Required Studying

For a millennium beginning within the 4th century, merchants and vacationers met in grottoes carved into cliffs close to the Dunhuang oasis, abandoning art work that was preserved because of the desert local weather.

However the area’s summers are not so calm or dry.

Within the Jinta Temple Grotto, over 300 miles from the Mogao Caves, atmospheric humidity ranges reached as excessive as 93 p.c throughout a extreme downpour in August of final yr. At these ranges, decomposition, rot and erosion change into tough to keep away from.

• Most of us are nicely acquainted with the time period “male gaze” by now, however Lauren Michele Jackson explains in an essay for the New Yorker how its origins could be traced to feminist movie concept and an essay written on the topic in 1973:

Although Mulvey’s essay analyzed the work of particular administrators—Alfred Hitchcock’s masterfully subjective digicam in “Vertigo,” as an illustration—she was not preoccupied with anybody technician or viewer a lot as with the technological course of by which gender dynamics are asserted onscreen and alchemized via the pleasure of spectators. The best way our bodies are framed, and the best way the digicam strikes, teaches us to have a look at girls the best way that patriarchy already does. Over time, Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze turned an compulsory quotation for works of feminist movie criticism. Because the critics Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane put it, any scholar who got here afterward “felt compelled to situate herself in relation.” It additionally turned a favourite shorthand for works of mainstream criticism searching for to critique how gender performs out in movie and tv. (In accordance with one reviewer, Sam Levinson’s tepidly provocative new HBO collection “The Idol,” a couple of pop star who bares all, “screams the male gaze.”) Numerous movies lately, equivalent to Steven Soderbergh’s male-stripper trilogy “Magic Mike” and Céline Sciamma’s lesbian interval piece “Portrait of a Girl on Fireplace,” have prompted a parallel preoccupation with “the feminine gaze,” broadly outlined as a humane courting of the pleasure of girls viewers. However, as different critics have identified, when utilized too broadly that time period can obscure slightly than illuminate.

• Erin Thompson pens an article for the London Evaluation of Books in regards to the looted sculptures of Koh Ker:

Visoth stated that many guests come to the museum in quest of a brand new place to worship after leaving the countryside for the town. Greater than 90 per cent of Cambodians determine as Buddhist. Dhakal requested Visoth why Buddhist guests supply worship to sculptures of Hindu deities. We requested many different folks the identical query, and so they all gave the identical reply: the exterior types of a statue chosen by the spirits don’t matter.

Even the looters prayed to the spirits within the sculptures earlier than they took them, asking their forgiveness. Tik instructed Gordon that his crew as soon as overturned a statue and located gold leaf blended with bones inside its pedestal. Tik took the bones and strung them collectively as a necklace. He wore it to indicate his males that the spirits wouldn’t hurt them. His spouse minimize the necklace off as he slept and reburied the bones.

On the drive north from Phnom Penh, I requested Gordon how he had realized in regards to the looting of cultural heritage. ‘I went to the British Museum,’ he stated drily.

• Houreidja Tall speaks with West African hair braiders in New York Metropolis for a report in Harper’s Bazaar about their frequent occupational accidents, which they obtain little help to deal with or stop within the first place:

Bendo, who’s initially from Liberia, works in a small store a couple of blocks north of a hundred and twenty fifth Road. I caught her at a second when she didn’t have a buyer, and as she and I spoke, she instantly obtained to the purpose: Braiding has taken a toll on her physique during the last 22 years. She recalled first experiencing ongoing ache round a decade into her profession. “Generally in case you begin braiding, you’re employed from 12:00 p.m. till 12:00 within the evening, generally 10:00 within the evening … it will depend on what type the client will get,” she says. “In the event you braid hair, you may’t sit nonetheless as a result of you must pay for the chair, and you must pay in your lease, and you must assist your folks again residence, too.”

• Miyazaki followers will admire author Lucy Jakub’s musings within the New York Review of Books on the filmmaker’s veiled probings into a serious downside of grownup life: work. Jakub observes:

But his biggest theme, a sure alienation he identified in Japanese society, impacts Individuals as nicely. At seven, the unusual melancholy of the practice scene in Spirited Away revealed one thing inarticulable to me about my father’s bifurcated life. Ten-year-old Chihiro has taken a grueling job in a bathhouse for spirits, and with the assistance of mates manages to flee her office for the primary time, taking a commuter practice to the tip of the road. For Miyazaki that experience traversed a metaphysical boundary. The scene is uncanny not simply because the practice is filled with ghosts however as a result of Chihiro is a toddler, and the opposite passengers are adults. She watches out the window as they disembark at a neighborhood station and sees the shadow of one other lady standing on the platform—the space, and distinction, between them lastly signaling how Chihiro has been modified by her entry into the grownup financial system.

• 1000’s of writers, together with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Min Jin Lee, and Roxane Homosexual, signed a letter earlier this week in opposition to coaching generative AI on literary works and writing with out permission, addressed to corporations like Meta and Microsoft. Chloe Veltman has the story for NPR:

The arrival of text-based generative AI purposes like GPT-4 and Bard, that scrape the Internet for authors’ content material with out permission or compensation after which use it to provide new content material in response to customers’ prompts, is giving writers throughout the nation much more trigger for fear.

“There’s no pressing want for AI to write down a novel,” stated Alexander Chee, the bestselling creator of novels like Edinburgh and The Queen of the Evening. “The one individuals who would possibly want which can be the individuals who object to paying writers what they’re price.”

This isn’t the primary time a state has criminalized a mom for serving to her personal daughter finish a being pregnant exterior the medical system. In 2012, Jennifer Whalen helped her teen daughter get abortion drugs when clinic care was inaccessible to them in Pennsylvania. Whalen’s daughter was scared when she began bleeding in order that they went to the emergency room, and instructed employees she’d taken mifepristone and misoprostol. She was discharged with out incident however the hospital system reported Whalen to state child-protective providers; the state sentenced Whalen to 9 to 18 months in jail.

Their budding friendship, which has by no means been critically explored, would quickly evolve right into a mutual alternate of instinctual and strategic impulses. Tworkov, almost thirty years her senior, would play a pivotal function in Kusama’s profession, advocating for her at a time when contemporaries, critics, and elder statesmen of portray seen her work with indifference.