‣ Fifty years after its release, Andy Warhol’s autobiography gets a close reading from critic-curator Hilton Als, who probes its commentary on art and money for the Paris Review:
By the time The Philosophy was published, Warhol had gone from queer avant-gardist with a strong interest in death, ranging from the death of beauty (Marilyn Monroe) to the death of time (as evidenced in his extended-duration films, like the twenty-five-hour-long Four Stars), to being a self-titled “business artist” with a strong, undisguised interest in not only accumulating capital but also being around it. A number of Warhol’s associates have written or said that one reason he turned in his leather jacket for a rep tie was that the mad people whom he so enjoyed being around and who had inspired him in the early sixties instead frightened him after 1968, when he was shot. (“Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.”) Performers like the brilliant improviser Ondine were replaced by potential advertisers for his magazine, Interview, or the wives of wealthy men who could afford to pay the sizable fees that Warhol charged for his portraits. Still, Warhol didn’t think this was much of a switch. After all, he had started out as a commercial artist. “Business art is the step that comes after Art,” he writes in The Philosophy.
‣ For the Los Angeles Review of Architecture, Carolina Miranda walks us through billionaire Republican businessman Rick Caruso’s ubiquitous mall designs — and what they say about the entanglement of politics and urban planning:
One of the long-running criticisms of Caruso’s malls is that they operate like fortresses within the city. The Grove and the Americana, designed by the Boston firm Elkus Manfredi, both bind a tepid Mediterraneanizing aesthetic to the nostalgia of a mythical Main Street, USA. Pedestrian lanes are hugged by shops (some designed by other architects) in compounds no more than a few stories high. Jovial trolleys add to the quaintness. It is beyond attractive, a dense urban enclave with every imaginable risk drained out: There are no unhoused people, no visible garbage, no honking traffic, no shirtless hippies playing bongos. Which is probably what makes Caruso’s environments so popular. (For a time, the Grove claimed greater annual visitation than Disneyland, the entertainment complex to which it is often compared, though in 2024 Disneyland bested the mall by about ten million visitors.) This sensation of order and safety is a boon if, say, you’re a parent of wandering children, since an SUV is never going to come barreling down these faux streets at fifty miles an hour. As a Pasadena architect told the Los Angeles Daily News back in 2002, when the Grove first opened, “People feel comfy in those environments—it’s the right scale, the right details and everything.”
Except for the ways in which this facsimile of the city meets the actual city around it. The Grove, though an outdoor mall, is inward facing. It offers impenetrable blank walls to busy West Third Street to the south, and its behemoth parking garage fronts Pan Pacific Park to the east. The Americana, which opened in 2008, is more conscientious, with the east side of the development sporting businesses that open onto Brand Avenue, a walkable commercial thoroughfare. But go to the west side of the complex and you’ll find more blank walls. It’s an approach writer Sam Lubell has described as “anti-civic.”
‣ Nobody did it like D’Angelo, who passed away this week at age 51. Marcus J. Moore pens a tribute to the soul musician’s gutsy, political, stirring body of work for Pitchfork:
I still remember that random night in December 2014 when D’Angelo’s third album, Black Messiah, dropped without warning during another period of national unrest. Michael Brown and Eric Garner had been killed by law enforcement that summer, and the streets were thick with protest. Once again, America was showing how it’s always felt about Black people, and here came D’Angelo with a work that sounded like a dispatch from both the front lines and the spirit realm. “1000 Deaths,” with all its distortion and chaos, leapt quickly into motion, supplanting D’Angelo’s voice beneath the weight of its dense mix. “The Charade” was all reflection, opening with the flicker of a guitar, a Prince-inspired rhythm, and lyrics that cut straight to it. “All we wanted was a chance to talk,” D’Angelo sang, his falsetto hovering above the funk, “instead we only got outlined in chalk.”
