Some excellent reading material

I think the best thing I’ve read in weeks is Soraya Nadia McDonald’s piece on necks, and, more specifically, George Floyd’s neck:

Aside from genitalia, the neck is the part of the body most susceptible when subjected to attack. And because of this widespread recognition of the neck as a spot of weakness, it’s also ideal for communicating intimacy. When André Leon Talley interviewed former first lady Michelle Obama for the November 2012 issue of Vogue, the article was accompanied by a portrait made by Annie Leibovitz. In it, Obama is in profile, her face turned away from the camera. Her hair is pulled back in an elegant swoop, to reveal her shoulders, her neck and a single earring. The composition, the lighting and the background called forth another portrait: Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. But while Vermeer’s subject directly engages the painter and the audience, Obama is turned away, but exposed.

There are those who, in their paths toward violence and abuse, seek out the neck. Sylvia Vella, a clinician and detective in the domestic violence unit at the San Diego Police Department, spoke to The New Yorker in 2015 about neck injuries from strangulation and their connection to domestic abuse and traumatic brain injury: “Statistically, we know now that once the hands are on the neck the very next step is homicide,” she said. “They don’t go backwards.”

And I also loved Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker on Edward Hopper’s paintings of solitude:

Nivison aside, or standing guard, Hopper’s independence feels absolute, repelling attempts to associate him with any other artist or social group. In this, he updates and passes along to the future the spirit of a paradigmatically American text, “Self-Reliance,” minus Ralph Waldo Emerson’s optimism. The free, questing citizen has devolved into one or another of millions rattling around on a comfortless continent. Can you pledge patriotic allegiance to a void? Hopper shows how, exploring a condition in which, by being separate, we belong together. You don’t have to like the idea, but, once you’ve truly experienced this painter’s art, it is as impossible to ignore as a stone in your shoe.

And a great piece by Amethyst Ganaway in Food & Wine on how Black communities have always used food as protest:

Not all acts of rebellion based around food were necessarily violent. Farming as resistance isn’t a new concept, although there has been a resurgence of farming in communities that have been hit especially hard by gentrification and food apartheid. These communities, largely Black people and other people of color, are often in places that don’t have any source of fresh food for miles. Throughout and after slavery was abolished in the Americas, Black people farmed and gardened to find sustenance literally and figuratively in trying times. During enslavement, people would often have their own gardens to make up for the food the enslavers didn’t or wouldn’t provide. Growing the foods of their homeland like okra, peanuts, benne, watermelon, and more, not only were they able to eat and be connected to their culture (an act of rebellion in itself), they arguably made one of the most significant impacts on what is known as American cuisine. The debt that is owed by America to Black people is so much greater than the forty acres of land that was promised, but never received, and that has accrued interest for over 400 years.