Required Reading

‣ Trans artist Miss Kitty Litter Green died of AIDS-related complications 30 years ago this month, and Visual AIDS‘s research fellow Avik Sarkar penned a beautiful essay on her radical embrace of found materials and homages to her queer community:

Kitty was eclectic in her style and eccentric in her technique. According to queer historian Gerard Koskovich, another friend of Kitty’s, she embodied the “do-it-yourself style of San Francisco drag artists of the era, who used the tawdriest of materials as a form of camp, as a critique of the values of luxury capitalism—and because “cheap” was all they could afford.” Kitty substituted paint for items in her purse (nail polish, eyeliner, rouge) and replaced canvas with cheaper, more portable substrates (cardboard, wallpaper samples, even toilet paper).

Kitty’s painting also took the form of graffiti, as illustrated in this postcard from 1989. Three belles are trapped in what was formerly a lion cage at a zoo in Los Angeles. With characteristic cleverness, Kitty stages a critique of violence in multiple forms, at once condemning animal cruelty (she became a vegetarian at age seven) and homophobic persecution. The words “QUEEN TANK” written on the outside of the cage evoke the long history of policing and incarcerating gay men and trans women for cross-dressing in public. “Inside the cell,” Kitty explained about queer ancestors jailed under these conditions, they would “scribble on the walls with eyebrow pencil.” Even under the most brutal circumstances, the creation of art was vital to queer existence—as Kitty’s own life demonstrates.

‣ Journalists are rightfully losing their minds over the obscene amount of money that Bryan Burrough made for writing three articles a year at Vanity Fair, as he recently confessed in the Yale Review. Be forewarned, this physically hurts to read:

As I look back today, Graydon’s Vanity Fair does feel like some lost world, a gold-encrusted Atlantis ultimately inundated by economic and technological tsunamis, its glories only now being picked over by media anthropologists. I’ve never talked much about what it was like to write there. Because I have always worried about how I’d come off. I mean, the money alone. I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

‣ US tariffs are already impacting artists, including musicians. The Peterson Institute for International Economics‘s Cullen S. Hendrix writes about the consequences for North American cymbal producers and drummers specifically:

At 100 percent (50 percent) pass-through, the SABIAN cymbals would now be 12 to 14 percent (7 to 10 percent) more expensive than the corresponding Zildjians.[4] On the face of it, this would seem to be bad news for SABIAN and good news for Zildjian. This is how protectionism as industrial policy works: By making imported goods more expensive relative to domestically produced goods, tariffs should shift demand toward domestic producers.

But would this be good news for US-based drummers? No. First, US-based drummers would have more limited choices. Instead of choosing on aesthetics, what their favorite drummer plays, or perceived (extremely minor) differences in sound, there would be drummers who would prefer to play SABIANs but find themselves buying Zildjians instead. But that scenario doesn’t factor in Zildjian’s response. With its closest competitor now charging higher prices, what incentive would Zildjian have not to increase their prices as well? If the evidence from US tariffs on Chinese washing machines is any indication, the answer is none. And if Canada were to reciprocate, the mirror image of this situation would obtain in Canada: Zildjian loses market share and/or SABIAN increases prices. And these calculations simply account for the narrow price effects. They don’t include potential product boycotts as a form of protest and national solidarity.

‣ And the vicious crackdown on non-citizens continues, this time with Canadian actor Jasmine Mooney, who writes in the Guardian about her 12 days in ICE detention despite the fact that she had a valid work visa and holds privilege as a White English-speaking woman:

It was surreal listening to my friends recount everything they had done to get me out: working with lawyers, reaching out to the media, making endless calls to detention centers, desperately trying to get through to Ice or anyone who could help. They said the entire system felt rigged, designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to get out.

The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

This is not just my story. It is the story of thousands and thousands of people still trapped in a system that profits from their suffering. I am writing in the hope that someone out there – someone with the power to change any of this – can help do something.

‣ I remember clearly when Indian student Umar Khalid was jailed for protesting discriminatory legislation in 2020. Five years later, he is still incarcerated. Himanshu Sharma writes for the Wire about the criminalization of protest in India, and the echoes of this case in the disturbing arrest of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil:

Reading this from India, I am struck by an eerie sense of déjà vu. Mahmoud Khalil’s ordeal mirrors that of Umar Khalid, an Indian activist and scholar, languishing in judicial custody since 2020. The Delhi Police, under the aegis of a government determined to stamp out dissent, accused Khalid of masterminding riots in the capital, alleging that he delivered provocative speeches and coordinated protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), a piece of legislation widely criticised for its discriminatory nature. Despite multiple bail applications, his continued incarceration underscores a deeper malaise: the weaponisation of anti-terror laws to silence voices of reason. With the case stuck in procedural quagmires and trial yet to commence, Khalid remains trapped in a Kafkaesque limbo, emblematic of India’s decaying judicial process.

The parallels between these two young men extend beyond their quandary and religion. Both Khalil and Khalid are intellectuals – men of thought and action, whose activism stems not from personal gain but from a deep-seated commitment to justice. Both possess an incisive understanding of the systemic failures that plague their nations. Both have dared to speak truth to power, challenging governments that increasingly lean towards authoritarianism. And both, for their defiance, have been caught in the crosshairs of state machinery that conflates dissent with sedition, resistance with terrorism.

‣ And for the Intercept, Hyperallergic Staff Writer Isa Farfan reports on the apology Columbia sent to Khalil (whose clear-eyed letter dictated from an ICE detention center I recommend reading in full) after his one-day suspension last spring, revealing the sinister inner workings of the university’s ongoing crackdown on student protesters:

Things were moving fast on Columbia’s campus. The same evening that Khalil received his suspension notice, Columbia moved to clear the occupation of Hamilton Hall, along with the protest camp.

It would become a harbinger of a deepening crackdown on the nationwide student protest movement, with the university inviting New York City Police Department officers in riot gear onto campus. By midnight on April 30, 109 pro-Palestinian protesters had been arrested.

The next day, on May 1, Khalil received the notice that his disciplinary charges had been dropped. Khalil said in May that the school administration reached out to him unprompted.

“​​They called — the president’s office — to apologize, saying, ‘This shouldn’t have happened,’” Khalil said, recounting the interaction. “They dropped it on their own. Other students — they appealed and got it revoked. I did not have to do anything.”

Though there were, Khalil said, no additional disciplinary actions against him pending, the rescinded suspension notice said the university reserved the right to add harassment charges or violations of the university’s nondiscrimination policies if he was found to have “contributed to the unwelcome and hostile environment.”

‣ This month marked one year since 25-year-old US airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in DC in protest of the genocide in Gaza. Scholar Riad Alarian reflects for the Nation on the act of defiance, and the lessons we shouldn’t take for granted:

Notably, Bushnell qualified his “extreme protest” by claiming that “compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” This is no minor addendum. In the context of his broader message, Bushnell arguably meant: “I can burn myself to death in public and nothing will come of it, even if many are horrified by my act—this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

We may never know exactly what the words this and normal refer to in Bushnell’s final statement. Analyzing them with closer scrutiny indicates multiple possible referents: Gaza’s suffering, Bushnell’s impending immolation, the apathy and culpability of the ruling class, and our collective impotence as eager but defeated spectators. What we do know, however, is that anti-war activists have been yelling fiery words demanding change since the genocide began, and that Bushnell was not oblivious to this fact. His statement was different—it was about when fiery words fail. His protest was both a rejection of the idea that human life is expendable and an acknowledgment that, for so many, it already has been.

‣ For Vox, Adam Clark Estes writes about what he learned from taking a break from Spotify and has some tips for working with its puzzling algorithm (some more helpful than others):

Music has always been important to me, and over the years, it started to feel like I had to gamify Spotify to find songs that I truly loved. When Spotify launched in 2011, it was basically a massive library of all the music, but over the years, it introduced more and more algorithmic recommendations and playlists that promised to match my taste. It still took work to find the good stuff.

