‣ A team of reporters at the Texas Observer explain how a 2001 theft of ancient Peruvian textiles from Texas Christian University raises questions about other university collections around the state, particularly how the donations of antiquities they accept were originally acquired:
But according to archaeologist Donna Yates, an expert on the illicit trade, “Most of the antiquities that have been acquired by collectors and museums in the past and that are on the market now are at least illicit in some way, and many are held illegally.” As Yates wrote in the Journal of Financial Crime, in one of several articles on antiquities trafficking, many museums and universities are reluctant to return or refuse donations of questionable provenance “because of desire to compete with other museums or because of a sincere belief that a museum is the best place for the object.”
At times, the value of donated art or antiquities collections might be inflated by fraudsters in order to overstate the value of a charitable gift as a tax write-off. The appraisal process of art and antiquities is highly subjective, and the opinions of ostensible experts are difficult to challenge, Yates said, creating the potential for abuse.
‣ The White women who supported Harlem Renaissance artists left behind a complex legacy, having been overshadowed by male patrons on the one hand but often fetishizing Black artists on the other. Novelist L. S. Stratton explains for LitHub:
Mason was of like mind, believing this “primitivism” could be White America’s literal salvation. Her fetishization of Black culture started well before the Harlem Renaissance, fomented by her husband, Dr. Rufus Osgood Mason, friend to the Rockefellers and one of the founding fathers of parapsychology and hypnotherapy. The doctor and his wife believed in the spiritual superiority of the so-called “primitive cultures” of the Native Americans and Africans. Charlotte Osgood Mason even claimed to have had visions of a “flaming pathway to Africa” that, if followed, could help cure the spiritually bereft white American society. She would become obsessed with creating that flaming pathway before she died, envisioning her Black artists as her building crew while she would take the lead and be the architect.
‣ Palestinian author Isabella Hammad was among several writers who withdrew from PEN America’s World Voices Festival in March. For the New York Review of Books, she considers the primacy of language and dangers of equating pro-Palestine speech with acts of genocide:
This focus on the speech used tο support Palestinian rights does more than obscure the context in which protesters are speaking; it also obscures the reality about which they speak. I believe in the power and importance of language. But what is happening is not primarily about language. Words are not weapons of mass destruction: when we encourage others to use language with care, we should be sure to do the same ourselves. Some metaphors are inappropriate in some contexts. The context here is a quantity of ammunition dropped on Gaza that is equivalent to more than three times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high proportion of those bombs were US-made and supplied. Those bombs were not made of language, and they certainly were not metaphors.
Later in her essay, [Zadie] Smith gestures toward the idea that language might, after all, be totally beside the point: “The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.” But little of the rest of the essay engages with the dead; it engages above all with language. The effect of training people’s attention on matters of discourse and representation is to avoid addressing what is principally at issue, which are material facts. The material facts in this case are: money, land, weapons, and over 37,000 dead Palestinians.
‣ Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Ahmed Ali Akbar explores the buried history of Indian food in the early 20th century via a new PBS documentary and what it can tell us about the deep roots of South Asian American cuisine:
“If you were to go to New York in 1955, the majority of Indian restaurants that you would find in Manhattan were run by Bengali Muslim men,” said Bald, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Those restaurants, for many many years and even to the present day, call themselves Indian restaurants because that’s what the American clientele understood and expected. But actually they were run by Bengali Muslim, eventually Bangladeshi, men.”
One of the major revelations of Bald’s work is the existence of Bengali “ship-jumpers” who escaped labor akin to indentured servitude on British naval ships by staying in the U.S. when they came into port.
‣ The students who survived the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School as first graders have just graduated from high school. For Mother Jones, Julianne McShane takes a look at what policies have remained unchanged since then — and what the survivors have to say about it:
The number one gun control measure Sandy Hook survivor Ella Seaver said she would like to see enacted is “regulation on AR-style assault weapons,” frequently used in mass shootings, including at Sandy Hook. But there is still no such federal legislation in place; these weapons remain broadly available in all but 10 states, plus D.C., which have passed state-level bans, according to the gun control research and advocacy organization Giffords. And according to the gun control research and advocacy organization Everytown, federal law does not require universal background checks for private gun sales, which make up most gun sales nationwide and include those that take place between friends or family or at gun shows, for example.
