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Boy Thrown From Tate Modern’s Deck Can Now Walk, Says Family

The victim, visiting London with his family from France, was 6 when he was hurled from the museum’s viewing deck by a deranged 17-year-old (now imprisoned) in August of 2019. The boy’s family says that he can now walk with a cane and breathe well enough to speak in words rather than syllables, though he still suffers from chronic pain and memory loss. – CNN

Remorseful American Tourist Returns Ancient Marble Fragment She Stole From Rome

“The National Roman Museum recently received the piece of stone, which was inscribed in black marker, ‘To Sam, love Jess, Rome 2017.’ ‘I feel terrible for not only stealing this item from its rightful place, but writing on it,’ said the note accompanying the item. ‘It was a big mistake on my part and only now, as an adult, do I realize just how thoughtless and despicable it was.'” – Artnet

An Emerging “Museum of The Future”?

A long period of relative peace, prosperity, and globalisation after the Cold War had lulled the museum field into complacency not only about its financial viability, but also about its relevance and credibility. The Covid-19 crisis—which coincided with a painful reckoning with the intertwined legacies of colonialism and racial injustice—has accelerated a push to adapt and innovate, in six principal ways. – The Art Newspaper

Magazine Slammed For Performance Of Audio Narration

“The first line identifies the writer as a “southern Black woman who stands in the long shadow of the Civil Rights Movement.” The essay itself appeared in Fireside on Nov. 24 and an audio version was published alongside it. Despite the topic and its author, the person who narrated the audio recording was a young, White male voice actor who spoke in an accent that listeners interpreted as something that would appear in a minstrel show.” – Washington Post

The Science Behind Gratitude

There is a strong correlation between gratitude and well-being. Researchers have found that individuals who report feeling and expressing gratitude more report a greater level of positive emotions such as happiness, optimism, and joy. At the same time, they have a lower level of negative emotions such as anger, distress, depression, and shame. They also report a higher level of life satisfaction. – Fast Company

America’s First Science-Fiction Novel Is Now 200 Years Old — But Who Wrote It?

Symzonia; Voyage of Discovery, published in 1820, follows a ship-captain/seal hunter to the South Pole (still undiscovered at the time), where there’s a portal to the interior of Earth (which is hollow), where lives a different race of beings. It’s a satire of colonialism and American self-regard, though a few newspaper writers at the time thought the book was non-fiction. But Symzonia was published anonymously — and here Paul Collins, with the help of JGAAP software, works out who the likely author was. – The New Yorker