Required Reading

‣ You’ve seen Florence Owens Thompson before, though you may not realize it. For Places, Myriam Gurba writes about the woman pictured in Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” a symbol of Great Depression-era poverty that erases its subject’s Cherokee heritage:

Mr. and Mrs. Owens left for California together, but by the time the Mrs. had turned 28, the only remnants of Mr. Owens were mouths left to feed. Mr. Owens died of tuberculosis, and Mrs. Owens, now a widow, had six children to care for. She picked cotton while lugging babies through woolly fields. The family slept beneath bridges. Car trouble determined their fate. While driving from the Imperial Valley to Watsonville, the timing chain broke. A kind stranger towed Mrs. Owens’s Hudson to a pea pickers camp, where she set up a tent. Soon a lady with a limp and Graflex camera approached.

“She didn’t ask my name,” the former migrant told Emmett Corrigan. “She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”

It bothered me that Lange had treated her subject with such disregard. It also bothered me that Lange’s photograph of an Indian woman had been turned into a symbol of White women’s destitution. Migrant Mother was not one of Steinbeck’s Joads. She had more in common with the migrant workers still working in the Santa Maria Valley than I’d assumed.

 ‣ ​India’s practice of bulldozing buildings primarily belonging to Muslim families as a form of political violence is officially illegal. BBC‘s Zoya Mateen reports on the aftermath and those left to pick up the pieces of their destroyed homes:

“This decision will change many things – courts will have to see whether legal processes were followed while carrying out these demolitions,” senior Supreme Court lawyer CU Singh told BBC Hindi.

Ms Fatima is not entirely sure whether the court’s order would actually halt the demolitions.

But her father, Mr Mohammad, is brimming with hope, she says.

Sometimes, she catches her father thinking about their old home – the sofas and the rugs, the rows of books on the shelves, which he had painstakingly put together, probably still lying in the rubble.

“He did most of the improvements, from the curtains to the cushion covers. Losing the house broke his heart more than anyone else’s,” she says.

‣ “Brutalist speaker” isn’t exactly compelling holiday wishlist material, but Verity Burns explains a new gadget’s nod to the oft-scorned design movement in Wired:

The Brutalist Speaker takes its reference from a style of architecture that originated in the UK in the 1950s, known for its simple, geometric lines and championing of raw materials over decorative excess.

Instead of the tempered glass used in a number of its other products, Transparent’s Brutalist Speaker is made from 70 percent post-consumer recycled aluminum. With its 6.5-inch side-mounted woofer, alongside dual 3-inch tweeters, placed rather strikingly at elevated 90-degree angles, it laughs in the face of traditional speaker design.

‣ As tempting as it may be to believe otherwise, linguist Ross Perlin explains for the Dial that it will take far more than AI alone to protect endangered languages:

Where AI promises magic, the most pressing need is for basic research, driven by communities. In-depth language documentation is difficult and costly, entailing years of work spent finding, getting to know and recording a range of speakers who can showcase as naturally as possible all the things a language can do. Properly probing a single, subtle element of grammar, like the use of tone or the way clauses are chained together, can be a serious accomplishment, not to mention the unsung arts of lexicography, transcription and archiving. When it comes to developing a language for modern life — beyond the daily oral use of its speakers — such steps cannot be skipped.

In no linguistically meaningful way is Seke deficient, however, nor is any “low-resource language.” Indeed, such languages often preserve the kinds of complex features that are wiped away or leveled off in a lingua franca like English, not to mention the natural variation patterns of embodied human communication. To know Seke is to have spent time with Seke speakers. Usually that means being born into, marrying into or living with a Seke family. Its local, oral, flexible character has served its speakers well for generations, maintaining an identity by indexing connection and belonging.

‣ Tlingit journalist and self-proclaimed “horse girl” Kate Nelson considers the deep connection between Indigenous cultures and horses, writing about their healing effect in Atmos:

Recent studies show that simply being in the presence of horses, caring for them, and handling them on the ground has countless benefits, including reducing our stress, improving our confidence, regulating our emotions, and helping us find more meaning in our lives—and that’s without ever getting in the saddle. Somehow, one of the world’s most powerful yet sensitive prey animals has allowed the world’s most dangerous and destructive apex predator to strike up an improbable partnership with them. In doing so, they teach us what true trust, compassion, and vulnerability look like.

My own personal history with horses goes something like this: Despite my early-onset infatuation and my upbringing in a farming community, I didn’t have a horse to call my own as a kid. Instead, I rode friends’ horses whenever possible and spent part of my summers at a Central Minnesota ranch, learning everything I could about the cowgirl way of life. It was hard work and far from fancy, but those formative experiences sealed the deal that I was destined to be a horse lover for life.

Horse ownership is a fairly illogical notion given the massive resources it requires, and logic got the better of me when I headed off to college and into the real world. But I found myself coming back to horses time and again. One foray started off innocently enough, volunteering with a Twin Cities-based therapeutic horseback riding organization offering lessons to children and adults living with physical, cognitive, and social-emotional disabilities or conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.

‣ And while we’re on the topic of animals, Leo Kim has an essay in the Baffler about the burgeoning industry that arguably takes our connection to the natural world a bit too far, pouring resources into translating their speech into human language using AI:

Given that this whole scheme relies on the transformative power of language, it’s surprising that the perils that surround this power are so often ignored—a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that these projects rarely employ more than a handful of actual linguists. Language is not the blindly unifying tool that these techno-delusionists characterize it as; it not only builds bridges but burns them down. My grandfather grew up learning Japanese because his native tongue, Korean, had been banned by the colonial government. It’s a familiar story for anyone who has suffered under imperialism, whether you’re Korean, Cherokee, Algerian, Irish, (the list goes on). Language contains and constructs worlds, serves as the vehicle through which culture disseminates and politics arise. To control language is to control the medium that conditions thought. No wonder that the forced imposition of language is a favorite tactic of empire.

Seen in this light, the desire to translate nonhuman thought into human language is anything but innocuous. The philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein once quipped that “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” This aphorism is a reminder that the umwelten of these animals—the phenomenal shape of their experience, the mental states that orient them toward the world—are so radically different from our own, the language we have crafted for our all too human lives cannot capture the full breadth of their existence. It’s one reason why, as a recent New Yorker article observed, many animal communications experts don’t expect “straightforward translations” to be forthcoming, since “animals live in perceptual worlds that are just too different.” Eco-theorists have built on this, arguing that an honest relationship with the nonhuman requires us to first acknowledge the fundamental differences that shape us. Only by cultivating an empathy that cuts across these divides might we move beyond the narcissism that has long polluted our relationship to the broader world.

‣ This locksmith turns discontinued subway tokens into resplendent little keys, and I (along with the rest of NYC) desperately want one. Hannah Frishberg reports for Gothamist:

“I buy them from anywhere I can get them,” Mortillaro explained as he rifled through a box of tokens. Coin dealers, collectors and eBay offer the best chances for find vintage subway tokens for sale, with Mortillaro saying he recently purchased about 100 from a coin dealer for “a small fortune.”

The tokens can cost him anywhere from $10 to $20 a piece, and he sells the final product for $95.

Many learn about the keys on social media, where they’re a viral sensation, thanks largely to an early endorsement from influencer New York Nico.

Some buyers are too young to even remember when the tokens were in use; for others, they’re so familiar they almost feel like a family heirloom: Mortillaro said many token key buyers have been transit workers.

“A lot of MTA people have bought them to give to their grandfathers and their fathers who worked on the MTA,” said Mortillaro.

‣ Artist Juana Alicia added to the storied murals of San Francisco’s Mission District this fall, drawing on multiple sources of inspiration to craft “Not in Our Name/No en nuestro nombre” against the bombardment of Gaza:

‣ Malika Bilal reports for PBS on the Muslim immigrants and formerly enslaved people who fought for the Union in the Civil War, unearthing an overlooked chapter of history: 

‣ This gave me a violent flashback to when I pronounced “both” as “goth” during English class in eighth grade. Not that it bothers me anymore. Obviously.