‣ Journalist Rana Ayyub writes for the Washington Post about the film All We Imagine as Light, its Oscars snub, and the recent wave of female directors in India whose work has often been overlooked or derided:
Lost in the fracas over this movie is the remarkable surge of female cinematic talent that has blossomed over the past decadein India. Indian films have traditionally used women merely as good-looking props, but women in these new movies are the protagonists, with complex challenges and lives. Women directors are telling stories considered taboo that do not conform to the propaganda machinery of the state, stories of casteism, misogyny and Islamophobia. These are subjects that mainstream filmmakers and stars will not touch.
Over the past decade, most mainstream Indian films have tried to stay true to the diktats of the government, with many echoing state propaganda; there have also been blockbusters that have been deeply regressive, female-bashing films that normalize extreme violence. Women filmmakers are reclaiming that space.
Even without Oscar recognition, “All We Imagine as Light” has made a strong impact inside India, where young women are responding to its message about the power of female friendship. Kapadia features subjects not often seen in Indian movies — migrant workers, overcrowded trains, the struggles of the working class — set in the fast-paced city of Mumbai. This is a film of beauty, about love and longing, and finding your own community.
‣ Lisa Boone of the Los Angeles Times spoke with artist Fiona Simpson, whose weaving practice acts as a way to better understand herself and her neurodivergence:
Holding her first weaving, a table runner, Simpson recalled the first time she sat down at the loom. “It was a powerful moment,” she said. “I had goose bumps and thought, ‘This is what I love.’”
Simpson stopping weaving for a few years although she had connected strongly with the art. “It was part of that classic struggle in being neurodiverse — the insecurity of ‘Am I dumb?’ ‘Why can’t I sit down and do this?’ ‘What’s wrong with me?’” she said.
Looking back, Simpson said her ADHD diagnosis, coupled with weaving, has been life-changing. “It felt like putting on a pair of glasses,” she said of getting individual therapy and having a strong support group. “Since then, feeling like I’m standing on the ground has been incredible. It’s not just getting by. I’m able to fully be myself now.”
‣ We’re less than a week into a hellish new presidency, and a team of reporters at Bloomberg released a damning investigation into the popular YouTubers who swayed young male voters to vote for Trump:
Over the weekend before the inauguration, many of the podcasters were coveted guests at parties hosted by YouTube, Spotify and other organizations. YouTube declined to comment. Spotify said “podcasts offer candidates a direct and influential way to engage with their audiences,” noting that both Trump and Democratic rival Kamala Harris took advantage of the medium.
With the podcasters’ audiences skewing about 80% male on average, according to people familiar with the shows’ listener demographics, the hosts connected directly to a voting bloc that helped propel Trump back to the White House. Of the 903 podcast guests tracked by Bloomberg in the past two years, only 106 people, or 12 percent, were women.
Men, and particularly white men, have long made up Trump’s core support base. But in November’s election, young men swung especially hard to the right. More than half of men under 30 supported Trump, according to the AP VoteCast survey of more than 120,000 voters, though outgoing President Joe Biden won the group in 2020. Exit polls have shown that Trump received more support from young men than any Republican candidate in more than two decades.
‣ Elizabeth Lopatto’s thoughtful, critical review of a new book on Spotify encourages us to understand it as part of a broader landscape of inequity in the arts. For the Verge, Lopatto writes:
At times, it feels like Pelly is tiptoeing around saying the obvious thing: Spotify is a tremendous bargain for users. I pay less per month for an enormous library than I did for a single CD in 1995. And while there’s a resurgence of interest in physical media, especially vinyl, accessing music that doesn’t take up a bunch of space in your house and that you don’t have to lug around when you move is also a win. So is being able to listen before you buy. It is easier than ever to be a music consumer, and the music industry’s profits have rebounded. But artists are still getting screwed.
I don’t expect Pelly to chastise the reader about that, if only because it risks alienating her audience. But it does highlight a specific weakness of the book: the vacuum-sealed approach to Spotify. What happens to musicians happens to all other types of creative people, just a little later. The final chapter of the book, proposing solutions, is weak in comparison to all that comes before it; a stronger version might have shown how what’s happening in the music industry is an echo of what’s going on in society more broadly. Art and its distribution are hopelessly tangled together.
‣ Has Bad Bunny been my most-listened-to artist for five consecutive years? Yes. Am I sick of him yet? Absolutely not. For Rolling Stone, Latinx studies scholar Vanessa Díaz breaks down the Puerto Rican musical traditions at the center of his blockbuster album:
While “DtMF” is number one in the world, many listeners might not even be aware of what genre they’re listening to. The release of the album’s YouTube visualizers (written by Puerto Rican scholar Jorell Mélendez Badillo) offered listeners historical context for the music. The visualizer for “DtMF,” which currently has over 24 million views, includes an abbreviated history of plena and the related Afro-Puerto Rican music genre of bomba. The visualizer explains that the cultural practice of bomba (music and dance) emerged in communities of enslaved Africans in Puerto Rico and their descendants. About a quarter century after slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico (1873), another Afro-Puerto Rican genre emerged known as the plena. Unlike traditional bomba, plena usually includes vocals (as well as differences in drums and instrumentation). On “DtMF,” Bad Bunny decided to do “gang vocals with all the kids who we now call the ‘sobrinos’” MAG explains, referring to the group of students from Puerto Rico’s Escuela Libre de la Música who are featured in multiple songs on the album.
‣ Musician Neko Case is releasing a memoir next week about her decades-long career and, refreshingly, refuses to shy away from the financial challenges she faces despite her success. Lindsay Zoladz writes for the New York Times:
Case is plain-spoken about the financial realities of being a working musician; she said she wrote the book mainly because she needed another source of income while the pandemic kept her from touring. Later in 2025, she will also release her first new album in seven years, which she described as an explicit rebuttal to what she sees as the digital era’s dehumanization of her industry. She intentionally employed more musicians than usual; some tracks feature an entire orchestra.
“I wanted everything to be played by real people,” she said, “to show how we fill space differently.”
Fans of her off-kilter, country-tinged albums like the Grammy-nominated 2009 release “Middle Cyclone” are unlikely to be surprised that Case writes uncommonly vivid and lyrical prose. Her mother’s pale-green station wagon, for instance, looks like “a nauseous basking shark.” The grasses of northern Washington house “grasshoppers the size of staplers with underwings like striped blushing flamenco skirts.” On a class trip, when her father packed an inadequate lunch (a few sad slices of cheese), a teacher’s aide gave her a pitying look and the young Case “dragged that shame around like a wet wool cape.”
‣ Lena Cohen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, compiled a step-by-step guide to limiting Meta’s ability to profit off your data, which it can do even if you delete your Instagram and Facebook accounts:
If these changes—or Meta’s long history of anti competitive, censorial, and invasive practices—make you want to cut ties with the company, it’s sadly not as simple as deleting your Facebook account or spending less time on Instagram. Meta tracks your activity across millions of websites and apps, regardless of whether you use its platforms, and it profits from that data through targeted ads. If you want to limit Meta’s ability to collect and profit from your personal data, here’s what you need to know.
‣ These mouse-POV headsets are both scientifically profound and the cutest things you’ll see all week:
‣ Nobody appreciates a museum visit like a six-year-old armed with an audio guide:
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.
