Zeynep Devrİm Gürsel at Public Books:

“Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the very first issue of the photography journal Sovetskoe Foto, published that same year. In fact, such amateur photographic practice—as Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko make clear in their book In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos—was a key form of active Soviet citizenship. A photographer’s manual published in 1931 openly ordered all to turn their cameras away from family, friends, and other mundane subjects and demanded, “Not one photograph devoid of social significance!”

As a scholar of photography, I appreciate anyone’s recognition of the power of photography. As a social scientist, I read the manual’s call to action as a statement of the obvious. Indeed, no photograph, Soviet or not—even (or perhaps, especially) that of friends, family, or other mundane subjects—is “devoid of social significance.” What people choose to photograph or put in family albums is itself socially significant.

More here.

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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

Yes, every fashionable conference has some panel on AI. Yes, social media is overrun with hypemen trying to alert their readers to the latest “mind-blowing” improvements of Grok or ChatGPT. But even as the maturation of AI technologies provides the inescapable background hum of our cultural moment, the mainstream outlets that pride themselves on their wisdom and erudition—even, in moments of particular self-regard, on their meaning-making mission—are lamentably failing to grapple with its epochal significance.

A recent viral essay in The New Yorker provides an extreme, but not an altogether atypical, illustration of the problem. “A.I. is frankly gross to me,” its author, Jia Tolentino, avows. “It launders bias into neutrality; it hallucinates; it can become ‘poisoned with its own projection of reality.’ The more frequently people use ChatGPT, the lonelier, and the more dependent on it, they become.” At least Tolentino has the honesty to acknowledge the astonishing fact that “I have never used ChatGPT.” Though the author considers herself a progressive, her basic attitude to new technologies resembles that of a reactionary 19th century priest who denounces the railways as the devil’s work—before proudly mentioning that he himself has, of course, never engaged in the sin of riding one.

More here.

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Alex de Waal in the Boston Review:

The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” These were the words of food insecurity experts at the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) mechanism earlier this week.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied, “Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a bald-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza and there is no starvation in Gaza.” To the extent that there is hunger, he says, it is the fault of Hamas for stealing United Nations aid—a claim backed by no evidence, part and parcel of the demonization used to justify all its actions in Gaza.

But Netanyahu knows perfectly well how he could prove who is telling the truth and yet chooses not to do so. Three steps would settle any possible denial or deliberate mystification about what is happening there—and who is really responsible for the bald-faced lie.

More here.

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Aaron Betsky at Architect Magazine:

When I travel to China, I find big, bold buildings for the arts in almost every city I visit. Building cultural facilities that double as monuments, markers, or anchors for a community marks a certain stage in a country’s social and economic development.

The United States has gone through waves of museum and concert hall construction starting in the Gilded Era. Japan threw up a slew of such structures during its boom in the 1980s. Europe saw a profusion of local community buildings devoted to culture using E.U. funds around the turn of the century.

China has been building structures devoted to music, visual arts, libraries, and other forms of culture at the same time as it has been threading its country with tens of thousands of miles of trains, subways, and other transportation infrastructure. The arts and learning projects are often prospective monuments, seeking to give focus and meaning to new or exploding urban areas.

more here.

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Robin Givhan in The Washington Post:

Along the steps leading into the New York Public Library on the last day of June, a small crowd gathered to watch a parade of guests make their way inside for Marc Jacobs’s fashion show. The arrivals included fashion editors, stylists and friends — many of them wearing Jacobs’s designs. The more daring were dressed in recent runway ensembles, some of which made walking perilous and moving through narrow doorways a high-class geometry problem.

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Careers

What is the life
of the old lady
standing
on the stair
print flowered
housedress
gray and orange
hair
bent
on a rail
eyes open for
jr.
bobby
jb. somebody
to come, and carry her
wish
slow
cripple woman, still does
white folks work
in the morning she gets up
creeps into a cadillac
into the florient lilac titty valleys
of blind ugliness, you think the woman loves
the younger white woman
the woman she ladles soup for
the radio she turns on when the white lady nods
she carries them in her bowed back hunched face
my grandmother worked the same
but stole things for jesus’ sake
we wore boss rages in grammer school
straight off the backs of straight up americans
used but groovy and my grandmother when she returned at night
with mason jars and hat boxes full of goods
probably asked for forgiveneess on the bus
i think the lady across from me must do the same
though she comes back in a cab, so times, it seems
have changed.

by Imamu Amiri Baraka
from To Read a Poem
by Donald Hall
Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1992

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Michael Kobre at the LARB:

IN 1975, JACK KIRBY, the “King of Comics” whose wildly kinetic art and sweeping visions had shaped the whole universe of Marvel Comics, sent a Hanukkah card to a friend, a young fan Kirby had met a few years earlier at a New York comics convention. At the time, Kirby had been living in Thousand Oaks, California, where he’d joined a Conservative synagogue, Temple Etz Chaim. An active temple member, Kirby occasionally read Torah portions at Shabbat services, visited the Hebrew School to demonstrate the art of drawing comics for the students, and later fulfilled a lifelong dream when he joined a congregational trip to Israel. So there was nothing remarkable about him sending a Hannukah card—except, that is, for the image Kirby drew on the card, which showed Ben Grimm, “the Thing,” the monstrous member of the Fantastic Four with a body that looks like it’s made of orange rocks, dressed for Shabbat services himself, in a coat and tie and wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl. In fact, Kirby liked the image so much that he hung a copy on the wall of his studio. When guests would ask him about it, as his friend and biographer Mark Evanier remembered, Kirby would just say, “It’s a Jewish Thing.”

more here.

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Diana Lind in the Washington Post:

There are plenty of healthy activities available at home, of course, from playing with your children to pursuing a hobby. But there are also consequences to our homebody lifestyle. Time in the house is more likely to be time spent alone and sedentary, triggering two of Americans’ biggest mental and physical health problems — social isolation and lack of exercise.

Screens surely explain some of our turn inward, but not all of it. For example, men are spending a record 100 minutes per day on household activities, including a 50 percent increase in time spent cooking since 2003. And if our phones, tablets, and video games are as insidious as they’re often portrayed, then part of the solution needs to be finding real-life environments and activities that can compete for attention with apps and streaming services at home.

More here.

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

I have always had a soft spot for bats, and yet, after more than 500 reviews, this is the first bat book I cover here. Having now read this richly illustrated general introduction to their biology, I am even more engrossed with their many unique adaptations.

The Lives of Bats is part of Princeton University Press’s series The Lives of the Natural World that has grown to 14 volumes since I reviewed its entry on viruses. Technically speaking, it is designed and produced by UniPress Books, which I have described elsewhere as the spiritual successor of Ivy Press and which is similarly known for producing good-looking books. As with the other volumes, this one is chock-a-block with full-colour photos, to the point that you would be hard-pressed to find a single page of plain text.

More here.

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Corey Robin at his own website:

This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify as Zionist or with parts of the Zionist project, who have supported, or continue to support, the military actions of the Israeli government in Gaza (even if they vehemently oppose Netanyahu), people who call for a return of the hostages and a ceasefire and say no more, people who fear that anti-Israel protests on college campuses are a sign of rising antisemitism in the US, people who believe, or hope, that Israel as a Jewish state is a cause worth defending.

This post is for you.

It’s for you because, given the way algorithms go and online communities sort themselves out, you may not have seen some developments in the last few days, among people who hold or once held views similar to yours. I’m posting these statements here just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing.

More here.

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Carly Tagen-Dye in People Magazine:

Roy, who is the author of novels like Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, had a “complex” relationship with Mary, after running away at age 18. The author says she left her mother “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her,” per the memoir’s synopsis. Mary, a women’s rights activist, was best known for winning a 1986 Supreme Court lawsuit that granted Christian women in India equal inheritance rights.

When Mary died in 2022, Roy was “more than a little ashamed” by her response to the news, and turned to the page to process her feelings. Mother Mary Comes to Me tells the story of Roy’s childhood in Kerala, India, where she was raised, as well as her path toward becoming the acclaimed author she is today. The memoir is “a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother,” per the book’s synopsis.

More here.

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David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times:

Everywhere they look, they find particles of pollution, like infinite spores in an endless contagion field. Scientists call that field the “exposome”: the sum of all external exposures encountered by each of us over a lifetime, which portion and shape our fate alongside genes and behavior. Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it.

There is plastic in salty sea foam freshly sprayed by crashing waves, in dreamy Japanese mountaintop clouds and in the breath of dolphins. When scientists test Antarctic snow, or the ice upon Mount Everest, plastics are there. When, in 2019, an explorer reached the ocean’s greatest depths in the otherworldly Mariana Trench, he found that plastics had beaten him there, too, miles past the reach of natural light.

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Almost August

Almost August.  The year
has turned.  You can feel the light
sucking at the sand beneath your feet
as it slides away into autumn.

You think back to childhood
when the days of summer seemed
endless, and time long enough.

But, when the school bell rang,
you woke with a jolt
into the mortality of arithmetic.

After supper, it was too dark
to go out again for very long,
then just too dark to go out,
then just too dark.

So you began to learn to live
with Night, admire her,
love her a little even.

Her nights were long,
but you began to know
time was not long enough.

by Nils Peterson

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Frances Wilson at the New Statesman:

There once was an ugly duckling, so despised by the other birds that he fled the farm to explore the wider world. But because of his very great ugliness he was taunted there too, until one day he caught his image reflected in a pond and he had turned into a beautiful swan. The Ugly Duckling, first published in 1843, was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s many autobiographical fairy tales: “It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard,” he wrote, “if one has lain in a swan’s egg.”

Andersen’s subject, from the start, was the outsider destined for greatness. “At school,” he recalled in The Fairy Tale of My Life, the third of his three memoirs, “I told the boys curious stories in which I was always the chief person, but was sometimes ridiculed for that.” His stories were miniature epics (The Princess and the Pea is 300 words long) and his characters, like the author himself, solitary figures of spiritual greatness for whom the world is a place of inexplicable cruelty. Other versions of Anderson’s life can be found in his first published fairy tale, The Tinderbox, in which a clever soldier discovers the magic formula for wealth and success; The Steadfast Tin Soldier, in which a one-legged, love-sick toy falls from a window, is swallowed by a fish, and then thrown into a stove where he melts into a heart-shaped lump; and The Little Match Girl, where a frozen, homeless child, on her last night on Earth, gazes through a window at a happy bourgeois family.

more here.

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