Required Reading

‣ One museum in New Mexico is grappling with historical photos of the Navajo Nation, reframing them in the context of colonial photography and bringing in the voices of Diné people. Jordan Eddy writes about the museum’s new show for Southwest Contemporary:

Milton Snow was a non-Native photographer hired by the federal Navajo Service in 1937. Snow had a background in museum work, having photographed for the Los Angeles Museum and Museum of Northern Arizona. For this job spanning 1937 to ’57, Milton took thousands of photographs of Navajo people to be used as proof of modernization, prosperity, and success by showcasing new additions to Navajo lands. Snow’s work catered to Anglo ideals, depicting educational institutions, nuclear families, and agricultural “advancements” that aligned with the program’s stated goals.

In stark contrast to Snow’s original goals, the exhibition calls attention to the devastating effects left out of the government’s official imagery, used to shape policy that wielded the language of environmental conservation to justify the violent eradication of Diné livestock. The murder of sheep and other non-human relatives not only meant a loss of livelihood and sustainability for Navajos, but also led to a shift away from land-based practices and punishments by the U.S. Indian Commission for sustaining them.

“Nothing Left for Me” features Diné oral histories within the label text, presenting a radically different perspective from the one Snow meant to capture through his lens. A photograph of a schoolhouse is described by elders with relatives who lived during the period as a place where being Diné was punished. Students in Native American boarding schools were to detach themselves from the teachings of their community, their relationships dramatically altered by the colonial education that valued gender binaries, heterosexuality, monogamy, and individualism.

‣ Meta’s now claiming that copyrighted books don’t individually have any “economic value,” so they can use them to train AI. (They really said, “Literature? Never heard of her.”) Frank Landymore has the story for Futurism:

Thus there’s no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says, because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange,” as quoted by Vanity Fair — “but none of [the authors’] works has economic value, individually, as training data.” Other communications showed that Meta employees stripped the copyright pages from the downloaded books.

This is emblematic of the chicaneries and two-faced logic that Meta, and the AI industry at large, deploys when it’s pressed about all the human-created content it devours. 

Somehow, that stuff is simultaneously not that valuable, and we should all stop pearl-clutching about the sanctity of art, and anyway an AI writes creative prose just as well as a human now — but is also absolutely essential to building our new synthetic gods that will solve climate change, so please don’t make us pay for using any of it. That last bit is literally what OpenAI argued to the British Parliament last year — that there isn’t enough stuff in the public domain to beef up its AI models, so it must be allowed to plumb the bounties of contemporary copyrighted works without paying a penny.

‣ Documented’s Paz Radovic talks with the father of Merwil Gutiérrez, a 19-year-old who was kidnapped by ICE in the Bronx in February, about the nightmare of his son’s abduction:

Amid the comings and goings of other tenants, the noise of children playing, and the watchful eye of security cameras installed by the apartment’s owner, Wilmer tries to recount how his son became one of the hundreds of men sent to El Salvador. Many of the detainees were like Merwil: randomly picked up without any prior suspicion. CBS’s 60 Minutes discovered that 75% of the Venezuelans now imprisoned had no criminal record after they obtained internal government documents and cross-referenced them with domestic and international court filings along with news reports and arrest records. 

Wilmer only found out his son had been detained after receiving a phone call on February 24 from his nephew, Luis, who lives with them. That morning was their last time together; they had gone around the corner to do their laundry. Later that day, Wilmer said that his son met with a friend to get help with some errands at the American Red Cross. He learned this from Luis, who looked at the situation from inside the apartment: When his son was on his way back, just steps from his home, ICE agents stopped him. “The officers grabbed him and two other boys right at the entrance to our building. One said, ‘No, he’s not the one,’ like they were looking for someone else. But the other said, ‘Take him anyway.’”

That moment marked the beginning of Wilmer’s search for answers — answers he’s still waiting for.

‣ Also in New York, Gothamist’s Arya Sundaram reports on a sickening pattern at court since Trump’s termination of a $200 million contract funding attorneys for migrant children, as detailed in the film Unaccompanied. As young as four years old, they are now attending Zoom hearings and being addressed by a judge, without a lawyer present. Sundaram writes:

While the contract termination is being challenged in court, immigrant advocates say the impact is already being felt, as lawyer groups pull back on services – leaving some children on their own.

