‣ Residents of New York’s Chinatown neighborhood, including artists, have protested the construction of a megajail there for years. April Xu reports for Documented on a public workshop on the jail’s design, and how community members who oppose it responded:
Organizers said the workshop would be a chance for the community to share their thoughts on key elements of the jail, including the public space around the facility, its architecture, interior public spaces and interior secure spaces, before the Public Design Commission’s conceptual review this fall.
But while more than 200 residents attended the workshop inside Surrogate’s Courthouse, outside over a dozen protesters held signs against the jail project and chanted, “You’re standing on stolen land!” During the Chinese-language session following the presentation at the workshop, presenters were met with chants of “We don’t want jails!”
‣ The period drama The Gilded Age, which recently featured a sad parody of a John Singer Sargent painting, continues to draw fans (myself included) despite its stiff acting and corny writing. The New Yorker’s Inkoo Kang pins down what makes the show fall so flat:
Part of the problem is that there have been no real stakes to the proceedings. Other series about the ultra-wealthy, such as “Succession” and “The White Lotus,” illustrate how money cannot protect against emotional (or even physical) harm; if anything, the characters’ riches make them more vulnerable to it. “The Gilded Age” takes place during a time of extreme flux, and the variability of its characters’ fates is meant to be central to its premise. The expectation is set early in the series, when an alderman who tries to swindle George bankrupts himself in the process, then kills himself in shame. But nothing so consequential has happened since—if ruin ever looms, it doesn’t stick. Toward the end of the second season, for example, Agnes’s son, Oscar (Blake Ritson), loses the family fortune. Oscar, who is in the closet, has spent the series seeking a wealthy heiress through whom he can maintain his life style; the woman he chooses turns out to be running a scheme of her own, with disastrous repercussions for the Van Rhijns. His widowed mother suddenly faces the prospect of selling her home and living out her final years with her sister, Ada (Cynthia Nixon), in dire straits, while her household staff are left to fend for themselves. The twist is one of the show’s few satisfying developments: comeuppance for a would-be conniver! And then, in the next episode, through an inheritance bequeathed to Ada out of the blue, the family’s money troubles are instantly over. Agnes and Ada’s niece exults that “nothing needs to change.”
‣ The latest episode of Mother Jones‘s More to the Story podcast tackles Trump’s draconian plan to jail unhoused people in DC, including an illuminating testimony from psychologist and housing advocate Sam Tsemberis:
The Trump administration signed an executive order that will make it easier to remove homeless people from the streets and called for ending support for Housing First policies that don’t promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency. What’s the clash between what they’re doing and what you do?
What they’re doing is they are insisting that people go to treatment or else they get arrested and go to jail. It sounds like they’re doing something. Actually, other than the immediate removal of someone from the street to go to a hospital or to a jail, this is a very expensive and completely ineffective approach to homelessness, because people will get discharged from the hospital, they will get released from the jail, and they’ll be back out on the street and the thing will be in a circle again. This is what it was like in the ’80s when Reagan started all of this, and we had that same cycling. The only way to end homelessness is to provide housing. Unless you provide housing, you’re going to have people going in and out of jail, hospital, shelter, jail, hospital, shelter. They’re saying that they believe in treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency. It absolutely flies in the face of what then they are proposing for their policy. There is no recovery in jail. There is no recovery in a hospital. You’ll take care of an immediate illness, but recovery is a long-term process that requires support in the community.
‣ Natural sounds, so often a source of calm and respite, are starting to deteriorate in the face of climate change. Sabrina Imbler, author of the moving 2022 book How Far the Light Reaches, recorded some examples and writes about them for Defector:
The hills of Kudremukh are alive with the sounds of field crickets, bark crickets, tree crickets, and bush crickets, also known as katydids. “Kudremukh National Park has some of the least disturbed rainforests in India, having been protected for several decades now,” Rohini Balakrishnan, a bioacoustics expert at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, wrote in an email. But one section of the park, which has been opened to mining, has a large patch of forest with just one species of tree Poeciloneuron indicum, or the Indian milled-leaf tree. Balakrishnan seized this opportunity to study how land use and tree species affect the forest’s soundscapes. Arpit Omprakash, a student of Balakrishnan’s, took a nighttime recording of the disturbed forest dominated by a single tree type. The soundscape is quiet, with a muted soundtrack of some bush cricket songs.
Meanwhile, in this recording taken at the same time of night in the same season from the undisturbed rainforest, you can hear a medley of bush crickets: the whining call of a lemon-lime colored false leaf katydid Pirmeda and the whistling call of the false leaf katydid Onomarchus, as well as calls from the leaf-mimicking Phyllomimus and ground-dwelling katydid Mecopoda. “The harsher calls are of high bandwidth (noisy) bush cricket species calls and the melodious ones are tonal (whistle-type) calls of bush cricket species,” Balakrishnan said. These recordings suggest that forests with diverse communities of trees are better equipped to support more species of acoustic insects, and the resounding choirs they form.
