Required reading

• UNESCO just voted to name the ceremonial earthworks at Hopewell, Ohio, a World Heritage Site, and Julie Carr Smyth reports on their history and importance to indigenous people communities across the state to AP News:

The massive earthworks include eight ancient sites spread across 150 kilometers (90 miles) of what is now southern Ohio, including one located on the grounds of a private golf course and country club . This designation puts the place in the same category as the wonders of the world, including the Greek Acropolis, Peru’s Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China.

“Pure excitement and elation” were the immediate reactions of Chief Glenna Wallace of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.

“Tears came to my eyes and elation turned to reflection, knowing that the world will now see and recognize the commitment, spirituality, imaginative art and knowledge of complex architecture to produce magnificent earthworks,” she said in a statement. “Our ancestors were true geniuses.”

• Jodi Picault, Jonathan Franzen and other authors are suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on their novels. Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris report for the New York Times:

Douglas Preston, a novelist who joined the lawsuit, said he was shocked when he asked ChatGPT to describe minor characters in his books and it returned detailed information that was not not available in reviews or Wikipedia entries for the novels.

“That’s when I looked at this and said, ‘My God, ChatGPT has read my books, how many of my books has he read?’ ” “, did he declare. “He knew everything, and that’s when I had a bad feeling.”

• Amid revelations that comedian and writer Hasan Minhaj fabricated entire anecdotes in his sets, including descriptions of police brutality, critic Raja Sen explains for mint why people are so upset:

Minhaj, however, is a different type of comedian. American Muslim artist who became best known as a correspondent on The daily show, he later hosted the White House Correspondent’s Dinner and, alongside his award-winning Netflix specials, launched his own truth-telling show. Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj (Netflix) where he stood in a hyperactive PowerPoint presentation pointing fingers and throwing out statistics about the rich and the bad. An episode titled “Saudi Arabia” that heavily criticized Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman was removed from Netflix in that country, while in other episodes it criticized world leaders like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and even India’s Narendra Modi .

So it’s baffling — and fundamentally disappointing — that Minhaj, in his specials that are mostly about his own identity (they’re categorized by Netflix under the label “Personal Storytelling”), lied to us. The truth is an integral part of his crusading comedy. He has always relied on his Muslim American identity to make important statements about race and racism, and knowing that the big things didn’t really happen to him unfortunately takes away from the valid points he made.

• A new book chronicles the set of Glossier, once the darling of the beauty industry. Hanna Kozlowska interviews author Marisa Meltzer for the Cut:

In his new book, Glossy: the ambition, beauty and inside story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier, Meltzer says the company’s success was never really due to its cult products. Instead, it was about the image of femininity these products sold: casual, carefree, and natural. “But like the work of putting on makeup to make yourself naturally beautiful, nothing at Glossier is easy,” she writes – and least of all its founder, Emily Weiss, whose ambition was clear from her first appearance as a ‘hypercompetent. Teen Vogue ‘superintern’ on MTV reality show The hills (a re-read is an excellent match to the book). “I had never seen anything like it,” Meltzer writes of the “born netizen” who learned how power worked in the fashion and beauty industries by sitting on the toilet seats of insiders and rummaging through their medicine cabinets for her first business, beauty. website In the gloss.

• Dalit activist and artist Thenmozhi Soundararajan writes a play for Religion Information Service on going on a hunger strike in support of a California bill to end caste discrimination:

Our lived experiences and data are revealing. In our research at Equality Labs, we found that one in four people from caste-oppressed backgrounds face physical and verbal attacks, one in three face educational discrimination, and two in three face discrimination in the workplace. This data set is supported by research from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and hundreds of scholars across the United States. The question is not whether or not caste exists in the United States, but rather how we should approach the liability created by such severe discrimination.

The coalition that helped pass this bill represents voters from San Diego to Bakersfield, from Fresno to Sacramento, from Yuba City to the Bay Area and Shasta County. We are farmers, truck drivers, nurses, restaurant workers, small business owners, doctors and technicians, each with our own story of heartbreak and a shared determination to end poverty once and for all. caste discrimination.

• TikToker Teddy Siegel, better known by his pseudonym @Got2GoNYC, is raising awareness about the shortage of public toilets in the city and its consequences. Andrew Lloyd writes for Insider:

She knew that access to public toilets was important, but considered her TikTok account a “fun thing that I did” and acknowledged that it was quite “weird”, until she started receiving comments and messages from viewers that expressed how profound the lack of access to public restrooms was. had then had an impact, from delivery drivers who worked nights and had given up trying to find them, to the homeless.

“That was really a turning point for me in my account,” she told Insider. “This is much more than a public health crisis. It’s also an equity crisis.”

• Apparently not everyone knowsbut it’s actually not it is legal to crush demonstrators (despite recent attempts by some legislators in Texas, Tennessee and Missouri to do so):