Donald Loggins was part of an army of people who fought against urban decay in the 1970s. He helped start the first city-sanctioned community garden, the Liz Christy Garden (originally called the Bowery-Houston Community Farm and Garden), located on the northeast corner of Bowery and Houston Street in Manhattan.
Today, the garden is a lush urban oasis with winding paths, a variety of plants, flowers and trees, and a pond teeming with fish and turtles. But, Loggins paints a very different picture of what space looked like when he first encountered it. With the garden marking its 50th anniversary, Loggins reflected on its rich history with George Bodarky of WNYC’s Community Partnerships office.
When the tour ended in 2010, the piece was sent back to Ore-Girón’s studio in South Los Angeles. But, in 2012, the artist, bouncing between cities, was struggling to hold on to a work that, crates and all, probably weighed between one and two tons. “It is enormous,” he says. “Just moving it would have cost me about $400, and then I would need somewhere else to put it.” So when he left his studio, Ore-Girón said to the owner of the building that he could sell it for scrap.
- Erica Schwiegershausen talks to podcast host Virginia Sole-Smith about the fatphobia at the heart of many parents’ dealings with their children’s eating habits — and their own. For THE Cutshe explains how to start moving towards healthier approaches:
Trusting children to listen to their bodies is now a defining principle of Sole-Smith’s work. Having a baby with an eating disorder, she learned firsthand that “obsessing over it doesn’t solve the problem – it makes it worse.” Even for parents fighting much more mundane battles at the dinner table, research shows that having too much control over what your child eats – whether that means forcing them to eat vegetables or restricting sweets – is usually backfires. So what does “healthy eating” look like for kids? When it comes to feeding her daughters, who are now 9 and 5, Sole-Smith’s priority is to respect their autonomy. eat.”
- AuthorYashica Dutt has words for those caste-dominated South Asian journalists who suddenly changed their minds about the discrimination being held on shows like Indian Matchmaking:
- For THE New York TimesJenna Wortham portrays Christina Sharpe, a specialist in Black studies and English literature, whose second book, Ordinary ticketsjust released this week:
Sharpe’s book is best known for “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” landed in the fall of 2016, just as the last illusions of a post-racial America were disintegrating amid rising nationalism white. The book begins with a stark statement: the black death is fundamental, even necessary, to American democracy. Death, literally, but also spiritually, culturally, socially. Sharpe is not the first scholar, poet or artist to assert that the denial of black humanity that began with the Middle Passage still animates American life, but she has offered a new metaphorical framework for understanding how.
“In the Wake” rocked academia. He emerged during a “raging and sometimes venomous debate between black optimism and black pessimism,” says Saidiya Hartman, author of “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” who met Sharpe nearly a decade ago when from a conference and became a close friend. “Christina’s work totally upends this binary. It addresses the structural conditions of anti-blackness that condemn black people on various levels and still deals with the richness of black social life, and this is an essential contribution. Sharpe is one of a cohort of thinkers and artists – including Hartman, Arthur Jafa, Fred Moten, Simone Leigh, Garrett Bradley, Ja’Tovia Gary, Lorraine O’Grady and others – who question the rendering of blackness into American culture and provide new ways of looking, seeing and being seen.
- The cityis Emily Swanson caught up with the owner of Langston Hughes’ Harlem House, where her longtime friend hosts a weekly drumming group, about her vision for the historic house and the challenges she faced over the years:
Joining forces with a nonprofit, she said, would curtail her freedom: ‘You’re limited in what you can say and do’, which she says is ‘not real property “.
As the drumming group sticks to its weekly schedule, Swords, Prince and his friends have started making more plans for the house: they want to hold interviews, recorded for YouTube in front of an audience. A book club, a writing workshop and an art exhibition are other possibilities.
For Prince, it’s about building a legacy.
“Owning the building is black wealth, and if you give it away to a nonprofit, you’re handing over the model of wealth,” she said. “A nonprofit is not black wealth.”
Whatever happens at Hughes House, it seems likely that people will find their way there.
- Researcher Kathleen Crowther traces the history of medical abortions for Breastfeeding Clioamid continued threats to its availability:
In his Natural History, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23/24 -79 CE) noted the abortifacient properties of several herbs, including the wild mustard plant and the squirting cucumber. As the name “squirting cucumber” suggests, many plants used as abortifacients, or for other aspects of reproductive medicine like contraception or fertility aids, had obvious phallic connotations. In his Gynecology, the Roman physician Soranus (active circa 1st/2nd century CE) provides recipes for compounds to be taken orally or administered as vaginal suppositories to induce abortions. The substances they contain include rue, myrtle, myrrh, white pepper, arugula, cow parsnip, cardamom and bay leaves.
- Following the death of star actor, activist and musician Harry Belafonte, the Atlantic published a photo report of scenes of his very varied life and work.
- A disturbing visualization layoffs and closures of journalists this year:
- A marketing professional (@marketinginmiami) breaks down the Bud Light “controversy” and what it means:
- And finally, nothing unites us as much as our collective exhaustion with a certain cinematic Francophile. The people have spoken:
Compulsory reading is published every Thursday afternoon and includes a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth checking out.
