Required Reading

‣ Video games, which I was never allowed to play as a child, may finally be shedding their notoriety and gaining serious consideration as both works and mediums of art. Celine Nguyen analyzes a new publication that makes a compelling case that might surprise you in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Taking software criticism seriously might also require taking software—including games like SimCity—more seriously as an art form. In Games: Agency as Art (2020), the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen observes that proponents of games-as-art often try to “assimilate games into some other, more respectable category of human practice.” Nguyen argues that comparing games to the more “legitimate” narrative forms of novels and films obscures what is distinctive about gameplay: “Games […] engage with human practicality—with our ability to decide and to do. […] In ordinary life, we have to struggle to deal with whatever the world throws at us […] In games, we can engineer the world of the game, and the agency we will occupy, to fit us and our desires.” 

Enacting one’s agency in a game can produce an aesthetic experience. It can also be a political act. SimCity players must make decisions about key urban political dilemmas: What businesses and residents should the government try to attract? What taxation policy encourages growth? What transit and zoning policies will improve cultural diversity? What defines an ideal city—or a city gone awry? 

‣ An Indigenous cafe at the University of California, Berkeley, plays a role in the Ohlone peoples’ ongoing fight for cultural and political sovereignty, a story that intersects with the university’s anthropology museum. Mary Ladd writes for Mother Jones:

At Cafe Ohlone, traditional foods meet modern tastes, highlighting continuity and adaptation. The restaurant incorporates recordings, storytelling, and education into the dining experience. Medina, an Indigenous language activist fluent in Chochenyo, is a powerful orator who often enlightens diners about Ohlone traditions. When I stopped by in May for a sunny lunch on the patio, I appreciated the recorded sounds of crickets, birds, and Chochenyo songs sung by the tribe’s youngest and eldest members. My grandma, a We Wai Kai Nation member, would adore the multigenerational Chochenyo rendition of “Angel Baby.”

The cafe serves another role, too: an attempt by the university to atone for past wrongs. For much of a century, the adjacent anthropology museum housed a vast collection of Native artifacts and bones. As I walk by, I queasily remember Ishi, one of the last Yahi Tribe members, who lived in the museum and was made to fashion arrows at the behest of anthropology professor Alfred Kroeber. In 1925, Kroeber controversially declared the Ohlone people “extinct” in Handbook of the Indians of California. This led to the Ohlone Tribe losing its federal recognition, while the building housing the museum was later christened Kroeber Hall.

‣ Eli Cugini peels back layers of apolitical hypocrisy in the British publishing industry, taking aim at presses that profit from work by trans authors with one hand and crank out transphobic books with the other. For Vashti, they opine:

One way these conditions have crystallised domestically is through the quiet ambivalence of the books industry towards trans people, which is a bellwether for its approach towards other groups whose humanity becomes politicised. The proliferation of gender-critical books over the past five years is part of a swirl of movements that have made many public spaces uncomfortable and hostile for trans people, as well as entrenching violations of their basic dignity into the public sphere. If your employer has published or hosted materials that denigrate you, or dehumanise you, or argue against your ability to determine your own gender, then that poisons your work environment; it emboldens anyone who wishes to be hostile to trans staff, and cows trans people by promoting hostile rhetoric as legitimate and protected speech.

‣ Underground rapper Ka passed away last weekend, and among an outpouring of tributes to the intrepid Brooklyn musician was this particularly sensitive one by critic Paul A. Thompson for Pitchfork:

The individual elements of Ka’s style would be familiar to a listener with even a cursory knowledge of rap. He wrote about power struggles in his neighborhood and about the sharpness of his own pen; he was fond of tidily straightforward wordplay, like saying that he was “at the bottom/That’s where all the tops is slung.” But these pieces were arranged in a way that made the familiar seem foreign; through his razorlike rasp, he could make a rote observation sound like conspiracy, harrowing details and sweeping indictments of character seldom rising above a whisper. Ka’s music, which is largely self-produced, is at once stark and enveloping, a fugue of dread and predatory housing law punctured by shards and wisdom and, occasionally, discrete moments of joy.

