Required Reading

‣ British painter Dora Carrington (no relation to Leonora), largely marginalized in accounts of the storied Bloomsbury Group, is finally the subject of a show mining her life and art. Historian Rosemary Hill muses on her distinct artistic hand for the London Review of Books:

One of the most revealing things she said about herself, in a letter to Gerald Brenan in 1921, was that ‘the discovery of a person, of an affection, of a new emotion, is to me next to my painting, the greatest thing I care about.’

The truth of this can be seen in her portraits. They are uneven in quality and it’s hard not to feel that they reflect her attitude towards the sitters. E.M. Forster (1920), recognisable but lifeless, is a watery, unmemorable composition. Brenan, painted in 1921 when he and Carrington were on the brink of their affair, stares straight out with such smouldering intensity that looking at him feels like an intrusion into an intimate moment. Strachey’s niece Julia is a turbaned arrangement of Fragonard-like delicacy, while Lytton himself presented a particular challenge. Immensely tall, thin, bearded and bespectacled, he was an auto-caricature – difficult to depict without seeming to exaggerate. Lytton Strachey (1916) is deceptively simple. Shown in profile from the midriff up, he reclines at eye level with his book, its marbled edges picking up the red of the upholstery on one side and the auburn of his beard on the other. The ingenuity of the pose is that it allows us to see his eye behind the lens of his round glasses. Deep-set, it looks naked and vulnerable, as the eyes of habitual spectacle wearers do – a glimpse, perhaps, of the Strachey that Carrington saw. She was also a frequent self-portraitist. The most striking of the examples at Pallant House is a watercolour from 1913 in which she stands side-on, one arm braced against a door frame as she strides forwards in baggy blue trousers, red-heeled shoes and a striped shirt. Her corps cap is a Germanic touch which adds to the impression that, like Gertler, she was looking at Vienna and the Secessionists as well as Post-Impressionism.

‣ Nobody writes quite like critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson. For the Paris Review, Hilton Als interviews her about her upbringing, her writing, and how she thinks about both:

A teacher of mine, Miss Torrance, who had a short Doris Day haircut and carried herself in an interesting way, wrote on my report card, when I was in fifth grade, “In Margo we have a poetess.” And I was always being told, by my white schoolteachers, how well I read. This was a private school, but they decided on admitting a certain number of Blacks each year so there was no unpleasantness. I was always reading. Irma had studied literature and had worked, in college, for Charlemae [Hill] Rollins, who stocked one of Chicago’s Black libraries with major works for children, and she read to us constantly⁠—in that way she was quite adorable. She and I would try to memorize all the poems in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and recite them in the car. All the books in the house were hers. I remember, for some reason, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, and later, when Denise got into French, there was Balzac. 

‣ The Trump administration’s sickening deportation and detention of immigrants rages on, and Time‘s Philip Holsinger was on the ground when a plane full of largely Venezuelan migrants arrived in El Salvador, despite no due process and a judge’s order to halt the flight:

One of the alleged organizers of the attempted overthrow fought the U.S. agents on the plane, cursing the Americans, the Salvadorans, President Nayib Bukele himself. El Salvador’s Minister of Defense, René Merino, who had been standing on the tarmac at the bottom of the gangway, rushed aboard, dragged the guy to the gangway himself, and flung him into the waiting hands of black-masked guards.

The transfer from the plane to the buses that would carry them to prison was rapid, yet it might as well have been the crossing of an ancient continent. I felt the detainees’ fear as they marched through a gauntlet of black-clad guards, guns raised like the spears of some terrible tribe. I walked the line of buses waiting to depart, photographing faces. A guard noticed one of the detainees turned toward the window and wrenched his head back down into his chest.

‣ And just yesterday, a horrific video circulated of ICE agents kidnapping Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk — who wrote an op-ed about Tufts University’s response to the war on Gaza — while on her way to a Ramadan iftar. Jericho Tran of NBC Boston reports on the protests that immediately erupted:

“A visa is a privilege not a right,” the spokesperson continued. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated. This is commonsense security.”

The throngs of supporters who rallied for Ozturk in Somerville Wednesday said she is here legally, calling her detention completely unwarranted.

“We need to call what happened to Rumeysa what it is: State-sanctioned political kidnapping,” one speaker said at the rally.

“It was just really disturbing and brought home the crisis that we’re seeing across the country,” Medford City Council President Zak Bear, who attended the demonstration, told NBC10 Boston.

Ozturk’s attorney said she maintained a valid F-1 visa status. School officials said Wednesday that they had no prior knowledge of Ozturk’s detention and did not share information with federal authorities. They said they’ve also been told the her visa has been terminated.

‣ Elon Musk’s estranged daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, spoke with Teen Vogue about standing firmly in her politics, fighting for trans rights, and not playing into her father’s deranged narratives:

TV: Does your transness inform your politics?

