The city council of the occupied, now-largely-destroyed Ukrainian city says that more than 2,000 works, including paintings by the renowned 19th-century artists Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky, were taken by Russian forces to Donetsk, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014. - The Guardian
Russian soldiers and intelligence officers, along with "a Russian-speaking man in a white lab coat" and a film crew, entered the Melitopol Museum of Local History and stole an entire collection, which had been carefully hidden, of 2,300-year-old Scythian gold ornaments, plates and weapons. - The New York Times
"Julie Finch, … the former CEO of the Cheltenham Trust, … has been appointed CEO of the Hay festival and will succeed founder and former director Peter Florence, who resigned from his role after a bullying claim was upheld last year." - The Guardian
As many cities today grapple with unprecedented housing shortages and cost-of-living issues, the degree to which historic-preservation laws can function as a pretext for preventing change entirely is clearer than ever. - The Atlantic
January 6th was an extreme attack. But it was not a coup d’état. Because a coup d’état is not a demonstrative action, where you go around shouting obscenities and doing noisy things. It’s a thing where you have figured out the control levers of the system and how you can physically dominate them. - The Point
China's growing clout in global media extends beyond movies to the entertainment industry generally. Capital investments by U.S. firms in ventures such as the Shanghai Disney Resort and the Universal Beijing Resort give Chinese officials still more levers with which to control U.S. media conglomerates. - Journal of Democracy
In the persistent wake of the pandemic, the pressure for scholars to self-promote has only intensified. Starved for opportunities to share our latest findings at in-person conferences, we take to Twitter, Instagram, or perhaps our email signature to hype our new books and articles. - Salon
The company’s response have stirred a mix of angst and uncertainty among many rank-and-file workers. Some are worried that the streaming heavyweight may have hired too fast and grown complacent as subscriber growth skyrocketed in the early days of the pandemic. - Los Angeles Times
Museum curators and conservators are especially worried that because of the amount of un-digitalized catalogues and other existing print materials in archives and libraries, some very vulnerable materials are in danger of being lost completely. - Aisle Say
The hyphen underwent an assault from a different corner in 2007, when Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, removed the hyphens from sixteen thousand words. - The New Yorker
At heart, they just expose our funny, brilliant, quirky humanness. We love riddles because they show how we’re “rationalization machines. We are great at finding patterns where none exist.” And if we don’t find the pattern? That’s our humanness, too. - Washington Post
Suddenly, Kobabe was at the center of a nationwide battle over which books belong in schools — and who gets to make that decision. The debate, raging in school board meetings and town halls, is dividing communities around the country and pushing libraries to the front lines of a simmering culture war. - The New York Times
These days, KEXP has roughly 180,000 weekly listeners on the airwaves, 100,000 listeners online, and a YouTube channel with 2.69 million subscribers and nearly 1.4 billion views — 75% of them outside the United States. Its biggest international audience is in Mexico. - Seattle Times
No, truly. And, in classic pandemic times fashion, "after several months of working remotely, the band members met one another in the flesh and performed together for the first time in the Adirondacks last summer." - NPR
The laws have done some good for buildings that truly do need to be preserved. However: "In cities with significant numbers of old buildings ... preservation became an essential part of the process by which communities fended off urban-redevelopment projects." - The Atlantic
