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Women ceramicists challenge conventions in clay, India’s drag scene, olive trees in Gaza, dystopian airport lounges, Jenny Holzer’s roommate, and the real story of “Jingle Bells.”

December 11, 2025 — 6 min read

Film stills don’t quite do justice to Sharmistha Ray’s Emergent Realities, a three-channel animation that fuses Buddhist and Hindu symbols, digital units of measurement, and cosmic diagrams to draw us into an experience that is, by design, both personal and universal. The piece goes on view tomorrow at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Wood Street Galleries, accompanied by a composition by Pakistani musician Arooj Aftab (whom I recently had the privilege of seeing perform live). (image courtesy Sharmistha Ray)

For Carla, critic Aleina Grace Edwards draws connections between clay and human bodies, reviewing a show on women ceramicists who challenge "classical" vessel forms:

While Cammie Staros’s vessels resemble those of the Greeks in shape, color, and decorative style, none of them look quite “right” according to typical standards. All hand-built, they wobble and swell, with lumpy bellies and lopsided handles cocked like errant elbows. Some look like they’re melting, as if blasted by the tectonic forces of the earth; others are inverted, well-formed, but simply turned upside down on their mouths. “I came to ceramics because I was obsessed with Greek figure vases,” Staros explains. “I was thinking about language, objects, and bodies, and the various relationships between them.” To interrogate the Greek vessel was to investigate the origin story, as she’s called it, of Western art history.

To call renewed attention to these vessels, to their historic meanings and implications, Staros disrupts them. *Reclining Nude *(2015)—a reference to the many nudes of the Western canon—literally lounges, propped on its side and supported by one of its spindly handles, on a white wooden pedestal that mimics an ancient column. There’s the gesture of a smile spreading across its body; on its stem, one eye stares at us, unblinking. It’s a cheeky, cycloptic subversion of our expectations, failing to meet the rules governing good pottery (the vase has fallen) and good figuration (the figure implied is asymmetrical and fantastical).

Upasana Das takes us on a radical romp through a few of India’s drag Houses, which are making the art form their own, for Dazed:

Bollywood remains a realm to draw from for Desi queers, even further north in Kolkata where 27-year-old Ahon Gooptu’s drag persona Xenia Fauxbia Darling fondly recalls learning to dance watching the Bollywood choreographer Saroj Khan during his one-woman show Item. Last month as an opener to the show, he hosted performances by first time baby drag queens – including performer Sasha G who paid tribute to Khan through a pun in her name, and roused the building as she shimmied among us to RuPaul’s “Covergirl”.

For others its channeling sharp-witted female actors who fly in the face of conservatism like Meena Kumari, who was the figure who held together the annual ‘Gham Bar’ last month organised by Gay Gaze Bombay to celebrate the community through their struggles. “Meena Kumari was the queen of tragedy,” says co-founder Gurleen Arora. “Constantly under the microscope like us and shamed for having multiple lovers. She wrote poetry and sang songs no one ever knew about.”

With AI slop creeping into every part of our lives, Cory Doctorow — who recently wrote a whole book on the subject — has some thoughts about how artists and writers can critique and counter AI:

If you’re a visual artist or writer who uses prompts to come up with ideas or variations, that’s no problem, because the ultimate work comes from you. And if you’re a video editor who uses deepfakes to change the eyelines of 200 extras in a crowd-scene, then sure, those eyeballs are in the public domain, but the movie stays copyrighted.

But creative workers don’t have to rely on the US government to rescue us from AI predators. We can do it ourselves, the way the writers did in their historic writers’ strike. The writers brought the studios to their knees. They did it because they are organized and solidaristic, but also are allowed to do something that virtually no other workers are allowed to do: they can engage in "sectoral bargaining," whereby all the workers in a sector can negotiate a contract with every employer in the sector.

Gazan researcher Hend Salama Abo Helow writes movingly in the Nation* *about harvesting her family’s olive trees, plants with deep connections to Palestinian history, amid the genocide:

But in October 2024, we pulled ourselves together and decided to take the risk—no matter the consequences. We couldn’t bear to see the olive trees left abandoned. Deep down, we knew how precarious this step was, beneath skies that rained bombs more often than rain.

