Debika Ray looks back at the film Indian writer Arundhati Roy made while studying architecture for Apollo, and argues that, in retrospect, it reads like an origin story. Roy’s character is marked by cynicism and uncertainty about life after graduation, should she not pursue architecture, and the film can be seen as an early sign of her later disillusionment with the profession’s limited ideas of progress, as well as the emergence of her political voice.
It also serves as a portrait of modern India in formation: the speeding up of development, the changing ties between city and countryside, and an unnervingly early view of the social inequalities that construction and real estate would deepen around the world in the decades ahead. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Abigail Susik turns to new translations of André Breton to examine how Surrealism balanced pessimism and hope. She notes that even essays in Cavalier Perspective that appear to concern art or politics carry traces of spiritual thought, including Breton’s sense that surrealism aimed not only to transform the world but to free the “instinctive impulse” and reach the “total psychophysical field.”
Susik also draws a line from Breton’s “Language of Stones” to the idea of a “unified field,” as described by the late artist Ben Morea, founder of the anarchist collective Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. In this reading, art alone cannot change life, and neither can politics on its own, nor the two fused together; instead, an animist view of a fully alive universe can combine them into a shared resistance to the death drive. If people could perceive this reality through art-as-divination and other consciousness-altering practices, she suggests, extinction might be avoided.
Michelle Myles, a tattoo artist of 35 years, shares New York City tattoo history with Gothamist’s Sonia Rao, tracing the shift from hand-poked work to electric machines. She explains that O’Reilly’s patent was based on Thomas Edison’s electric pen, patented in 1876, and recalls that a newspaper editorial soon after Edison’s patent even urged him to invent an electric tattoo machine.
Myles adds that O’Reilly’s patent appears to have been nearly identical to Edison’s, though it may never have worked especially well because it was never mass-produced. Only one is known to exist. O’Reilly later fought over the patent with another tattooer, “Electric” Elmer Getchell, and the dispute ended up in court under a New York Times headline that declared, “Tattoo Artists at War.”
For Wired, Tamara Davison reports on a museum in the West Bank that has built a digital archive project devoted to preserving Palestinian culture. What started as door-to-door visits asking families for permission to scan old photographs, letters, and documents has grown into one of the region’s most ambitious preservation efforts. The open-source archive now includes more than 500,000 digitized photographs, identification papers, diaries, maps, films, and letters, much of it gathered directly from Palestinian families.
The Palestinian Museum’s work is meant to do two things at once: preserve Palestinian history and make it accessible to people who cannot travel to Palestine. In Vanity Fair, Elise Taylor writes about two exhibitions focused on Paul R. Williams, the pioneering Black architect whose work shaped Los Angeles. “I always like to say you could be born in a hospital designed by Williams, get married in a church designed by Williams, live in a home designed by Williams, go to a school designed by Williams, and then when you die, have your funeral in a Williams design funeral home,” says Staci Steinberger of LACMA.
The scale of Williams’s output, Taylor notes, would place any architect in history’s record books. “Paul Williams is one of the most prolific American architects, period. I would set his body of work alongside Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne,” says Milton S. F. Curry of Cornell University. Yet his significance becomes even greater when considered alongside the fact that he was the first licensed Black architect west of the Mississippi. Pauletta Washington adds, “I felt special living in that house. I felt that he designed it for us.”
For Huck, Jack Burke explores the six-decade history of the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee Springs, a vivid relic of mid-century Florida. In the beginning, the women reportedly waited for cars to pass along Route 19, then ran out in their swimsuits to try to stop drivers, putting on a full performance only if they attracted even one customer. By the 1950s, that hustle was no longer necessary, as the road-trip boom brought a steady flow of visitors.
By the 1960s, Weeki Wachee had become one of the country’s major attractions, drawing more visitors than many newly established national parks and staging as many as nine shows a day at its peak. Celebrities came through, first Don Knotts and then Elvis, prompting the expected waves of shrieking excitement. The mermaids also toured nationally in giant tanks, appeared on Ed Sullivan, and represented Florida at world fairs.
In The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman takes on the familiar ethical question of whether airline passengers should recline their seats. He argues that more legroom may be a misleading fix, since people are not getting taller but wider, while aircraft design makes it difficult for airlines to increase seat width. The tube-like shape of planes gives carriers room to alter pitch, but not the fuselage itself.
Rothman points to aircraft such as the Airbus A220 and A320, as well as the Embraer E175 and E190, as examples with economy seats that are eighteen or even nineteen inches wide. On those planes, he suggests, travelers may have reason to feel slightly more at ease about reclining. Elsewhere in conservation news, researchers have identified a notably adorable new monkey species in the Concolese rainforest, according to Yejin Lhee in Science.
The Likweli monkey was first photographed in 2008, when a research expedition captured a blurry image of a black-pelted primate it could not identify. Scientists did not see it again until a decade later, when the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation’s TL2 Project, which focuses on the Tshupa, Lomami, and Lualaba river regions, set up a field base nearby. Once researchers saw and photographed the monkeys again, they realized they were looking at an unknown species.
With racism in Argentina in the news in the wake of the World Cup, Tess Garcia highlights Indigenous and Black communities that are often left out of the conversation. Wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen offers a more lighthearted intervention with National Park Service pass sleeves, while one social post about the product invites shoppers to “Click on ‘more from this shop’ to select the image you like best!” and notes that it can be used for licenses, credit cards, and permits.
The list closes on a jokingly ominous note: “Maybe we are safe from an AI apocalypse after all:” followed by “Maybe a 4th is needed.” Required Reading appears every Thursday afternoon and gathers a short selection of art-related links, from long-form articles and videos to blog posts and photo essays, all worth another look.
