Required Reading: Studio Museum Reopening & Sagrada Família's 140-Year Journey (2025)

‣Ahead of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s reopening this November, Salamishah Tillet asked artists, curators, and educators about the institution’s immense impact on their careers and lives in Harper’s Bazaar:

Rashida Bumbray (independent curator; Studio Museum staff, 2001–2006):I came in 2001—I believe in April. I was a page at NBC, which I hated. Thankfully, they laid us all off right after Thanksgiving. But I went, I think, to the very first of the “Uptown Fridays” [series of parties] that Sandra organized. Then I saw a Whitfield Lovell installation,Whispers From the Walls[featuring a series of charcoal drawings of unidentified Black Americans based on photographs from the pre–Civil Rights era]. I was walking around, and I just started crying. I saw Thelma standing there. I didn’t know her, but she looked like she worked there. So I walked up to her and I was like, “I want to work here.” She gave me her card. I called her seven or eight times, and finally she was like, “Come have an interview with me tomorrow.” So I ran around to all my aunties in Harlem and got this really inappropriate outfit, like an oversize blazer and a brooch and things that I would never wear, and I went to this interview. Thelma was like, “Okay, I’m going to give you a six-month post. Are you interested in curatorial or education?” And I just said, “Curatorial.” Sandra, Christine, and Lowery were all there. On the very first day, Lowery said to me, “You need to learn this shit, because some of us want to retire.”

Lauren Haynes (head curator and vice president for arts and culture, Governors Island, New York; Studio Museum staff, 2006–2016):When I got to the museum, Lowery Stokes Sims had moved from director to president. [Golden succeeded Sims as director in 2005.] Lowery was working on very specific projects, including with some African objects in the collection, and I was also tasked to work with her on that. She was so warm, welcoming, and kind but also very smart and precise. To see these examples, particularly of Black women who were so stellar in what they were doing … I was like, “Oh, right. There are people who look like me who do this work.”

‣Construction on the Sagrada Família began over 140 years ago, and will theoretically wrap up next year. The New Yorker‘s D. T. Max reports on the monumental project, the long saga of its completion, and how architects are negotiating staying true to Antoni Gaudí’s ambitious vision:

With the hundredth anniversary of Gaudí’s “vulgar” demise approaching, Faulí agreed to let me observe the progress he and his team were making on the site. I first met him in May, 2024. He greeted me outside the basilica. Church officials had by then rescinded their unkeepable promise to finish by 2026, blaming delays caused by the pandemic. Faulí explained to me that the current goal was to have the Jesus tower complete by the end of 2025, so that the full height of the building could be celebrated on the centenary of Gaudí’s death. “Done” would be a state of mind.

To my eyes, the building looked nearly finished, but Faulí suggested that I look at the side of the church where Gaudí had wanted to depict the history of humanity, from Adam and Eve to the Last Judgment. It had no façade, narthex, portal, angel statues, or stone credos. Metal fencing covered some of the exterior. During the pandemic, Faulí had spent some time on a treatment, but the design was still being worked on; half his team was focussed on it now. How long would the façade take to complete? He startled me with the answer: “I would say maybe twelve years.”

Faulí, who has his ownfamília—a wife and a daughter—was sixty-four at the time. Would he still be around when the Sagrada Família was truly done? “Lo que Díos quiera,” he replied—“Whatever God wishes.” At one point, we peered over the shoulder of one of his architects, who was designing a snail-shaped stairwell for the unfinished façade on a computer. Faulí pointed at the screen and explained, “It’s a curling staircase to get you to the roof, but you also have a vertical column with electricity and data lines, which also plays a structural role, because it will help fuse the walls of the nave to the façade.”

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‣From the Atlantic to Ezra Klein’s column in the New York Times, mainstream media’s hagiography of Charlie Kirk is truly bizarre to behold. For Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates performs a razor-sharp dissection of the dangerous phenomenon:

Kirk subscribed to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known. But it is still chilling to think that those beliefs would be silenced by a gunshot. The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.

In 2022, when Kirk was frustrated, for instance, by the presence ofLia Thomason the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team, Kirk did not call for “spirited discourse.” Instead, while discussing a recent championship tournament, he said he would have liked to have seen a group of fathersdescend from the stands, forming “a line in front of [Lia] Thomas and saying, ‘Hey, tough guy, you want to get in the pool? ’Cause you’re gonna have to come through us.” Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump’s deployment of federal troops to DC. “Shock and awe. Force,”he wrote. “We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches.” And in 2023, Kirk told his audience that then presidentJoe Bidenwas a “corrupt tyrant” who should be “put in prisonand/or given the death penaltyfor his crimes against America.”

