Required Reading
This week: remembering Betye Saar on her 100th birthday, saving a women’s sculpture garden, Emily Wilson breaks the internet, climate scientists on OnlyFans, and more.
The classicists are fighting! Emily Wilson, whose celebrated Odyssey translation bucked historically Western and misogynistic approaches, has caused quite a stir with her scathing critique of Christopher Nolan's film in the London Review of Books. Far from a stuffy academic take, her text recognizes the murkiness of adaptations and still insists that Nolan bungles the questions of humanity and morality at the center of the epic:
Filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang's Fresh Kill (1994), starring Erin McMurtry and my personal icon Sarita Choudhury, was decidedly ahead of its time. It follows a lesbian couple as they expose a network of corporate pollution, weaving what the filmmaker calls an "eco-cybernoia" story about capitalism and hacking as activism. Critic Elissa Suh spoke with Cheang about the film for Dirt:
In 2021, curator Claire Mander set out to challenge the famously sexist history of monuments by founding the Artist's Garden on a terrace in London, the world's only public sculpture garden dedicated to women artists. But as is so often the case with public space, the city ordered it cleared by October (which the founder suspects is part of a plan to develop the property). For the Guardian, Anita Chaudhuri reports on the movement to save this vital space as a haven for repose, community, and celebration:
The Atlantic is on a years-long streak of running stories declaring the "end of reading." Of course, we all know what we're up against — tech companies threaten to sap us of our creativity and the American education system consistently fails young people — but what function do these sensationalist pieces serve beyond getting more clicks for the website? Timothy Noah writes in the New Republic about the magazine's lazy "doom porn" problem, which extends well beyond the literacy crisis:
Students in India have been organizing mass protests against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party after a Supreme Court justice likened unemployed young people to cockroaches — giving the movement its incredible name: "Cockroach Janata Party." Arundhati Roy, one of my favorite writers, contextualizes the movement, and the violent backlash likely to still come, within broader fights for justice across India for the Walrus:
Katrina vanden Heuvel's new piece in the Nation is one of the most hopeful pieces I've read recently. She identifies the "politics of joy" that suffuse Zohran Mamdani's administration and the grassroots movement that elected him, a reminder that joy is a fundamental right at the heart of civic life:
As if we needed any further proof of the government's disastrous cuts to research funding, some climate scientists have turned to an unlikely source of income: OnlyFans. Bryce Canyon of River Front Times spoke to the researchers about the dire state of affairs:
The Huntington has been recirculating its touching 2024 documentary on Betye Saar, that indomitable artist who passed away earlier this week, just before she would have celebrated her 100th birthday today:
Imagine paying someone to dunk your book into a cup of coffee ... the social currency of appearing well-read is really doing a number on us:
Love to see some divine intervention at the gym:
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.