VW: If one of the sides of the political spectrum is like, “Trans people are men who are invading women’s spaces to whatever,” and they’re trying to take away trans health care and trans rights and trying to minimize our visibility, and one of the sides is like, “No,” [then] it kind of has to. If you are trans and conservative, you are voting against your own interests.… But I am also 20 years old. I am constantly shifting and evolving. I’m never going to be conservative, obviously, but I feel like everyone’s politics change.

TV: Do you think your parents influenced your politics?

VW: Seeing that kind of wealth — extravagant wealth — firsthand, while living in Los Angeles and seeing the [huge] homelessness problem, the wealth gap… You start to wonder, How is this fair? You have to inevitably come to the conclusion it’s not. There is no world in which people should be owning multiple private planes, private islands, private whatever, while other people are sleeping on the street.

TV: Have your parents’ politics changed? Was Elon always… like this?

VW: I’m going to not answer that. I’m sorry. But [his views are] not because of me.

It’s such a convenient narrative, that the reason he turned right is because I’m a f**king tr*nny, and that’s just not the case. That’s not what that does to people. Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word “further” — make sure you put “further” in there — is not because of me. That’s insane.

Someone’s Twitter profile is not who they are in reality. Your perception of someone is a very small glance of what they’re choosing to let you into. To judge everything a person says or someone says online as what they really believe is dumb.

I haven’t talked to him since 2020. That was almost half a decade ago at this point. Thank God.

‣ Musk’s equally odious bestie, Mark Zuckerberg, is also in the news for trying to bury a memoir by former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams, who spills disturbing details about the company while sometimes missing larger issues. Nitish Pahwa reviews it for Slate:

Presented like a workplace memoir rather than a work of keen reportage, Careless People is easy to read and carries a casual, personable tone throughout. (The book was not formally fact-checked, although Flatiron asserts that Wynn-Williams provided extensive backup documentation.) It’s less a fluid narrative and more a flutter of vivid memories from over the years, both deeply personal and in relation to the notorious man hovering over so much of it.

Wynn-Williams’ duration as Facebook’s first real director of global public policy was limited but part of a key moment in the company’s history. This stretches roughly from the peak of public optimism over the platform’s role in fostering democratic movements (the Arab Spring) and the start of the sharp decline in that utopian vision (Donald Trump’s first electoral victory). The author herself serves as the surrogate for that rise and fall, claiming to have realized early on the ways Facebook would forever change global diplomacy, tenaciously pitching her position to a Silicon Valley upstart that didn’t even think about global relations. Then, however, she found herself more and more compromised in her position with a company she still thought could change things for the better, until the sour end. (Meta has publicly stated that Wynn-Williams was “fired for poor performance and toxic behavior” in 2017.)

If I were to guess, the primary reason Meta has been so horrified by the prospect of this book is less for Wynn-Williams’ allegations than for her laying into Zuckerberg and Sandberg as people. She portrays them as a C-suite Tom and Daisy who were granted public images wildly at odds with their actual selves, and struggled with maintaining that grandiose facade over their clear self-obsessions. (Part of the image-making, Wynn-Williams strongly implies, came from Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s gaming of the Facebook algorithms to ensure that their public posts got maximal reach and engagement.)

‣ Amid such a shitstorm, astrobiologist Graham Lau invites us into a practice that can be surprisingly grounding: the “panzoic effect,” or pondering the existence of life outside our planet. Tracing the fine line between imagination and escapism, he writes in Aeon’s Psyche:

What if alien life is not just present, but abundant? What if there are myriad worlds afar where life has happened, perhaps even with some similarities to our own? There may even be other civilisations out there that have developed their own art, philosophy and science. Convergent evolution suggests that some alien forms may resemble Earth life in some ways while others could be utterly unrecognisable.

Thinking about alien life is not just a scientific endeavour; it’s a call to be better stewards of our world

It’s by reflecting on these ideas that you can take the first steps to experiencing what I call the panzoic effect. Like the overview effect, thinking about a possible abundance of life in the Universe can lead you to look with fresh eyes at humanity and life on Earth.

For example, the search for alien life drives us to consider the range of possible settings for life to emerge and to evolve, and to consider how different the story could have been for our own world. We know that Earth life has faced many threats through the past – impacts from space, largescale volcanism, rapid changes in climate, and so on. And yet, as the character Ian Malcolm states in Jurassic Park (1990), life truly has found a way. Extinctions for some have led to opening of ecosystems for others. Life has had a long, complex history on our planet.

And when we contemplate the vastness of space and the possibilities for extraterrestrial life, we’re often reminded of our shared humanity and responsibilities to life on our planet. In this way, thinking about alien life is not just a scientific endeavour or a means to frame our considerations of the future; it’s a call to be better stewards of our world and more compassionate members of the cosmos.

‣ Yoga instructors will always choose violence:

‣ Unfortunately, $7 tea lattes pass the will to live litmus test every time:

‣ Finally, a practical solution to my inability to get up in the morning!

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.