorde’s initial silence on Palestine did protect her career and her flourishing afterlife as a patron saint of the oppressed. Meanwhile, Jordan’s decades of writing and advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people have been woefully underappreciated. Jordan once wrote, “I say we need a rising up, an Intifada, USA,” and for her, intifada was not a metaphor. Unlike Lorde, Jordan intended her writing to be a weapon, a public act in the service of Palestinian liberation. Despite their biographical similarities, Jordan and Lorde had differing practices of solidarity. How can we add nuance to the historical narrative of Black feminist solidarity with Palestine? After all, even 40 years later, US-based solidarity movements are still threatened by the same fault lines that felled Lorde and Jordan’s friendship.

‣ In the recesses of Reddit thrives a thread simply titled: “r/PhotoshopRequest.” The Cut’s Bindu Bansinath investigates the online community where you can pay a stranger to edit someone out of (or into) a photo:

One of the popular wizards on the sub-Reddit is Akash Harsana, a 23-year-old biotech graduate in Delhi and a self-taught photographer who started doing edits seven months ago. He quickly gained traction, in the form of upvotes and awards, for his seamlessly realistic edits — like the work he did for a woman who lost her mother in a car accident a decade ago and wanted to see what she’d look like today, or the teenager who lost his dad last year and didn’t have enough photos of the two of them together. Harsana says the most challenging aspect of the work is staying true to a late person’s real essence. Many wizards use AI to turn around a quick result, he says, but he prefers to do things old-school. AI adds unnecessary noise to the image: hyperreal blue eyes where the person had brown, a warped nose, and cheek structure. Each request takes him three or four hours, and he spends 16 hours a day Photoshopping. Half of the requests are paid — Harsana says he makes roughly $1,500 a month doing edits on this sub-Reddit alone — but half are grief-related images he does for free, to give back to the community.

‣ Book covers have long been critiqued for playing into stereotypes and tropes, and Tajja Isen unpacks how publishers make it especially difficult for minoritized writers to voice their opinions about their own covers. She writes for the Walrus:

The problem of stereotypical covers may emerge, in part, from the idea of whom they are meant to be legible to. The industry, So and Sinykin attest, has a narrow concept of its target market. Most decisions cater largely to white women between the ages of thirty-five and sixty, with little effort made to develop readerships beyond that bracket. It follows that this group is also the imagined consumer whose putative tastes shape the product. “Cis white women between thirty-five and sixty” is also an accurate description of the majority of industry workers, including editors. If a book adorned by racially reductive imagery was gobbled up by the target audience in the past, publishers will be motivated to do it again.

‣ Reporting for the Washington Post, Fenit Nirappil and Rachel Chason speak with health experts about the mpox global health emergency and the lethal consequences of the World Health Organization’s failure to take the growing crisis seriously:

“Children are dying of malaria, of malnutrition. This is an additional disease. It’s more visible, it is more stigma provoking,” said Ramm, based for the aid group in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. “This is one more significant challenge in already difficult lives.”

He said the country needs more personal protective equipment and disinfectants to reduce the spread in health centers and to ramp up vaccinations.

The declaration of a global health emergency comes after criticism that the world has been slow to address a long-standing infectious-disease threat in poorer countries.

“Mpox, originating in Africa, was neglected there and later caused a global outbreak in 2022,” said Dimie Ogoina, a Nigerian infectious-disease specialist who chaired the WHO committee that recommended the emergency declaration. He warned the world that mpox was spreading sexually years before cases exploded.

‣ Author and journalist Mohammed Hanif reflects in the New Yorker on his own experience of white supremacist violence and the recent anti-immigrant riots that swept the UK, shattering the illusion that the increasingly diverse country has left racism in its past:

The whole thing was humiliating, getting beaten up by a bunch of teen-agers on my own street. I didn’t want my seven-year-old son to know that this kind of thing could happen in our neighborhood. To explain the bite marks on my hand, I told him that a goat bit me, which made him laugh. Then I said a white boy bit me, and he didn’t believe that, either. When I told him that not all white boys bite, he asked jokingly how I could be sure. People who found out about the assault shared their sympathy and solidarity, but I was annoyed that they expected me to know the motives of my attackers. When Brits are attacked, I have to explain. When I am attacked, I have to explain. I wasn’t sure anymore if there was such a thing as we.

‣ Lisa Wong Macabasco brings the unsung heroes of the art world — our beloved dogs — to the fore in a piece for Vogue, featuring some wonderfully boop-able noses:

When it comes to going on walks, for example, “there’s value to the interruption,” says Martinez; they are more of a generative interlude than an unwelcome disruption. “I can get inspiration from the light or little things shimmering on the ground and come back with a refreshed sense of energy.” Or as Brooklyn artist Dominique Fung puts it of her dog: “He breaks me out of my thought patterns. If I didn’t have a dog, I would just spiral.”

‣ Architect Michael Wyetzner takes a deep dive into the history of some of the most common styles of collegiate architectural design:

‣ Badass activist Aisha Jung reclaims a protest sign that got her arrested during a pro-Palestine action: