‣ Chinatown’s Yu and Me Books is a hub for Asian-American writers, artists, and lovers of literature, and Jordyn Holman writes for the New York Occasions in regards to the bookstore’s combat to get better after a devastating fireplace within the fall:
After lengthy days spent doing retailer inspections and speaking to different entrepreneurs in Chinatown who had handled fires, she would return to her one-bedroom Brooklyn house, which was stuffed with mismatched furnishings, books and information, and binge-watch home-improvement TV exhibits like “Hack My Dwelling” and “Hoarder Home Flippers.”
The exhibits taught her which colours conflict and find out how to make a room really feel larger. Murphy bookshelves and nooks might create a homey really feel. She sketched drawings to indicate her contractor.
“I want I had identified different those that had designed areas,” Ms. Yu mentioned. “However I used to be like, ‘That is simply one thing I’m going to should do.’ And that’s why HGTV was my useful resource throughout this time.”
‣ After Columbia Regulation Overview editors refused to take away an already-published paper on the Palestinian Nakba, the journal’s board shut down the web site fully, surprising students throughout academia and past. Natasha Lennard and Prem Thakker report for the Intercept:
Board interventions in editorial content material are, the editors mentioned, extraordinarily uncommon. (The board of administrators didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon how usually it will get concerned in editorial processes.)
The entire legislation overview editors who spoke to The Intercept mentioned that Eghbariah’s textual content went by way of an intensive editorial course of, with additional warning taken resulting from issues over potential backlash.
“I used to be simply sick to my abdomen and disgusted that, as soon as once more, this was taking place, seven months later after Harvard had simply gone by way of that debacle,” mentioned Erika Lopez, a CLR editor and its variety, fairness, and inclusion chair.
‣ When Helen Stephens took the worldwide stage for the 1936 Olympics, the lesbian athlete — the quickest feminine runner on the earth on the time — was accused of not being a girl. Sound acquainted? Michael Waters delves into Stephens’s life and legacy for Defector:
“It’s scandalous that the People entered a person within the ladies’s competitors,” the paper plainly said. The accusation ought to have been dismissed outright, the ravings of a paranoid sportswriter annoyed by the defeat of one in every of his nation’s prime stars. However on the Nazi-run Berlin Olympics, the place road sweepers and bus drivers had been wearing brownshirt uniforms, the story had juice. At a press convention, a European journalist translated the article aloud for Stephens. As an alternative of expressing sympathy, the reporter dug in. “Are you actually a girl? Are you disguised, a person operating in ladies’s races?” the reporter requested her, as Stephens recounted to her biographer many years later. Stephens recalled snapping again that the rumors had been simply “bitter grapes.”
Within the historical past of the Olympics, the firestorm is maybe the primary high-profile instance of sports activities leaders questioning the intercourse of an athlete. Whereas male officers had whispered earlier than about ladies athletes who didn’t conform to their notions of femininity, by no means earlier than had such a direct accusation been made out within the open. The truth is, by speculating about Stephens’s intercourse, that Polish sportswriter codified what would quickly develop into a well-recognized narrative on the Olympics—that girls who didn’t match particular gender norms had been inherently suspicious. You may draw a direct line between the accusations about Stephens in 1936 and the insurance policies that largely bar ladies like Maximila Amali and Caster Semenya, and trans and intersex ladies particularly, from sports activities as we speak.
‣ For Rolling Stone, Lisa Fernandez recounts the historical past of sexual abuse on the ladies’s jail in Dublin, California, which the Division of Corrections just lately shuttered:
The sexual abuse scandal at FCI Dublin was horrific and rampant,” mentioned Shanna Rifkin, deputy basic counsel at Households In opposition to Obligatory Minimums, a nationwide group whose mission is to create a extra honest and efficient justice system. “However they’re the canary within the coal mine. They’re solely distinctive as a result of folks began to concentrate. However sexual abuse is occurring in prisons all throughout the nation. This isn’t only a Dublin-specific drawback.
‣ People are spending report proportions of their revenue on meals amid sky-high grocery costs, and for Jacobin, Veronica Riccobenne explores the corporate greed behind the scenes:
Since pandemic-era expansions to the social security web expired on the finish of 2021, starvation has been on the rise. The variety of households going through meals insecurity grew by 3.5 million between 2020 and 2022. Households with youngsters are significantly susceptible to meals insecurity, rising by 24 p.c between 2021 and 2022 alone. The Division of Agriculture estimates some twenty-eight million adults in America lack fixed entry to sufficient meals to steer an energetic and wholesome life, forcing them to eat unbalanced diets, reduce portion sizes, and skip meals.
This spring, a gaggle of Democratic senators known as on the Biden administration to make use of govt motion to deal with rising meals costs.
‣ Perhaps you’re enraptured by basketball phenom Caitlin Clark; perhaps you’re simply interested by all of the hype. Emma Carmichael pens an immersive court-side report and ponders the longevity of this momentous time in WNBA historical past for the Minimize:
Even when the phrase has already been as overworked because the Fever’s backcourt this season, the so-called “Clark Impact” is straight away clear on recreation days in downtown Indianapolis. Fever season-ticket gross sales have greater than doubled, in line with Barber. There are strains of idling automobiles to get out and in of the parking garages, and in addition, notably, there’s multiple parking storage in use. (Barber remembers promising her dad and mom early in her tenure that “sometime we’ll have site visitors. And now we have now site visitors. It’s superior.”) I spoke to followers who had traveled from so far as Connecticut, Florida, Tennessee, and, in fact, Iowa, a lot of them for his or her first-ever WNBA recreation. The general affect, Joel Reitz, the proprietor of a close-by Irish pub known as O’Reilly’s, informed me, is “like including one other sports activities crew” in Indy. (The Fever, which gained a championship in 2012, is celebrating its twenty fifth season this 12 months.)
‣ Filmmaker Justin Simien explains how the historical past of minstrelsy, the appropriation of Black artists’ work, and racism in Hollywood are prophetic of the present threats AI poses to creatives throughout fields:
‣ Blimey, pubs throughout the UK are struggling to remain afloat regardless of their historic presence in British society. Be taught why in PBS NewsHour‘s report:
‣ Google Maps lastly launched a characteristic highlighting public bogs round New York Metropolis, a much-needed step towards taking entry to restrooms critically as a well being problem. What a reduction!
‣ JLo canceled her world tour this week, and on the very least, one particular person was dissatisfied:
‣ This TikTok development asks folks to reveal the ridiculous lengths they went to so as to impress a crush, summoning some really exceptional content material from our digital camera rolls:
‣ Have we been sleeping on newscasters as efficiency artists?
Required Studying is printed each Thursday afternoon, and it’s comprised of a brief record of art-related hyperlinks to long-form articles, movies, weblog posts, or picture essays value a re-examination.