Over the course of the 2010s, Ka’s stature in rap’s underground grew steadily, from curiosity to cult hero to wizened elder. I’ll speak anecdotally here: I cannot think of another living rapper who was spoken about so reverently by his contemporaries. The admiration was universal and it was absolute. The fact that he continued to ship records himself (and even deliver some local packages by hand) was often cited as a sort of moral good. Maybe it was. But it always scanned to me less like performed humility and more like the inevitable extension of his worldview. His music was handmade, labored over, and ultimately physical in nature: as pared down as his syntax and instrumental arrangements often were, the songs gained their own internal rhythms, his meter implying momentum at the same pace as the story beats in the parables he loved. He was going to be above packing an envelope?

‣ For the Yale Review, Yung In Chae considers what the work of Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang means for South Korean women who grew up under a military dictatorship:

The Gwangju Massacre is central to Han’s magnum opus, Human Acts—a harrowing and clear-eyed yet somehow tender look at the weeks-long uprising against Chun that began on May 18, 1980, resulting in exorbitant death and enduring collective trauma. The novel also means a great deal to me personally: For as long as I can remember, my mother, who is four years older than Han, has resisted thinking about life under Chun in the 1980s, so much so that she avoids TV shows and movies set in that decade. She does not refuse to talk about it per se, but over the years I have gathered that discussing it causes her pain, so I prefer waiting for her to volunteer information rather than asking her for it. Once, we were wandering the campus of her alma mater in Seoul when she looked up at a building and remarked that her classmates set themselves on fire and jumped off the roof as a form of protest. And then, I fill the gaps in my knowledge with books.

It wasn’t until I read Human Acts, I recently told Han, that I truly understood my mother’s silence and was able to imagine what might lie on the other side.

‣ Journalist Mukta Joshi writes in Al Jazeera about her investigation into the influence of the Hindu American Foundation, which maintains close ties to India’s right-wing ruling party:

The BJP has no shortage of allies in the US. One of them, the Overseas Friends of BJP, a registered foreign agent, has the stated objective of “projecting a positive and correct image of India and its people in the US and foreign media and correcting any distortions in the media’s reporting of current events taking place in India”.

While this is the Overseas Friends of the BJP’s stated purpose, it is also a strikingly accurate description of HAF’s activities.

In February 2017, as the Modi government was being criticised for fanning religious ethnonationalism and fomenting violence against religious minorities in India, HAF wrote to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. It requested the retraction of its report on the persecution of Indian religious minorities. It also requested the commissioners to engage with HAF’s leaders “regarding the Commission’s continued misrepresentations of India’s religious diversity, legal system, and political dynamics”.

‣ Smithsonian Magazine‘s Margherita Bassi has the details about the Euclid Space Telescope’s new “cosmic atlas.” It’s giving “to infinity and beyond,” and I’m here for it:

Euclid is nicknamed the “dark universe detective,” because it’s meant to reveal truths about little-understood phenomena such as dark energy and dark matter, which make up about 96 percent of the universe. Dark energy is hypothesized to be the cause behind the universe’s accelerated expansion. But details about these “dark” elements of the universe remain a mystery.

To shed light on these concepts, Euclid will image a wide range of galaxies. Dark matter will have bent the light from the most distant galaxies over time, so scientists could work backward from Euclid’s observations to find out where that dark matter lies. By tracing the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe’s history, the telescope can also uncover more about dark energy.

‣ The Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid released an illuminating recreation of the process for “Mercury and Argos,” painted in the 1630s in Peter Paul Rubens’s studio:

‣ TikToker @shebuildsrobots is, indeed, cooking. Chef Gusteau would certainly approve of this magnificent contraption. Oh, how I wish I were a woman in STEM: