Required Reading

‣ A Studio Ghibli ChatGPT filter has swept the internet this week, and the Verge‘s Adi Robertson digs into its sinister usage by the Trump administration and what it signals about the entwinement of tech and politics. Fellow Kiki’s Delivery Service stans, you’ll want to give this a read:

The social and political pressure to avoid doing that now is overwhelming. Whatever OpenAI staff’s internal opinions are, it’s bad business to get feted by a vindictive president and then turn around to criticize his policies, particularly amid a larger Silicon Valley rightward turn.

But there’s also something deeper at play, because the Ghibli filter itself has a sour aftertaste — at its core, it’s a minor echo of the Trump era’s utter disregard for other human beings.

I’m not remotely immune to the appeal of Ghiblifying pictures. Seriously. Some of them really are adorable. People have loved anime filters for years, and I don’t think most of these images were created with ill intent. But filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, whose name is synonymous with the animation studio, is one of the most famously anti-AI artists in the world. He’s widely quoted for calling an earlier version of AI animation “an insult to life itself,” and there’s no sign he approves of ChatGPT being used to imitate his signature style probably thanks to training on his art, let alone OpenAI selling subscriptions off the back of it. Using Ghibli’s work specifically for publicity, as Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant explains, is a power move. It loudly tells the artists whose creations make ChatGPT function, We’ll take what we want, and we’ll tell everyone we’re doing it. Do you consent? We don’t care.

‣ Didion fans will be delighted to know that the writer’s long-awaited archives are now on view at the New York Public Library. Vulture‘s Christopher Bonanos gives us a peek:

This extraordinary little looseleaf binder — undated, though one page makes reference to 1965 — may be among the the most revealing items in the collection. It’s a (seemingly but not really) random collection of quotes, thoughts, observations, and other bits of prose, mostly likely just Didion’s “I might want to use this” file. (They’re mostly typewritten, though one bears the handwritten addition “what am I saying here.”) Mann remarked to me that it’s a lot like the “commonplace books” that many 19th- and early 20th-century authors kept. Virginia Woolf, however, did not include an entry about Marlon Brando’s organizing on behalf of the Beverly Hills chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

‣ Sundance Film Festival is moving from a Utah resort town to Boulder, Colorado, report Hannah Schoenbaum and Mead Gruver for AP:

Boulder stood out to organizers as an artsy, walkable and medium-sized city close to nature. It has one of the highest concentrations of professional artists in the U.S. and is home to the University of Colorado, where the film program contributes to a vibrant art scene, Sundance leaders said. They noted the large student population and campus venues will create new opportunities to engage young people in the event.

Nearby nature in the Rocky Mountain foothills offers room for visitors and artists to stretch their legs and draw inspiration from high country scenery. It’s also just over half an hour from downtown Denver and not much farther to the city’s international airport. There is not currently a light rail system connecting Denver to Boulder, but a bus runs between the two cities.

When Sundance leaders began their search for a new home, they said the festival had outgrown the charming ski town of Park City and developed an air of exclusivity that took focus away from the films. Boulder, a city of 100,000 people, has space for a more centralized festival. But it’s not all that more affordable for attendees. The cost of living is estimated to be 31% higher than the national average, versus Park City’s 33%, according to the Economic Research Institute. Visitors also say it can be difficult to find available hotel rooms and short term rentals when the university hosts large events or home football games.

‣ Poet Kaveh Akbar writes beautifully for the Nation about the fascist crackdown on immigrant activists, the human beings carrying out this repression, and the urgent responsibility to continue writing and protesting. He asks us, “What will you do?”:

I know it is absurd to write about my cat with the same machine I use to write about genocide. But I am yoked to my subjectivity. I do not have one brain for thinking about a rubbled Gaza and another for thinking about my gentle cat wheezing through the night. There is, in every moment, an at-once-ness that language cannot accommodate. You will, I hope, forgive me my instruments.

I think about the children Ozturk was learning to help. The hours of tenderness stolen from them. I think about my father, whose beloved big sister is right now this second desperately fighting a serious cancer in Tehran. My father became an American citizen some years ago, but feels he cannot safely, under this regime, return to Iran to be with her. I want to hurl my laptop through the window typing that. The hours stolen from them. From Doroudi and Khalil and every soul domestic and abroad who has ever been stolen or stolen from by the American project.

We are all barreling from the infinity that preceded us into the infinity that will follow. No one can report from either side. The poet Franz Wright called them “twin eternities, some sort of wings.” Whether those eternities are filled with nothing or something is a matter for theologians. Either way, this is our one chance to be alive on the planet Earth. I want to spend my turn in rapturous baffled love. And justice, Cornel West famously asserted, is what love looks like in public.

So I am writing this before going to bed, where I will weep with Paige over our beautiful beloved cat and try to forgive myself for not being God. Tomorrow I will wake to eat before sunrise. I will speak with a friend new in sobriety, I will call my parents, I will talk to my students about Virginia Woolf, I will come home to hug Paige and the cat and feel very, very sad.

What will you do? Not the royal you, but you specifically? I want to say Jim, I want to say Shannon, like that thing in movies where the newscaster suddenly starts speaking directly to the hero using their real name.

‣ Meanwhile, for the Guardian, scholars Arjun Appadurai and Sheldon Pollock write about Columbia’s spineless capitulation to its wealthy board members and the Trump administration, probing the question of how to protect academic freedom when the academy won’t protect its students:

Boards are accountable to no one – only to themselves, and to some vague set of norms, often unwritten, about their obligations. Accountability is for faculty, administrators and students.

Given the remarkable absence of any mechanism for assessing, monitoring or auditing their performance, should we be surprised if trustees bring the most intense political agendas into the heart of the institutions they oversee? With their powerful connections to local, state, and federal agendas and networks, trustees become conduits for politicians and finance-driven values that affect the core life of academic institutions rather than buffers against these forces. (A Penn trustee was accused by the faculty last year of attempting a “hostile takeover” of the university.)

The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to create a new social contract on boards of trustees, who have become too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge fund managers and tech bros with professors, schoolteachers, researchers, scientists and students. For public institutions, this may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors. Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of colleges and universities by an unholy alliance of wealthy alumni, rightwing billionaires and bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched.

‣ In terrifying times, nothing quite soothes my anxiety like a good dose of low-stakes, hyper-local gossip, and nowhere can you find this precise brand of tea than the Buy Nothing Facebook groups of New York. For Gothamist, Vito Emanuel dishes on the drama:

Defections over rule disagreements aren’t uncommon. Alisa Rauner left her Williamsburg Buy Nothing group to start her own sharing group, too, after a disagreement with one of its admins. But there are spats in her new group as well, like when tempers flared over one member getting a better free bike than another.

“It was so ugly how it turned out,” Rauner said. But getting stuff for free is so hard to pass up that even disagreements like this don’t make a big splash, especially when, Rauner said, the sense of community is usually strong.

Others told stories about members secretly reselling free items, a big no-no and members being in more than one group — another contentious rule originally designed to stimulate participation by giving members a personal stake in one group. On another group, a debate raged in the comments of a post over whether giving away free palo santo constituted cultural appropriation.

Despite the rules and the occasional drama, everyone interviewed for this story said the groups are worth it.

‣ Short filmmaking at its absolute finest:

‣ These belong at a museum:

‣ Footage from a berry important work call:

‣ And lastly, a reminder as the sun starts to come out 🥹

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.