Required Reading – culturemosaic

‣ Hyperallergic Senior Editor Hakim Bishara appeared on the BBC Sounds podcast to discuss the infamous banana auction heard ’round the world. Listen to his take around the ~10:10 mark, and read his Opinion piece from last month while you’re at it, too.

‣ Journalist Jason Koebler went to the premiere of commercial AI-generated movies — yes, alas, they now exist — so you don’t have to. For 404 Media, he writes:

All of these films are technically impressive if you have watched lots of AI-generated content, which I have. But they all suffer from the same problem that every other AI film, video, or image you have seen suffers from. The AI-generated people often have dead eyes, vacant expressions, and move unnaturally. Many of the directors chose to do narrative voiceovers for large parts of their films, which is almost certainly done because when the characters in these films do talk, the lip-synching and facial expression-syncing does not work well. Some dialogue is delivered with the camera pointing at the back of characters’ heads, presumably for the same reason.

‣ Love it or hate it, Luigi Mangione fever is undeniably in full swing. But the New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino considers how violence, and its many definitions, figures into debates about the suspected murderer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO and the American healthcare system as a whole:

Thompson’s murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence; his line of work is another. Denied health-insurance claims are not broadly understood this way, in part because people in consequential positions at health-insurance companies, and those in their social circles, are likely to have experienced denied claims mainly as a matter of extreme annoyance at worst: hours on the phone, maybe; a bunch of extra paperwork; maybe money spent that could’ve gone to next year’s vacation. For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death. Maybe everyone knows this, anyway, and structural violence—another term for it is “social injustice”—is simply, at this point, the structure of American life, and it is treated as normal, whether we attach that particular name to it or not.

‣ For the Intercept, Noah Hurowitz and Patrick Hilsman spoke with Syrian activists who are speaking out after being forced into exile or hiding under the Assad regime:

There exists grave uncertainty about the stability of the country, and both Israel and Turkey have exploited the chaos by moving aggressively to secure their own interests in Syria, while the U.S. has carried out airstrikes on what it says are ISIS militants still operating in isolated desert areas.

But after 13 years of war and half a century of dynastic autocracy that forced Syrians to censor themselves even with their family, the fall of the regime unleashed a jubilant, collective unmasking in cities across Syria on Sunday. Crowds poured into the street to celebrate, tear down statues of the old regime, and unveil their true feelings, often for the first time in their lives.

With Assad gone, many of the activists who had labored under pseudonyms for years began to come out to the world — and to their families back home.

“My country is free, there is no need to hide anymore,” wrote Oussama, a 31-year-old doctor living in Paris, who had tweeted under the name OSilent4 since 2012.

Born to Syrian exiles in France, Oussama still prefers to use only his first name, and told The Intercept in an interview that, like most Syrians, he is not naive about the challenges to come.

‣ Beloved poet Nikki Giovanni, who grew up between Tennessee and Ohio, passed this week at age 81. For the Knoxville News Sentinel, Tyler Whetstone and Keenan Thomas honored her impact on local community members, from fellow poets to former classmates:

Rhea Carmon, the former poet laureate of Knoxville, was a University of Tennessee undergraduate when she first met Nikki Giovanni, the poet who inspired her to become one, herself. It happened when Giovanni came to campus for a speech, which Carmon introduced with two poems of her own.

“That right there for a young poet, that was everything I needed to keep going,” Carmon said. “It was life-changing because I had read her poems for years.”

Hearing Giovanni read “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” Carmon knew she wanted to follow in the footsteps of Giovanni, the poet − to be able to command attention, espouse truth and remain eloquent through her work.

“She was exactly who she was supposed to be at every moment, and that was always astonishing for me,” Carmon said. “She never backed down, and her beliefs and who she was was who she showed you.”

‣ Christina Cooke tells the story of North Carolina farmer Patrick Brown, who purchased the land that his enslaved ancestors once worked in a journey to transform his community’s health. She writes in Bitter Southerner:

In this work with the land, Patrick is carrying out acts of reclamation, finding ways to push back against the systems designed to oppress people of color. In a county that was intentionally poisoned — and a world suffering from a changing climate — he is reviving the soil under his feet by transitioning away from pesticide-dependent row crops like tobacco to industrial hemp, which is known to sequester carbon and remediate soil, and using earth-friendly organic and regenerative methods.

And in a region where many residents suffer from diet-related illnesses and do not have easy access to grocery stores selling fresh foods, Patrick offers vegetable boxes through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, as well as by producing hemp-derived CBD products meant to reduce chronic pain by holistic, nonpharmaceutical methods.

“He is incredibly business-oriented and entrepreneurial, but he is grounded, he’s literally grounded in the earth and the values of Black family life,” says Jereann King Johnson, a Warrenton organizer and cultural historian who has long known the Brown family and hosted Patrick on a public panel discussion about Black land ownership and land loss a couple of years ago. “The values that have been instilled in him from his family — of being a good steward of the land, caring for the community, being a good businessperson — that whole legacy of the Brown family — when you see him and talk to him, he is enshrined in those values.”

‣ Kyle Chayka and Nate Gallant’s Substack One Thing shared a list of “new rules of media” and asked for readers’ input, especially relevant in light of the right-wing media landscape’s ubiquity and urgent calls to counter it with strong journalism:

Everything is iterative. A single Instagram or Twitter account becomes a newsletter becomes a small publication with a few contributors becomes a corporation. (See The Free Press.) Thus it makes sense to build your concept in public and test its engagement at every stage. Every powerful brand starts with a single post. As with restaurants, new publications or writerly personas will pop up in established spaces and then go independent when they can survive alone.

Everything is multi-platform and multimedia. Not just journalist-personalities, but every magazine issue, every feature package, every article. The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible. The presentation has to be optimized in every venue: You need good Instagram pinned posts, whether you’re a person or a brand, not that there’s a difference.

Broadcast on every channel, at least if you want to intensify your personality cult: text, livestream, video, audio. Jamelle Bouie broadcasts his ideas (and persona) on every platform at once. His TikTok commenters mostly ask him where he buys his very fashionable jackets. Now we’re watching Ezra Klein talk on the NYT site as well as listening to him. You have to be better than the rando parroting your articles in a selfie video.

‣ A deep-dive into the ~seedy~ underbelly of the apple industry through the case of the Honeycrisp’s decline. Chef Genevieve Yam writes in Serious Eats:

The move to Washington facilitated the arrival of the Honeycrisp everywhere and made it possible for consumers to purchase the apple variety wherever and whenever they wanted. All the problems with the Honeycrisp became much more common once the apple was grown and distributed on such a large scale; as Cornell University pomology professor Ian Merwin told Axios reporter Nick Halter, “There is no question that the quality that’s in the market is not what it was 10 years ago.” Apples are spending longer than ever in storage, and “even with advances in refrigeration in technology, that further erodes their quality.”

‣ I fear this is a direct cultural consequence of the Wicked frenzy: