Elizabeth Schambelan writes about the January 6 Capitol breach in an essay for Triple Canopy. She discusses the Three Percenters, nation-states and fraternity, “the far-right’s Sparta fetish,” and the difficulty of making sense of it all: “Apparently, I’m overreading, overthinking, but how could I not? The American right has undergone an occult turn, communicating in esoteric code, hand gestures, arcane glyphs, abbreviations as forbiddingly cryptic as the tetragrammaton. A hermeneutics that pushes interpretation only as far as parsimony allows seems unlikely to penetrate the rococo bramble of right-wing semiotics. What if to interpret conservatively is to be played for a sucker?”
For The Nation, Rosmarie Ho interviews Richard Jean So, whose latest book, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction, examines the hegemony of whiteness in publishing. Using computational analysis and close readings, So’s “major takeaway is that we can use machines to identify a white cultural voice. . . . Sara Ahmed argues that a big part of whiteness is narcissism. I think that the data really bears that out—that white narcissism is really a thing that has certain qualities and a historical trajectory.”
Over four hundred journalists have signed an open letter calling for clearer coverage of Palestine in the US media. “The evidence of Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians is overwhelming and must no longer be sanitized,” they write, urging journalists to use more accurate language in describing Israeli-enforced apartheid and contextualize the “total asymmetry in power” between Israel and Gaza.
Kyle Chayka gives an in-depth breakdown of how he used non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to fund the entertainment newsletter Dirt. According to Chayka, the campaign sold 131 NFTs, bringing in a little over $30,000, which is enough to fund a “season” of the newsletter (about two months of content). The first season will be edited by Jason Diamond, who is accepting pitches now.
On June 17th, the Arts Club of Chicago is hosting a virtual event with Jo Livingstone and Alex Shepard, who will discuss corporate consolidation in the arts.
Archipelago Books is holding an art auction to raise funds for the press and its children’s book imprint, Elsewhere. Bidding on work by this year’s artists—including Lisa Oppenheim, Leanne Shapton, Linda Karshan, Manel Lledós, Nina Katchadourian, Kyung-Me, and Coline Marotta—begins June 15th. Among the writers and translators whose work will be supported by the proceeds are Hanne Ørstavik, Martin Aitken, Ida Jessen, and Scholastique Mukasonga.
