‣ The one and only Mona Chalabi, Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator, writes in the Guardian about animating Muslim women in realistic, narratively complex ways — an antidote to the Disneyfication of hijabis in mainstream animation:
The way that the hijab is depicted matters. Not just for the half a billion people in the world who wear them, but for all Muslims, because this head covering has been a target for Islamophobia from France to the US. And since the right tends to conflate religion, race and culture, the hijab has also become a target of growing anti-Arab sentiment too.
When I was commissioned to create a hijabi character for Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady’s animated TV show #1 Happy Family USA, I thought a lot about how to draw it. This was the first time a main character in a US animated series would be shown wearing a headscarf and I wanted to get it right.
Hijabis don’t usually wear their headscarves when they’re in private spaces with family members. I thought about what the mother character, Sharia, would look like at home and outside of the house. The designs shouldn’t be totally separate. She’s still got a certain taste in color and comfort. Outdoors, her clothes are also part of her hijab. Sharia chooses to wear loose items that cover most of her body. Indoors, I wanted to be able to see this character’s sexuality without sexualizing her (unlike most in adult animations, this female lead doesn’t have thin thighs and a squeezed waist).
‣ A new book introduces English-speaking readers to Mafalda, a six-year-old Argentinian comic strip character who guided readers through the world in the 1960s and ’70s. Lily Meyer writes in the Dial:
Mafalda is the eponymous heroine of a comic strip by the cartoonist and illustrator Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, who published as Quino. She lives in Buenos Aires with her parents, whom she torments when she’s not occupied with her friends or the news. Mafalda’s central conceit is its protagonist’s obsession with the state of Argentina and the world. She’s constantly listening to the radio and studying her surroundings, trying to understand what’s going on and why it’s so disappointing. In one early strip, she and her friend Felipe turn on the news, hoping to hear about the NASA Mariner that’s just landed on Mars. “Isn’t it amazing to think there’s life on other planets?” Felipe asks. But instead of talking about Mars, the news reports, “Carpet bombing North Vietnam. Geneva: No progress on treaty for nuclear disarmament. Jordan: Ongoing gun battles with Israeli…” Mafalda says dispiritedly to Felipe, “What’s amazing would be finding intelligent life on this planet!”
What she means, really, is intelligent adult life. Grown-ups let Mafalda down at every turn — not an unusual experience for a cartoon character, of course, but what sets Mafalda apart is that Quino didn’t write it for children, though many have read and loved it over the years. Quino drew Mafalda as a quintessential ’60s child in Mary Janes and bobby socks, a bow perched on her enormous head, but he jammed that head full of grown-up concerns: hyperinflation, the global ripple effects of North American consumerism and the Vietnam War. Crucially, he didn’t give Mafalda a sophisticated understanding of these issues, but let her interpret them more or less like a real six-year-old would. As a result, Mafalda is at its core a conversation between Quino and his adult readers, a discussion of how we got so unsatisfactory and whether we can change. Some of Mafalda’s worries, like Argentine brain drain in the 1960s, may belong to her place and time. Likewise, a child in 2025, confronted with a plate of unwelcome spinach, wouldn’t imagine how peaceful the world would have been if Karl Marx hadn’t eaten his greens to grow up big and strong. But Mafalda’s wish for intelligent life remains more than relevant today, as she makes her debut in the English-speaking world, courtesy of translation-focused publisher Archipelago Books.
‣ Musician and actor Saul Williams discusses the resonance of his role in the game-changing film Sinners and the crux of his creative practice with Nia Shumake for Essence:
How would you say your activism and work as an artist lend themselves to each other?
In my mind, I’m an artist and there is a long history of our revolutionary and literary elders who have said that we need to be clear on the fact that art in many instances operates as propaganda. You may think that you’re doing neutral art, but when I hear your song, I hear your relationship to women. I hear your relationship to money. There’s so much that’s betrayed by you doing something that you think is just a “get-up-and-dance” thing. So once you understand that neutral is not neutral, then as an artist, you begin to make conscious decisions to say, well, I don’t want this to be misinterpreted, so let me make myself clear. That is what Toni Morrison did in her work, Nina Simone, Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, Stevie Wonder did and does in his music. So it’s not necessarily activism to connect your gift or voice to your understanding of the times to speak to the moment beyond whatever fears may approach because of the fact that it may be controversial.
I come from a school of artists—that was the teaching of the Black Arts Movement, they said that art should serve a function, because the other side uses all of their art as propaganda.
