A 5,000-year-old Egyptian tomb says they found evidence that could potentially rewrite ancient history

“Thanks to careful excavation methods and various new archaeological technologies, the team was able to show that the tombs were built in several construction phases and over a relatively long period of time,” they explain. “This observation, together with other evidence, radically challenges the idea of a ritual human sacrifice as part of the royal burial in the 1st Dynasty, which was often assumed in early research but never really proven.”

The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong

Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler of Seattle Pacific University and their colleagues report that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters. The women participate in hunting regardless of their childbearing status. These findings directly challenge the Man the Hunter assumption that women's bodies and childcare responsibilities limit their efforts to gathering foods that cannot run away.

Oliver Cotton’s The Score, dealing with Bach’s confrontation with Frederick II at Potsdam in 1747

In Taking Sides (1995) he offered a surprisingly sympathetic view of Wilhelm Furtwangler, who remained as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third Reich. In the even better Collaboration (2008), Harwood showed how Richard Strauss, while working on Die Schweigsame Frau with Stefan Zweig, was forced into an accommodation with the Nazis to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and her children.

Gego Is Finally Getting Her Due as an Innovator of Kinetic Art in a Guggenheim Retrospective

Whether or not you know the life and work German-Venezuelan artist Gego (1912–1994) may depend on where in the world you call home. The deeply influential artist—best known for her conceptual and elegant wire sculptures—has routinely been hailed as one of the most influential figures of post-war Latin American art. In the United States, particularly, however, her recognition has been slow-coming when compared to the fame of her contemporaries.

Kaija Saariaho, the composer who explored color and light, has died at age 70

"I think that sound and color are not completely detached from each other," the composer told NPR last year. "That's maybe how it is in our brain. And I think that certain sounds, or certain kinds of music, can have even a specific smell. So I feel that all the senses are somehow present when I compose."

By the early 90s she had followed French spectralists such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, who used the experience of electronics, and especially the computer’s then new facility in analysing sound, to write music mainly for instruments and voices

Ahmad Jamal, influential jazz pianist, dies aged 92

The trumpeter Miles Davis once said: “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal,” writing in his memoir that his friend had “knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages”.

Warm-toned abstract paintings using dots and lines

Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s warm-toned abstract paintings use dots and lines specific to her Aboriginal heritage to create immersive works of art. The painter’s somewhat expressionistic style is a testament to the genre’s global footprint that extended beyond, and came before, the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. 

In remembrance of Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023)

Phyllida Barlow was one of the most important British sculptors of her generation, whose work often transformed quotidian materials—plywood, cardboard, cement, fabric, plastic—into what she called “very impractical and very illogical” pieces of unexpected beauty

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in the small town of Galesburg

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in the small town of Galesburg, Illinois in the United States. She died in 2012 in New York, aged 101. Amazingly, she continued to create art and poetry until the end of her life

The Encyclopedia of the Dance

In the centuries since there have been gifted sisters whose lives were less anguished—Maria Anna (“Nannerl”) Mozart, Fanny Mendelssohn, Gwen John—but who were long overshadowed by their more eminent brothers. In our time, however, these sister-artists are being given fresh attention and revaluation. None is more remarkable than Bronislava Nijinska, the radical dancer-choreographer sister of the legendary radical dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Yet Lynn Garafola’s La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern is the first full-length biography of this singular creator.

Vera Molnár, the 98-Year-Old Generative Art Pioneer

Starting with the simple geometric forms that she favored—in this case concentric squares—Molnár introduced random patterns of disruption through an algorithm, giving the work a lively rhythm as the lines vibrate with variation. 

Jean-Luc Godard, giant of the French New Wave, dies at 91

Jean-Luc Godard, the French-Swiss director who was a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the film-making movement that revolutionised cinema in the late 1950s and 60s, has died aged 91. French news agency AFP reported that he died “peacefully at home” in Switzerland with his wife Anne-Marie Mieville at his side. Liberation, quoting an unnamed family member, reported that Godard’s death was assisted, which is legal in Switzerland. “He was not sick, he was simply exhausted. 

Five lessons from the 19th-century Crimean war

The American purchase of Alaska was another legacy. After Crimea, the young tsar knew he could not defend this distant frontier and decided to sell it to a nation with a more realistic hope of populating it someday.

Russian envoy to Poland hit with red paint at war cemetery

earlier in the war the Soviet forces had invaded Poland following a secret agreement with the German Nazi government, and carried out atrocities against Poles, including mass executions and deportations to Siberia.

Pop Art Visionary Marisol Was All But Forgotten. Now, a New Exhibition Places Her on Equal Footing With Her Pal Andy Warhol

Certain artistic subject matter overlaps between the two as well—both make references to the Kennedys and Coca Cola. As a Venezuelan artist, however, Marisol’s handling of these themes hints at the very real political implications of American expansionism in South America. The totemic qualities of her sculptures, too, hint at Pre-Columbian traditions. Materially, the artists were diametrically distinct; Marisol’s works are made from the hands-on process of carpentry, while Warhol’s devoted himself to silkscreening, which detached the artist’s hand. 

Holodomor, an engineered famine that killed anywhere from 4 to 10 million people in Ukraine during a single winter

It’s a hard lesson that Stalin murdered upwards of 20 million people while trying to modernize and industrialize Russia. It’s hard to see that his crimes were ecological and environmental, and those ecological crimes killed millions. It’s hard to read about gulags and secret police rounding up innocents by the thousands, for all kinds of reasons, even not clapping for his birthday. It’s even harder to accept Stalin is just the worst, most obvious example of a common theme in humanity. He’s not the only monster. He’s a pattern.

Why do some nations fail while others succeed?

"whether or not a nation succeeds or fails depends on how the people in that society themselves organize that society"

Around 30% of those born in Portugal aged between 15 and 39 decided to emigrate. According to figures from the Emigration Observatory and reported by Expresso, this percentage corresponds to more than 850,000 people.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

On the morning of 27 January 1945 the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps still held some 7,000 prisoners. Over a million people deported to Auschwitz perished there. It is estimated that six million Jews were exterminated in the death camps.

Phillip King, Influential British Sculptor, Has Died at 87

Initially, King was turned off by abstraction, but a visit to Athens, where he saw the Parthenon situated in the hilly landscape, changed all that. “My later reluctance to see abstraction as something worthwhile was to do with it being cerebral and not from nature,” he told the Guardian in 2014. “Greece allowed me to rediscover how things can be of the mind but also of nature, and the idea of using gravity as a way to make things stand up.”

She made history in the fall of 2005 as the first woman to be elected chancellor

Ironically, we may one day look back and judge that one of Merkel’s greatest legacies for the EU was to open the door to women’s political leadership in Germany—so that a new leader could emerge who would reverse many of her policies. Though Merkel may not be the savior of Europe some have made her out to be, she may have paved the path for a new leader who could be