Required Reading

‣ In a posthumous essay written the year before his death in 2011, Los Angeles Review of Books designer Peter Campbell mused on preserving printing practices, granting us a fascinating peek into typesetting during the rapid rise of online publishing:

I have spent most of my life following up what I began then. I still work with print and play with words, but the sound of typesetting is now the tapping of a writer at a word processor, and I move pages about on my computer screen not on a stone. The formes we sent down to the press room are now files sent over the wire to a printer. Typesetting, once handwork, is now screenwork, a branch of computer graphics, and the presses that output printed sheets are governed electronically. It will be some time before printing on paper disappears, but in many fields it is being edged out. The page has become a graphic image that can be printed, or output to a screen where texts, which long ago made the transition from scroll to book, are once again scrolled. Some ebook software generates images of turning pages – an anachronism as odd in its way as the steam train on signs that warn of a level crossing. Odd, but not surprising. ‘Book’ means both the object you can throw and the words you read.

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‣ My brain knows Christmas is over, but my heart needs to micro-dose holiday cheer to survive January. Erik Trinidad mines the surprising historical origin of the snow globe for Smithsonian Magazine:

It was 1900 when Erwin Perzy I, a tradesman who built and repaired surgical instruments for local physicians in Vienna, was tasked with creating an inexpensive solution to amplify light in hospital operating rooms. Perzy, who always had a knack for experimenting in his workshop, found inspiration for his assignment in a tool used by local shoemakers: a glass globe filled with water to act as a magnifying glass. He positioned an Edison light bulb near a water-filled glass globe, and he added different reflective materials to the liquid that might help increase the illumination—including white particles that floated around before sinking like snow.

‣ Speaking of January, that famously grim month, the Nation‘s John Nichols reflects on the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter and fighting oligarchy this inauguration season:

Though he has played a billionaire on TV, Trump’s tumultuous financial record, including six bankruptcies for his hotel and casino businesses, has often left him in economically vulnerable spots. He has a long history of playing up to billionaire-class oligarchs, and during his first term he made a point of giving them massive tax cuts.

There’s little doubt that Trump will seek to do so again in his second term, providing further confirmation of the late former president Jimmy Carter’s observations from almost a decade ago about the damage done by billionaire-guided governance. “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president,” explained Carter in the summer of 2015, just weeks after Trump launched his first presidential bid.

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‣ Author Avi Steinberg made headlines after denouncing his Israeli citizenship this week, and he explains why in a must-read essay in Truthout:

Nineteen years after this Citizenship Law of 1952 was enacted, my parents moved from the U.S. to Jerusalem and were granted citizenship and full rights under the “Law of Return.” Out of a youthful naivete that would deepen into willful ignorance, they managed to become both American liberals who opposed the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, while also acting as armed settlers of another people’s land. They moved into a Jerusalem neighborhood that had been ethnically cleansed only a few years earlier. They occupied a home built and recently inhabited by a Palestinian family whose community was expelled to Jordan and then violently barred from returning at the barrel of a gun — and by the citizenship papers my family held in their hands.

This 1-to-1 replacement was not a secret. People like my family lived in these quarters precisely because it was an “Arab house,” proudly advertised as such for its elegant, high-ceilinged design in opposition to the drably utilitarian, haphazardly constructed apartment blocks of the settler Zionists. I was born in the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Ayn Karim, much prized for possessing all the native Arab charm with none of the actual native Arabs to unsettle the pretty picture. My father was in the Israeli military, from which he and many of his friends emerged, after the monstrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, liberal proponents of “peace.” But to them, that word still meant living in a Jewish-majority country; it was a “peace” in which the original sin of the state, the ongoing process of ethnic cleansing, would remain firmly in place, legitimated and thereby more secure than ever. They sought peace, in other words, for Jews with Israeli citizenship, but for Palestinians, “peace” meant full surrender, a permanent occupation and exile.

All of this is to say: I don’t regard my decision to renounce this citizenship as an effort to reverse a legal status as much as it is an acknowledgement that this status never held any legitimacy to begin with. Israeli citizenship law is predicated on the worst kinds of violent crimes we know of, and on a deepening litany of lies intended to whitewash those crimes. The look of officialdom, the trappings of lawful governance, with their seals of the Ministry of the Interior, testify to nothing other than this state’s slippery effort to conceal its fundamental unlawfulness. These are forged documents. They are, more importantly, a blunt instrument used to continually displace actual living people, families, entire populations of the land’s Indigenous inhabitants.

‣ A team of reporters and illustrators at ProPublica compiled a movingly designed piece on the brutality and inhumanity of encampment sweeps, with handwritten testimonies from unhoused people who have experienced them:

My sence of self + the will to keep trying to better my self + get off these streets. So the most devastating object I lost was Jeremy Foreman.

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‣ In a veritable Christmas miracle, reported by Gothamist‘s Hannah Frishberg, a library book was returned to a New York branch after 72 years:

“We routinely get stuff [returned], all the time, from the ‘80s or the ‘90s but rarely stuff from mid-century,” said Parrott, who loves learning the stories behind such superlatively overdue items.

When this one was checked out from the Bronx’s 160th St. Woodstock branch, Harry Truman was president, the “Red Scare” was all over American news and “Singin’ in the Rain” was about to hit theaters. Stravinsky was 69 years old. The 455 5th Ave. NYPL location was not yet built, and the woman who checked out the book was working towards a music degree at Hunter College, according to Parrott. Neither she nor her son, who Parrott said returned the book, could be reached for comment by press time.

‣ YouTube queen Mina Le is back with a video essay to kick off the new year, using the Wicked frenzy to explore the question: What happened to color saturation in mainstream film?

‣ Philomena Cunk is the art historian the world has been waiting for:

@bbc

Philomena Cunk, the art critic 🎨 #CunkOnEarth Head to #iPlayer now for more #Cunk content, and watch new #PhilomenaCunk in #CunkOnLife from 30 Dec Landmark documentary-maker Philomena Cunk traces the history of Britain and the world, from the Big Bang to Brexit. Comedy from Charlie Brooker, starring Diane Morgan.

♬ original sound – BBC
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‣ Me and my overgrown eyebrows can confirm that this is 100% accurate:

@tahalikesyou

2 years ago i posted one of my fav videos ive ever made SO HERE IT IS AGAIN LOL

♬ original sound – TAHA

‣ Happy engagement season!

@ria.rafael

Diese geprobte lache killt mich 😭 #fyp #trend #justforfun #justjokesokayyy

♬ Waves – 243 Music

🔗 Source: Original Source

📅 Published on: 2025-01-03 00:56:00

🖋️ Author: Lakshmi Rivera Amin – An expert in architectural innovation and design trends.

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