Required Reading
A meditation on light, hedonistic dance-floor photos, a filthy history of public bathrooms, and more reading to ring in a new year.
A meditation on light, hedonistic dance-floor photos, a filthy history of public bathrooms, and more reading to ring in a new year.
This year, I'm thinking about cultural preservation despite the ravages of the world. Photos from Lviv, Ukraine, show people celebrating Malanka Pereberia — a folk holiday that includes house visits, songs, costumes, and mask-making. (photo by Mykola Tys/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
What makes a year? The Earth's orbit around the sun, with shifting light shaping our days, weather, and seasons. Boris Acket and Studio Airport's "Five Studies on Light" is part film, part interactive exploration — a mesmerizing meditation on how light bends, scatters, and defines what we see, in Emergence Magazine:
It is light, in its many permutations, that gives form to the cycle of Earth’s seasons. As our planet tilts and orbits around the Sun, the shifting angles of light create rhythms that shape temperature and weather, and beyond that, entire ecosystems, human cultures, and our deepest sense of time and place.
Variation—and its absence—is central to our experience of these rhythms. The changing light of the seasons is more than a visual phenomenon; it is a cosmic metronome. Without these fluctuations, time would feel adrift, and the intricate ecological, emotional, spiritual systems built on light would begin to unravel.
Does this article find you hungover, recovering, or perfectly fine? However you feel this New Year's Day, dive into Tiarna Meehan's round-up of 2025's most hedonistic dance-floor photos — an exploration of nightlife's political and aesthetic power — for Dazed:
Amid venue closures, police raids and the rising cost of nightlife, clubs have become increasingly endangered in 2025. As a result, it’s become the subject of panel talks, crowdfunding campaigns, and a slew of thinkpieces asking what nightlife is worth and who it’s really for.
And yet, with the club more endangered than ever, it was the people who showed up who kept things moving. Promoters, performers, dancers and door staff continued to turn up night after night, refusing to let the lights go out quietly. In the face of uncertainty, the dance floor remained a place of resistance.
Those giant gaps around public bathroom doors weren't always standard. In fact, things were once much, much worse. My New Year's resolution: Remember that the next time I'm making eye contact with someone through a gap in the stall. Calvin Gimpelevich writes on the history of the public bathroom for the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Like us, the Romans suffered constipation, diarrhea, gluey or ropy or viscous stools; like us, they had to wipe off. For this reason, it is hypothesized, the small shallow gutter running before forica benches provided a constant flow of water within easy reach. Romans may have scooped water to cleanse with, or used it to rinse xylospongia—sponge sticks, a Roman classic, featuring sea sponges fixed to wood rods. Some academics declare, emphatically, that the sponges were used to wipe with, while others insist they were more like toilet brushes for mopping external spills. Alternate materials—papyrus, plant husks, wood shavings, corncobs, and rags—have been found and used as evidence of the latter theory, but most experts believe the sponges were indeed a form of recyclable toilet paper. Seneca recounts the story of a German prisoner, condemned to public execution, who asked to use the toilet and “seized the stick of wood, tipped with a sponge, which was devoted to the vilest uses, and stuffed it, just as it was, down his throat; thus he blocked up his windpipe, and choked the breath from his body,” rather than face the savage beasts of the arena. As comfortable as they may have been about digestive matters, Romans were not free of disgust: “Yes, indeed,” Seneca writes, “it was not a very elegant or becoming way to die; but what is more foolish than to be over-nice about dying?”
Flossie the cat just turned 30! Dylan Horetski writes for Dexerto:
At the time of her record confirmation, Guinness World Records noted that Flossie was deaf and had limited eyesight, but was otherwise in good health. She maintained a daily routine that included eating, sleeping, and playing.
Flossie is currently recognized as the oldest living cat in the world. She is also one of the seven oldest verified cats in recorded history.
As New York City says goodbye to the iconic MetroCard, meet Thomas McKean, who turns them into gorgeous collages and sculptures:
Tomorrow, the MetroCard officially becomes a relic of the past. Introduced in 1993, it replaced subway tokens and became a daily ritual for millions of New Yorkers. It lived in our wallets for over 30 years and quietly carried the city through workdays, late nights, and everything in between. On the eve of its discontinuation, I linked up with my friend Thomas McKean, a New York artist who’s spent decades collecting used MetroCards and turning them into intricate collages and sculptures. Thomas believes the MetroCard was one of the rare objects that connected New Yorkers across every neighborhood, job, and background. No matter who you were, you had one in your wallet. A small piece of plastic that belonged to everyone. Now officially history.
Forget Times Square. We've got something better:
better than watching the ball drop pic.twitter.com/BOvloDhV07
— Mads (@MadsPosting) December 31, 2025
Remember that you don't have to explain your 2026 New Years Resolutions to anyone, including yourself:
— Images AI Could Never Recreate (@imagesaicouldnt) December 30, 2025
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.