‣ The newly opened Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center is making waves, with a unique approach to ancestral knowledge, ecology, and community. Jeanette Marantos of the Los Angeles Times writes:
Inside, the exhibits are arranged in a meandering flow (just follow the blue line) that introduces visitors to a large and engaging range of interactive displays and stories, many of which were provided by elder Maria del Refugio Solares, Zavalla’s “fifth great-grandmother” and one of the last native speakers of the Chumash language Samala. Some tribal members are trying to resurrect Samala through classes and “just getting together and speaking with each other,” said Zavalla. “It’s opened so many doors to understanding our culture, our medicinal plants and ceremonies.”
Solares died in 1923 at 81, but left wax cylinder recordings of Chumash songs, stories and translations with linguist and Native American language ethnologist John Peabody Harrington. Incorporating Solares’ songs and stories makes the exhibits come alive.
For instance, near the beginning of the permanent exhibit there is a cave-like room explaining the Chumash understanding of the universe, which is divided into three levels. The upper world is inhabited by celestial Sky People, such as Sun and Sky Coyote, whose peón gambling games affected the seasons for everything from harvesting acorns to hunting game. The dark, eerie lower world is dominated by two giant rattlesnakes whose writhings cause the ground in the middle world — our world — to shake.
‣ British-Mexican painter Leonora Carrington often extended her painted worlds onto the page, writing short stories, novels, and plays. Celia Bell considers her newly reissued novel against the backdrop of World War II for LitHub:
Occultism, in whose rituals The Stone Door is deeply steeped, is not necessarily a tool of liberation. Leonora’s intuition, during her nervous breakdown, that the war was being waged by hypnotic power was perhaps not entirely wrong. To the Surrealists, madness was a sacred state, an illumination that revealed, as André Breton, high priest of Surrealism, put it, “that we are not alone at the helm of the ship”—that the great and small coincidences of our life are directed with the participation of forces to which we have no conscious access. But even as the Surrealists were experimenting with ritual and divination in the face of horror, the Nazis also embraced occultism, with its secret and hierarchical rituals of power. Magic and ideology are both practices of belief: how to inspire it, how to turn it into action. How to turn a human into a statistic, an alien, an enemy combatant–transformations worked not through incantation, but through the movement of paper in government offices.
‣ This week in cake criticism, The Cut published an article calling out ugly social media cakes, without contacting the bakers for comment. The Cake Zine Substack swiftly responded with the most thoughtful piece of — er, about cake that I’ve ever read:
What we found particularly frustrating about the piece is not that the author expresses a subjective opinion instead of simply going to the nearest grocery store and buying a $30 sheet cake. It’s that the article uses images of these independent bakers’ cakes, and then hyperlinks specific criticism directly to the baker’s pages. No outreach. No quotes. We can’t see the point in hyperlinking directly to the bakers whose work you are publicly ridiculing (except to send snarky readers to their pages to laugh along).
We launched Cake Zine with a focus on cake because of its cultural richness. Cake reflects a moment in time: the aesthetics in vogue, the economic conditions that shape what ingredients are prized or even just available. The artists driving this most recent evolution in cake are largely independent, self-taught, and incredibly driven—and through the magazine, we have been lucky to sample their (non-ugly, non-dry) cakes and see the hard work that goes into them.
Nobody made us the defenders of cakes, or cake bakers. But after seeing familiar names in these hyperlinks, we reached out to some of the bakers to hear their response:
Lulu Prat of Bodega Cakes: “Of course not every style resonates with everyone—that’s the nature of creative work. What I did find disappointing was seeing an entire space—one made up almost exclusively of small, femme-owned businesses—reduced so casually.”
‣ A new documentary about NASA astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman to go to space (who was surely rolling in her grave during the Katy Perry debacle), grants us a window into her private life and the homophobia that forced her to conceal her queerness. M. G. Lord writes a moving review of it for the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Interviewed for Sally, fellow astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan describes Ride’s marriage as a “great PR move.” Hawley, Ride’s former husband, saw it differently. Ride was not that cynical, he told Costantini. Their union had had meaning, even if it ebbed with time.
I was struck by the kindness of his words. Not all ex-husbands look back with compassion and forgiveness. My own marriage ended less politely in the 1990s.
