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2021 May Be The Year Europe Gets Serious About Returning Looted African Cultural Objects In Museums

A consensus has been building over the past few years that statues, ceremonial objects, and other items taken from Africa during the colonial period should be given back — but few items have actually been transferred so far, largely due to European laws on museum deaccessions. Naomi Rea reports on why, next year, the logjam may finally break. – Artnet

America’s Iconic Hotel Atriums

“We don’t build them much anymore, but Americans invented, perfected and exported this unique building style to the world (where it continues to prosper). Birthed in brash excess, atrium hotels were first seen as too gaudy by the modernist architectural establishment and as too profligate by penny-pinching chain hoteliers. To varying observers, they suggest everything from Disney to dystopia. But in their heyday, these buildings promised — and delivered — a spectacle like no other.” – Bloomberg

New AI Can Predict Your Moral Principles

The development team “choose to focus on a theory commonly used by social scientists called Moral foundations theory. It postulates several key categories of morality including care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity.  The aim of the new models is to infer values of those five moral foundations just by looking at their writing, regardless of what they are talking about.” – IEEE Spectrum

Why The Most Interesting British Philosophers Were Born Before WWI

This mix of genius, the dark history of the mid-20th century and wonderful anecdotes and gossip about intellectual life in Oxford and Cambridge make for a good read. There are some fine philosophers around today but the smart money would still bet that the next major biography of a philosopher will be about someone born before the First World War. – The Critic

Why Producers Are Killing Movie Theatres

“We’re witnessing a transformation of what it means to watch a movie. For over a century, film was at its core a theatrical art form: While it’s true that movies could be watched on TV, the primary cinematic experience was immersive viewing in a theater surrounded by strangers. Now there is a push to make the movie theater merely one platform among others, offering an experience deemed no more meaningful than watching the same feature-length visual narratives on a home entertainment system, a laptop, or even a cell phone.” – The Nation

The Agonizing, Years-Long Journey That Took David Hallberg To The Australian Ballet

“I was broken,” the new director of the company says. In 2013, he injured a foot, and the treatment he got for it (including one badly misguided surgery, followed by another to correct the first) over the next two years was disastrous, much worse than he revealed publicly at the time. At age 33, not only could he no longer dance, he couldn’t really walk properly. Desperate, he got a one-way plane ticket to Melbourne and turned to the Australian Ballet’s unique physiotherapy team. Here’s the story of how they saved him. – The Age (Melbourne)