This was a new guitar-wielding D’Angelo, in a bandana or a top hat, more Sly and George Clinton than seductive soul crooner. That he titled the album Black Messiah was no small thing: eschewing the slow-burn sensuality of Voodoo and the gospel-soul of Brown Sugar, D’Angelo aimed for something sentimental and prayerful, a resurrection of sorts. He came back weathered and scarred. I could hear the years in his voice, the gravel and the tenderness. But I could also hear resilience. I could see the armor of a man who’d wrestled with demons and the industry and lived to testify.
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable being quote-unquote a leader,” he told the Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale in 2015. “But I do realize and understand that my role as a musician, and in the medium that I am, that people are listening to me. Kids are listening to me. We have power to influence minds and influence lives. So I respect that power. I really do. I’m not putting myself on a pedestal or anything like that. I think that’s dangerous. When you start playing with that, and you’re not careful, you can get yourself into trouble.”
‣ Israel released around 1,700 wrongfully imprisoned Palestinians, but dozens were deported to Gaza as their families awaited their return in the West Bank. Mondoweiss‘s Qassam Muaddi reports:
At the Ramallah Cultural Palace, prisoners’ families and crowds of Palestinians gathered to receive the released prisoners. In the crowds, the family of a prisoner, Murad Abu al-Rub, 45, including two of his sisters, his cousin, and his paralyzed mother, stood on a sidewalk trying with difficulty to get a glimpse of the Red Cross buses as they arrived.
“He has been in jail for 19 years with a life sentence, and the last time we visited him was before October 2023,” the cousin told Mondoweiss. “For more than two years, we haven’t seen him, and the news we have had about him through lawyers is very limited.”
“His father and one of his brothers died during his time in jail,” the cousin explained. “And his mother suffered a stroke last year that left her unable to move or speak. But we brought her because she has been very anxious to see him.”
The family left Jenin in the northern West Bank at 6 a.m. to avoid the Israeli army’s expected road closures, as it did during the previous ceasefire. “The Israeli Shabak came to our house yesterday and warned us not to show any signs of celebration, and they told us that Murad will be released here.”
After all the prisoners left the bus, the family discovered that Murad wasn’t among them. Minutes later, they received confirmation from the Red Cross that he had been deported to Egypt.
As the cousin shared the news, the elderly mother broke into tears and random screams in her wheelchair. As her daughters helped her into the car, one of them tried to console her. “He went to Egypt to study! He’ll be back later,” she said. The mother moved her hand in an apparent refusal to hear, continuing to weep.
‣ How can we ensure the fight for Indigenous sovereignty doesn’t begin and end with renaming Columbus Day? Aquinnah Wampanoag writer Joseph Lee opines for the Nation:
When I talk to people from other tribes across the country, the challenges they talk about are not about names. Those challenges—from preserving Indigenous languages to the US government violating treaty rights—are the direct result of the broader mission of colonialism that Columbus was a part of. That is the work that interested allies can and should learn more about and help with. Changing names can be a stepping stone on the way to building that solidarity, but it cannot be the last step.
When my grandfather was a kid, the cranberry harvest was a longer affair, with the community staying down by the bogs for days. Back then, Martha’s Vineyard was a relatively unknown island, not the exclusive vacation destination it is now seen as. The tribe also did not have federal recognition as a sovereign nation, a status that the tribe fought for years to get, finally achieving it a few years before I was born. Those are the bigger fights—fights over land, sovereignty, and rights—that we can lose sight of when we focus only on names.
I recently published a book that explores, among other things, the complexity of Indigenous identity. At book events, one of the most common questions I am asked by non-Indigenous people is about terminology. People want to know, more than anything, what the right thing to say is—Indian, Native American, or Indigenous. Words matter, of course, but it bothers me that their most urgent concern seems to be using the term that won’t get them in trouble. There are many ways to support Indigenous communities, but they all require actually engaging with and listening to them. The problem with these conversations about language is that they can become sideshows, apart from the deeper political questions. And that’s how most Americans have thought about Indigenous people—as sideshows to the real political struggles.
‣ Self-proclaimed mushroom enthusiast Maria Pinto unpacks the biological, culinary, and racialized history of the truffle in an excerpt from her forthcoming book in Longreads:
An industry insider I spoke with said that this was the open secret among purveyors and their clientele—the truffle is an experience, not a food. You’re buying an idea, a brief essence, a marker of luxury, the notion that someone was out in the woods to hunt this for you with a dog. It’s sort of amazing how much cultural cargo these nuggets of empty, earthy funk can carry.
Dumas, of The Three Musketeers fame, also loved to write about fine cuisine. He called the truffle “the gastronomic holy of holies.” I get it: there’s something sacred about the ability to be stumped in this day and age, to live, for one deep breath, in a question. Truffles trade in the ineffable. Their currency is scent. Unlike other sensory information, “smell is hardwired into the limbic system,” writes Rowan Jacobsen in Truffle Hound, the obsessed author attempting to give a neurological explanation for why it’s so difficult to process the hold truffles have on us: “Scents bypass the higher brain, instantly imprinting on emotion and memory without interpretation.” This is one way to say their aroma can inspire mindless longing, that they practice a form of olfactory hypnosis. Hypnosis has been used to remember. To suspend its subject in a state between presence and memory. Perhaps some of the truffle’s power comes from how, through scent, it conjures the hint of a taste on the tip of the tongue, like a delicious dream whose outlines we only vaguely remember on waking.
Before we became such a complex profusion of cells, we were driven by chemical impulse, which a truffle knows better than anyone. That’s why they fetch the prices they do. Why animals will harm themselves to unearth a fruit. Why truffle hunters are poisoning one another’s dogs. Why suspected truffle thieves in French orchards get shot. Why I brought that truffle everywhere I went for days, even driving with it down the entire Eastern Seaboard, like a talisman, like a security blanket, like a holy, holy tribute to the primordial cells in me that have operated under impulse power toward their chemical quarry since near the beginning of time. Why I asked a stranger from the internet if I could come visit her truffle farm in the Virginia Piedmont.
‣ The messaging around “invasive” species — think the spotted lanternflies that we’ve all been instructed to squash — is explicitly xenophobic, Carlyn Zwarenstein explains in Undark:
In a 2021 paper, researcher Jonathan Davies described how the nationalist press in the U.K. co-opted the issue of invasive species in Britain after 2015, when migration began to be seen as a crisis in Europe. He wrote that “abject nature” was used as a metaphor to serve xenophobic and anti-immigration ends in the lead-up to the Brexit vote to leave the European Union. This March, University College London biologist Tim Blackburn’s popular science article about invasive and “alien” species arriving on British shores risked — as lay readers observed in the comments — fanning xenophobic flames that have smoldered since before Brexit.
Last year, an international group of biologists attempted to provide a common framework of terminology to use across the discipline, advising caution around the use of various terms that carry ideological connotations, including xenophobic ones that might offend and confuse. Still, while we may deplore such co-optation, from a scientific perspective, it doesn’t flat out invalidate the analogy.
Perhaps the most relevant point noted by the authors of the common framework is that imprecision is fatal to science. Analogies that implicitly or explicitly extend themselves too far or that seize on irrelevant factors for comparison only serve to weaken their value as scientific models.
In an insightful 2018 paper, Cynthia Taylor and Bryan Dewsbury of the University of Rhode Island warned: “The metaphors we rely upon may uphold and reinforce outdated scientific paradigms, contributing to public misunderstandings about complex scientific issues.” They critiqued the use of military metaphors in invasion biology, for example, largely on the basis of their polemic use. “Invasion metaphors are performative,” they wrote, and such metaphors “blur ‘facts’ with ‘values,’” promoting militaristic responses to invasive species.
‣ Who says vapid politics isn’t an art?
‣ Me at the ripe age of 26:
‣ The real spooky season is being an adult:
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.
