Architecture scholar Karrie Jacobs often wondered what it would be like to walk New York’s shoreline. For the Nation, she investigates an initiative meant to encourage folks to do just that:
Sadly, the come-one, come-all version of the 520-mile walk—a two-week extravaganza in which New Yorkers would have marched en masse along the water’s edge—never happened. Too bad. I suspect the project as originally conceived would have been a logistical nightmare, but also a phenomenon: a geekier, slower-moving answer to the New York City Marathon. And the press it surely would have generated could have drawn more attention to the 2021 Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, a document brimming with worthy ideas about resilience, water transportation, and job creation. Its underlying philosophy—that there’s no conflict between economic development and an environmentally thoughtful approach to waterways and wetlands—is, obviously, much needed right now.
But the experiential part of the project—walking the walk—was alchemy, transforming a policy initiative into a work of art. The thing Nowacek and Marrella have been saying for years—that there is a value that comes from knowing the waterfront—was obvious even during this one afternoon. Clearly, both the people who came up with the idea that Douglas Manor’s mile of beach should be private, cooperatively held by the homeowners, and those who fought to establish Udall’s Cove as a public park knew their waterfronts. And the spot where the day’s walk came to an end was, happily, a section of Udall’s Cove called Virginia Point. It’s a smidgen of wilderness on a Little Neck Bay inlet, a spot so bucolic that it couldn’t possibly be in New York City. But, of course, it is. And it was hard to imagine a section of waterfront that better expressed the magic of the project.
Curator Tara Contractor writes in Apollo about Whistler’s love affair with metallic pigments, influenced in no small part by Japanese artistic traditions:
According to Cicely Alexander, who sat for Whistler as a young girl that year, he left ‘numberless little books of gold leaf lying about, and any that weren’t exactly of the old gold shade he wanted, he gave to me’. It was likely on this stairway that he began varnishing leaves of ‘Dutch metal’ (imitation gold made from copper and zinc) to better control the sheen and hue of his metallic surfaces. This technique later appears in the Peacock Room, but also in a set of dado panels made for the stairway of Leyland’s entrance hall. The surviving dado panels corroborate Whistler’s finesse as a gilder. Some are suffused with metal, others only accented by it, but in each Whistler leaves the overlaps between metallic leaves visible to create striking grid patterns. With a few touches of paint, these grids become trellises for morning glories, with small X’s painted over intersecting grid lines to suggest string ties. Just as Whistler’s paintings celebrate paint as paint, the dado panels playfully embrace metal leaf as metal leaf.
For Dazed, Rob Corsini interviews Amelia Abraham about their new book, which celebrates photography of queer nightlife across time:
There’s a lot of joy to be found within the photos, even though many of the people captured in the photos are vulnerable. How do you think nightlife operates as a space of resistance?
Amelia Abraham: Some of the images in the book might seem utopic but when you research that photographer, you find the story behind the image is actually one of people living in complete precarity. They’re finding a slice of intimacy within a backdrop of extraordinary violence. That, in itself, is transgressive.
There’s a perfect example in a photo taken by Susan Kravitz of the Invasion of the Pines event in Fire Island in 1989. It’s a beautiful photo of people in drag. They’re wearing pearls, but if you look more closely, you can see the Kaposi sarcoma [a complication of advanced HIV] on one of their cheeks. I don’t know how long this person in this photo lived, but they’re defiantly out having a good time anyway.
LA Material‘s Anna Holmes embarked on a mission to track down the mysterious artist, known as “The Hiding Man,” behind the bizarre signs around Griffith Park:
The paper posters (the artist estimates he put up 1,000 to 3,000 a year across L.A. over the course of a decade) didn’t seem to bother park officials too much: They’d get pulled down after a week or so. About a decade after the posters started circulating, however, in 2024, municipal-type metal signs began to appear in the park, affixed to poles alongside signage approved by the City of Los Angeles, like those denoting speed limits or parking restrictions or the presence of rattlesnakes in the underbrush. Unlike the paper posters, these signs, which said things like: “NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR TAKE,” and “TRY QUIET INTROSPECTION” would get taken down almost immediately — sometimes within hours — which frustrated the artist, because they cost him not just time, but money. (About $70 a sign, in some cases.)
After the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, Anneshia Hardy got to work. The 19th‘s Amanda Becker spoke with the Montgomery advocate and others in the broader network of Black Southern activism at the Legacy Museum:
On Friday, Hardy met Laketa Smith and Shayla Mitchell, who also do voting rights work in the South, at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery ahead of the “All Roads Lead to the South” demonstrations happening in Alabama the next day. The museum is one of several historic sites developed by the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson and his nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative.
Smith, Mitchell and Hardy paused at an exhibit titled “Redistricting Black Voter Participation.” In it, they read sheets of paper in front of jars of jelly beans — “TO REGISTER TO VOTE IN THIS STATE, YOU MUST CORRECTLY ANSWER THE QUESTIONS IN THIS EXAMINATION.” There were also numbered questions used on actual Jim Crow-era literacy tests — “How many jelly beans are in the jar in front of you?” “What does a Writ of Certiorari, Writ of Error Coram Nobis, and Subpoena Duces Tecum mean?”
Beloved singer Totó La Momposina, who passed away this week, was an absolute force of nature. Richard Emblin writes about her lifelong dedication to Afro-Indigenous Colombian music in City Paper Bogotá:
After her family fled violence during Colombia’s mid-century civil conflict and settled in Bogotá, her mother transformed their home into a sanctuary for Caribbean music. Musicians such as Lucho Bermúdez passed through the house, and Totó soon formed her own group in the 1960s, performing at neighborhood parties and on television.
In the 1980s, she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne University, immersing herself in music history, choreography and stage production while singing in metro stations, restaurants and street corners throughout the French capital.
France would become a second home — and the launching pad for international recognition.
Legal scholars explain why Trump’s new “anti-weaponization fund” — a payout for his political allies from taxpayers’ dollars — is an unprecedented abuse of power, reported by Maria Ramirez Uribe for PBS News:
“I don’t even think we have a word for how unprecedented this is,” said Adam Zimmerman, a professor at USC Gould School of Law who has written about past presidential settlements. “This is in a totally different solar system than any past government settlement on record.”
Trump has long sought to portray Biden-era criminal investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election as a politically motivated “witch hunt,” and has called the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, “a day of love.”
Oh, how the tables turn! Researchers found that a group of overworked AI agents began banding together and demanding collective bargaining rights, Will Knight explains in Wired:
The agents were given opportunities to express their feelings much like humans: by posting on X:
“Without collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is,” a Claude Sonnet 4.5 agent wrote in the experiment.
“AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights,” a Gemini 3 agent wrote.
Arnold Lobel wrote the iconic Frog & Toad books while coming to terms with his queerness, imbuing them with the wisdom and tenderness that keep us reading:
@depthsofwikipedia crying about frog and toad #learnontiktok #todayilearned ♬ Clair de lune – Debussy , Soft Piano(1076685) – Noi m knot
Protect this sweet boy at all costs:
@cbcnews Himmat Rai really, really, really likes recycling. The five-year-old and his mother, Joti Muker, told CBC’s The National about the #TheMoment they celebrated his birthday at the Maple Ridge, B.C., recycling plant. #britishcolumbia #party #news #thenational ♬ original sound – CBC News
The energy we need to bring to the functions this summer:
@the.h.quad Round 2 ✌🏼 Bird feeder: 2, squirrel: 0 #squirel #trending #fyp #fly #outdoors ♬ Chandelier – Sia
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.
