‣ A new study attempts to quantify the amount of energy animals expend “sculpting” the earth, Cody Cottier writes in Scientific American:
Beavers are, of course, famous for their engineering feats. But when it comes to other animals, no matter how extensive their nest building or den digging is, “the perception has been that they’re interesting curiosities but really not that important globally,” says the study’s lead author, Gemma L. Harvey, a physical geographer at Queen Mary University of London. “This paper challenges that.”
The study of landform evolution is called geomorphology, and when the changes are caused by animals, we tack on another prefix: zoogeomorphology. As early as 1881, Charles Darwin recognized earthworms’ role in soil formation. But it wasn’t until 1992 that physical geographer David Butler, now a professor emeritus at Texas State University, coined the term for the effect.
‣ For Time, Andrew Chow reflects on the legacy of the legendary Sly Stone, who passed away this week, and the political undercurrent of his iconic 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On in particular:
The album’s provocative title was a reference to several touchpoints: the 1954 song “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” by the Robins, which jubilantly depicts a prison uprising; Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released earlier in 1971, which lamented war and moral decay; and the Grant Park riot from a year earlier. It also represented, he wrote in his memoir, “the riot that was going on inside each person.” On its cover was a modified version of the American flag, suggesting that small and big riots alike had always been part of America’s legacy—and that the nation’s fabric was changing in fundamental ways.
The album, which confused some reviewers at the time, is now revered as an American classic. The record’s bass and drums influenced later funk icons like Parliament Funkadelic, as well as groundbreaking jazz-funk explorations from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Its stripped drum machine sounds created a blueprint for many hip-hop artists. “Listen close, because there’s no way in hell a major label will ever again let out this much horrible truth,” wrote Pitchfork’s Andy Beta while naming it the fourth best album of the ‘70s.
‣ As Trump’s tariff frenzy raises prices for Black hair stylists across the US, their clients are facing both the economic challenge of affording appointments and the prevalence of anti-Black beauty standards, Charlotte Kramon reports for the Associated Press:
For many Black Americans, especially women, affording their hair care also means confronting unfavorable beauty standards. Georgia State University law professor Tanya Washington said recent discoveries about dangerous chemicals in synthetic hair and hair straightening products have sparked conversations among Black women looking for hairstyles that don’t require as much imported products.
But embracing natural hairdos can be daunting for women like the soon-to-be lawyers and clerks Washington advises who face pressure to straighten their hair.
“That puts everyone who does not have organically, naturally derived straight hair at a disadvantage in these spaces,” she said. “I think that a definition of professionalism that favors one phenotype — European phenotype — over all others, is inappropriate.”
Longstanding income disparities between Black and white American women can also make higher hair care prices untenable. According to the U.S. Census, as of 2023, the median household income in Atlanta is $131,319 for white households and $47,937 for Black households.
It’s an inequality issue that professional hairstylists are aware of nationwide.
‣ Queer, Native actor Jonathan Joss was killed by his neighbor on June 1, just months after his home was burned down in a homophobic attack. CNN‘s Amanda Jackson and Taylor Galgano report on a memorial to the actor and community responses:
When most people think of an actor’s life, they tend to imagine gleaming houses high in the Hollywood Hills. For years, Joss lived in the modest house his father built in the 1950s.
This week, a makeshift memorial for Joss began growing at the property’s fence. A man pulled up in a truck with a royal blue memorial cross adorned with ribbons and flowers. He tied the cross to the fence above the growing memorial.
The man, Adrian Reyes, told CNN he had known Joss since high school; they were both in the class of 1984 at Dillard McCollum High School, which recently held its 40th year reunion.
“We’re very, very close with him in that class. We track him everywhere,” said Reyes. “We helped him financially. We helped him get to his events when he didn’t have transportation.”
“It’s a shame that people are learning about him now that he’s gone rather than when he was alive and how talented he was and what a talent we lost,” Reyes said. “He was a different kind of guy, but he was the life of the party.”
‣ The Israeli army detained or deported members of the Madleen Freedom Flotilla Coalition, including Greta Thunberg, who were sailing to deliver aid to Palestinians in Gaza. For Al Jazeera, Maram Humaid interviews the vessel’s namesake, fisher Madleen Khulab:
Throughout its voyage, Kulab remained in close contact with organisers of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), which launched the vessel.
But her guarded optimism gave way to heartbreak when she woke Monday to the news that Israeli forces had intercepted the ship in international waters and detained all 12 people on board, including the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
“I was deeply disheartened,” Kulab told Al Jazeera. “I strongly anticipated this scenario, but I was truly hoping for a miracle that somehow the ship would break the blockade and reach Gaza.”
The night before the ship was intercepted, Kulab had spoken to one of the 12 people on board, Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament from France. Hassan, who is of Palestinian origin, told Kulab over a video call that her biggest dream was to visit Gaza.
‣ And in the United States, ICE raids and deportations are ramping up across Los Angeles and the rest of the country. If you’re able, please consider donating to support families in our communities who are fighting for their loved ones’ deportation stays and rights to due process, including Cristian Aranda of Austin, Texas, and Maximo Londonio of Olympia, Washington, and organizations like Casa San José in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (A note that we aren’t able to independently vet all fundraisers.)
‣ For Truthout, Nyki Duda offers a timely story for our times, speaking with Kurdish women journalists who have long spoken out against Turkish state violence about lessons from working under an authoritarian government:
The repression against media by Turkey is part of a global trend. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) confirmed that 2024 was the deadliest in its history for media workers worldwide. Nearly 70 percent were killed by Israel, but others “were or may have been targeted by Turkish drones in Iraq and Syria.” They include several Kurdish women journalists who were covering Turkey’s attacks on primarily Kurdish forces in northern Syria and Iraq, such as Jihan Belkin and Gulistan Tara, who were from Turkey, as well as Hêro Bahadîn of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Within Turkey, repression against women and other journalists persists, though the state of emergency ended in 2018. At least 30 journalists were in prison in January 2025. Last month, police violently detained Jin News journalist Öznur Değer; in Istanbul, former Bianet editor Elif Akgül, as well as Kaos GL’s Yıldız Tar, who covers LGBTQ+ issues, were detained on terror charges. Meanwhile mainstream TV anchor Özlem Gürses was released from a 52-day house arrest for “insulting state institutions” after she seemed in a broadcast to compare Turkish-backed forces in Syria to ISIS (also known as Daesh) over their fighting with Kurdish-backed militants.
‣ So, it’s no wonder that all our attention spans are shot and nobody knows how to fix them. Vulture‘s Rebecca Jennings suggests that the answer might be to waste more time, one of my favorite activities:
Many of the people I talked to keep their phones on DO NOT DISTURB mode 24/7, use plug-ins like Brick that remove distracting apps, or turn to e-ink tablets for reading and writing without the temptation to open another tab. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted in April about how switching to gray scale on his devices was “incredibly focusing.” Whether these small fixes work is a somewhat complicated question. Mark says that in her decades of studying attention, she’s found that for about half the population — the half less able to self-regulate — these blocking programs help in the short term. She suggests that the only real way to sustainably improve one’s ability to pay attention is to develop new habits and exercise willpower, similar to what it takes to quit smoking or lose weight. She says that knowledge workers sitting in front of their computer for long periods of time and hoping inspiration strikes are instead burning themselves out and therefore are more prone to fall back on cheap distractions. “People just don’t take enough breaks,” she says. In one experiment, she had people do work for prolonged periods of time with software blockers, then again without them. When people who are good at self-regulation didn’t have the blockers installed, they would work for a bit, take a short social-media break, and then get back to work. But when they had the blockers, they would work nonstop. “They could have stood up and walked around or chatted with someone. They didn’t. They just kept working straight through.”
‣ Don’t Rank Cuomo reason #1,383,039: A super PAC just sent out a mailer with a filtered image of frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, darkening and elongating his beard in a blatantly Islamophobic edit:
‣ This game-changing device translates Mandarin into English in real-time (Google Translate rn: 👁👄👁):
‣ Oh, to be a rescued pet zebra soaring through the sky:
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.