“How is a child supposed to navigate this?” said Beth Krause, supervising attorney of the Immigrant Youth Project at the Legal Aid Society. She noted many adults find themselves confused and disadvantaged in immigration court proceedings.

The now-terminated contract paid for attorneys to represent 26,000 children across the country and “friend of the court” programs for children, which provide attorneys in court to help pro se respondents navigate the court process. The figures were provided by the Acacia Center for Justice, the nonprofit that manages the contract and doles out money to other providers across the country.

‣ Amid the torrent of terrifying actions by the Trump administration, Anishinaabe scholar Riley Yesno writes in the Star about why leaning into Canadian nationalism is not the answer:

Certainly, there needs to be a response to would-be tyrants from the south, but I can’t find myself sharing enthusiasm with this current painting of the country in red and white. Particularly since it was not even a year ago that #CancelCanadaDay was trending.

Yes, not so long ago, thousands of people opted to trash their red shirts for orange ones. They found community rallies to attend rather than barbecues or fireworks. And why? Because Canadians had been prompted to spend the day reflecting rather than celebrating; asked to focus on the ongoing genocide and violence that comes with being a settler-colonial state — a prompt advanced primarily by Indigenous people’s tireless labour to show that Canada is not as “nice” as it often purports to be.

To go from that moment to this feels like a particularly annoying whiplash — a reminder of how short Canadian memories can be and how easy it is to forget Indigenous people when times become challenging for non-Indigenous Canadians.

It’s not that I think most Indigenous people would be pro-Trump by any means. It is more that, from this position, it is a lot to live in this patriotic moment — to be asked to embrace one celebrated colonial power for fear of another.

The other day, my mother told me she found this moment confusing. Before this nationalist surge, she had associated people with Canadian flag bumper stickers and flags on their porches as people whose politics she disagreed with; the same people who might have supported the “Freedom Convoy” and subscribed to a vision of “liberty” that was radically individualist. Now, she says, she can’t be sure.

‣ Understandably, constantly checking the news can feel vile these days. Michael Savage writes for the Guardian about the impact of the “big switch-off” on newsrooms across the world and how publications are adapting to stay afloat and engaging:

“On the audience side, there is a degree of fatigue and exhaustion. A lot of people just feel, for their own mental health, they want to curtail the amount of news they’re paying attention to. Meanwhile, younger people who are using Instagram and TikTok, where the ability to include links to content outside of those platforms is a major challenge, are probably contributing to the decrease in [news site] traffic.”

The response in newsrooms has been varied, but there are a few clear trends. To deal with the boom in content and declining free time, curation is king. Newsletters with a few handpicked stories, podcasts delving into a single subject and a reduction in story counts have already emerged as early winners from the news avoider war. Personalisation is the next frontier, with some newsrooms already using newsletters personalised using AI.

“If the personalisation algorithm takes into account personal interest and what’s trending now in a relevant way, you can increase retention by double-digit numbers,” said Danny Lein, the founder of the Twipe tech company, which pioneered personalised newsletters at the Times. The firm has since rolled it out across seven international newsrooms. “Finding that good mix is really key. If it’s only based on personal interest, you get echo chambers.”

‣ Apparently, we’ve got muscle memory all wrong, Bonnie Tsui writes in Wired:

When we talk about muscle memory, most of the time we refer to the way our bodies seem to remember how to do things that we haven’t done in some time—riding a bike, say, or doing a complicated dance we learned in childhood. When you learn and repeat certain movements over time, that movement pattern becomes refined and regular, and so does the firing pattern of neurons that control that movement. The memory of how to perform that action lives in our motor neurons, not in the actual muscles that are involved. But as Adam proceeded through his academic training, he became more and more interested in the question of whether muscle itself possesses a memory at the cellular and genetic level.

‣ This is performance art idc idc:

‣ The weather’s getting warmer and group picnics are the place to be — time to mix friend groups like a pro:

‣ And lastly, a little slice of soy sauce design history:

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.