Either way, staying in the closet certainly benefited or protected Ride, and though it’s easy to take issue with historical figures who choose to conceal their sexuality, viewing Sally might temper the rush to judgment. With a handful of news clips, Costantini evokes the overt bigotry of the 1970s. “[T]wo out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear,” one CBS news report begins. Then, in an on-the-street interview, a teenage boy blurts, “I think they should be shot, if you ask me.” Celebrities were not exempt. In 1981, Billie Jean King’s same-sex palimony lawsuit caused her to lose all her endorsements.
Ride also had a legal reason to be silent. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which, for the first time in civil service law, named “sexual perversion” as grounds for firing or not hiring federal workers. In the military, homosexuality was grounds for a dishonorable discharge. Although NASA had pointedly been established as a civilian agency, this directive made it as exclusionary as the armed services.
‣ Chris Smalls, who made headlines in 2021 for founding the Amazon Labor Union, was abducted from a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza and beaten by Israeli soldiers. Smalls was released today, but as the only Black member of the flotilla, his assault sparked outcry online. Adria R. Walker reports for the Guardian:
The Handala, which carried food, baby formula, diapers and medicine, was attempting to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza, as Palestinians there continue to starve in what UN-backed hunger experts have called a “worst-case scenario of famine” that is unfolding.
“The Freedom Flotilla Coalition confirms that upon arrival in Israeli custody, US human rights defender Chris Smalls was physically assaulted by seven uniformed individuals. They choked him and kicked him in the legs, leaving visible signs of violence on his neck and back,” the Freedom Flotilla Coalition wrote in a statement posted on Instagram on Tuesday morning.
“When his lawyer met with him, Chris was surrounded by six members of Israel’s special police unit. This level of force was not used against other abducted activists. We condemn this violence against Chris and demand accountability for the assault and discriminatory treatment he faced.”
Smalls, the only Black person onboard the boat, was one of 21 members of the group who were detained. Others included 19 civilians, including parliamentarians, medics and engineers, and two journalists. Jacob Berger, a Jewish American actor who shared on Instagram that Smalls was in “great spirits” after his detention – everyone else who was detained, he said, should be released on Tuesday or Wednesday.
‣ Last month, Kenyan police killed 16 people in youth-led protests across the country, held a year after massive demonstrations against several governmental policies. Scholar Muoki Mbunga reflects on the movement’s connections to the anticolonial 1950s Mau Mau Rebellion, explaining in Africa Is a Country:
Among the key lessons that today’s Gen Z activists can learn from Mau Mau, the most essential are building an organized movement and expanding political education among the youth. Over the past twelve months, Gen Z activists have shown that they are extremely effective at mobilizing thousands of young Kenyans through social media to come out to protest. The street demonstrations have become an important avenue for these youth to grieve in community, release pent-up anger and frustration, and ensure that their voices are being heard. The period of mobilization and actual demonstrations usually lasts for about a week before the energy begins to fizzle out. Everyone then goes back to their daily routine, the conversations continue online, and several weeks or months go by before the next round of protests starts all over again.
But what would happen if the periods of lull after every cycle of protests were used to build and expand the Gen Z movement? What difference would it make if members of the Gen Z movement congregated on their own terms rather than in response to yet another police killing or abduction of a government critic?
‣ Fireflies have been popping up a bit more around the US this summer due to rising humidity levels, but they’re still at risk of extinction. For Atmos, Oliver Milman talks to scientists about the future of the luminous critters:
Paradoxes swirl around fireflies like few other creatures, yet it is partly because of this mystery that an animal the length of a fingernail can appear to possess magic. “You’d have to be a cold person to hate fireflies,” said Heckscher. “I mean, they can create light from their own bodies. If we were to discover such a thing on another planet people would freak out, and yet it is happening in our backyards.”
Some of the scientific fogginess around fireflies has started to lift recently. A 2021 assessment of 132 species in the U.S. and Canada found that, while data on half this cohort was lacking, at least 18 species are threatened with extinction. “The last five years have been an exciting as well as a scary time for fireflies,” said Sara Lewis, an expert at Tufts University who cochairs the firefly group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “It’s exciting that we’re now examining fireflies and have discovered a lot of new species. The scary part is there are quite a few firefly species being pushed to the edge of extinction.”
We are losing nature’s magicians before we properly know them.
‣ It was time to cancel that NYT subscription, like, yesterday:
‣ Every American history museum ever:
‣ Not gonna sully the conversation with mention of that American Eagle ad, but let’s just say this is the version we all would’ve preferred:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.