‣ This week in the death of monoculture, summer 2025 might go down in history as the first time the season didn’t have a signature song. For Wired, Jason Parham explains how we got from Brat Summer to whatever this year is:
Currently sitting at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 is “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, a YouTuber and founding member of Hype House, the former collective of Gen Z TikTok stars. The song is a choir-heavy ballad about love that echoes the rising wave of Christian music. But where Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” once defined the irresistible atmospheres of summers past, “Ordinary” is not necessarily what you’d consider song of the summer material. Songs like Warren’s, despite their chart dominance, don’t really capture the spirit of the season. It’s a change that may forecast the future of the industry.
“It’s harder to find cultural consensus overall,” says Dan Charnas, associate professor at New York University and author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. Summer isn’t as vital to the actual business model of the music industry as summer movies have been to the film industry, he says, which may explain why record labels aren’t necessarily jockeying for chart dominance in the same way they do in the fall. “Which doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Last year, Sabrina Carpenter defied the odds and created some seemingly ubiquitous musical moments. But convergence around one song is much harder in the streaming era when everyone is pretty much programming their own playlist.”
‣ Gothamist‘s Hannah Firshberg reports on the whimsical new club that celebrates the little commonalities connecting objects, people, and places around New York City:
Today, Snyder has about 200 people on the Association Association’s member email list and the group has met 14 times, with about five to 20 people attending every time. Each meeting is in a new location — past ones have included the East Village, Astoria, Midtown and Red Hook — decided by the prior month’s attendees. They like to use what she called a “sort of chance-based process” to decide. It’s different each time, but has included tossing coins at a pretend map of New York, employing a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey-like method, and pointing at a real map of New York City.
As for what actually happens during the Association Association’s meetings, “I don’t want to give away too much,” Snyder said. One of the most delightful aspects of the group, she said, is how little members know coming in.
“One person who came and had a great time said that originally, when she saw the website, she thought it might be a cult, but she was intrigued by that,” Snyder laughed.
“ The website is, like, perfectly janky and vague” in its Web 1.0 simplicity, said that person, architectural designer Anna Rothschild, who described the group as “a fun way to meet people that you wouldn’t normally cross paths with. The site doesn’t have much in the way of fancy formatting, but it does include a tagline: “p.s. No, this is not a cult.”
‣ Kate Sosin reports for the 19th News on the history of intersex activism in the United States chronicled in a recent book, which cements the movement’s crucial role in raising awareness of intersex issues and challenging constrictive understandings of sex and gender:
Approximately one out of every 100 people is born intersex or with a sexual characteristic that does not fit neatly into the binary of male or female. Despite the prevalence of intersex conditions, Gleeson demonstrates how doctors’ views on gender evolved in relationship to intersex bodies, explaining that the history of intersex people is one marked by medical censorship.
For much of the 20th century, doctors have been operating on intersex babies to assign them sexes, often without fully explaining the consequences to their parents. After those surgeries are complete, the children can be left with painful irreversible conditions and a loss of sexual sensation.
Pediatric intersex surgeries, such as clitoral reductions or hypospadias repairs to move the position of the urethral opening, are performed routinely at children’s hospitals today. But as Gleeson notes, starting in the 1990s, intersex activists started to raise the alarm about the procedures and the devastating physical and mental toll many reported experiencing as a result of them.
The Intersex Society of North America, which shaped the early intersex rights movement, was founded in 1993. Today, its work is carried on by national nonprofit InterACT.
‣ I will die on the hill of a wisely deployed “like,” but the much-maligned word brings with it a whole bunch of gendered baggage. Matthew Cantor reviews a book that dissects the word’s evolution and contemporary uses for the Guardian:
Still, using the word carries some embarrassment. As Reynolds and others point out, much of the vitriol directed at “like” is tied to its association with young women, beginning with the 1980s stereotype of the valley girl – a teen in the Los Angeles suburbs who, God forbid, enjoyed shopping. It’s true, researchers have found, that young women in particular play a leading role in shaping our language. But at the same time, as Reynolds writes: “The policing of the way women speak – which, in turn, makes women feel as if they need to police themselves, often subconsciously – is a sport that will never get old.”
That internalization, along with the history of finger-wagging, can make things difficult. “I have a friend who works for the FBI – she works with a lot of men – and has said that her father used to tell her to not say ‘like’ a lot, and it’s been sort of drilled in her head,” Reynolds says.
It all leaves the word in a sort of purgatory – no longer condemned outright yet not fully embraced. That makes this an opportune moment for Reynolds’s book, which, despite the “history” in its title, might better be described as a series of meditations on the word. Reynolds reflects, of course, on Love Island and Terry Gross, as well as influencer culture, films ranging from My Fair Lady to Clueless (a movie exposing the misguidedness of the valley girl stereotype), and the different ways we use language, from texting with friends to emailing across the office (where we shift into what she calls “corporate drag”, with all its reaching out, circling back and touching base).
‣ There’s no way Downtown LA wasn’t designed by a burnt-out architect after multiple shots of vodka (for legal reasons, this is a joke):
‣ “B-b-but they weren’t gay, they were just best friends!“
‣ What hath corporate Pride wrought …
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.
