For a millennium from the 4th century, traders and travelers met in caves carved into the cliffs near the oasis of Dunhuang, leaving behind works of art preserved thanks to the desert climate.

But the region’s summers are no longer as calm or dry.

In Jinta Temple Cave, more than 300 miles from the Mogao Caves, atmospheric humidity levels reached 93% during a heavy downpour in August last year. At these levels, decay, decay and erosion become difficult to avoid.

• Most of us are familiar with the term “male gaze” by now, but Lauren Michele Jackson explains in an essay for the New Yorker how its origins can be traced to feminist film theory and an essay written on the subject in 1973:

Although Mulvey’s essay analyzed the work of specific directors – Alfred Hitchcock’s masterfully subjective camera in “Vertigo”, for example – it was concerned not so much with any particular technician or viewer as with the technological process by which gender dynamics are affirmed on screen and alchemized by viewer enjoyment. The way the bodies are framed and the way the camera moves teaches us to look at women as patriarchy already does. Over time, Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze has become a required citation for works of feminist film criticism. As critics Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane put it, any researcher who came later “felt compelled to relate.” It has also become a favorite shorthand for mainstream critical works seeking to critique how the genre plays out in film and television. (According to one reviewer, Sam Levinson’s lukewarmly provocative new HBO series “The Idol,” about an all-baring pop star, “screams the male gaze.”) Various films in recent years, such as Steven Soderbergh’s trilogy of male strippers “Magic Mike” and Celine Sciamma’s lesbian period piece “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” have sparked a parallel concern with “the female gaze,” broadly defined as a human courtship of female viewers’ pleasure. . But, as other critics have pointed out, when applied too broadly, this term can obscure rather than illuminate.

• Erin Thompson writes an article for the London book review on the looted sculptures of Koh Ker:

Visoth said many visitors come to the museum looking for a new place of worship after moving from the countryside to the city. Over 90% of Cambodians identify as Buddhists. Dhakal asked Visoth why Buddhist visitors offered worship to the carvings of Hindu deities. We asked the same question to many other people, and they all gave the same answer: the external forms of a statue chosen by the spirits do not matter.

Even the looters prayed to the spirits of the sculptures before taking them, asking for their forgiveness. Tik told Gordon that his team once toppled a statue and found gold leaf mixed with bones inside its pedestal. Tik took the bones and put them on like a necklace. He wore it to show his men that the spirits would not harm them. His wife cut off the necklace while he slept and reburied the bones.

On the way north from Phnom Penh, I asked Gordon how he learned about looting cultural heritage. “I went to the British Museum,” he said dryly.

• Houreidja Tall interviews West African hair braiders in New York for a feature in Harper’s Bazaar about their common workplace injuries, that they receive little support to deal with or prevent in the first place:

Bendo, originally from Liberia, works in a small store a few blocks north of 125th Street. I caught her at a time when she didn’t have a client, and as she and I were talking, she immediately cut to the chase: braiding has wreaked havoc on her body for the past 22 years. She remembers first feeling continuous pain about a decade into her career. “Sometimes if you start braiding, you work 12:00-12:00 at night, sometimes 10:00 at night…it depends on what style the client is getting,” she says. “If you braid your hair, you can’t sit still because you have to pay for the chair, and you have to pay your rent, and you also have to help your people at home.”

• Miyazaki fans will enjoy writer Lucy Jakub’s thoughts in the New York Book Review on the filmmaker’s veiled questions about a major problem of adult life: work. Jakub observes:

Yet his biggest theme, a certain alienation he diagnosed in Japanese society, also affects Americans. At seven o’clock, the strange melancholy of the train scene at Taken away as if by magic revealed something inarticulate to me about my father’s bifurcated life. Ten-year-old Chihiro has taken a grueling job at a spirit bathhouse and, with the help of friends, manages to escape her workplace for the first time by taking a commuter train to the end of the line. For Miyazaki, this journey crossed a metaphysical boundary. The scene is strange, not only because the train is full of ghosts, but because Chihiro is a child and the other passengers are adults. She looks out the window as they disembark at a local train station and sees the shadow of another girl standing on the platform – the distance and difference between them finally signaling how Chihiro has been changed by entering the adult economy.

• Thousands of writers, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Min Jin Lee and Roxane Gay, signed a letter earlier this week against generative AI training on literary works and writing without permission, addressed to companies like Meta and Microsoft. Chloe Veltman has the story for NPR:

The advent of generative, text-based AI applications like GPT-4 and Bard, which crawl the web for authors’ content without permission or compensation and then use it to produce new content in response to user prompts, has writers across the country even more worried.

“There is no urgent need for AI to write a novel,” said Alexander Chee, the best-selling author of novels like Edinburgh And queen of the night. “The only people who might need it are people who object to paying writers what they’re worth.”

This isn’t the first time a state has criminalized a mother for helping her own daughter terminate a pregnancy outside of the medical system. In 2012, Jennifer Whalen helped her teenage daughter get abortion pills when clinical care was inaccessible to them in Pennsylvania. Whalen’s daughter got scared when she started bleeding, so they went to the ER and told staff she had taken mifepristone and misoprostol. She was discharged without incident, but the hospital system reported Whalen to state child protective services; the state sentenced Whalen to 9 to 18 months in prison.

Their budding friendship, which was never critically explored, would soon evolve into a mutual exchange of instinctive and strategic impulses. Tworkov, nearly thirty years his senior, would play a pivotal role in Kusama’s career, championing it at a time when contemporaries, critics, and former statesmen of painting viewed his work with indifference.