This week, the
library of King Ashurbanipal, the new Ford Foundation Center for Social
Justice, geographies of fear in antiquity, China’s Uighurs, alt-right New York,
and more.
Here is a list of
some of the Uighur intellectuals already arrested.
A socialist reporter
goes inside the alt-right scene of New York and finds some scary things:
Hrag Vartanian
Designed by Danish
architecture studio CEBRA, this twisting set of floating copper staircases are
at the main entrance of Copenhagen’s new science and technology center, the
Experimentarium. The design is an abstract version of a DNA strand’s
composition. At over 300 feet long, the staircase includes 20,000 pounds of
copper and 320,000 pounds of steel. More images and info at Colossal (via
Colossal)
Curator Jonathan
Taylor discusses King Ashurbanipal’s Library at the British Museum, which
contains thousands of clay tablets covering everything from magic to medicine.
It is considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever
made:
The Library was also
famous in antiquity – centuries after Ashurbanipal’s death (and Assyria’s
destruction), scribes in Babylonia celebrated the compilation of the Library.
Perhaps these stories inspired the great libraries of the Greek world – such as
the great Library of Alexandria in Egypt.
While many tablets
have been found at other sites over the last 170 years, Ashurbanipal’s tablets
remain our primary source for most of what we know about Mesopotamian
scholarship of the time.
Michael Kimmelman
gives high marks to the newly renovated Ford Foundation Center for Social
Justice in Manhattan:
More than 1,500
pieces of Platner’s furniture have been restored, decades of varnish
painstakingly stripped from paving tiles in the atrium to reveal their original
dusky colors. Custom window latches, brass rails and leather-lined parapets are
all shined, buffed and oiled.
I was reminded of
Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum and Louis I. Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art
when I saw the newly lighted, bush-hammered concrete stairwells tucked into the
fins that jut from the 42nd Street facade.
The new Ford is a
virtual reliquary of midcentury detail.
Over at her personal
blog, Sarah Bond gives us a taste of her upcoming project on the geographies of
fear in antiquity:
From Byzantine
emperors to Abbasid Caliphs, rulers used the morphing Alexander legend as a
means of striking fear into the heart of their constituency and casting
themselves as their foretold savior. I have been thinking a lot about the use
and abuse of this myth lately, as we see the invective and the actions against
the “migrant caravan” heightened by the Trump Administration.
Although I have no
power to intervene as either a diplomat or a soldier on behalf of the refugees
currently waiting to be granted asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border, what I can
point out is that geographies of fear––and the use of walls or gates to address
them––are an synthetic and archaic trope often employed by autocrats. They
empower them to use force and to galvanize their people through the creation of
a scapegoat. Though Trump has chosen to associate himself with Lincoln and
Reagan instead of Alexander the Great, we should still be wary of his
demonizing of peoples who, like many in antiquity and today, simply strive for
sanctuary.
This is
unbelievable. A racial justice group got death threats after Facebook launched
a secret smear campaign against them:
It wasn’t until the
New York Times published its blockbuster report that detailed the inner
workings of an alleged smear campaign to deflect criticism of Facebook from
progressive activists that the string of unfamiliar threats added up. The bombshell
exposé claimed Facebook hired the Republican opposition-research firm, Definers
Public Affairs, to smear anti-Facebook protestors as anti-Semitic, while
simultaneously scapegoating anti-Facebook groups — like Color of Change — as
under the control of Soros, a common right-wing refrain that reeks of
anti-Semitism.
“No, we didn’t know
about Definers prior to the New York Times report,” Robinson said. “It makes so
much sense now, and it also shows me how effective and how much the pushing we
have been doing and challenging and calling out Facebook and running campaigns
and sitting at the table with them had gotten under Facebook’s skin.”
China’s emergence as
a superpower means that others are doing a lot to accommodate their markets,
including Hollywood, which is rewriting scripts to ensure their movies play in
the most populous nation in the world:
China’s booming box
office and seemingly inexhaustible cash reserves have provided a much-needed
boost to Hollywood as it faces slowing ticket sales in the United States and
challenges from Amazon and Netflix.
But Hollywood’s
embrace of China has not come without strings attached.
So when the creators
of “Pixels” wanted to show aliens blasting a hole in the Great Wall of China,
Sony executives worried that the scene might prevent the 2015 movie’s release
in China, leaked studio emails show. They blew up the Taj Mahal instead.
In the 1960s, Marvel
Comics introduced a mystical guru character known as the Ancient One into its
universe. He was portrayed as an elderly Tibetan man.
But in the 2016
movie “Doctor Strange,” the Ancient One is Celtic, played by the white actress
Tilda Swinton. Moviemakers decided to change the character’s ethnicity early in
the process, reportedly to avoid offending the Chinese government.
There appears to be
a massive ethnic cleansing (if not worse) being executed by the Chinese against
the Uighur Muslim minority in the western provinces of China. This report —
published by the Lowy Institute in Australia — is terrifying:
“Break their
lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.”
These chilling words
are stated in an internal document, reported by news agency AFP, and
encapsulate Beijing’s policy towards its ethnic Uighur minority. At the United
Nations Human Rights Council, Beijing rejected criticism of its practice of
interring ethnic Uighurs in indoctrination camps in the Xinjiang province as
“politically driven”.
But accounts from
exiled Uighurs and Xinjiang scholars point to one chilling fact: those
internment camps – hidden from view except to satellites far above – represent
one of the more visible planks of an overarching attack on Uighurs.
I had encountered
neo-Nazis before. They lurk on the fringes of every punk scene, kept at bay
only by violence. But the alt-right movement, though no less contemptible, was
different from the old guard of self-serious skinheads and Nazi costume
players. Their podcasts sounded like my dorky high school lunch table, with
many of the same jokes repeated verbatim. These were not historical reenactors.
They were the kind of ordinary guys I grew up with in a downwardly mobile,
opioid-soaked, white-flight wasteland. I could picture my old friends, numbing
themselves to the banal brutality of the world with liquor and gallows humor,
enraged at having been fucked out of a quality of life their parents had known,
which itself wasn’t that great to start. Now they are getting mad as hell, and
who is helping them give their problems a name?
Jamilah King writes
about the experience of Black Americans at San Francisco’s Peoples Temple (it
was majority Black) and what is often ignored in the story of Jonestown. It is
beautifully told:
That was the moment
that really helped crystalize for me the blackness of Jonestown. Peoples Temple
was a hugely influential part of black San Francisco at one time, embedded so
deeply that middle schoolers like my mom took time to check it out. On some
level, I knew this intuitively, that some hulking part of the community I had
grown up in had been scarred by this infamous American tragedy. For years, I’d
heard vague stories, about aunties and cousins who went off to Guyana and
disappeared. But, over the past year, the more I asked people in my community
about Jonestown and Peoples Temple, the more I came to understand how close it
still is to the surface of everyday life in the Fillmore, even decades later.
One person remembered being hospitalized as a kid in the same unit as a young
member of Peoples Temple, and becoming pen pals with a person who had come to
visit the bed-stricken churchgoer. My high school English teacher taught
creative writing to Temple children and later published a book featuring the
students’ work.
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