Required Reading

‣ For the Nation, Kate Wagner writes about how the West finally caught up with Iranian brickwork:

Brickwork has long played an important role in Persian architecture simply because it is the most widely available material, tied intimately with the climate and geological features of the area. Vernacular architecture responds to its surroundings, and Persian architecture is no different. Brick resists the elements, keeps buildings cool, is amenable to building tall, and is well-suited to decorative articulation. Many of the tessellating patterns and geometric forms of Iran’s contemporary architectural language have roots in Persian architecture dating back to the Seljuk period (around the 11th through 13th centuries). According to Mahsa Kharazmi at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, what separates Iranian brickwork from Western masonry is its use of complex geometrical forms, rather than the typical grid. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, critical regionalism, an idea popularized by architecture critic Kenneth Frampton, expressed a desire to counter the “placelessness” that plagued many utilitarian modernist structures by encouraging styles and techniques rooted in local cultural contexts. It’s a Western term, but aptly describes how contemporary Iranian brick architecture reconciles contemporary and historical modes, all drawing from a vernacular sense of space, behavior, and climate.

‣ Reporting for Al Jazeera, Katherine Blouin, Nathan Kalman-Lamb, and Derek Silva reveal how some Canadian universities are deeply involved in Israel’s brutalities in Gaza:

Canada’s flagship school, the University of Toronto (UofT), where one of us teaches and another is an alumnus, is a particularly salient example.

Over the past 12 years, the UofT’s entanglements with Israeli institutions have snowballed, stretching across fields from the humanities to cybersecurity. They also involve Zionist donors (both individuals and groups), many of whom have ties with complicit corporations and Israeli institutions, and have actively interfered with university hiring practices to an extent that has drawn censure from the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

This phenomenon must be understood in the context of the defunding of public higher education, which forces universities to seek private sources of funding and opens up universities to donor interference.

‣ Hindu nationalist groups in the United States have founded their own dubious Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Mukta Joshi explains how in an essay for Jewish Currents:

Over time, these groups’ attempts to raise the alarm about alleged Hinduphobia have translated into policy. In the past few years, HAF has promoted multiple successful resolutions recognizing Hinduphobia at city and state levels. Recently, Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) introduced House Resolution 1131, a first of its kind attempt to get the US Congress to recognize Hinduphobia. Speaking to Jewish Currents in February, Thanedar confirmed that he had engaged with HAF as well as CoHNA in generating the resolution. “I have been observant about the rise of hate against Hindus over the last couple decades,” he said. “That’s why I approached some of the Hindu groups, and we had a very meaningful discussion with their policy people. That resulted in me taking it upon myself to represent them as strongly as I can in the US Congress.”

However, even as HAF’s narrative around rising Hinduphobia has reached lawmakers, independent verification by Jewish Currents found that a full 75% of the 161 incidents that HAF has condemned as Hinduphobia in the United States did not meet the group’s own definition of the term. Twenty of the incidents involved criticisms of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva—the virulently anti-Muslim ideology that dominates Indian politics both in the subcontinent and diaspora—many of them by academics and journalists. An additional 12 allegations of Hinduphobia were leveled at activists aiming to ban caste discrimination in the US, a move that some diaspora Hindus, adherents of the caste supremacist ideology of Hindutva, brand as biased against Hinduism. Furthermore, while 93 incidents highlighted by HAF did appear to be unambiguously fueled by hateful and discriminatory attitudes, 36 of those featured hate directed not at a person’s religious identity but rather their race, immigrant status, or national origin. An additional 29 of the hateful incidents HAF presented as evidence of systemic Hinduphobia consisted of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab language, many occuring in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (Jewish Currents was unable to find more information about an additional 24 allegedly Hinduphobic incidents in the US that HAF has condemned. Despite the events still being mentioned on its website, HAF declined to provide sources, with spokesperson Mat McDermott writing: “We don’t have the staff resources to go back and do this research for you, about incidents, for some of them, [sic] are more than two decades ago.”)

‣ This week in fascism: The Harvard Educational Review cancels an entire issue on Palestine, fearing Trump. Alice Speri reports for the Guardian:

The authors asked for the legal review to be reconsidered. But less than a month later, the press’s executive director, Jessica Fiorillo, wrote to them that the issue was being pulled altogether. In an email seen by the Guardian, she claimed the manuscripts were “unready for publication”, in part due to a copy editor’s resignation. She also cited an unspecified “failure to adhere to an adequate review process”, a “lack of internal alignment” between the authors, editors and the publisher, and “the lack of a clear and expedient path forward to resolving the myriad issues at play”.

“This difficult situation is exacerbated by very significant lack of agreement about the path forward, including and especially whether to publish such a special issue at this time,” she wrote.

The copy-editing issue wasn’t just a personnel one. The publisher’s letter claimed that the review editors “provided highly restrictive editing guidelines to the copy editor under contract to work on the special issue, limiting her focus to grammar, punctuation, and syntax errors, and directing her to refrain from offering any editorial suggestions to address, in the editors’ words, ‘politically charged’ content”. It claimed that the copy editor resigned in large part because of those restrictions.

Fiorillo added that it would be “entirely appropriate” to subject the work to legal checks for “any libelous or unlawful material” but that no such review had taken place. She added that the cancellation was not “due to censorship of a particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic freedom”.

‣ In an essay for The Walrus, Eve Lazarus solves a century-old mystery related to a shipwreck considered worse than the Titanic.

More than 200,000 litres of water a second poured into the Empress, causing catastrophic flooding in the engine rooms and lower decks. The furnaces flooded. The power went out.

The ship was thrown into darkness before most of the sleeping passengers could even grasp what was happening. Those who had managed to leave their cabins were left groping around in the pitch dark, trying to find a way out, clawing their way up the tilting stairs. Because they had boarded the ship mere hours earlier, they were unfamiliar with the ship’s layout. In just thirty seconds, the Empress had taken on almost half her own weight in water. After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms were flooded with the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools of water.

‣ The FBI has long surveilled activists against Lithium mining in Nevada. Mark Olalde reports for ProPublica:

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have for years worked alongside private mine security to surveil the largely peaceful protesters who oppose the mine, called Thacker Pass, according to more than 2,000 pages of internal law enforcement communications reviewed by ProPublica. Officers and agents have tracked protesters’ social media, while the mining company has gathered video from a camera above a campsite protesters set up on public land near the mine. An FBI joint terrorism task force in Reno met in June 2022 “with a focus on Thacker Pass,” the records also show, and Lithium Americas — the main company behind the mine — hired a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism to develop its security plan.

“We’re out there doing ceremony and they’re surveilling us,” Farrell-Smith said.

“They treat us like we’re domestic terrorists,” added Chanda Callao, an organizer with People of Red Mountain.

‣ We can’t look away: