Compulsory reading

• Challenging the notion of “fusion” cuisine, Ifrah F. Ahmed writes in Eater on the forced migration of his family and the role of the diaspora in reinventing and shaping Somali cuisine:

Our brothers and sisters in Somalia – those who never left – have not had exactly the same experience of migration. Their experiences were also often difficult but of a different variety. Many stayed during the war, were born during the war or were born after the war. They were free to experience the culture. Somali cuisine in Somalia was allowed to move, expand and flourish, as there were no heavy anchors on classical or traditional forms. There was nothing to prove to anyone, nothing to cling to lest you lose your identity. They were already at home.

No wonder, then, that it is especially in the diaspora where the cuisine can be considered “classic”. This adherence to ‘classic’ forms of culture and cuisine is a bridge connecting members of the diaspora to their homelands, a thread tying the lost to what they left behind. It can also sometimes become a crutch.

• After years of uncertainty, scientists have finally identified why black dots began to appear on pages added during Leonardo da Vinci’s restoration. Atlantic Codex, a massive series of tomes filled with sketches by the artist. Beckey Ferreira reports for Vice:

Fortunately, these dark spots were only observed on “mat” paper that was attached to the Manuscript during 20th century restoration efforts; the original folios on which da Vinci scribbled have not been stained. Yet the origin of the marks has remained a mystery for more than a decade, leaving researchers baffled.

Today, scientists from the Polytechnic University of Milan (POLIMI) think they may have finally solved the case after analyzing a single page of the Manuscript, known as Folio 843, with sophisticated and non-invasive techniques. This approach revealed that the stained sections are contaminated with metacinnabar, a compound containing mercury and sulfide that may be linked to the glue used in previous restoration efforts, as well as ambient air pollution.

Molly Donovan, curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery, likened working with her to being “that lucky student in a professional seminar taught by the preeminent voice on the subject. Yellow has a generous pedagogy; she freely shares her knowledge.

Smith’s first solo exhibitions were in Santa Fe, then in New York. She continued to exhibit regularly throughout her career, but nonetheless felt relegated to the periphery: seen and heard but not always fully understood, her work written but rarely in depth.

“We’re marginalized,” she said, “and actually there’s a certain level of comfort in that. You don’t have to worry about bad public relations, because nobody talks about it — nobody watches it. So you can do whatever you want. »

• LA’s famed Last Bookstore has started hosting sleepovers — think Night at the museum with an independent bookstore touch, without animated dinosaur skeletons. Julia Carmel recounts her experience in a dispatch for the Los Angeles Timenoting that, predictably, “things got scary”:

I arrived just after 8pm with my partner, an air mattress, a pile of blankets and pillows, and a bag with Trader Joe’s wine. The others had already arrived and Powell was ready to kick off a relaxed tour.

“Self-help, memoir, science, math, philosophy, poetry, writing,” he rattled as we browsed the shelves.

“I’m going to pop an edible, read all the self help books and leave a new person here,” my partner joked.

Soon Powell was remembering the scariest things he had seen in his years at the store. He described colleagues hearing or glimpsing figures moving around corners, and instances of people watching books fly off shelves for no apparent reason.

“This corner is where the books sometimes drop, in science fiction, for whatever reason,” he said.

As we passed the gate, a hidden nook where my partner and I had signed up to sleep, we realized it was both secluded in the back corner of the store with books on United States history and located closest to the “haunted” shelves that the books fall off of. We quickly decided that we weren’t going to sleep there.

• Aaron Marion’s review of Ben Smith’s new book (Trafficking: genius, rivalry and illusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral) on online media is in The New Republic and it’s a great read (even if it gets a little personal at times, the kick is gold). Here’s a taste, as Marion points out, Smith’s new project feels like he learned nothing:

Semafor was launched last year with the promise of bringing readers “an unparalleled level of journalistic transparency through innovative new forms”. The fruit of that promise are captions: every Semafor (or “Semaform”) story typically includes wording for discrete sections devoted to news, the reporter’s point of view, and contrasting perspectives. In the roughly 16 months of its life to date, the new media company has accepted $25 million in funding, secured several major advertising deals and reported live from the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Swiss. After witnessing — and chronicling — how venture capital, social media and digital advertising have distorted and cannibalized journalism over the past two decades, Smith now hopes angel investors and ad sales will help his social media-savvy online news service to restore trust in journalism. very institution that these forces have distorted. The media can rehabilitate their image with a distrustful public by deepening their ties with the elites. (One can already imagine swing voters in suburban Phoenix running to their devices to check out Davos’ upcoming Semaform.)

• Oh, Mike Lindell. The pillow guy has become a fixture in right-wing American media, but he now faces a $5 million bill because someone accepted his offer to prove that the material he was showing during his “cybersymposium” was not from the 2020 election. A computer forensics expert and Robert Zeidman, 63, Trump voter from Nevadadid just that, according to a report from the Washington Post. Chris Dehghanpoor, Emma Brown and Jon Swaine write:

In frequent media appearances, he had heralded his three-day symposium as the event where he would finally provide data proving his claims. And he issued his high-stakes challenge.

“There is a $5 million prize for anyone who can prove that the election data I have from the 2020 election was wrong, is not from the 2020 election,” Lindell said on the show. curator “The Glazov Gang”, broadcast online.

The data he planned to reveal, he said, were “packet captures” that would demonstrate Chinese government interference. Packet captures, or “pcaps,” are a specific file format that is an industry standard for archiving Internet traffic.

“They were captured in real time and stored. They cannot be changed. … It’s 100% proof,” Lindell said on the show. “So it will show an intrusion. It was an attack from China.

• Rebecca Brenner writes a moving essay in Time about supporting, empowering, and loving her trans child despite and in light of attacks on trans children’s right to gender-affirming health care in Utah:

Almost three years ago, he shared that “sometimes I feel like a girl, but sometimes I also feel like a boy” and soon after he asked if we would use the pronouns he/him. It always felt like a celebration to us — his dad Allan, his sister B, and me — that E knows who he is and feels safe enough to share it. However, I was very careful not to share anti-LGBTQIA+ stories with him.

I haven’t told my gorgeous, wildly funny, smart kid about the politicians fighting to take away his rights. How the new law bans hormone therapy for minors, prohibits trans youth from changing their name and gender on their birth certificates, and prevents schools from changing their name and gender on permanent records without parental consent. How this law will make it harder, if not impossible, for many families like us to navigate our state’s health care system, school, and most other systems and institutions. Or what he ultimately does – deny E and all young non-binary trans youth the reality of truly being themselves.

• Journalist Sonia Paul explains why caste is especially prevalent (but rarely discussed) in Silicon Valley’s tech industry in a podcast episode for BBC. It is worth listening to carefully and illuminates many of the systems that keep casteism alive in the South Asian Diaspora.