- Reading forum is back thanks to a partnership with the Nationjust six months after it closed following Penske Media’s acquisition of art forum. Answering some preliminary questions about what this means in practice, Kate Dwyer reports for the New York Times:
The main difference between the old and new Bookforum will be its revenue model, Sunkara said. The magazine was launched in 1994 as a quarterly supplement to Artforum. The new Bookforum will still rely on ad sales as part of the business model, Sunkara said, but it “will need to develop a much larger direct subscription base.”
Sunkara dismissed the idea that print magazines – especially niche literary magazines – are unprofitable.
“We have to try stubbornly to make these institutions sustainable on their own,” he said. “It’s somewhat defeatist to simply say that these entities can’t be profitable, or that in a country of 330 million people – and a much larger language market – you can’t find enough people to sustainably produce a quarterly printed magazine.”
- For the GuardianCarey Baraka writes a detailed dispatch from her visit to the home of Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose anti-colonial fiction and rejection of the Eurocentric literary world continue to push readers’ political imagination into new realms:
Ngũgĩ’s career is often divided into two parts. There is the first Ngũgĩ, whose published work as a writer began at Makerere University in Uganda in the late 1950s and continued until the late 1960s. This Ngũgĩ was called James Ngugi (sometimes JT Ngugi) and he wrote in English. His novels were political and critical of the colonial state, but subtly. Its protagonists grappled with the effects of colonialism, but saw Western education as a tool that could be used against the settlers; they were not explicitly anti-Christian and dreamed of uniting local traditions with the best Western ideals. Ultimately, however, they failed.
The second Ngũgĩ appeared in the 1970s. Ngũgĩ dropped its English name and later rejected English as its primary literary language. Influenced by his reading of Marx and Frantz Fanon, in these later works he began to engage much more directly with the state, with the class, with education, with all aspects of postcolonial life. blood petals, published in 1977, attacked the new political elite of independent Kenya. It was the first of his works published under the name Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and the last novel he wrote in English. In this novel, education is no longer a tool of liberation; it is the educated elite who betray the people. It was the first salvo in what critic Nikil Saval described as “the raging middle period of the Ngũgĩ, who excoriate the Kenyan bourgeoisie, with their golf clubs and other ersatz recreations of the colonial world they once abjured “.
- The United States welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with open arms this week despite his active cultivation of Hindu nationalism. For AlJazeeraJoseph Stepansky speaks to human rights activists warning against Modi’s manipulation of practices like yoga to sanitize the violence he stokes:
“Yoga means to unite. So your rally is an expression of another form of yoga,” Modi told attendees at the United Nations event on Wednesday morning, hours before he was hosted by Biden at the White House.
But Ria Chakrabarty, policy director at Hindus for Human Rights, accused the prime minister of using the event as “om-washing”, a variant of “whitewashing” which employs the mantra “om”.
She explains that cultural Hinduism – through activities like yoga, meditation and mindfulness – has a lot of “soft power” in the West, with thousands of fans and adherents.
“Essentially what he’s doing is taking advantage of that soft power,” Chakrabarty said.
“It’s really just creating cultural soft power for him to go back to India and say, ‘Look…I’m that person who put Hinduism on the world stage,’ even though what he really fact is to put Hindu nationalism on the world stage.”
- And, as Nadia Nooreyezdan explains in Rest of the worlda new AI tool trained to speak with the voice of the Hindu deity Lord Krishna has begun spouting dangerous nationalist rhetoric that only reinforces the existing far-right antagonism:
At least five GitaGPTs were released between January and March this year, and more are on the way. Experts have warned that chatbots allowed to play God could have unintended and dangerous consequences. Rest of the world found that some of the responses generated by Gita bots lack filters for caste, misogyny, and even law. Three of these bots, for example, say it is okay to kill another if it is their dharma or duty.
“It’s like it’s a good thing [to build] for people new to tech who want recognition and respect,” said Viksit Gaur, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and former head of user-centric AI at Dropbox. Rest of the world. “But someone else might take that up and say, ‘What if I could use that to shape opinion and drive my own agenda? And this is where things get really insidious. So there is a lot of danger here.
- Miamians won’t be surprised to learn that a new study has identified a specific dialect of English developing from direct translations of words and phrases from Spanish in South Florida. Linguist Phillip M. Carter writes in the Conversation:
There were “literal lexical layers”, a direct word-for-word translation.
For example, we found that people used phrases such as “get out of the car” instead of “get out of the car”. This is based on the Spanish phrase “bajar del carro”, which translates, for speakers outside of Miami, to “get out of the car”. But “bajar” means “get down,” so it makes sense that many Miamians think of “getting out” of a car in terms of “getting down” not “getting out.”
Locals often say “married to”, as in “Alex got married to José”, based on the Spanish “casarse con” – literally translated as “married to”. They will also say “have a party”, a literal translation of the Spanish “hacer una fiesta”.
- Discover the remarkable life of black American musician Dorothy Ashby, who revolutionized the role of the harp in American jazz but is rarely given credit for it, in Julian Lucas’ play for the New Yorker:
Making a name hadn’t been easy. “The audience I was trying to reach wasn’t interested in the harp, period,” Ashby later recalled, “and they certainly weren’t interested in seeing a black woman play the harp.” Nightclubs routinely denied him a chance to audition, even though the technical hurdles could have been even more daunting. Harps are all white keys, in piano terms, relying on seven different pedals to produce sharps and flats. Their notes last so long that hairpin bends of key or melody are nearly impossible without damping the strings by hand. Jazz, with its complex rhythms, changes and improvisations, demands everything the harp lacks, which is why so few musicians had tried to marry them before. It took another practitioner of a “foreign” instrument to see the potential of the experience. In 1957 Frank Wess, flautist with the Count Basie Orchestra, saw Ashby’s trio at a Detroit nightclub. A few months later, they recorded his debut.
- While the Titan submersible disaster dominates the news cycle, Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan write for democracy now about another maritime disaster that has seemingly faded from mainstream attention, the 700 migrants lost when the Adrian sank last week:
Most or all of Adriana’s roughly 100 survivors were helped not by Greek authorities but by a private yacht that had responded to the distress call. Among the survivors were 47 Syrians, 43 Egyptians, 12 Pakistanis and two Palestinians. All were men, for they were traveling on the deck of the Adriana. Hundreds of women and children were trapped below decks and sank with the ship.
“I am struck by the alarming level of tolerance towards serious human rights violations against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants that has developed across Europe,” said Dunja Mijatović, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, on 19 June, a day before World Refugee Day. . “Reports of human rights abuses… are now so frequent that they are barely registered in the public consciousness.”
- A practical guide to make your own “hologram” desktop companion for a quick craft project this weekend:
Required 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.
