‣ Georgia O’Keeffe painted the beauty she saw in the New Mexican landscape, but poet Alanna Offield writes in Aeon about the Indigenous communities who are often erased from this art historical chapter:
The image of a remarkable woman striking out alone in the desert ticks the boxes of a great American story. But the myth erases the peoples of Abiquiú, who tolerated her presence and whom she employed to maintain her home and property, allowing her to focus on her art. She could not have become an icon without them. Though her relationships with Abiquiú residents were sometimes strained by her lack of cultural understanding, there was mutual respect, and O’Keeffe donated generously to local organisations and individuals later in life. Norby notes that she’s remembered more as a quiet benefactress than as someone who recognised her dependence on local support. If she failed to acknowledge her dependence, she had some inkling of remaining an outsider. After almost 20 years living in New Mexico, O’Keeffe quipped: ‘I’m a newcomer to Abiquiú, that’s one of the lower forms of life.’
‣ Remember the Upstate trucker whose meticulous model of every building in NYC went viral? Now, the model is set to go on view at the Museum of the City of New York, Gothamist‘s Hannah Frishberg reports:
While Macken’s model is in many ways similar to the Queens Museum’s famous “Panorama” (Macken visited the scale model while growing up in Middle Village, Queens and said it significantly inspired his work), Sherman hesitates to compare the two.
The “Panorama” displays an institutional view of New York, while Joe’s model is personal: “It’s his view from Middle Village, looking towards Manhattan. It’s his hand, it’s his technique, it carries so much of his own personality,” she explained. “While he’s not sharing intimate personal stories in the model itself, it feels to me like it’s really communicating one person’s personal New York,” his own lived “psychogeography of the city.”
‣ In Transition Magazine, professor Nisrin Elamin chronicles the history of famine — and famine denial — in Sudan, and how neocolonial meddling threatens to worsen the crisis:
In light of USAID cuts and a dismal international aid response, millions of Sudanese are increasingly relying on each other to survive. The Trump administration’s aid cuts have exposed how the current relief effort on the ground is largely being sustained by Sudan’s emergency response rooms—grassroots, neighborhood-based mutual aid collectives run by volunteers across the country. In the absence of an adequate international aid response, they are leading food and medicine distribution efforts, organizing communal kitchens, coordinating evacuations and protection activities, setting up ad-hoc emergency clinics, rape crisis centers and women response rooms. They are also converting defunct schools into shelters, repairing and restoring public services such as water and electricity, and retrieving and burying dead bodies. In one emergency response room in Sennar, volunteers used diaspora support to purchase an entire pharmacy and distributed vouchers so people could obtain their medications for free.
‣ Indigenous leaders staged a massive protest at the 30th UN Climate Change Conference in Brazil, and Al Jazeera gathered journalists’ images in a moving photo essay:
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has emphasised the importance of Indigenous communities in this year’s COP30 negotiations. Earlier in the week, dozens of Indigenous leaders arrived by boat to participate in the talks and advocate for greater involvement in forest management.
In an interview on Tuesday, respected Indigenous leader Raoni Metuktire, also known as Chief Raoni, told Reuters that many Indigenous communities are frustrated with ongoing industrial and development projects in the forest. He called on Brazil to empower native peoples in Amazon preservation efforts.
‣ Last week, Condé Nast shut down Teen Vogue and fired four employees for questioning that decision. For the Columbia Journalism Review, Sarah Leonard explains what the loss of this magazine means for the feminist, progressive media landscape:
As the media landscape changes, it’s worth remembering how we all ended up with intelligent things to read in the first place. Teen Vogue’s early political pieces emerged because large social movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Bernie campaign, and the Sunrise movement politicized millennials and Gen Z. Young writers brought a sharp political orientation to their work. For a while, heads of corporations at least performed shame about the whiteness, maleness, and straightness of their hirings; for a while, they did hire more diverse staff. The writers were also protected by new unions, which forced the powerful heads of magazines like Vogue and The New Yorker to negotiate with organized workers. It was no secret that media bosses didn’t like this—and long-standing conflicts have gotten more contentious as workers demanded, over the past two years, better coverage of Gaza. Last year, Semafor reported that the talent-booking side of Condé Nast (essentially, the celebrity wranglers) were unhappy with Teen Vogue’s sympathetic coverage of the pro-Palestine movement. Now left-wing movements are reeling and Trump has hamstrung the NLRB. Young lefty writers are being swept out with the elimination of DEI programs.
‣ CapitalB‘s Aallyah Wright reports on the Black farmers who stepped up to feed their communities when SNAP benefits were paused during the government shutdown:
For months, she and her family have given free bags of produce to elderly residents in the Historic West End of Charlotte, a majority-Black community. They run Deep Roots CPS Farm, and have gifted people collard greens, kale, and radishes. Other times, they gave away fruits like strawberries and blueberries.
“Especially in times of crisis, you definitely need institutions like farms, led by people who care about the people that they’re providing produce to,” Jzar said.
Now, as Congress inches closer to a deal that could reopen the federal government, it is uncertain when SNAP payments could arrive. Jzar said she knew she and her family had to continue their work.
‣ You know it’s bad when we start using AI for things we ostensibly enjoy, from solving escape rooms to yapping at book club. Michelle Santiago Cortés writes in the Cut:
And it’s not just escape rooms. ChatGPT is being used to enshittify fun in all sorts of places. It’s used at trivia nights (“Just went to a nightmare trivia night where i lost because the questions were generated by chatgpt,” wrote one X user; “chatgpt at trivia should be a deadly sin,” said another). It’s writing flirty messages and “Good morning” texts full of em dashes. It’s even sapping the joy from snarky internet lurking: As one X user lamented, obviously written-by-AI Instagram captions are ruining the distinct pleasure of close-reading someone’s post. Or, more succinctly put, “Show me your run-on sentence you stupid bitch!
The latest and most comprehensive study in ChatGPT usage, published by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that nonwork messages make up approximately 70 percent of all consumer messages. The study’s “privacy-preserving analysis of 1.5 million conversations” also found that most users value ChatGPT “as an adviser,” like a pocket librarian and portable therapist, as opposed to an assistant. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that ChatGPT does not consistently deliver reliable facts, people now seem more likely to use it to come up with recipes, write personal messages, and figure out what to stream than to consult it in higher-stakes situations involving work and money.
‣ Chappell Roan isn’t the only one pining for a fantasy of Medieval times. Kellly Faircloth has a rundown of medievalism and pop culture for National Geographic:
“The idea of the medieval is very much filtered through consumer culture, through popular media,” says Cook. She adds that the current obsession with the past is “a kind of vibes medievalism, where things circulate because of familiar aesthetic and narrative tropes that are coded medieval.” That imaginary medieval is capacious, too. Cook recounted a recent trip to her local Ren Fair: “You have the very serious Viking reenactors with their 20-pound helmets and their shields and their furs, and they were hanging out next to the aerialists with elf ears on.”
It’s not about the medieval, really—it’s about the here and now, and it’s specifically about rejecting it.
‣ Nur gets it!
‣ San Francisco feels like a simulation:
‣ And finally, I think we all need this cutie patootie in our lives:
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.
