Required Reading

Nobody paints portraits quite like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Writing for the New York Review of Books, Lovia Gyarkye considers her new, mournful works on view in Manhattan:

Mourners are everywhere in the exhibition. Yiadom-Boakye’s tightly controlled brushstrokes, a departure from the expressive marks in her earlier paintings, convey the sobering clarity that grieving in community can provide. In The Unbending Amaranthine (2026), five men are dressed in traditional black ntoma, or cloth, a striking contrast against the red-orange sky behind them and the forest-green grass under their sandals. As in many non-Western countries, in Ghana, where Yiadom-Boakye’s parents were born and raised before immigrating to the UK in the 1960s, funerals are multiday affairs in which the attendants embrace grief’s contradictions. One day is reserved for cathartic displays of sorrow: crying, wailing, swaying, flinging one’s body to the ground. Another is spent celebrating the life of the deceased and marking their soul’s transition into the ancestral world. We gather to process the vertiginous effect of loss and to stave off the isolation it can bring.

Journalist Katie Thornton delves into the annals of Esperanto, the language designed to be universally intelligible, for Harper's:

For a satirist or a cynic, Esperantists are easy fodder. Many of its enthusiasts are undeniably eccentric: longhairs, train enthusiasts, nudists, and Brazilian spiritists (who believe that Esperanto is the language of the vastly more peaceable spirit world, and that it was sent to earth from God, via Zamenhof, to bring about universal harmony). But Esperanto was once a legitimate force in global politics. Before facing heavy persecution during World War II, it gained serious traction in international labor, anticolonial, and anarchist movements. And most of today’s Esperanto adherents are neither naïve nor even particularly batty. They include European social democrats and elder anarchists, Chinese Communists, Central African youth pacifists, and Ukrainian-independence advocates. There are Esperantist gay-rights advocates, Bible translators, lawyers, and Go players. Why, against all evidence to the contrary, would this motley group, many of whom are no strangers to global conflict, still believe that the widespread adoption of a century-and-a-half-old invented language might yet overpower the world’s divisions, particularly as the global order, by any reasonable account, appears to be rapidly disintegrating?

CBS News fired longtime 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley, who took a stand against the network's conservative editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. The New Republic's Perry Bacon writes:

In a staff meeting on Monday, Pelley said Weiss and her team were “murdering” 60 Minutes and mocked Bilton for his lack of experience. CBS unsurprisingly fired Pelley.

I am not sure if Pelley meant to be fired. But I’m quite sure he meant to create a firestorm and focus the nation on what’s happening: Bari Weiss, a center-right activist more concerned by Donald Trump’s critics than the authoritarian president himself, has now consolidated power at one of America’s three broadcast networks and taken control of perhaps the nation’s most reputable and prestigious news program.

Lemme Say This podcast co-host Peyton Dix writes beautifully in Vogue about the radical life of her grandmother, a former volunteer with the Black Panther Party, and navigating her own queerness in relation to her Granny's:

While everyone else’s grandmothers softened with age, mine only seemed to harden into her butchness by the year. Even without the word “lesbian” said aloud, there was always some unspoken union between Granny and me that drew us both to nose rings and kept us loud and curious. I would drive up north from Los Angeles and visit her, her “roommate,” and their enormous Rottweiler, Juma, the dog more of a sign of her sapphic life than the dark-skinned stud living in her apartment. There were no pointed questions or formal sit-downs around her sexual identity; she just was. She just is.

Arsenal, which just won the Premier League for the first time in over two decades, has grown into a symbol of African and Black identity, Sean Henry Jacobes writes for Africa Is a Country:

When Wenger signed players like Kanu, Lauren, Touré, and Éboué, English football was still distrustful of foreigners, especially players and coaches from outside Europe. African fans, watching via satellite television, recognized themselves in Wenger’s Arsenal (he was one of the first foreign coaches in the Premier League). Their accents, hairstyles, fashion, and joyful football (though when they needed to, they could also play a physical style) stood in stark contrast to the tactics of their opponents at other clubs. Wenger also seemed unfazed by African players flying off every two years for a month to play in the Africa Cup of Nations, further endearing him to African fans who felt disrespected by Europe’s top leagues, their clubs, and football managers when their native sons were denied the opportunity to represent their countries.

Four authors who write about the ocean discuss their fascination with aquatic life, and its inherent queerness, for Orion:

Each of us writes about our lives, queerness/transness, and the body in unexpected ways, and each of us found our way to ocean life to consider these topics, maybe especially bodies. What is it about animals, and fish in particular, that resonates with you as a queer/trans writer?

SI: Fish occupy a totally different sliver of the planet than we do. In the ocean, sound travels far further than light, so they rely on different senses to navigate, find each other, and mate. I loved learning about how their bodies diverged from mine, and how their bodily adaptations inspired me to push the limits of my own. I found a particular kinship with deep-sea creatures, who are often described in terms of estrangement, as “aliens” who survive on the scraps of sun-touched society. But many deep-sea creatures that live by hydrothermal vents, which are gaps in the seafloor where geothermally heated water surges through, forgo the sun entirely, and survive on chemosynthesis, spinning sugars from the chemicals of the crust of the Earth. This reminded me of the way queer people are often exiled to the margins of society, and yet we manage to create these fantastical spaces that are wilder than anything the straights could have imagined.

The scholars behind the Banana Craze project have just launched a free, online course on the history of bananas, which is the history of colonialism in the Americas.

Mamdani's City Hall rings in Pride with style:

@cnn New York City Hall turned its chambers into a runway for its first-ever "Pride Ball" to kick off #PrideMonth ♬ original sound - CNN

The secret leftist history of Renaissance faires:

@kaitytheaspiringbard A long overdue video essay in honor of Renn Faire season #renfaire #leftist #renaissancefaire #fyp #politics ♬ Orange Afternoon - Bossa Nova Terrace

Nature is healing:

@daniellocampo it just warms my heart and soul凉 #badbunny #badbunnypr #colombia #latino ♬ sonido original - ☀️❤️

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.