‣ For the Boston Review, Joan Wallach Scott reflects painfully and lyrically on today’s neo-McCarthyism, as the son of a former teacher who lost his job because of the original:
My response to injustice these days is visceral rage at the powerful, but it’s not the same feeling I had in the oddly more optimistic time of the 1950s. Then I had the sense that justice was on the side of virtue—that my father was a hero, a David fighting Goliaths, whose evil motives would eventually bring about their defeat. There was justice and injustice and we were on the side of history. Now the attacks feel like yet another manifestation of the relentless self-preservation of the powerful, at the expense of the dedicated teachers and the school children whose education was in their hands. These days, as a much larger authoritarian behemoth wreaks havoc on democratic education in the name of white supremacist masculinity, I am no less committed to resisting, but without the belief that history is on my side. It’s a form of stubborn resistance that is the legacy of my father.
‣ Did the MAGA movement hit a wall, and what does music have to do with it? Amanda Marcotte explains in a piece for Salon:
The musicians who performed at Kirk’s memorial hailed exclusively from the niche worlds of contemporary Christian music (CCM) and worship music. CCM, while lucrative for musicians, is mostly the domain of artists who don’t have enough juice to cross over into the more desirable secular market. Traditionally, those artists who do manage to transition — think Creed or Evanescence — drop the “Christian” moniker and will even insist that they never intended to be categorized as such. Worship music, a genre that was popularized in the late 1990s and early 2000s by groups like Hillsong — a band affiliated with a controversial church in Sydney, Australia — and singer-songwriters like Chris Tomlin, who performed at the memorial, bills itself as producing modern hymns built around simple choruses.
[…]
Look, we’re all very worried here about rising fascism. But it’s time to take a deep breath and remember this: If Christian music appealed to anyone outside the white evangelical world, we’d have seen evidence of it by now. CCM has been around for decades, and yet it remains what it always was — watered down versions of sounds that were popular on the radio years ago. Gate attempted to equate the popularity of CCM in white evangelical circles with the way Wagner was synonymous with German cultural pride. But they are categorically different. Despite his rancid politics, Wagner was a true genius who remains popular nearly 150 years after his death. Both CCM and worship music are subpar forms that white evangelicals settle for because they think you can catch demons from the real stuff.
‣ In New Lines Mag, photojournalist Paddy Dowling follows a collective of Ethiopian women who run a spice mill in war-scarred Tigray:
The 11 members of the Baltna Women’s Group are determined to help families stay connected to their Tigrayan roots and keep their beloved spices within reach, especially if war returns.
Spice has served as a symbolic part of Ethiopia’s history for more than 2,000 years. The ancient kingdom of Aksum, once a formidable regional power in the Horn of Africa region — including parts of modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia — harnessed the monsoon trade winds along the Silk Road to send its ships toward Asia in summer, and back to Africa in winter.
‣ Maram Faraj and Adel al-Ramadi, two writers from Gaza, talk about what it means to make art under genocide on the pages of Jewish Currents:
MF: How has the war affected you, both as a person and as a poet?
AR: The war stripped me of everything. It changed my whole life. My house built of stone became one made of fabric. The war changed the colors that I write with; the suffering is so immense that I cannot write with other colors. The Adel of the past used to write poems about the homeland, love, and philosophy. Now all I write about is war. But of course, despite it all, my soul, my will, and my fingers have not raised the white flag of surrender.
MF: What are specific experiences that have affected you during this war?
AR: There are so many events that I would never have enough time to share them all. But I will tell you about one moment that impacted me a great deal: I was passing by a cemetery when I saw a child whose arms had both been amputated, crying bitterly. So I approached him and asked him why he was crying. He told me that his arms were buried there, and he wished only that the occupation had left him one arm, so at least he could wipe away his tears.
‣ I find this kinda funny; I find it kinda sad:
‣ Thank you, Tesla, for helping us detect douchebags from a distance:
‣ Welcome to the British Museum, the world’s most memed museum:
‣ Happy Thursday:
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.