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges usto commemoratean unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

‣After learning that UC Berkeley sent the Trump administration a list of 160 faculty members and students, many of whom have protested the genocide in Gaza, Judith Butler penned a cogent reply to the school that the Nation published this week:

Instead of treating the report according to procedure as you are obligated to do under both US constitutional law and University of California policy, you forward the allegation, unadjudicated to an office of the federal government. Whether or not the allegation is fair is of no consequence, it seems, for there has been an allegation, and that appears to be sufficient to forward my name to the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (clearly not my civil rights), where it will be on a list and used in whatever way that office and that government deems appropriate.

Will I now be branded on a government list? Will my travel be restricted? Will I be surveilled? Have you no compunction about submitting the names of “members of the UC Berkeley community” as you address us in your form letter, without having complied with basic rules of due process institutionalized in both US law and UC policy? In addition, students on visas and adjunct faculty unprotected by academic freedom are among those whose names were passed along. As we know from actions taken against students at Columbia, Harvard, and Tufts, to name a few, they are all potentially at risk of being detained, deported, expelled, harassed, fired, even abducted on the street.

‣Speaking of censorship, Karen Attiah writes on Substack about her experience being fired from the Washington Post over her social media posts after Charlie Kirk’s death:

I was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist at the Post, in one of the nation’s most diverse regions. Washington D.C. no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves. What happened to me is part of abroader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media— a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful — and tragic.

I am proud of my eleven years at the Post. Beyond awards and recognition, the greatest honor has been working with brilliant colleagues and connecting with readers and writers around the world. To all who have supported me, read me, even those who disagreed with me— I say, thank you. You’ve made me a better writer, thinker, and person.

But this is not the end of my work. I still believe in the power of the pen. My values have not changed.

‣Scarlett Harris reports on the hidden environmental costs of the plastic surgery industry, and where it intersects with waste across other surgical fields, for Atmos:

Cosmetic surgery, meanwhile, has grown into its own rapidly expanding market. Currently valued between$59.13 billionand$85.83 billion, the sector is projected to reach $160.47 billion by 2034.The scale of the market hints at the scale of its footprint.In 2020 alone, rhinoplasties in the United States produced anestimated 6 million kilograms of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of nearly 6,000 cross-country car trips from Los Angeles to Boston. Globally, that number climbs even higher, with roughly 2.5 million additional rhinoplasties performed in the same year.

Breast augmentation remains the most popular plastic surgery, and most implants are made of silicone. Despiteindustry claims of sustainability—somewhat justified, since the rubber-like material generates less medical waste than many single-use plastics—silicone is still derived from fossil fuels and manufactured through an energy-intensive heating process. It does not biodegrade, and while technically recyclable, it requires specialized services not available to most people. Certain silicones and additives also carry health risks,leaching into the environmentand, in some cases, evenour bodies.

Add to that the rise ofcosmetic tourism, with patients flying to countries like Mexico, Singapore, and Turkey for breast enhancements, cosmetic dentistry, and hair transplants. In the U.S. and other countries where health care and medical insurance is becoming untenable, it’s no wonder people are traveling to circumvent these access gaps. So much so thatVoguerecently published anarticleon the emergence of cosmetic tourism brokers to aid in this process.

‣Barnes & Noble is set to buy the beloved San Francisco chain Books Inc. soon, and LitHub‘s Brittany Allen writes about the company’s new strategy to temper its acquisitions with indie bookstore aesthetics and formats:

Allison Smith inModern Retailobserved the irony—that B&N, “once maligned as the big-box retailer that nearly killed the independent bookstore…is now fashioning itself as their savior.” Last year, my colleague Drew Broussard also considered “the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend response” to the Tattered Cover acquisition, ina thoughtful op-ed.

It’s true that B&N has seen a funny turn of fortunes. After Amazon emerged as the true Sauron of the book business, and B&N itselffiled for bankruptcy in 2011, the company experienced a turn of public opinion. No longer theJoe Foxes come to crush The Shops Around the Corner, we started to see those big empty buildings as peers in solidarity. Just another third space under threat.

But a lot of this rebranding is the direct result of James Daunt’s (formerly ofDaunt Books) shrewd PR work. AsPublishers Weeklyand Smith have reported, since taking the reins in 2019, Daunt “has increasingly borrowed from the playbook of independents themselves” by pushing to decentralize buying decisions, empowering local managers, andrunning each B&N store with its own character.

This “playbook” casts the acquisitions of beloved local indies in something of a different light. Not that Daunt’s been cagey about this. The behemoth-does-bespoke strategy, in which a large chain tailors its outlets to a community to echo a spirit (if not a letter) of indie-ness, has been successful across the pond. Especially atWaterstones, the UK mega book chain that Daunt stewardedbefore taking this job.

And though the CEO hastens to reassure skeptics that indie buy-outs are not an empire-building maneuver (“This is very much not Barnes & Noble roaming the countryside, looking for great indie bookstore chains and acquiring them”), a sprinkle of healthy suspicion seems in order.

‣YouTuber Mina Le is here to make sense of the “death” of the celebrity interview, which has drastically shifted in recent years:

‣Make this man a museum docent stat:

‣The Bad Bunny effect in real-time (you go, titi):