Alan Turing (June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954) was once a hero in England. He helped the government crack German Codes during World War II and developed the Turning Machine, establishing the framework for today's modern computers and was generally regarded as one of the nation's brightest stars. Then, in 1952, Turing was outed, leading to a very public trial, conviction and chemically castrated for "gross indecency." He killed himself two years later. Now, 60+ years on, the British government is honoring Turing by including him in a series of twelve new "Britons of Distinction" stamps set to be released to coincide with the year of the 100 anniversary of his birth. George Broadhead, secretary of the Humanist group the Pink Triangle Trust, celebrated Turing's inclusion in a press release. "This is richly deserved," he wrote. "It is well known that Turing was gay, but perhaps not so well known that he was a staunch atheist.
At 17,000 square feet, Sacha Jafri’s The Journey of Humanity (2020), an abstraction featuring drips, whorls, and splatters of various hues, is the world’s largest painting, as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. This week, the grand canvas was sold for a fittingly epic price at an auction in Dubai. On Tuesday, March 23, 2021 "The Journey of Humanity" sold for $62 million at an auction held at Atlantis, The Palm hotel. The sale puts it among the most expensive artworks by a living artist ever sold at auction, and it is not far behind behind a $69 million Beeple NFT piece that sold at Christie’s earlier this month.Jafri’s plan had initially been to slice up the painting and sell it in 60 segments to raise $30 million to support “global digital equality.” Those paintings were intended to have been sold in four auctions.
Madonna got a little provocative and used her performance at the roving Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Aviv, Israel, to share some politically charged perspectives. While her performance did close out with two dancers—one with the Israeli flag on their back, the other with the Palestinian flag—embracing, it wasn't like Madge made any screaming proclamations against injustice. She was more focused on the prospect of peace.
When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6, 2021 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version. Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.
