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We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2023 Robert Colquhoun and Bobby MacBryde were once household names in the London art world, until they weren\u2019t. Author Damian Barr writes in the Guardian<\/a> about the now-obscure artists, whose lives he attempts to recreate in his new novel:<\/p>\n I stumbled across them as footnotes in the biographies of people who used to want to be them. Soho survivors claim Francis Bacon is supposed to have said \u201cEverything I learned about drawing, I learned from Robert Colquhoun.\u201d Endless enraging articles describe them as \u201cfriends\u201d or \u201croommates\u201d: polite closeting elisions, more final than any coffin. When Bobby was 27 he wrote to Robert: \u201cWe must be certain to create our legends before we die.\u201d By the time I discovered them they were almost forgotten. Could fictionalising them bring them back?<\/p>\n Obsessing, I found them in an issue of the Picture Post from 1949 with Prunella Clough, Keith Vaughan, Patrick Heron and John Minton (Minty). Rich Minty was in love with Robert and would eventually move into their studio, making a couple a throuple \u2013 that\u2019s a fun chapter. The Roberts\u2019 interview is titled The Artists Who Live, Travel, Work and Exhibit Together. The photo, by Felix Man, shows them at their easels in matching shirts and ties. Robert is in a fisherman\u2019s jumper probably knitted by Bobby who made most of their clothes, ironing Robert\u2019s shirts with a\u00a0spoon heated on their single gas ring.\u00a0On the easels are Bobby\u2019s Woman in a\u00a0Red Hat and Robert\u2019s Two Scotswomen \u2013 both bought by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Metropolitan Art and sadly no relation. On a mission to acquire the best young British artists, Barr\u2019s other purchases were Bacon, Edward Burra and Lucian Freud.<\/p>\n \u2023 After a protest, what happens to the visual language of its art and signage? Aaron Boehmer explores the rich lineage of typography used in social movements for Carla<\/a>:<\/p>\n Get the latest art news, reviews and opinions from Hyperallergic.<\/p>\n Through their publishing platform GenderFail, the artist Be Oakley coalesced these individual moments, both from the Gay Liberation Movement, to create a single, downloadable typeface called \u201cI am your worst fear; I am your best fantasy \/ FIRST GAY AMERICANS.\u201d\u00a0This typeface and nine others produced since 2018 were the subject of Oakley\u2019s 2024\u201325 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Each of Oakley\u2019s fonts are derived from distinct but intrinsically interconnected socio-political movements\u2014from the Stonewall Riots in 1969 and ACT UP in the 1980s and \u201990s, to the resurgent calls for Black liberation in 2020, and the student uprisings for Palestine in 2023\u201325. The fonts are symbolically meaningful, wherein the \u201cuppercase letters [do not have] any hierarchical importance over lowercase letters.\u201d But they are also meant primarily to be useful, readily downloadable for queer, trans and non-binary folks, and queer people of color to use for protest signs, fundraising and mutual aid purposes, personal projects, and more.<\/p>\n In this way, an archive of past protest typography is transformed into a tool for the present and future. Oakley engages with the archive of protest not as a fixed or nostalgic look at the past, but as a dynamic and living resource\u2014a place from which a movement can be both catalogued and continually reimagined. The \u201cI am your worst fear\u201d typeface is not merely a symbol of queer history, but an instrument for queer futurity, allowing generational knowledge from a movement that has been decades in the making to be passed down, active and defiant.<\/p>\n \u2023 Five Palestinian women reflected on cherished objects from Gaza, as told to the Cut<\/a>\u2018s Danya Issawi. Artist Rama Duwaji, Zohran Mamdani\u2019s partner, crafted quietly moving illustrations of the items they shared, from a portrait of two nieces to a handmade blanket:<\/p>\n When I left, about a week before the Rafah invasion, I could pack only a single suitcase. My home had already been destroyed by bombs, and I pulled some of my belongings from the wreckage. The blanket reminds me of my mom \u2014 she made it herself. I used to join her in the living room when I got home from work; we would watch YouTube as she crocheted. She tried to teach me the stitches a few times, but I just didn\u2019t have it in me. She is still alive, thank God, though she is still in Gaza. Our names were on a wait list for evacuation, and mine was called before hers. Now she is trapped. No one has been allowed to leave. My mother keeps reassuring me and my sisters that better days are coming. I think she is also trying to reassure herself.<\/p>\n \u2023 Two decades after Hurricane Katrina, artist Kristina Kay Robinson reflects on the soul of New Orleans and the ways the city has failed its Black communities in Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/a>:<\/p>\n This anniversary month, to cope with my post-traumatic stress, I\u2019m reading Muhammad Khudayyir\u2019s 2007 novel,\u00a0Basrayatha.\u00a0In it, the author presents both the historical and contemporary city of Basra, Iraq, alongside the mythical \u201cBasrayatha,\u201d which is a reconstruction of the city through memory and storytelling. In the section titled \u201cAbu al-Khasib: Story Road,\u201d Khudayyir writes, \u201cImagine with me a man whose job is collecting stories. What road would he take? What would he ride? Who would he be?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important not to cede the story at the crossroads,\u201d\u00a0I wrote a decade ago. Even in 2015, we had already become a smaller, whiter city. Every public-school teacher in Orleans Parish (including my mother) was fired just months after Katrina\u2019s landfall, making New Orleans the first all-charter-school system in the country. Twenty years later, the ramifications rear their heads. A major pathway to Black homeownership and wealth\u2014stable, union-protected employment in the public-school system\u2014was blocked off by those in power in New Orleans, with those who would teach our children their history stymied by charter-school politics. Public schools were also a major artistic incubator. Many of our teachers were artists, musicians, and thinkers in their own right, and they fostered an environment that held our culture together, a part of the lineage of artists that included my great-aunt, Gloria Ann Dupre, and those who came before her.<\/p>\n \u2023 For Wired<\/a>, Taylor Lorenz reports on a shady initiative that allegedly paid influencers to boost Democrats online, as long as they adhered to content restrictions and did not disclose their funding \u2014 raising questions about media literacy and dark money in both parties:<\/p>\n For years, Democrats\u00a0have struggled to work with influencers. In 2024, President Joe Biden\u2019s White House\u00a0snubbed several prominent\u00a0content creators after they lightly criticized the administration over its policies on climate change, Covid, Gaza, and the TikTok ban. Content creators who challenged Kamala Harris\u2014including\u00a0Hasan Piker, a well-known influencer on the left\u2014were similarly unwelcome at campaign events.<\/p>\n After the Democrats lost in November, they faced a reckoning. It was clear that the party had failed to successfully navigate the\u00a0new media landscape. While\u00a0Republicans spent decades\u00a0building a powerful and robust independent media infrastructure, maximizing controversy to drive attention and maintaining tight relationships with creators despite their small disagreements with Trump, the Democrats have largely relied on outdated strategies and traditional media to get their message out.<\/p>\n Now, Democrats hope that the secretive Chorus Creator Incubator Program, funded by a powerful liberal dark money group called\u00a0The Sixteen Thirty Fund, might tip the scales. The program kicked off last month, and creators involved were told by Chorus that over 90 influencers were set to take part. Creators told WIRED that the contract stipulated they\u2019d be kicked out and essentially cut off financially if they even so much as acknowledged that they were part of the program. Some creators also raised concerns about a slew of restrictive clauses in the contract.<\/p>\n \u2023 Robin D. G. Kelley, who has written extensively about Black culture and subverting institutional power structures, considers the newly urgent responsibility of academics during an age of fascism and genocide. He explains for the Boston Review<\/a>:<\/p>\n Moving beyond the ivory tower does not mean abandoning the university. The university is still contested terrain, and groups such as Scholars for Social Justice, the African American Policy Forum, and the Smart Cities Lab have managed to carve out spaces for resistance and visionary planning from within. UCLA\u2019s Institute on Inequality and Democracy, founded by Ananya Roy, is an exemplary model of what insurgent intellectual work can look like. For the last ten years, the Institute has not only effectively fought for affordable housing and against racial banishment but developed a dynamic activist-in-residence program to provide space for movement intellectuals\u2014from South Africa to Chicago to here in Los Angeles\u2014to think with scholars in order to better understand the forces pushing people into greater precarity and find ways to fight back.<\/p>\n In order to sustain this work, we need to create a new university. And we will never change anything unless we are organized. Unionizing all faculty and teaching staff is not just about salaries and teaching loads, but about academic freedom, free speech, and the right to protest. Our efforts to build solidarity on campuses have tended to be around something bigger, about values and intervening in the world. Yes, we do this in our classrooms all the time, which is why the state and our university admins try to monitor everything we do. But it\u2019s when we seek to build power, expand governance, take the offensive, and recognize our responsibility to transform this world, that the hammer falls. And the myth of the liberal university, of the transcendent intellectual, of the power of reason shatters at once. The lesson is that defeating the fascism we face now requires much more than defeating the current administration or winning elections. It requires a deeper shift: the recognition that we need to always stand in solidarity and fight for others as if our lives depended on it.<\/p>\n \u2023 Earlier this week, a devastating earthquake in eastern Afghanistan killed over 2,000 people, with the death toll rising by the hour. Chad de Guzman has a round-up of organizations accepting donations for disaster aid in Time<\/a>:<\/p>\n Health-focused relief and development organization\u00a0Americares\u00a0has responded to previous quakes in Afghanistan and other quakes around the world. It said in a press releasethat it is ready to give emergency funding to its regional partner organizations to help restore health services in the most affected areas.<\/p>\n \u201cAfghanistan has suffered multiple natural disasters in recent years compounded by years of conflict and crises that have affected over 23 million people,\u201d said the organization\u2019s deputy senior vice president of emergency programs Provash Budden. \u201cRight now, we\u2019re focused on meeting the most urgent health needs of earthquake survivors to help them recover during this incredibly difficult time.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2023 Oksana Mironova contextualizes the resurgence of boxing, especially among women in places like New York City, in the history of anti-racism and feminism in the sport for Lux Magazine<\/a>:<\/p>\n I am not alone in mining boxing for potent symbolism. Authoritarians of all stripes \u2014 who excel at weaponizing working-class culture to gain and hold power \u2014 have long recognized boxing\u2019s potency. On the international scale, President Vladimir Putin\u2019s regime in Russia has tried to rebuild the (brutal) Soviet amateur boxing training system that feeds into the Olympics while\u00a0taking over\u00a0the International Boxing Association (IBA) to \u201cuphold Russian soft power.\u201d More recently, Saudi Arabia has\u00a0sought control\u00a0over the professional side of the sport in a multi-billion dollar sportswashing exercise. Closer to home, police departments across the United States use the Police Athletic League\u2019s boxing classes and mentorship programs to\u00a0exercise soft power\u00a0over the communities they police.<\/p>\n Central to boxing\u2019s potential for fascist co-optation is what sociologist Kath Woodward calls the \u201cheroic narrative\u201d of the absolute triumph of a singular, cis, non-disabled male body. In American boxing this narrative is deeply racialized, epitomized by the 1910 white pogroms that followed Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson\u2019s\u00a0defeat\u00a0of James \u201cThe Great White Hope\u201d Jeffries. A half-century later, Muhammed Ali would subvert this white nationalism by making\u00a0a stand\u00a0against the Vietnam War part of his own heroic narrative.<\/p>\n \u2023 Jaws turns 50 this year, and scientists are jumping on the opportunity to give sharks a \u201cPR makeover\u201d and channel some of the attention around the film\u2019s anniversary into environmental awareness. Rosanna Xia writes for the Los Angeles Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cThe shark in an updated \u2018Jaws\u2019 could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim, for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors,\u201d Benchley wrote in\u00a0an essay in 1995. \u201cIt has been estimated that for every human life taken by a shark, 4.5 million sharks are killed by humans.\u201d<\/p>\n But seeing all the renewed excitement for \u201cJaws\u201d this year made me appreciate the feelings of commonality (and dare I say, hope?) that this cultural phenomenon has brought about. In a year where our politics have become more polarized than ever, this shared fascination with sharks has been a refreshing, less-controversial way to care about the ocean.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been somehow made aware of \u2018Jaws\u2019 every single day this year \u2014 and not in a negative way. It\u2019s very uniting,\u201d said Jaida Elcock, a shark biologist with WHOI\u2019s Marine Predators Group who runs\u00a0@soFISHtication_, a popular animal-facts page\u00a0on Instagram\u00a0and\u00a0TikTok. \u201cEveryone knows this movie, and even if there\u2019s sometimes differing opinions, you can strike up a conversation with a stranger just because it\u2019s the 50th anniversary of \u2018Jaws.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u2023 My girl Nonprofit Boss is back<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u2023 Moths to a flame were the original chiaroscuro<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u2023 Don\u2019t go giving them ideas<\/a>!<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/ellis-j-rosen-bug-comic-1.jpg\")
(screenshot via @ellisjrosen<\/a> on Instagram)<\/p>\n