Month: November 2022

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

A painting by abstract Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various museums since it was first put on display 75 years ago, an art historian has found. The 1941 picture, a complex interlacing lattice of red, yellow, black and blue adhesive tapes titled New York City I, has hung in Düsseldorf since 1980. The way the picture is currently hung shows the multicoloured lines thickening at the bottom. However, when a curator started researching the museum’s new show on the Dutch avant garde artist earlier this year, she realised the picture should be the other way around. Despite the discovery, the work will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it.

Even during war with Russia, bat rescue operation continues

As Russian forces advanced this summer on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, the façade of an eight-story apartment building in the Saltivka district suffered heavy damages from shelling. By August, only a few families remained. Some noticed dozens of bats trapped in the lower windows. The animals had flown through broken panes of glass, then got stuck, unable to find an exit. But in a lucky turn of events, one of the families called the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center, an organization of biologists who rescue injured bats. When a director and volunteer arrived, they carefully removed the remaining animals.

Continue reading “Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Previously known as South West Africa, Namibia gained independence from South Africa after many years of guerilla warfare in the Border War. About the time Namibia was founded, Berrie Holtzhausen began a remarkable journey from irreverent preacher to caregiver for people with dementia and finally to his latest role: locating people who have been accused of witchcraft in Namibia’s tribal populations. His pioneering discovery of a connection between persons with dementia and an elevated risk of being named a witch spurred a personal mission to seek justice. “Witches need us to understand them,” he says.

Martin Luther King Jr. paid the hospital bill when actress Julia Roberts was born

When the was born 55 years ago in Smyrna, Ga., a couple swooped in and paid her parents’ hospital bill, because her parents didn’t have the money to do so. It was Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King. And how did this happen? Walter and Betty Roberts owned a theater school in Atlanta, called the Actors and Writers Workshop, which the King children attended. “One day Coretta Scott King called my mother and asked if her kids could be part of the school,” Julia Roberts recalled. “My mom was like, ‘Sure, come on over.’ And so they just all became friends and they helped us out of a jam.”

Continue reading “They were labeled witches, but they just had dementia”