Required Reading

‣ Scholar Saida Grundy takes a deep dive into the 1960s Black arts movement and its radical aesthetics in an astute essay for the Guardian, offering a different way to understand why the Trump administration is doubling down on efforts to defund Black cultural institutions:

The movement swiftly enveloped better-known mainstream Black artists, including many who quietly funded causes such as the Black Panther party legal defense fund and several fledgling Black arts institutions. Artists such as John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Thelonious Monk and Harry Belafonte used their sounds, images and performances to amplify Black consciousness and liberation into the 1970s and beyond. BAM’s artists radicalized a Black aesthetic into a political ideology and understood, as literary theorist Terry Eagleton explains, “the aesthetic, one might argue, is […] the very paradigm of the ideological. Ideology and style are the same thing.”

BAM was not a civil rights campaign, however, and its endgame was neither style and visibility nor representation and inclusion. What BAM artist-activists understood and made into a political strategy was the idea that art itself, as a product and form of Black expression, was not solely capable of liberating Black people. It needed to be safe-housed and incubated within Black communities by independent Black institutions. Thus even as BAM composed the cultural wing of Black power, it further deployed into subsidiaries across an institutional and scholarly landscape.

‣ And elsewhere in the Guardian, Michela Moscufo reports that Harvard University hired a researcher to dig into its connections to slavery and identify descendants of people enslaved by its faculty or founders, only to fire him after he “found too many.” Moscufo writes about the university’s attempt to muffle the project’s findings (note that the article includes images of daguerreotypes of enslaved people):

When he started the research, Harvard had already identified the names of 70 people that had been enslaved with ties to the university. Over the course of the past three years, working alongside American Ancestors, the country’s pre-eminent genealogical institute, Cellini and his researchers have identified more than 900 people that had been enslaved by university affiliates (faculty, staff and people in leadership positions) and nearly 500 of their direct living descendants.

It wasn’t long after the work began to pick up steam that Cellini started running into trouble.

In March 2023, he said he was asked to meet with the project’s executive director, Roeshana Moore-Evans, and the Harvard staff member overseeing the initiative, the public health professor and vice-provost for special projects, Sara Bleich.

These informal meetings were held in a boardroom in the student center, a tall glass building overlooking the gates of Harvard Yard. It was here and during extended phone calls that Cellini claims he was told repeatedly by Bleich “not to find too many descendants”.

“At one point the fear was expressed that if we found too many descendants, it would bankrupt the university,” he said.

‣ Good news for Gatsby fans: There’s a summer boat tour around the Long Island of F. Scott Fitzgerald in honor of the book’s 100th anniversary, and you can even dress the part, Steven Kurutz writes in the New York Times:

Mr. Fitzpatrick, 59, who was dressed in a blue seersucker suit and tie, is one of those people whose soul belongs to another era. He is the author of several books about the Jazz Age and is the founder of the Dorothy Parker Society.

As he told the cruisers, “I’m the one who brought Dorothy Parker’s urn from Baltimore to the Bronx and buried her next to her parents.”

Last year, Mr. Fitzpatrick took over the Gatsby boat tour from a friend who had started it in 2008. The most famous passenger so far has been the director Baz Luhrmann, who was looking for potential locations for his 2013 film adaptation of “Gatsby,” which starred Leonardo DiCaprio.

No doubt Mr. Luhrmann was looking to see, as the cruisers were, the real-life setting of arguably the greatest American novel. The Fitzgeralds lived in a cottage in Great Neck from 1922 to 1924; the spectacular houses, wealthy people and carefree atmosphere of the area in those roaring years are reflected in the novel.

‣ Lobato Felizola writes for LiveScience about newly unearthed, Indigenous ceramic funeral urns in the Amazon, possibly made thousands of years ago, and why their discovery and preservation are important:

The month-long fieldwork was planned in coordination with residents of the nearby community of São Lázaro do Arumandubinha, who first alerted researchers to the finding.