‣ Joni Mitchell occupies a singular place in so many listeners’ lives, and a new biography of the beloved singer explains why. Journalist David Hajdu writes for the Nation:
The driving idea of Powers’s book is that the author, a longtime music writer held in high esteem for her critical journalism (for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and in her current perch as the music critic at NPR) and books (on artists and subjects as varied as Kate Bush, American bohemia, and the sexual currents in pop music), sees more than a little of herself in Joni Mitchell. It’s a view Powers came to over time, after years of listening to and thinking about Mitchell’s music and researching her life through interviews with many of her famous contemporaries, rivals, collaborators, and lovers, some of whom—such as James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Graham Nash, and David Crosby—played all four of those roles in the overlapping circle game of Mitchell’s career. Powers came to relate to Mitchell in multiple ways: as the only daughter of middle-class parents inclined to uncertainty, as a woman redefined by adoption (Mitchell having given up a baby for adoption, Powers a mother through adoption), as a woman asserting herself in a sphere dominated by men, and as a cerebral adventurer who resisted reductive classification.
‣ Meg Anderson reports on a Minnesota prison newspaper that’s gone to print for over a hundred years. She delves into the publication — and prison newspapers at large — for NPR:
Thirty years ago, she says there were estimated to be only six prison newspapers. Today, there are more than two dozen. That doesn’t take into account the hundreds of incarcerated writers submitting work to publications on the outside, like The Marshall Project’s Life Inside series.
Kane says this kind of work can offer a window into what prison is actually like, one that prison administrators aren’t necessarily going to offer up freely.
“There’s a lot of information that people who are inside prisons see and are experiencing every day. There’s some reporting that can only be done from inside,” she says.
Even if a newspaper doesn’t circulate far beyond the prison yard, it can offer a sense of empowerment for its writers.
“Having a newspaper, it’s beneficial to everybody. It informs the population. It gives you a voice,” Gordon says. “There’s a quote I like: You can either be an agent of destiny or a victim of it.”
‣ The first-time filmmakers behind the 2004 hit Napoleon Dynamite recount writing the indie comedy and inventing the iconic “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt. Paula Mejía has the store for GQ:
Jerusha Hess: We were literally just these kids in this rattletrap apartment. We couldn’t afford a computer, and so our friend lent us this old, old Macintosh, when they were called Macintoshes. It was one of the bubble ones that had, like, neon blue casing. He lent it to us knowing that we were trying to write a script. Jared and I had one chair in the house that we also kind of just borrowed and stole from BYU. We sat at that desk and just typed out Napoleon so slow, and midway that computer started smoking.
Jared Hess: It started to have electronical issues and it would catch on fire. But it stayed alive long enough for us to finish the script.
‣ Filmmaker Lauren Windsor’s secret recording of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito launched a frenzied ethics debate. For the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Wasserman argues that Windsor’s actions don’t constitute the scandal they’ve been made out to be:
Still, deception is a big deal. People have a right to know whom they’re talking to and what will be done with what they say. Otherwise, they can’t really know if they want to talk at all.
You should be able to justify deceit as indispensable to get something important, of public significance, that you would never get without the lie.
U.S. media have turned against deception, and projects built on undercover reporting are vanishingly rare. Gone is work like that of the Chicago Sun-Times, which opened a bar in 1977 and ran it for weeks to ensnare corrupt city inspectors, or the ABC News 1995 Food Lion story, in which reporters got hired by the grocery chain to secretly document unsanitary food handling.
Did the Alito comments justify the deception it took to get them? I think so.
‣ In some wonderful scientific news, elephants might have their own names (sadly, there’s no evidence of any “Hortons” as yet). Gemma Conroy reports for Nature:
The researchers analysed recordings of 469 rumbles using a machine-learning technique. The model correctly identified which elephant was being addressed 27.5% of the time — a much higher success rate than when the model was fed with random audio as a control. This suggests that the rumbles carry information that is intended only for a specific elephant.
Next, Pardo and his colleagues played recordings of these calls to 17 elephants and compared their reactions. The elephants became more vocal and moved more quickly towards the speaker when they heard their ‘name’ compared with when they heard rumbles directed at other elephants. “They could tell if a call was addressed to them just by hearing that call,” says Pardo.
‣ And speaking of animals and humans being more similar than we think:
‣ Entering Diane Keaton season:
‣ A soothing look into the Chinese teapot-making process by @teapotcraftsman:
