Observations · Science · People · Humour
Vasily Belokurov, one of the 2026 Kavli Prize laureates in astrophysics, is a galactic archaeologist. I have read his article about intruders and learnt that the constancy of the starry sky, to which people have prayed from the Palaeolithic to our own day, is an optical illusion the length of
Coming Up · Archaeology · In the Press · Observations · Science
In essence, the cognitive revolution of 40,000 to 50,000 years ago is one of the textbook stories. Homo sapiens supposedly grew clever all of a sudden, drew a bull on a cave wall and set off to conquer the planet. The trouble is that anatomically modern humans appeared
Coming Up · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Pop Culture · Rome
On 9 July Fendi will show its first couture collection by Maria Grazia Chiuri, who moved from Dior last October. The venue is not Paris but Rome's National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the GNAM. The gallery building itself is a former seventeenth-century monastery of the
Archaeology · Science
Vráble in south-western Slovakia, a Linear Pottery culture settlement of 5250-4940 BC, has become the site of a mysterious mass burial. In a ditch at the entrance to one of the quarters lie dozens of skeletons without skulls, among them four pairs and a common grave holding at
NB! · Archive · Cinema · People
Art · Moscow · Museums · Observations · Saint Petersburg
The Garage Museum opens a new season of open storage with "Art on the Frequency of the 1980s", running until 23 September. I did not attend the guided tour, only chatted with friends, but that will not stop me from dissecting the curatorial conception. First, given that we
Architecture · Faith · Society
On 10 June, the centenary of Gaudí's death, Pope Leo XIV consecrated the Tower of Jesus Christ, the central and tallest of the eighteen towers of the Sagrada Família. The basilica has risen to 172.5 metres and has officially become the tallest church in the world. Yet
NB! · Archive · Architecture
NB! · Art · Paris · People
Science · Palaeontology · Nature
The first animals are thought to have appeared in the Ediacaran, some 635 to 539 million years ago, but then came millions of years of calm, until a sudden diversity burst forth. A study from Cambridge, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, tries to answer the question of where this
Archaeology · Science
Palaeogeneticists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona have studied the genomes of 54 Iron Age infants from the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula. The material was taken from settlements of the Iberians, a pre-Roman people of eastern Spain, within a chronological range of roughly 750 to 250 BC,
Archaeology · The East · Observations · Science · Society · Humour
By right of the first. When political regimes justify their claims to some territory by length of tenure, one can always object that somebody other than them was there first. And somebody other than those first ones. And than them, too. If one is so inclined, one may go all