What I’ve Taken — No. 2
Survivors the law forgot, ambition that became dependence, and a demon built to be destroyed.
Eight things for this week’s What I’ve Taken. One of them goes up in smoke.
Sinners at the Oscars
Variety + ABC
Ryan Coogler’s vampire-blues epic went into the Oscars with a record 16 nominations and left with four wins. The performance makes the case better than the awards count does: Sinners put Black musical inheritance on center stage.
The Victims Who Fought Back
ProPublica / The New York Times Magazine
Oklahoma passed a law to reduce sentences for domestic violence survivors imprisoned for fighting back against their abusers. Prosecutors have made sure it barely works. The legal system inherited its assumptions about who counts as a victim — and those assumptions are surviving even the laws designed to challenge them.
Love in the Time of A.I. Companions
The New Yorker
These tools are arriving in a culture already accustomed to thinner and thinner forms of care. What they normalize is companionship stripped of reciprocity, obligation, and any expectation that care should ask something of us in return.
Computing in the Age of Decolonization
Rest of World
India spent decades pursuing technological sovereignty. What it built instead was a deeper dependence on the firms it set out to escape. Postcolonial ambition became a route to new forms of subordination — not because the ambition was wrong, but because the structures it confronted proved more adaptive than anyone anticipated.
Inside the Criminal World of Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds
Aeon
Workers trafficked into cybercrime compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar exist in a space where victim and perpetrator collapse into the same person. Nobody — not governments, not NGOs, not the workers themselves — has a clean name for what’s happening.
Instrumentalisation Is Making Everything a Means to an End
Aeon
Friendship improves health outcomes. Nature reduces cortisol. Art boosts creativity. When did we stop valuing anything for its own sake? The essay names a cultural inheritance so pervasive it is easy to miss: the belief that nothing matters unless it produces a measurable return.
Cultural Fluency Is the Strongest Currency for Media in 2026
Nieman Lab
Legacy media institutions abandoned cultural fluency precisely when it became most valuable. Now community-rooted outlets and culturally embedded creators are inheriting the audiences those institutions trained themselves not to see.
Ogoh-Ogoh
Field video, Ubud, Bali
The night before Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence, I watched communities parade enormous demon effigies called ogoh-ogoh through the streets, then stage their destruction in smoke and flares. These took months to build and lasted one evening. The ritual turns fear into something visible, public, and temporary — name what haunts you, build it so everyone can see it, then let it go.