“This was a community-driven demand, which understood the historical importance of these objects,” Márcio Amaral, an archaeologist at IDSM who co-led the excavation, told Live Science. The São Lázaro do Arumandubinha community advised the excavators when to avoid seasonal river flooding, since the archaeological site, called Lago do Cochila (or Cochila Lake), lies in a flooded zone with no access to firm ground.

‣ Zohran Mamdani’s campaign may have rewritten the script on electoral mobilization — namely, through the distribution of cute, free merch. Heven Haile writes for GQ:

CUNY alum Tenay admitted that she hadn’t been especially tapped into Mamdani’s campaign until Hot Girls for Zohran got her into it. She called Mamdani’s logo “modern and chic.” Her high school friend Rene convinced her to come to Friday’s event. “I wouldn’t wear any person’s name on my clothing, but it takes balls to advocate for the majority of his policies,” Rene said. “It takes an extra amount of guts to say, ‘I would arrest Netanyahu if he stepped foot in the city.’ And as a Jewish New Yorker, I know how hard it can be to say that. I know how ingrained Zionism is in New York City politics and certain communities of Jewish New Yorkers, so it’s really impressive to see a mayoral candidate not back down and say something as bold as that. To take a stand on that, I am willing to wear his name on my shirt.”

The volunteers and voters that I spoke with all asked to only be identified by their first names. In recent weeks, Mamdani—alongside many of those even indirectly affiliated with his campaign—have received violent threats. Still, the mood on Friday night was jubilant. Hundreds of supporters were unfazed by the hours-long wait to get Mamdani’s logo printed on a piece of clothing; some passersby even ducked into nearby shops to buy “I ❤️NY” shirts to have them screenprinted on the spot.

‣ Scientists just confirmed that using ChatGPT is not good for our brains. Who knew! Futurism’s Noor Al-Sibai reports on a new MIT study that has the internet in shambles:

The research team recruited 54 adults between the ages of 18 and 39 and divided them into three groups: one that used ChatGPT to help them write essays, one that used Google search as their main writing aid, and one that didn’t use AI tech. The study took place over four months, with each group tasked with writing one essay per month for the first three, while a smaller subset of the cohort either switched from not using ChatGPT to using it — or vice versa — in the fourth month.

As they completed the essay tasks, the participants were hooked up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines that recorded their brain activity. Here’s where things get wild: the ChatGPT group not only “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels,” but also got lazier with each essay they wrote; the EEGs found “weaker neural connectivity and under-engagement of alpha and beta networks.” The Google-assisted group, meanwhile, had “moderate” neural engagement, while the “brain-only” group exhibited the strongest cognitive metrics throughout.

These findings about brain activity, while novel, aren’t entirely surprising after prior studies and anecdotes about the many ways that AI chatbot use seems to be affecting people’s brains and minds.

‣ The inestimable Merve Emre unravels the long history of advice columns, starting with Ovid quotes, and what it says about our relationship to advice and public debate. She writes in the New Yorker:

When advice is delivered over the airwaves or in print, these strangers constitute a public—what the theorist Michael Warner, in his book “Publics and Counterpublics,” describes as a virtual relationship among an indefinite number of people, who remain unknown to one another but are united by shared routines of reading and writing, speaking and listening. To pick up a weekly magazine, like this one, and read an essay, like this, is to be part of a public, along with all of the magazine’s other, invisible readers. By paying attention to words and their circulation, one becomes a member of a group, with a shared identity.

More than any other genre of public speech, advice brings strangers into scenes of intimate exchange. Adviser and advisee may seem to speak only to each other (often through the veil of anonymity), but their remarks will be oriented to the spectators who can read or hear their words, conferring, as Warner writes, “general social relevance to private thought and life.” These spectators evaluate the adviser and advisees on the basis of their rhetoric and their displays of emotion—in short, the styles by which they transform one person’s secret betrayal or broken promise into an impersonal theatre of moral education. Some spectators eagerly leap into the churn, asking questions, making calls, writing letters to the editor, posting comments online. This activity expands the forum of advice-giving, pulling in more voices and points of view. Advice may feel individual, but it can also be a savagely social pleasure, and it has been so for centuries.

‣ That’s how you do socially engaged art, y’all: