The classicists are at it again. Emily Wilson, whose acclaimed translation of the Odyssey pushed back against long-standing Western and misogynistic readings, has stirred debate with a blistering critique of Christopher Nolan’s film in the London Review of Books. Her essay is hardly academic in tone; it acknowledges the difficulty of adaptation while arguing that Nolan still mishandles the epic’s core questions of humanity and morality:
But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.
Filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill (1994), which stars Erin McMurtry and my personal icon Sarita Choudhury, was well ahead of its time. The film follows a lesbian couple as they uncover a web of corporate pollution, building what Cheang describes as an “eco-cybernoia” narrative about capitalism and hacking as activism. For Dirt, critic Elissa Suh spoke with Cheang about the film and the role of food, contamination, and revenge in its imagery.
In 2021, curator Claire Mander founded the Artist’s Garden on a terrace in London to challenge the notoriously sexist history of monuments. It is the world’s only public sculpture garden devoted to women artists, but the city ordered it cleared by October, which Mander suspects is part of a plan to develop the property. For the Guardian, Anita Chaudhuri reports on the campaign to save the space as a place for rest, community, and celebration.
The Atlantic has spent years publishing stories that declare the “end of reading,” but the formula has grown stale. Timothy Noah writes in the New Republic about the magazine’s broader appetite for sensationalist doom, arguing that its habit of framing everything as terminal goes far beyond the literacy crisis. The result, he suggests, is less journalism than click-driven “doom porn.”
Students in India have launched mass protests against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party after a Supreme Court justice compared unemployed young people to cockroaches, giving the movement its striking name: “Cockroach Janata Party.” Arundhati Roy places the protests, and the violent backlash they may still provoke, within wider struggles for justice across India in the Walrus.
Katrina vanden Heuvel’s new piece in the Nation is an unusually hopeful one, tracing the “politics of joy” running through Zohran Mamdani’s administration and the grassroots movement that elected him. She points to the city’s free and affordable leisure options as part of that vision, with Renita Francois, the new deputy mayor of community safety, saying, “Safety is not just the absence of violence, but the presence of opportunity, dignity, and community.”
As government cuts continue to undermine research funding, some climate scientists have turned to an unexpected source of income: OnlyFans. Bryce Canyon of River Front Times spoke with researchers about the bleak state of affairs, including the absurdity of needing a subscription platform to support marmot research.
The Huntington has been recirculating its affecting 2024 documentary on Betye Saar, the formidable artist who died earlier this week, just before what would have been her 100th birthday today. Elsewhere, there’s a post asking, “Imagine paying someone to dunk your book into a cup of coffee … the social currency of appearing well-read is really doing a number on us,” and another one notes, “Love to see some divine intervention at the gym.”
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.
