What Was the Most Influential Work of the Decade?

Where Should Art History Go in the Future?

The reorientation means that instead of gaining expertise about a legacy of specific masterworks, we instead have to take on a project that is less comfortable: constantly studying our own ignorance.

Chocolate: Child Labour and Deforestation

In 2001, the lucrative chocolate industry, due to pressure from NGOs, committed itself to putting an end to child labour in cacao plantations before 2006. 18 years later, has that promise been kept? The Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cacao producer, made a real effort to eradicate this scourge on the country. They built schools and trained farmers. Television adverts even reminded populations that child labour is illegal. So why does child exploitation still exist?

In the past half-century, few countries have lost rainforests as fast as the Ivory Coast. More than 80 percent of its forests are gone, most following an illegal invasion by as many as a million landless people into national parks and other supposedly protected forests. The Marahoue National Park alone has 30,000 illegal inhabitants. The invaders are growing cocoa to supply the global chocolate business.

A millennium ago

A millennium ago, Buddhist domination of Tibet spawned a new civilization, one in which the celebrated Lamaist religions of Bön and Buddhism came to hold sway. The inexorable march of time and the ascent of the new religious order slowly but surely clouded the memory of the earlier cultural heritage. As a result, many of the ancient achievements of the Upper Tibetan people were forgotten. All that remains are preserved in the impressive monumental traces of the region. Antiquities of Zhang Zhung attempts to reclaim these past glories by systematically describing the visible physical remains left by the ancient inhabitants of Upper Tibet.

Is our future set in stone?

The laws of physics suggest that our path in life is predetermined

Padre Max & Maria de Lurdes

Murdered for generously teaching the rude and ignorant portuguese people from Cumieira. Day in honor of Father Max and Maria de Lurdes: 3rd of April 

The tradition on the Noite de São João involves locals placing a cat in a clay jar and hanging it on a pole clad in straw which then is set alight

The fun, apparently, is in watching the string holding the jar burn and seeing the cat and container crash to the ground.

Summers could become 'too hot for humans'

when the body is unable to cool down properly so its core temperature keeps rising to dangerous levels and key organs can shut down.

Who owns the Nile?

The universe has an odd sense of humor

While a crown-encrusted virus has run roughshod over the world, another entirely different corona about 100 million light years from Earth has mysteriously disappeared.

Mysterious Thermonuclear Blast Sends Strange Star Hurtling Across The Galaxy

Dox - is whizzing along at 250 kilometres per second (155 miles per second), against the direction of the galaxy's rotation.

Livestock farming and fossil fuels could drive 4C global heat rise

Animal farming and fossil fuels have driven global emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane to the highest level on record, putting the world on track for dangerously increased heat levels of 3C to 4C.

Incorporate remote access from the get-go

During the first few weeks of the COVID-19 lockdowns, many people found themselves scrambling to make the everyday things they do—jobs, classes, family gatherings—accessible from remote locations. Disabled people have been practicing, advocating, and innovating alternative ways of showing up and getting together since long before the pandemic—out of necessity, and to accommodate one another. On May 8, I moderated a Zoom panel on remote access with disabled artists and writers Kevin Gotkin, Johanna Hedva, and Yo-Yo Lin. The video recording is embedded here. Together, we discuss the importance of incorporating the remote access techniques we’re all learning now into future programs, as well as precedents (artworks, exhibitions) that incorporate remote access from the get-go, rather than tacking it on as an afterthought.

Free Tibet and the world’s oldest pro-Tibet group, the Tibet Society have completed a merger

in a move which will see both organisations combine their strengths in support of the Tibetan cause. The merger has been welcomed by the Tibetan community, activists and supporters from across the Tibet movement. Free Tibet is globally known for its public campaigns, advocacy and research, becoming one of the biggest and most influential Tibet organisations in the world. As the secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Tibet, a group of MPs committed to supporting Tibet, Tibet Society has strong links with decision makers and politicians to keep Tibet on the agenda of the British Government. 

Ennio Morricone Dies at 91

his brilliant body of work includes collaborations with other notable directors like Gillo Pontecorvo (1966’s The Battle of Algiers), Don Siegel (1970’s Two Mules for Sister Sara), Bernardo Bertolucci (1976’s 1900), John Boorman (1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic), Edouard Molinaro (1978’s La Cage aux Folles), John Carpenter (1982’s The Thing), William Friedkin (1987’s Rampage), Brian De Palma (1987’s The Untouchables), Pedro Almodovar (1989’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), Franco Zeffirelli (1990’s Hamlet), Wolfgang Petersen (1993’s In the Line of Fire), Mike Nichols (1994’s Wolf) and Warren Beatty (1998’s Bulworth). He was asked but never scored a film for Eastwood the director, a decision he said he regretted, and missed out on a chance to do Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) when Leone insisted that the composer was too busy finishing up one of his films (he wasn’t).

‘A Delightful Flurry of Movement’: Dances to Bach

Tanowitz, who works with a range of companies and founded her own in 2000, has developed a style of choreography that is rigorous and structured while often appearing permeable, receptive, and spontaneous. She makes great use of theater wings, upstage recesses, and even audience aisles. One of the joys of watching a Tanowitz performance is catching moments that seem unplanned: a gracious smile between dancers, a performer who stays airborne after her peers have landed, or a group huddle that falls to the left of a spotlight.

Hong Kong: protests erupt as China brings in controversial new security law

Police make first arrest since new law comes into force after man held Hong Kong Independence flag in protest