Is there a cure for disinformation, propaganda, and other offenses against the truth? Twitter’s answer has been to add fact-checks to misleading statements, a move that has led to a showdown with Donald Trump. While this fight has been framed as an issue of free speech, ancient Greek philosophers, who worried deeply about what “fake news” meant for their own societies, would say it’s much more profound and more urgent than that. As technologically advanced as the fight between Twitter and Trump now seems, this dilemma is not new at all.
As an artist, Joaquin Clausell (June 16, 1866 - November 28, 1935) had two periods of production, the first between roughly 1903 and 1910 and the second from 1920 until his death in 1935. He abandoned painting during the Mexican Revolution, mostly likely to concentrate on his law practice. However, his production was most intense in the latter period, becoming something of a vice, with all of his spare money going to supplies and even painting on wood and cardboard when he did not have canvas. In addition, he occasionally disappeared to Mexico’s coasts, especially the area between Mazatlán and Acapulco to return with sketches as the basis of new paintings.
Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps made music; now it's being discovered and performed. More than 6 million people, most of them Jews, died in the Holocaust. The music they wrote as a temporary escape, however, did not die with them, thanks in part to the efforts of Francesco Lotoro. An Italian composer and pianist, Lotoro has spent 30 years recovering, performing, and in some cases, finishing pieces of work composed in captivity. Nearly 75 years after the camps were liberated, Francesco Lotoro is on a remarkable rescue mission, reviving music such as the one created by a young Jewish woman in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.
Volunteers are helping forgotten Dutch diarists of WWII to speak at last. Their voices, filled with anxiety, isolation and uncertainty, resonate powerfully today. Anne Frank listened in an Amsterdam attic on March 28, 1944, as the voice of the Dutch minister of education came crackling over the radio from London. “Preserve your diaries and letters,” he said. Frank was not the only one listening. Thousands of Dutch people had been recording their experiences under German occupation since the Nazi invasion four years earlier. So the words of the minister, part of a government trying to operate from exile in England, resonated.
