In 2006, the Met [art museum in the US] agreed to return the Euphronious krater, a masterpiece Greek urn that had been a museum draw since 1972. In 2007, the Getty [art museum in the US] agred to return 40 objects to Italy, including a mable Aphrodite, in the midst of looting scandals. And in December, Sotheby's and a private owner agreed to return an ancient Khmer statue of a warrior, pulled from auction two years before, to Cambodia.

Cultural property, or patrimony laws limit the transfer of cultural property outside the source country's territory, including outright export prohibitons and natural ownership laws. Most art historians, archaeologists, museum officials and policymakers portray cultural property laws in general as invaluable tooks for counteracting the ugly legacy of Western cultural imperialism.

During the late 19th and early 20th century - an era, former Met director Thomas Hoving called "the age of piracy" - American and European art museums acquired antiquities by hook or crook, from grave robbers or souvnir collectors, bounty from digs and ancient sites in impoverished but art-rich source countries. Patrimony laws were intended to protect future archaeological discoveries against Western imperialistic designs...

I surveyed 90 countries with one or more archaeological sites on UNESCO's World Heritage Site list, and my study shows that in most cases the number of discovered stes dimishes sharply after a country passes a cultural property law. There are 222 archaeologicalsits listed for those 90 countries. When you look into the history of the sites, you see that all but 21 were discovered before the passag of cultural property laws....

Strict cultural patrimony laws are popular in most countris. But the downside may be that they reduce incentives for foreign govnments, nongovernmental organizations and educational institutions to invest in overseas exploration because thir efforts will not necessarily be rewarded by opportunitis to hold, display and study what is uncovered. To the extent that source countries can fund their own archaeological projects, artifacts and sites may still be discovered...The survey has far-reaching implications. It suggests that source counties, particularly in the developing world, should narrow their cultural property laws so that they can reap the benefits of new archaeological discoveries, which typically increase tourism and enhance cultural pride. This does not mean these nations should abolish restrictions on foreign excavation and foreign claims to artifacts

China provides an interesting alternative approach for source nations eager for foreign archaeological investments. From 1935 to 2003, China had a restrictive cultural property law that prohibited foreign ownership of Chinese cultural artifacts. In those years, China's most significant archaeological discovery occured by chance, in 1974, when peasant farmers accidently uncovered ranks of buried terra cotta warriors, which are part of Emperor Qin's spectacular tomb system.

In 2003, the Chinese government switched course, dropping its cultural property law and embracing collaborative international archaeological research. Since then, China has nominated 11 archaeological sites for inclusion in the World Heritage Site list, including eight in 2013, the most ever for China.

Steven Pinker's new book, "Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters," offers a pragmatic dose of measured optimism, presenting rationality as a fragile but achievable ideal in personal and civic life...
Pinker's ambition to illuminate such a crucial topic offers the welcome prospect of a return to sanity...It's no small achievement to make formal logic, game theory, statitics and Bayesian reasoning delightful topics full of charm and relevance.

It's also plausible to believe that a wider application of the rational tools h analyses would improve te world in important ways. His primer on statistics and scientific uncertainty is particularly timely and should be required reading before consuming any news about the [COVID] pandemic. More broadly, he argues that less media coverage of shocking but vanishingly rare events, from shark attacks to adverse vaccine reactions would help prevent dangerous overreactions, fatalism and the diversion of finite resources away from solvable but less-dramatic issues like malnutrition in the developing world.

It's a reasonabl critique, and Pinker is not the first to make it. But analysing the political economy of journalism - its funding structures, ownership concentration and increasing reliance on social media shares - would have given a fuller picture of why so much coverage is so misguided and what we might do about it.

Pinker's main focus is the sort of conscious, sequential reasoning that can track the steps in a geometric proof or an argument in formal logic. Skill in this domain maps directly onto th navigation of many real-world problems, and Pinker shows how greater mastery of the tools of rationality can improve decision-making in medical, legal, financial and many other contexts in which we must act on uncertain and shifting information.