‣ For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sophia Stewart considers the life and legacy of revolutionary Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos (who watches over Manhattan’s 106th Street via a 2006 mosaic by artist Manny Vega):
Poetry formed just one part of Burgos’s political activism: off the page, she was on the ground. By the time she was 22, Burgos had been elected secretary general of the party’s women’s wing, the Daughters of Freedom; she regularly attended Nationalist rallies and wrote in support of the cause for the San Juan newspaper El Mundo. All of this came naturally to Burgos, who had grown up in the shadow of American imperialism. The year she was born, Puerto Rico’s national congress, operating under US jurisdiction, unanimously voted for independence; Washington ignored the vote and, three years later, imposed citizenship on Puerto Ricans (a move that conveniently allowed the government to conscript the island’s men into the army when the United States entered World War I the following year). When Burgos was 14, the worst hurricane in Puerto Rican history—dethroned only by Maria some 89 years later—decimated its infrastructure and economy, and federal aid to the island’s now-citizens proved meager and sluggish.
‣ Nora Claire Miller muses on the history and intimacy of those dreamy, oft-overlooked marvels of technology: screensavers. They write in the Paris Review:
My grandmother’s iMac spent most of its time showing Flurry, a dancing rainbow spider that was the first-ever Macintosh screen saver when it debuted in 2002. My grandmother was very tech-averse and preferred to write on a yellow legal pad. Whenever she needed to use the iMac, she’d call me with questions. “Thank goodness you picked up,” she’d say. “An alternate universe has emerged in the corner of my screen. Can you help?”
I quickly gave up on trying to convince her to use words like “window” or “application” instead of “planet” or “dimension.” Her descriptions felt closer to the real experience of using a computer—like trying to fly a spaceship. She read a lot of sci-fi. I helped her download Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven from iTunes as an audiobook. We listened together as a man altered collective reality with his dreams.
One of the few things my grandmother’s family managed to bring from Austria when they fled the Nazis in 1938 was a stereoscope—a three-dimensional image-viewing device. When I was young, my grandmother sometimes let me look through its binocular-like lenses at glass slides of her in Austria: a three-dimensional child in a cart pulled by a three-dimensional horse.
When my grandmother died, everyone agreed I should be given her computer. Actually, at first everyone agreed that we should throw her computer away, but they said I could have it if I really wanted it.
‣ New York City’s infamous criminalization of street vendors has been going on for centuries, Errol Louis reports for Intelligencer:
Farías is pushing a package of bills that would speed up licensing, expand outreach and education to vendors, and centralize regulation in the hands of the Department of Small Business Services. “We want to make sure that we’re setting up a legal framework where people are able to actually legally vend with a proper license, but also make sure there’s supportive services to answer for the problems that we know are happening throughout communities,” she says.
It sounds like a promising start on a problem that has defied solution for more than 300 years. As far back as 1707, decades before the United States came into existence, vendors were banned from selling on the streets of New Amsterdam, opposed by traditional storefront merchants who didn’t want competition. A political compromise called the Thirty Minute Law barred peddlers from setting up in a single location but gave rise to the famous pushcarts that enabled vendors and their goods to move along — sometimes only a few feet — every half-hour. Street hawking gradually returned in the course of the next 200 years, even while New York, exploding in population, was pioneering new forms of retail, such as indoor arcades and department stores. Finally, in the 1800s, a handful of vendors defiantly lined up their carts and decided to stay put, creating permanent (and illegal) outdoor markets on the Lower East Side.
‣ In Mexico, activists are finding ways to fight back against the ubiquity and power of big tech. Tamara Pearson reports for Truthout:
Sanchez´s group is involved in the feminist server movement, “where a ton of women and dissidents, we work together to learn to create the types of services that Google offers (such as email, storage) and to agree on how we are going to manage our Internet.” That way, women and gender nonconforming people can set content and behavior rules that protect them from abuse or objectification, for example. Her group is also promoting open-source software, which she stresses should never be used to exploit anyone, and promoting “social technology … that involves good practices and better conditions for the users.”
Apart from working with migrant organizations, Domingo’s group also participates in various national and international digital activism networks, bringing to Chiapas their social issues and needs, while also bringing information about digital safety and technology to local spaces. “We work with organizations or collectives that want another type of Internet, without corporations, for the citizens, communities, the people,” he said.
Sursiendo, he explains, conducts research, provides training, helps groups “take care of themselves in the digital world” and promotes alternative technologies “so the Internet can be created collectively, rather than with an individualist vision.”
‣ Fellow anxious texters! Consider Vox editor Izzie Ramirez’s observation about how her friendships improved after she switched to a flip phone for a month (once again, big tech is ruining our lives):
The rules, my boss said, were simple. I had a $100 budget. (Him: “I mean, it goddamn better be under $100. It won’t do anything.”) And I had to go the whole way. That meant I couldn’t switch back and forth between phones. The only exception was using my iPhone for two-factor authentication apps.
“I wonder if you’ll have any friends left over by the end,” my boss, editorial director Bryan Walsh, slacked me. “Or maybe more because you’ll call them up on your telephone. Maybe you’ll get new friends, better ones.”
The strict budget ruled out fancy but still internet-free dumbphones like the Light Phone my colleague Adam Clark Estes tried out last month. So I first turned to older flip phones.
‣ You know it when you see it!
‣ The Pride Month kick-off nobody asked for:
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.
