Required Reading

‣ Sudanese dentist-turned-artist Hashim Nasr is using photography to highlight the pain of displacement amid the nation’s civil war, his surreal compositions like portals into the inner world of his subjects. The Guardian‘s Kaamil Ahmed writes:

His work is mostly shared on social media sites such as Instagram but his images are earning attention in the art world, winning him the East African Photography award last year, a series of fellowships and a place in the British Journal of Photography’s “ones to watch” issue last year.

The striking masks in his photos were developed while trying to find a creative way to conceal the identities of his models, mindful of the risk to them and their families in Sudan if they were identified.

Some of his photos are a commentary on the war itself – such as a series called the Curse of Gold, which depicts men looming over a woman wrapped in gold fabric to represent the looting of Sudan’s gold resources by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

But most of his work is about connecting with other Sudanese with shared experiences of trauma, loss and exile.

“I noticed this war isn’t talked about enough in social media or in the news,” he says. “I feel like it’s neglected and that gave me the motivation to talk more about it.”

‣ The latest novel to bridge the literary fiction and visual art spheres is Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu, who speaks with Tess Pollok in the Los Angeles Review of Books about what inspired her story, including the art market’s fetishization of Black art:

For the most part, the novel does stay firmly embedded in Ruth’s consciousness as she travels through life; I can see how one function of her friendship with Maria is to generate the friction that makes her internal journey compelling. Did you like writing Ruth that way? What attracted you to that character?

I think her dissatisfaction with life and success were interesting to me. I started writing this book a bit after Black Lives Matter exploded, and it was a moment where a lot of Black art markets were booming. I was feeling a bit cynical about the instincts of the curators and collectors behind that, about why they were acquiring that art at the time that they were. So I came up with the character of Ruth as someone who’s not coming of age at exactly the same time as I was, but who exists in the 1990s art world where she grapples with many of the same issues that I did in the late ’10s. I thought of Ruth and how she might feel being on the sidelines watching Maria’s star rise and feeling bitter about it. Over time, I started to hear her voice more, and that just calcified the first-person narration and made her definitive for me.

‣ In a Substack essay from April, writer W. Kamau Bell shared a beautiful reflection on visits with his family to DC’s National Museum of African American History, reminding us what museums are for. The essay has been recirculating now that the institution is under attack by the Trump administration, and is well worth another read:

When we went there was no line that you had to wait in to get into the basement exhibit on enslavement. Over the years, whenever I have heard people talk about that part of the NMAAHC, their eyes get wide. [Their] tone drops. They use words like “intense” and “overwhelming.” When we first arrived at the museum, my 10-year-old somewhat excitedly said she wanted to see that part right away. Melissa and I were torn. What if it was as intense as adults had said it was? Could our girls handle it? Was it even appropriate for children? We even discussed a plan where I would go down first to check it out. Eventually—mostly because the day was running away from us—we just decided that it was okay for the two oldest girls to take it in. The two girls understood that if at any point it got too rough for them that we could leave, no questions asked. I was their escort.

We had nothing to be worried about. The exhibit strikes the perfect balance of bracing information with colorful, eye-catching, and immersive installations that kept all of us informed and engaged. At one point my 10-year-old saw an exhibit on Harriet Tubman and she ran towards it like it was a ride at Disneyland. She was excited to learn more about this person that she had only read about in books. I was so proud. It sort of made me wonder if the people who were so affected were just raised differently than I was and differently than my kids are being raised. I remember watching the groundbreaking miniseries Roots when I was a kid. I’ve been reading to my kids about Black folks’ painful history since I found the age-appropriate books to do it. Maybe it isn’t the museum that is “intense.” Maybe it is just an indicator of how necessary the museum is.

‣ One month after Israel bombed Gaza’s only Catholic church, Palestinian journalist Huda Skaik visited and spoke with some of the survivors and community members in a moving piece for the Intercept:

“My aunt died beneath the debris, alongside many others who carried nothing but their faith and a small hope for survival,” he said. “Seeing the church targeted was a wound to the soul. For us, it is not just a building — it is a house of prayer, a house of gathering, a refuge for the weak.”

At that moment, Mosa felt that the attack was not only on the place, but on the spirit that unites us as one community in Gaza. “Here, Muslims and Christians share the same fate: the same fear, the same loss, the same siege. And under these conditions, our bonds grow even stronger, because we are all fighting to survive and to protect what remains of our lives and dignity,” Mosa highlighted.

In Mosa’s work as an administrative coordinator at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the day of the church bombing was one of the harshest he has ever experienced. He accompanied a paramedic during rescue efforts, helping to evacuate the injured. “The wounds were severe and varied: deep cuts, burns, fractures. Some victims arrived late because of the shortage of ambulances and transport; some were brought in civilian cars,” continued Mosa. “The hospital was working far beyond its capacity, but we all gave everything we could to save lives, without the luxury of stopping for a moment.”