The harvesting lasted 20 grueling days—days that tested us not only physically but mentally as well. Each attempt to flee the quadcopters, the explosive arsenals, and the artillery shelling left imprints on our souls. Yet amid all this, the warmth of our neighbors and the displaced people around us made the weight easier to bear. Together, we shared our unspoken fears, spilled our untold stories, and carried our intangible grief during the harvest. We breathed in the fragile hope of a possible ceasefire, even as we were stripped of the safety, tranquility, and joy we once knew. Still, this experience connected us in ways we had never imagined.

Jennie Rose Halperin argues that independent media should be harnessing the power of libraries as centers of social change. For the Objective, she explains:

A particularly generative way to rebuild this focus on and service to local initiative is through libraries: There are an estimated 124,903 libraries in the United States, of which about 14% are public. We need to invest in underexplored partnerships between civic media makers and libraries as a clear place of change. While not all libraries are of equal size (many have barely one staff member), they all exist to provide vetted, quality information to their communities.

Top-down, corporate media is always going to be part of a broader information landscape. Social media has become an accepted fact of life. But democratic media — the kind that builds interpersonal trust — is a sticky and difficult, yet rich, locus of power that requires interpersonal connection beyond the digital realm in order to exist.

The holiday travel season means a whole lot of gazing enviously into exclusive airport lounges. Zach Helfand visited a few of them and delved into their strange history for the New Yorker:

Everyone at the Capital One Lounge at J.F.K. called me Mr. Zach, which made me feel like a preschool teacher, only wealthier. Capital One was a late but enthusiastic lounge-war combatant. Last year, it opened a lounge at Washington National Airport which included a kitchen custom designed by José Andrés, who oversees the food. One company executive told the Times, “If there was a budget, I was not aware of it.” There’s a little cart, which is wheeled around to deliver cones filled with caviar. In New York, it’s used for a sunset champagne service. There’s also a counter meant to evoke a bodega, stocked with fresh Ess-a-Bagel. I spent a delightful forty-five minutes at the cheesemonger’s bar, where I was served a personalized flight consisting of a Swiss cows’-milk cheese shaved into little bouquets, a deep-orange cheddar, and a black-truffle sheep-milk cheese from Italy, along with sherry and wine, with limoncello to clear my palate. When I was done, I moved to hand my plate back to the cheesemonger. “The cheese attendant will take care of that, Mr. Zach,” the cheesemonger told me. Out of the wall taps flowed regular water. A Capital One travel employee told me that fresh-fruit-infused water can be a pain—everything has to be cleaned constantly and kept at a low temperature, and the fruit clogs up the spigots. “I just want a glass of water,” she said. “We don’t need all that stuff.”

It turns out that "Jingle Bells," like so many products of White American culture, has a racist origin story. Kahlil Greene explains:

@kahlilgreene Drop a better Christmas song in the comments 👇🏾 #jinglebells #christmassongs #blackhistory ♬ Jingle Bells Horror - Jack’s Reindeer

A nice alternative to the New York Times games section:

@ponderclub New York Times style games, but from an indie developer?? Thats 100% free even all the archives and mini crosswords?? That’s Ponder Club! 🩵🪿 . we have leader boards, streaks, comments, fun, avatars, and this week we will be releasing Friend Groups! . It’s just me and my friend Eden taking on the New York Times games to become you go to for thoughtful fun. . Hello new puzzlers!! Prefer to support indie devs over NYT games? You’ve found us!! 😊👨🏾‍💻👩🏻‍💻 All of our games have no subscriptions or upsells, just pure fun daily games. I make a mini crossword everyday, it’s free to play even the entire archives! . We have streaks, leaderboards, comments, fun avatars and more! It’s just me and my friend taking on NYT games with the dream of quitting out full time jobs to focus just on Ponder Club games! Sounds like the kind of fun you’d like? . Please check out www.ponderclub.co to play and let me know what you think! . We’re always taking suggestions and comments, we want to make these games the best possible so we really depend on feedback from our players :) . #nytgames #nytconnections #nytmini #dailygames #indiedev ♬ Where’d All the Time Go? - Dr. Dog

Ongo Gablogian at a museum:

@taradefrancisco POV: people bad at understanding what the exhibit actually is at a museum pt. 2 | meaning is E v E r y w H E r e #comedy with @taradefrancisco @rrizzutto #art #bits ♬ original sound - tara d.

Nobody’s braver than Jenny Holzer’s roommate:

@mollmclea Who relates #sketch #comedy #sketchcomedy #art #museum ♬ original sound - mollmclea

Required Reading* is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look*.

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