Despite the undeniable power of the sort of rationality he describes, many of the deepest insights in the history of science, math, music and art strike their originators in moments of epiphany. From the 19th-century chemist Friedrich Agust Kekule's discovery of the structure of benzene to any of Mozart's symphonies, much extraordinary human achievement is no a product of conscious, sequential reasoning. Even Plato's Socrates - who anticipated many of Pinker's points by nearly 2,500 years, showing the virtue of knowing what you do not know and examining all premises in arguments, not simply trusting speakers' authority or charisma - attributd many of his most profound insights to dream and visions. Conscious reasoning is helpful in sorting the wheat from the chaff, but it would be interesting to consider the hidden aquifers that make much of the grain grow in the first place.

The role of moral and ethical education in promoting rational behavior is also underexplored. Pinker recognizes that rationality "is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one." But this profoundly important point, one subtly explored by ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, doesn't really get developed. This is a shame, since possessing the right sort of moral character is arguably a precondition for using rationality in beneficial ways.

Many human phenomena and characteristics - such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things - are influenced by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people...

[T]he differences between the current economies of North and South Korea cannot be attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them]... They are instead due entirely to the different [governmental] policies...At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other traditional people living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no agriculture, while equatorial lowland people around the world never developed warm fur clothes but oftn did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or historical quirk unrelated to geography... Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding...[Here the] explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species and few domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now make Australia a food and wool exporter are all non-native (mainly Eurasian) species such as sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.

Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don't react to cultural, historical, and individual-agent explanations by denouncing "cultural determinism," "historical determinism," or "individual determinism," and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any explanation invoking some geographic role, by denouncing "geographic determinism" ...

Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other than geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological explanations advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist genetics etc explanations is widely accepted today.

Another reasin for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition, in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians) based in individual decisions and chance. Oftn that view is warranted...But often too, that view is unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north of the Artic Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inunit in 1783 to adopt warm fur clothes, for no good environmental reason.

A third reason is that geographic explanations usuall depend on detailed technical facts of geography and other fields of scholarship...Most historians and economists don't acquire that detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.

The second hand September campaign, led by Oxfam seeks to encourage shopping at local organisations and charities as alternatives to fast fashion brands such as Primark and Boohoo in the name of saving our planet. As innocent as mindless scrolling through online shops may seem, such consumers are unintentially - or perhaps even knowingly - contributing to an industry that uses more energy than aviation.

Brits buy more garments than any other country in Europe, so it comes as a shock that many of those clothes end up in UK landfills each year. 300,000 tonnes of them to be exact. This waste of clothing is disctuctive to our planet, releasing greenhouse gasses as clothes are burnt as well as bleeding toxins and dyes into the surrounding soil and water. As ecologist Chelsa Rochman bluntly put it, "The mismanagement of our waste has even come back to haunt us on our dinner plate."

It's not surprising then, that people are scrambling for a solution, the most common of which is second-hand shopping. Retailers selling consigned clothing are currently expanding at a rapid rate, If everyone bought just one used item in a yar, it would save 449 million lbs of water, equivalent to the weight of 1 million Polar bears. "Thrifting" has increasingly become a trendy practice. London is home to many second-hand, or more commonly coined 'vintage', shops across the city from Bayswater to Brixton.

So you're cool and you care about the planet; you've killed two birds with one stone. But do people simply purchase a second-hand item, flash it on instagram with #vintage and call it a day without considerig whether what they are doing is actually effective?

According to a study commissioned by Patagonia, for instance, older clothes shed more microfibres. These can end up in our rivers and seas after just one wash due to the worn material, thus contributing to microfibre pollution. To break it down, the amount of microfibres released by laundering 100,000 fleece jackets is equivalnt to as many as 11,900 plastic grocery bags, and up to 40 percent of that ends up in our oceans. So where does this leave second-hand consumers? [They would be well advised to buy] high-quality items that shed less and last longer [as this] combats both microfibre pollution and excess garments ending up in landfills.

Luxury brands would rather not circulate their latest season stock around the glob to be sold at a cheaper price, which is why companies like ThredUP, a US fashion resale marketplace, have not yet caught on in the UK. There will always be a market for consignment but there is also a whole generation of people who have been taught that only buying new products is the norm; second-hand luxury goods are not in their psyche. Ben Whitaker, director at Liquiation Firm B-stock, told Prospect that unless recycling becomes cost-effective and filters into mass production, with the right-technology to partner it, "high-end retailers would rather put brand before sustainability."