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Nobody owns the Odyssey, which is why it keeps working. Emily Wilson is retranslating it from scratch (AP), having decided her celebrated version has flaws worth fixing. In Kyiv, professional actors and active-duty soldiers are staging Homer as Odysseus, Maeotis, using the myth to ask what return means while the war is still on (AP).
The UK has blocked a $97 million Rembrandt from leaving the country (The Art Newspaper). Mexico appears to be forfeiting a long argument over who gets access to Frida Kahlo (The New York Times). And the State Department pulled a Kehinde Wiley painting off the wall because a White House official found it “aesthetically terrifying” (The New York Times) — Yup. The bureaucrats are flexing their muscles.
Authorship is getting the same treatment. The defense of an AI-assisted op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was essentially that speechwriters have done this for years (The Atlantic), while non-star actors say they’re being talked into training their own synthetic voice replacements (Los Angeles Times).
Two European museum heists in two days: Bronze Age gold in Villena, Spain, gone in four minutes (The Guardian). And the Vienna crew who took a 673-diamond necklace at least bought tickets first (AFP).
All of our stories below.
