‣ Earlier this week, the Israeli military bombed and destroyed the main public library in Gaza, previously a hub for students, families, and community members. Dan Sheehan reports for LitHub:
As was the case in Sarajevo in 1992—when Bosnian Serb forces, stationed in the hills above the city, razed the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the ground—the targeted destruction of Gaza’s primary public library is a stark reminder that genocide is about more than just the premeditated mass extinguishing of human life; it’s also about the calculated, and often vindictive, destruction of a people’s culture, language, history, and shared sites of community.
‣ Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, drag artist Pattie Gonia, and Indigenous trans musician Quinn Christopherson recently collaborated on a climate-conscious bop. Have a listen and read Samantha Riedel’s report for Them:
As musicologist Nate Sloan explained to NPR, Ma’s “haunting” cello itself reflects those themes, with its tones and drawn-out notes even evoking the feeling of a glacier’s slow melt. “And that tension to me captures something about the subject of this song,” Sloan said, “which is preserving this beautiful planet we live on while acknowledging how delicate and fragile it is and how quickly it’s being threatened.”
This kind of thing is par for the course for Gonia, whose drag is explicitly informed by environmental crises and the need for sustainability (if you couldn’t tell from the “Patagonia” pun). In a 2021 interview, Gonia said her “unshowered” drag — which often includes upcycled materials and sometimes literal trash — is part of a fight for climate justice, and to “make the outdoors as gay as possible” in the process.
‣ Palestinian writer and activist Mohammed el-Kurd writes an urgent piece for the Nation on the “politics of appeal” and the dangers of the victim-terrorist binary:
Let me tell you a story. Last year on May 11, I, like many around the globe, woke up to the news that the beloved Palestinian TV reporter Shireen Abu Akleh had been shot and killed by the Israeli occupation forces during a raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Within minutes of the news breaking, I found an anonymous e-mail in my inbox, with a tip. The e-mail read: “Very urgent and necessary, please announce on Twitter and Facebook that Shireen Abu Akleh is an American citizen. This is a fact, not a rumor. The Israelis killed an American journalist.” I, of course, did not announce it. And when I wrote about the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, I made sure not to refer to her as an American citizen but rather as a holder of a US passport. But it didn’t matter. The news that Shireen was an American was out in the following hours, and her alleged Americanness suddenly made her human.
This anecdote is an opportunity to ask ourselves three questions: In the mainstream Western mind, who is considered mournable? Who is humanized? And who gets the mic?
‣Jewish Currents hosted a fascinating roundtable on Memory, the Holocaust, and the seige of Gaza with scholars and it’s worth a watch:
‣ As educational censorship continues across the US, a public library in Kansas renewed its lease for another year in exchange for removing children’s books containing “LGBTQ content.” Rachel Mipro reports for the Kansas Reflector:
A six-person library advisory committee is in charge of evaluating books. One of the committee members searched “gay,” “transgender,” “lesbian,” “bisexual” and “queer” in the library’s catalog to find books the committee wanted to review. They then read the books before determining which ones needed to be physically removed from the library premises.
They removed about a dozen books, including “Squad,” “Blood Countess,” “The Great American Whatever,” “Beyond Clueless,” “Red Rolls of Magic,” “Infinity Son” and “Icebreaker.”
“Most of these titles, the topic really isn’t LGBTQ or anything like that,” Cremer said. “It’s just describing a reality that is normal now for most people.”
Cremer has been working with the library advisory committee over the past few months in an attempt to appease city commissioners who threatened to pull the library’s lease because of religious-based objections to LGBTQ books. While the commissioners have no governing influence over the library, the Pottawatomie Wabaunsee Regional Library would be forced to find a new location if the lease weren’t renewed, giving up a community spot it has held for decades and depriving St. Marys residents of easily accessible library material.
‣ Business Insider reports that the brain trust at the Pentagon is moving toward letting AI weapons autonomously decide to kill humans. I can’t imagine what might go wrong:
Several governments are lobbying the UN for a binding resolution restricting the use of AI killer drones, but the US is among a group of nations — which also includes Russia, Australia, and Israel — who are resisting any such move, favoring a non-binding resolution instead, The Times reported.
“This is really one of the most significant inflection points for humanity,” Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s chief negotiator on the issue, told The Times. “What’s the role of human beings in the use of force — it’s an absolutely fundamental security issue, a legal issue and an ethical issue.”
‣ In what may be a major shift in the way tech companies work with news companies, Google has settled with the government of Canada over payments to news organizations that have their links shared on social media. For months now tech giants have banned links in order not to pay up, but now Google is the first Silicon Valley behemoth to give into pressure and do what’s right by ponying up $100 million:
“We have found a path forward to answer Google’s questions about their process and the Act. Google wanted certainty about the amount of compensation it would have to pay to Canadian news outlets,” St-Onge said, backed by Liberal MPs in the House of Commons foyer.
“Many doubted that we would be successful, but I was confident that we would find a way to address Google’s concerns and make sure that Canadians would have access to news in Canada on their platform,” she said, insisting there were “absolutely no concessions” made on the government’s part.
‣ The best response yet to all the OpenAI drama, also WHAT?!:
‣ Theodore Hamm, writing for The Indypendent, investigates the man falsely convicted of killing Malcolm X and what his current lawsuit may expose about the FBI:
Aziz’s lawsuit names 19 FBI officials involved in the incident, investigation and cover-up, including Hoover as well as another familiar name in the organization, Mark Felt. The bureau’s Chief Inspector at the time of Malcolm’s murder, Felt later became the main source of leaks in the Watergate scandal. So much for law enforcement heroes.
The filing also questions the extent of Bradley’s relationship with the FBI. He had been on the bureau’s radar for at least two years prior to the assassination. Four years after X’s murder, Bradley participated in an armed bank robbery in New Jersey. Although his accomplice got 25 years, Bradley went free after the Department of Justice intervened.
‣ Fergus Ryan posts a thread on X about the “foreign vlogger to Chinese Communist Party propaganda pipeline,” as he calls it. I bet most governments do this far more than we currently know:
‣ A mesmerizing giant pottery wheel in Jingdezhen, the birthplace of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain:
‣ The artist who designed the iconic pictograms that guide our everyday lives was a Palestinian-American activist, TikToker @hellodizzymisslizzy explains:
‣ If your Spotify Wrapped doesn’t quite communicate how Fun and Quirky you are, never fear — there’s always Photoshop:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
