Required Reading

After last year's wildfires devastated Altadena, California, photographer Kevin Cooley set out to document the plants that survived. For the Los Angeles Times, Marah Eakin writes:

Driving around town, looking at the lots and the wreckage, Cooley says he started to notice the bits of nature that were trying to persevere. He spotted a begonia poking through a burned fence on his neighbor’s property and snapped a photo, and soon he was accumulating more and more similar images. Cooley says if you’d told him before the fire he’d be taking so many pictures of flowers, he’d have scoffed, but now images like one he captured recently of a group of blooming roses in front of a cluster of dead vines remind him that perseverance is possible no matter the odds.

Author Whitney Washington shares dispatches from her trip through the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail for Burnaway:

Legend passed down through oral tradition and popular history says that during slavery, quilting took on a critical role as a communication system, with certain quilt square designs guiding travelers through the Underground Railroad. To many Black Americans, quilting remains an important symbol of family and resilience. My mother has a quilt passed down from her Aunt Mae tucked in a closet away from everyday use. Its origins beyond Aunt Mae are unclear, but it’s precious because it’s been in our family for a while. It survived Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and more. But I am not sure where scholarship shakes out on how true these stories of quilts as maps are. If quilt squares have meaning, it’s unknown to me, but I desperately want to know, to feel a connection to a history that has likely been lost, but like many other Black Americans, all I might have is a quilt. This gap of knowledge turned my barn tour from an exercise in observation to one of deciphering.

Last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists removed 20 names from its list of Palestinian members of the press killed by Israel since October 7. New Lines Magazine's Christin El-Kholy has the story:

Walid Batrawi, a Palestinian journalist who worked on Forbidden Stories’ Gaza Project, a collaborative investigative initiative aimed at investigating the targeting and killing of journalists in Gaza and the West Bank and continuing their unfinished reporting, argued that the controversy risks obscuring a larger issue. “It’s not about numbers. It’s about accountability. It’s about documentation,” he told New Lines. Even if individual cases are revised, he argued, the central fact remains that Israel is responsible for the killing of Palestinian journalists.

CPJ’s Gaza data has become the authoritative source for news outlets (including New Lines) and governments trying to understand the scale of the violence. Changes to its records don’t just affect their accounting, they shape how the Gaza genocide itself is understood and remembered in the public record. But this is not the first time CPJ has faced criticism for its data around Israel-Palestine.

Mondoweiss's Michael Arria spoke with author Emmaia Gelman about her new book, which mines the Anti-Defamation League's nefarious history of spying on activists and attacking Palestinian movements:

The ADL used the language of the civil rights movement to explain why people should support its aims. It had to perform liberalism. The ADL, for example, adopted a concern for queer rights on hate crime laws that it was proposing. Only in the 1990s did queer organizations advocate for a full decade for the ADL to do that. The ADL refused and refused and refused, saying that queer rights were not part of an American value system, and it didn’t want to disrupt and distract its work on hate crimes laws by adding it.

Then it had a sort of revelation: queers had built political power, and talking about queer rights was actually an advantage. And so it’s important to add queer to its work. It wasn’t a pro-queer organization. It was a neoconservative organization led by a homophobe who didn’t even think women should necessarily have equal rights.

Now it doesn’t need that anymore. The U.S. state is no longer using liberalism as a rationale for its wars and repression at home, and the ADL doesn’t need to do that either.

In the 1990s, a group of lesbians transformed a Kansas City neighborhood into a self-sufficient queer utopia dubbed "Womontown." Rebecca Barker reports for Rewire News Group on the lesbian haven's origins:

To spread the word, Nedelsky and Hopper published ads in places like Lesbian Connection, a magazine founded in 1974 with the mission “quite simply, to connect the lesbian community worldwide,” according to its website. The couple also attended underground music festivals, like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and the National Women’s Music Festival, which functioned as women-only spaces for lesbians to connect. Those gatherings offered inspiration for the kind of place Womontown could become.

Imogen West-Knights traveled to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held at a hotel in Connecticut, for a glimpse into the world of professional puzzlers for Slate:

Out in the corridor, I ask Agard what he thinks of the theme. Puzzle 4, written by a student called Rena Cohen, is titled “Driver’s Aid” and features four answers that contain the name of car brands, followed by an O representing a spare tire (AUDIOLOGISTS, for instance). “I didn’t read the title or the blurb, so I’m not 100 percent sure I know what it was,” Agard says. “That would take too much time.”

And, I have to say, I find myself curiously disillusioned by this brief conversation. It hasn’t occurred to me, although it should have, that to reach the heights of ACPT championship, to get through these puzzles as quickly as the top solvers are able to, means dispensing with the part of the crossword that holds all the pleasure for me. I am not very fast when I solve a crossword, nor do I try to be. I’m doing it to appreciate the “punch line,” as it were, of realizing what a puzzle’s theme is, or to enjoy the aha moments of seeing how the words in the grid lace themselves together. To my mind, solving at speed is to take the joy out of the activity entirely, and that begins to color my perception of the event.

Journalist Anna Peele, who just wrote a book about Love Island, offers a compelling framework for understanding its allure in LitHub:

Pantomime establishes a clear moral universe: some characters are evil, and some are virtuous, and they get what they deserve based on their actions. “It’s drama that engineers transformations, because that’s what we want to see,” Oxford culture theater professor and pantomime expert David Taylor says. Characters evolve, whether they want to or not, through situations they can’t control. The machinations of the play, and its producers, force them to adapt to those situations. “We both anticipate those changes and also are surprised when they happen,” Taylor says. “Pantomime has to tread this quite fine line between something that feels very familiar to us as a formula we immediately recognize and that we can immediately engage with emotionally, quite strategically placed surprise, in order to keep us coming back to it. We’ve seen it all before and we’ve also never seen it before.”

Human laughter patterns, it turns out, might be 15 million years old. Jenny Lehmann has the delightful story for Discover Magazine:

Looking at the origins of laughter in our relatives, with whom we share a direct ancestor 15 million years ago, this research hints at a gradual shift during the evolution of apes. They may have developed more control over their vocalizations to convey meaning, an important clue to how speech emerged.

“Speech leaves no fossils, and complex language exists only in our own species. But we've found a 15-million-year-old clue in an unexpected place: our laughter. Unlike speech, laughter is shared by all living great apes,” said De Gregorio.

Historian Amanda Timpson sheds light on the double life of Stonewall Inn's notorious door manager:

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Erling Haaland has bewitched us body and soul:

@evieofficially Am I too deep into the Haaland rabbit hole?? 藍藍 #haaland #haaland #fifa #fifaworldcup ♬ Haaland (Ha Ha Ha) - CTID

It's called PERFORMANCE ART:

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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.