This work is what has now made Spotify’s algorithms irreplaceable to me. It has a decade-and-a-half of my listening history, and over the years, I’ve learned its quirks and tinkered with it to meet my needs. I spent months trying to replicate this experience on Apple Music, but its algorithms struggled to surprise me.

‣ It’s no secret that gossip has historically been demonized because of its association with women, but Kelsey McKinney, former host of the iconic Normal Gossip podcast, dedicated an entire book to its many uses and abuses. Alexandra Schwartz unpacks its arguments for the New Yorker:

If McKinney is at pains to stress the universality of her subject, she has cause. Gossip has been considered the province of half of humanity—the female one—for such a long time that it is surprising to learn that it wasn’t always so. At its root, the word means “god-sibling” and once signified any person, man or woman, connected by baptism rather than blood: a close friend, someone with whom you’d happily trade secrets. In Renaissance England, the noun “gossip” came to refer to a woman’s female friends who were invited to be present at a birth. McKinney supplies a ditty (“At Child-bed when the Gossips meet / Fine Stories we are told; And if they get a cup too much, / Their Tongues they cannot hold”) that makes giving birth in the age before antibiotics and epidurals—or, at least, attending one—sound improbably great. Not to men, however. Exclusion bred suspicion. In his dictionary, Dr. Johnson defined a gossip as “one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in.” From there, it was a skip and a hop to the 1811 definition, in the Oxford English Dictionary, of gossip as “idle talk, trifling or groundless rumour, tittle-tattle,” which more or less stands to this day.

If women were uniquely susceptible to idle talk, explanations must be supplied. One was biological. In “Gossip,” her 1985 study of the subject, the literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks quotes an eighteenth-century manual that maintained that women’s brains are “of a soft Consistence,” thus producing “the Weakness of their Minds.” Another was religious. To Christians, the original gossip was Eve, who, Spacks says, “brought sin into the world by unwise speaking and unwise listening.” Everything was fine until a woman passed on a story told to her by a snake.

‣ I love a wholesale dismissal of that seemingly noncommittal man your friend is dating as much as anyone else, but Serena Smith brings up a good question: Are we just being mean? She delves into the missing nuance of dating advice aimed at straight women in Dazed:

It’s hard to shake the feeling that dating advice is more brutal than ever. We’re constantly being reminded that “if he wanted to he would”, or that if you’re having relationship issues it’s probably because you’re dating someone who “just doesn’t like you”. It’s something 22-year-old Katie has noticed too. “There’s a guy I used to date while I was at uni and we still link up every so often,” she explains. “But my friends aren’t too keen on him. They keep telling me to ‘air him’ or ‘block him’. It’s like they forget feelings are involved.” She adds that her friends’ lack of compassion is ultimately making her feel worse about the situation. “It makes me feel like I’m wrong for having those emotions, even though I do have a connection with this person.”

Sure, in some cases, tough love can be helpful. Many of us are liable to overlook a sea of red flags when in the throes of a head-scrambling crush (see: the Carrie complex) and often strong words are the only thing which can shatter the illusion. “We can often be blinded by love, desire, and hope for relationships to go well, so it can be useful to get different perspectives on approaches to take in dating,” says Dr Natasha McKeever, lecturer in applied ethics at the University of Leeds and relationship expert at Feeld. Plus, it can be truly freeing to acknowledge your autonomy and take some responsibility for the state of your love life.

But there’s a limit to how much responsibility we can really take for relationship breakdowns. “While understandable, harshness often backfires, since it also contributes to an atmosphere where people may struggle to be vulnerable,” adds Dr Luke Brunning, also a lecturer in applied ethics at the University of Leeds and relationship expert at Feeld. “I would be very wary of online dating advice in general,” adds Dr McKeever. “People come from a huge range of backgrounds, and have diverse needs, personalities, and ways of expressing love and desire. Assuming a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, as much online dating advice does, can lead to disappointment, and to attributing ‘meanings’ to others’ behaviour that may not exist.”

‣ Just war machine girlie things:

‣ We all know “I’m a storyteller” is code for “I post shitty late-night ruminations on my IG story“!

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.