‣ Colombian novelist Ingrid Rojas Contreras turns her pen toward the cenotes of Mexico, caverns of spiritual and ecological importance that several organizations are working to preserve. She reports in National Geographic:

For the Maya people, these cenotes are sacred places where gods and spirits dwell. They are also geological wonders that may contain historic artifacts and endangered aquatic species, although some have been converted into tourist spots for visitors who want to swim in their traditionally crystalline waters.

Critically, Southern Mexico’s cenotes serve another time-honored purpose: They’re part of a deep aquifer that spans 64,000 miles and supplies the only source of freshwater to millions of people within the region. “Everyone is connected through the cenotes,” says Urbina. For him, Rojo, and a growing band of conservationists, that makes surveying exactly what’s happening inside these enchanting portals ever-more important.

Cenotes have been threatened by agricultural farming runoff and residential sewage leaks for decades. But in recent years, the arrival of Tren Maya, a rail line connecting tourist destinations across Mexico, has increased the urgency to better understand these fragile ecosystems. The 966-mile cross-country loop, which cost an estimated $30 billion to build and began running in late 2024, was constructed in part by drilling massive support pillars directly into the same bedrock that holds the cenotes.

‣ Scholar David Shiffman just co-authored a paper about the mass exodus of scientists from X and explains what the trend means for public science engagement in Southern Fried Science:

For more than a decade, I was a Twitter power-user and evangelist- I trained over 2,000 early career scientists in public science engagement using online tools, and in each of those workshops and talks I stressed the power and utility of Twitter. Several of my most-influential and highest-cited scientific papers are guides for how to use Twitter for science communication or conservation advocacy, case studies of groups doing that successfully, or pleas for my field to embrace this powerful new technology. Several members of the JMIH community have published papers focusing on how social media in general, and Twitter specifically, helped them with environmental advocacy resulting in policy change, professional networking, public science engagement, fundraising, professional development, and even research.

But everything changed when Elon Musk took over Twitter and changed both the algorithm and the moderation policy. New Twitter- which I absolutely refuse to call “X,” because that is silly- encourages pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, an extremist political fringe, and harassment of experts (especially experts who are not white Christian men). Prior to us distributing this survey, many of my colleagues using Twitter reported a clear pattern that was confirmed by analytics data: they saw declines in monthly engagement of 90% or more even as their follower count remained the same. (Mine decreased by 99% eventually). I will note that a few colleagues have reported that their engagement has remained the same or even increased slightly, but at least some of these colleagues do not use a data-based analytics strategy-it’s clear that even if these declines aren’t universal, they are widespread and common.

‣ Meanwhile, a new study confirms that social media is inherently conducive to extremism and echo chambers. Jennifer Ouellette interviews one of the authors for Ars Technica:

Co-authors Petter Törnberg and Maik Larooij of the University of Amsterdam wanted to learn more about the mechanisms that give rise to the worst aspects of social media: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive voices. So they combined standard agent-based modeling with large language models (LLMs), essentially creating little AI personas to simulate online social media behavior. “What we found is that we didn’t need to put any algorithms in, we didn’t need to massage the model,” Törnberg told Ars. “It just came out of the baseline model, all of these dynamics.”

‣ It’s August, but “Christian girl fall” has already begun. Lord help us. The Cut‘s Julia Reinstein catches us up on the de facto leader of the aesthetic:

In an emotional video she posted to TikTok, the North Carolina–based influencer cried as she broke the news to her followers. “This is my fourth time recording, and I just don’t know how I’m going to tell you guys that I’m not going to be able to post fall videos this year,” she said. Covington didn’t go into detail about the decision but said she’d felt “a lot of pressure to make each video better than the last, to make each fall trip better.”

As it turns out, Ms. Autumn was lying. Less than a day later, she posted a 12-second video to TikTok declaring that she was “just kidding.” “Plot twist: I would NEVER cancel fall 🍁🍂,” she captioned her post.

While this turned out to be all a ruse, Covington has addressed the pressure she feels to ring in the season before. In an interview with People last year, she said she starts preparing in May or June of each year, planning trips up north to shoot content, putting together the perfect outfits, and researching potential photo-shoot locations. “I do feel pressure, especially during fall because I feel like everyone looks to me for fall content,” she said. “So I try to hold myself to a certain standard and brainstorm new creative ideas. I spend hours researching and planning outfits for fall. There’s a lot of pressure, and I want my videos and pictures to be well received.”

‣ Speaking of fall, what better way to ring in the season than with a “Fall of Rome” candle? Historian and Hyperallergic contributor Sarah E. Bond puts us on:

‣ For once, Germany is not wrong: