‣ Setting the record straight on overwhelmingly White male architectural history, writer Prinita Thevarajah delves into the work of three women of color who left an indelible mark on the field for Architectural Digest:
Despite its sensitive, community-oriented approach, De Silva’s work has been popularly overshadowed by Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, lauded as the pioneer of “tropical modernism.” According to Welandawe, the scarcity in the naming and claiming of De Silva’s impact is rooted in a “fear that if you claim she was the giant of modernist architecture in Sri Lanka, it will diminish the work of Bawa.” Revealing the explicit and subtle conditions of society, patriarchal values are reflected in access to and conversations around built environments.
What many don’t know is that De Silva’s definition of a modern, regional, tropical aesthetic predated Bawa’s. Bawa, in fact, was informed heavily by De Silva, even going to the extent of hiring her studio assistant, Ulrik Plesner. “Simply no one was studying her work at the time,” Welandawe says while reflecting on the lost archive of De Silva’s work. Many of her original drawings and plans have not been preserved. In fact, some of her constructions, including the Senanayake Flats, are in a dilapidated state. Instead, a romanticized and imagined legacy in the romantic fiction Plastic Emotions by Shirome Pinto tells of an affair De Silva had with close friend Le Corbusier.
‣ The Department of Homeland Security (immediately no) has been developing a comic book series to combat disinformation. What could possibly go wrong? Ken Klippenstein has the ins and outs of the story for the Intercept:
Writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Thomas Gaulkin said that “the Resilience Series … conjures a certain jingoism peculiar to government publications that can mimic the very threat being addressed.”
All of which raises the question as to what role the Department of Homeland Security should play in adjudicating “media literacy,” as the series webpage says.
Both “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes” were written by Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who works as a contributor to MSNBC and is affiliated with Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, and Farid Haque, an education technology entrepreneur who is CEO of London-based Erly Stage Studios and was previously CEO of StartUp Britain, a campaign launched by then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.
Watts, who writes and speaks about Russian influence campaigns, has testified to Congress on the matter and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Clearly knowledgeable, his own writings can sometimes veer into hyperbole — a potent reminder that even experts on disinformation are not infallible.
‣ Amid all the buzz around the upcoming solar eclipse, a group of incarcerated people in New York are suing for the right to witness the rare event on the grounds of religious freedom. Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Justine McDaniel report for the Washington Post:
Those incarcerated at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in New York say they should be allowed to view it, too. They filed the suit Friday, after DOCCS acting commissioner Daniel F. Martuscello III last month announced plans to lock prisoners in their housing units from 2 to 5 p.m. on April 8 and prohibit them from watching the eclipse in the yard, citing safety concerns.
“Religious freedom is at the heart of not only our constitution, but our shared humanity,” Madeline Byrd, one of the attorneys representing the inmates, said in a statement. “This historic eclipse is religiously significant to people of many different faiths, and we are fighting for everyone’s right to observe it.”
‣ How was the oldest synagogue in New York’s Borough Park neighborhood demolished last month without a permit? Adam Daly writes for the Brooklyn Paper about the 122-year-old Chevra Anshei Lubawitz and the public outcry in the wake of its dismantling:
Jewish Future Alliance President Yaacov Behrman told Brooklyn Paper that the Jewish community in Borough Park owes much of its existence to the Chevra Anshei Lubawitz.
“The synagogue was definitely not just destroyed. It was desecrated the way it was ripped down,” said Berhman.
First constructed in 1906-07 for Temple Beth El, a congregation of Eastern European origin, it was sold in 1922 to Chevra Anshei Lubawitz, one of the earliest Brooklyn congregations to affiliate with the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, according to a report submitted by architectural historian Anthony W. Robins to the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2019. However, landmark status was never granted.
‣ An academic paper launched contemporary AI? People actually read those? In WIRED, Steven Levy has the unlikely story of how eight Google employees converged to draft a scientific article that became “the most consequential tech breakthrough in recent history”:
Approaching its seventh anniversary, the “Attention” paper has attained legendary status. The authors started with a thriving and improving technology—a variety of AI called neural networks—and made it into something else: a digital system so powerful that its output can feel like the product of an alien intelligence. Called transformers, this architecture is the not-so-secret sauce behind all those mind-blowing AI products, including ChatGPT and graphic generators such as Dall-E and Midjourney. Shazeer now jokes that if he knew how famous the paper would become, he “might have worried more about the author order.” All eight of the signers are now microcelebrities. “I have people asking me for selfies—because I’m on a paper!” says Llion Jones, who is (randomly, of course) name number five.
“Without transformers I don’t think we’d be here now,” says Geoffrey Hinton, who is not one of the authors but is perhaps the world’s most prominent AI scientist. He’s referring to the ground-shifting times we live in, as OpenAI and other companies build systems that rival and in some cases surpass human output.
‣ Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would kick Al Jazeera out of the country. He called the news agency a “terror channel,” stating that it “harmed Israel’s security, actively participated in the October 7 massacre, and incited against Israeli soldiers.” But Al Jazeera is one of the few outlets still reporting on the ground in Gaza. Below, watch the outlet’s in-depth investigation of October 7, which bypasses and corrects many of the misconceptions we’ve seen platformed by other media publications:
‣ In case you needed another horror story to question the ethics of the nonprofit world:
‣ TikTok takes on a rhetorical point — can White people experience racism? — and a media studies professor takes the opportunity to answer a different question. How are White people affected by racism?:
‣ Sometimes it’s cathartic to watch people with too much time on their hands:
‣ Where have all the good cultural appropriators gone and where are all the Gwen Stefanis?
‣ And speaking of besties …
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
