Poland will formally ask Russia to return seven paintings now in a leading Moscow museum that were looted during World War II by the Soviet Red Army, the Polish culture minister said Wednesday. - AP
Russell told Business Media News he envisioned it as a business news show that would appeal to a mass audience, not just executives and investors. The show is currently heard by more than 12 million listeners weekly on more than 800 public radio stations nationwide. - Inside Radio
The pianist has spent the last four years commissioning new arrangements of the Disney songbook, turning the company’s vast library of show tunes — from the 1930s operetta of “Snow White” to the modern salsa of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” — for his new album. - Los Angeles Times
I knew that if I merely retreated to my “side,” I would only contribute to the problem. With some trepidation, then, I set out to ask twelve scholars what they see as the main challenges facing literary studies and literary criticism today. - The Point
Polshek rarely worked for private clients. He devoted himself to public buildings, ranging from the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. Equally rare, Polshek, who died last week at 92, chose commissions that were consistent with his politics. - Architectural Record
In the mid-1930s, Mussolini's minister of agriculture(!), Edmondo Rossoni, worked to turn his home village, marooned in the marshes of Emilia-Romagna, into a model town that could be replicated across Italy. "In Tresigallo, Rossoni envisaged a utopia based around people, with everything geared towards improving their lives." - Atlas Obscura
Rituals are highly structured. They require rigidity (they must always be performed the “correct” way), repetition (the same actions performed again and again) and redundancy (they can go on for a long time). In other words, they are predictable. This predictability imposes order on the chaos of everyday life. - Nautilus
She was certainly a canny operator, but she was working to maintain safety and authority for herself and her sons (all three of whom became king) and stability for France. Though blamed for the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, she spent years trying to make peace between Catholics and Huguenots. - Smithsonian Magazine
"M*A*S*H is in some ways the most contemporary of its contemporaries. Its blend of madcap comedy and pitch-dark drama — the laughs amplifying the serious stakes, and vice versa — is recognizable in today's dramedies, from Better Things to Barry, that work in the DMZ between laughter and sadness." - The New York Times
"I was looking for stories, each in a different way, that showed how everybody left the war with a wound of some kind. ... The crazy behavior wasn't just to be funny. It was a way of separating yourself for a moment from the nastiness." - The New York Times
"I wrote a biography of the man that was largely glowing. Football heroics, overcoming obstacles, practical joker, etc. And, looking at it now, if I’m being brutally honest—I’d advise people not to read it. He’s a bad guy. He doesn’t deserve the icon treatment. He doesn’t deserve acclaim." - Poynter
"Where groomer has a pedigree as a legitimate term of opprobrium, ... miscegenation was invented out of whole cloth, intended as a bludgeon to preempt debate in a racist society where intermarriage was deemed an appalling notion, even among many white abolitionists." The election year: 1864. - Literary Hub
Although momentum behind AI-generated art has been building for a while, the release of Stable Diffusion might be the moment the technology really takes off. It’s free to use, easy to build on, and puts fewer barriers in the way of what users can generate. That makes what happens next difficult to predict. - The Verge
The story enacted by Viola Davis and her colleagues is fictional, but the Agojie did actually exist: a troop of women warriors, founded in the early 1700s in the Kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin), which grew to 6,000 strong by their peak a century later. - Smithsonian Magazine
