Required Reading

‣ For the Cut, Nell McShane Wulfhart narrates the life of Bonnie Erickson, the woman who created Miss Piggy, the Phillie Phanatic, and a number of other larger-than-life, brazenly confident characters. It’s an overdue celebration of an ingenious creator:

Her mascots are all, as Erickson puts it, “fanciful. And I think of them all as gentle anarchists.” A mascot, she says, begins with a backstory and a personality, not with drawings and swatches. This is the same process she followed when creating Miss Piggy in 1974 in response to a request from Jim Henson: He needed three pigs for a sketch titled “Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs.” The puppet originally had button eyes and long, dirty blonde hair; Erickson modeled her after torch singer Peggy Lee, a favorite of her Minnesotan family. “She had that low voice and just seemed really out there for women singers of the time,” says Erickson. “It was her personality, really, that inspired the pig for me.” Soon after, Miss Piggy was scheduled to appear on The Herb Alpert Show and needed a glow-up. “I had to throw on big eyes, a long wig, and drape her in a silk dress,” said Erickson. “I wired on some gloves, because the original pig had hooves, and there was no time to make hands. And I had to put pearls around her neck. Normally, on a puppet you see the join between the neck and the body. That’s why she got the fake pearls.” This Miss Piggy, infinitely more glamorous, is much closer to the Muppet we know today.

‣ With AI steadily making its way to seemingly every facet of our lives, Kyle Chayka forecasts the grim future that Apple’s “new personal intelligence system” might ring in for the New Yorker:

The fact that Apple A.I. is designed to run on the device itself, rather than via the cloud, promises to protect users’ vulnerable personal data to some extent. Yet generative A.I. remains prone to random misunderstandings or “hallucinations,” the somewhat euphemistic A.I. term of art for dramatic mistakes. It has no ability to determine what is factually accurate or connected to reality. Cook told the Post that the tool would not achieve a hundred-per-cent accuracy but added, less than reassuringly, “I am confident it will be very high quality.” One can imagine that a single bizarre accident might be enough to turn an iPhone user off A.I. A wrong answer to “When is my mom landing?”—another sample query from the conference—could yield an airport-pickup snafu. More frightening would be a reply-all disaster—perhaps the A.I. might misunderstand your use of the term “everyone” and e-mail every person in your contact list. Maybe you don’t respond very quickly to messages from your boss and the A.I., clocking this, will decide to start hiding them. (Generative A.I. has been known to be so affirming of its user’s desires that it even hallucinates fictional sources, including Web sites and books, for the faux facts that it produces.)

‣ It’s no secret that contemporary American fiction — and its attendant publishing apparatus — has a fatphobia problem. Emma Copley Eisenberg breaks down this phenomenon for the New Republic:

To read contemporary American fiction is to swim through a sea of fatphobia so normalized that it is almost never remarked upon in book reviews, and those who perpetuate it are awarded the National Book Award or become national bestsellers. When I encounter these fatphobic moments, I’m forced to make a choice: Will whatever insight into being human this novel might offer be worth the damage? Often, I’m interested in the writer’s larger vision but their casual dismissal of the bodies of the majority of Americans creates a jarring effect. Fiction at its best shows genuine interest and curiosity about every aspect of what it is to be human; cruel remarks about fatness diminish the humanity of characters and diminish the book.

‣ For the Code Switch podcast, historian Jules Gill-Peterson sits down for an interview about her recently released book A Short History of Trans Misogyny. It’s a wide-reaching conversation that probes colonial and racist histories while examining the persistence of trans misogyny today:

GILL-PETERSON: I was like, OK, how long has all this stuff been around, (laughter) right? And as I was looking back in time, I was just thumbing through, you know, all of the archival records I’ve collected. And I was just looking for accounts from trans women, you know, talking about a date gone wrong or, you know, a guy, you know, attacking her in the street. And I could find them, you know, about as far back as the 1890s. But I didn’t really see them before that. Like, there were trans women, but they didn’t talk about, like, people clocking them in the street. And they didn’t talk about going on dates and having to disclose their trans status as something dangerous. It just kind of starts happening in the 1890s.

But what I did see was that these characteristic kind of trans panic scenes were happening earlier – a couple of decades earlier – but they were not happening to trans women. They are happening to people like hijras, whose mere presence in public was panicking. You know, the British state was panicking – right? – colonial authorities. But then I was like, OK, but then what happened, right? Like, sure, a state or a government can treat a whole group prejudicially and target them. But, like, how do we get from there to, you know, women on the street in the 1890s being attacked when they’re on a date?

‣ The Ukrainian city of Kyiv hosted its first Pride parade since Russia’s invasion began in 2022, and Siobhán O’Grady and Kostiantyn Khudov have the story for the Washington Post:

Volia and her fiancée, Diana Harasko, 25, are unable to marry or register a civil partnership in Ukraine, where the law does not recognize same-sex relationships. This discrepancy poses an urgent concern for the couple: If Volia is killed or wounded, Harasko will not receive benefits like the spouses of straight troops. Harasko also cannot make emergency medical decisions on Volia’s behalf or decide details of her funeral if she dies.

“I want to be able to marry my fiancée and in case something is going to happen to me, I want to make sure the state will take care of her,” Volia said.

Russia’s war has propelled Ukraine ever closer to Europe. Ukraine’s survival depends on its ties to the West — and its image as a bastion of democracy at total odds with Russia’s authoritarianism and conservative social values. But for LGBTQ+ Ukrainians, the reality is more complicated.

‣ If you’ve ever experienced even a glimmer of interest in the mysterious and bizarre breeding habits of eels (there’s a lot to learn!), Paige Williams’s New Yorker story about the shady underbelly of glass-eel fishing is sure to reignite any lingering obsession with the slithering sea creatures:

Demand in Asia drives the price, but the floor is set locally by a small group of buyers whose names are known and whose conversations, I was told, are private. Nine hundred dollars per pound was the lowest opening price in years. (Loughran had heard that there was a “bottleneck” in Hong Kong.) As the season progresses, the price climbs in twenty-five- or fifty-dollar increments. Each change is posted in Elverholics, a popular fishing forum on Facebook. Some fishermen sell early and low, just to get money in hand. Those who won’t even consider taking less than fifteen hundred dollars a pound respond with yawn emojis and exhortations to “HOOOLLLDDDD!!!!” as they wait for the price-setters to turn on one another.

‣ NBC‘s Cheng Wong reports on a natural waterfall in China that’s been getting a little help — everything is a lie!

But after a hiker posted the video showing the pipe on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, the operators of the Yuntai Mountain Geo park where the falls are based admitted they had made a “small enhancement” to the site.

“To enrich the visiting experience of our friends, and to ensure that you who have traveled from afar do not come in vain, I have made a small enhancement during the dry season, solely to be able to present myself in a better state when meeting with my friends,” they said in a statement.

‣ Added the “Native American accent” to the list of Hollywood’s racial offenses: