Quartz: A controversial museum is forcing Italy to talk about its fascist past

The shops that line the main street of Predappio, a small town in Italy’s Sangiovese countryside, seem innocent enough—the biggest one is simply called “Predappio Souvenirs.” But it’s what’s inside that makes them remarkable: a vast collection of fascist memorabilia, including statuettes, towels, books, posters, and postcards covered in fascist symbols; and images and busts of fascism’s founder, former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The window displays feature batons bearing Mussolini’s name or quotes, while pink and pale blue baby rompers are adorned with the dictator’s portrait and most famous slogans (“I don’t care!” and “We shall march forward!”), casually arranged as if they were any other kind of merchandise. [...]

A visit to Predappio can feel like an excursion into an alternative reality, one where fascism is displayed as a folkloric episode, and where revisionist history is displayed as fact. You wouldn’t find this type of scene anywhere else in Italy. Of course, fascist graffiti pops up from time to time in the country’s biggest cities; extreme right-wing soccer fans will raise their right arm straight in the air in the Roman salute while chanting their team’s name; and a neo-fascist group called Casa Pound (from the name of the British poet Ezra Pound, a fascist sympathizer) has attacked refugees, immigrants and left-wing opponents, while also developing an ideology that openly admires fascism. And yet, none of this compares to what a visitor sees in Predappio. [...]

A few things have contributed to this eagerly pursued amnesia. To start, Italians have chosen to focus on the resistance movement that helped to overturn the fascist regime rather than on its supporters, explains Giulia Albanese, professor of Contemporary History at Padova’s University. And Italy has also avoided reckoning with its own crimes by concentrating on “the comparison with Nazism, which has always been used to justify, and minimize, fascism’s crimes,” making what happened in Italy look more benign, Albanese says. Add to all this the fact that Italy became one of many pawns during the Cold War, meant to fight a further spread of communism, delaying indefinitely the day of reckoning.

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VICE: We Asked Couples Why They Opened Up Their Relationship

One in five Americans recently reported that at some point in their dating or married lives, they'd been in an open relationship. But what does it really mean to be open? And how does this conversation come about? Surely it's not as easy as pausing Netflix and asking, "so, um, you want to see other people?" [...]

Kasara: It took a while for me to realize this, but I'm not a monogamous person. I've always been able to have feelings for other people. I don't think jealously should be perpetuated as the norm in relationships, as it is with monogamy.

Chris: I have a similar mindset. We never place limits on emotions other than love, like we don't say you can only be sad or happy about this one thing, but with monogamy it's like only one person is allowed to feel your love. And love is such a crazy emotion, so why not experience it with a bunch of people? Polyamory is OK, guys! We're not all weird. [...]

Daniel: About five years ago, my ex-wife told me she had fallen in love with another man. But she taught me the most profound lesson: no matter who you are, your partner could wake up one day and not be in love with you anymore. And that's no one's fault. I realized that my next relationship needed to be open because I no longer have the desire to control my partner. Control is just an illusion anyway.

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The Atlantic: The Challenge of Memorializing America's Wars

ften the terms “monument” and “memorial” are used interchangeably to describe the iconic sites in the nation’s capital, but there is a difference. The New York Times recently cited philosopher of art Arthur Danto’s definition to illustrate this distinction: “We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget.” While memorials are a source of remembrance, monuments seek to celebrate the purpose, the accomplishments, the heroic. They evoke the cause. As the Global War on Terror Memorial Foundation campaigns for a site to honor those who've died in Iraq and Afghanistan, its members will likely have to grapple with these definitions in deciding what exactly it should be. [...]

The design review committee selected the design of Yale University architecture student Maya Lin. Lin proposed a polished black granite wall with the inscribed names of the Americans who had died in the war. The proposed wall, with no decoration, not even a flag, provided a stunning tally of loss. Many of the early supporters of a memorial were troubled by the absence of any recognition of heroic service. [...]

Memories of patriotic sacrifice enrich national pride: The courageous dead were worthy of their city or their country. Now the survivors must be worthy of them. It is not necessary to go back 2,500 years to Athens to affirm this. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln stood at Gettysburg, on ground still stained by death and in air filled with the stench from shallow graves, and eulogized the dead only in the most general terms. He provided no tally of cost, focusing instead on the purpose of their sacrifice. He promised, “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” and assured that “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

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CityLab: The Highway Hit List

Built in the federal highway-building heyday of the early 1960s, Buffalo’s Scajaquada Expressway offered commuters an unusually scenic high-speed trip into the city: The highway’s planners routed the four-lane thoroughfare right through the middle of Delaware Park, the crown jewel of an ambitious city-wide network of parks and parkways designed by celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead and his partner Calvert Vaux in the 19th century. [...]

Upstate New York residents will find their region well represented. In addition to the Scajaquada, Rochester’s below-grade Inner Loop (“designed to wrap like a noose around downtown,” according to the report) and Syracuse’s sunken stretch of 1-81 (which “cuts like a knife through the heart” of downtown) make the list. Both highways bulldozed historic neighborhoods of color and kick-started downtown population purges. Demolishing and replacing them with wide, tree-lined avenues—as community groups and planners have proposed—could spur economic revitalization around them, according to the report. NYSDOT is currently considering such an approach for Syracuse, and thanks to a TIGER grant, the Inner Loop is already on its way getting filled in. Further east, Trenton, New Jersey’s waterfront-blocking, under-used Route 29 also makes CNU’s cut, and its demise, too, is being plotted. [...]

But some highways on this list are here to stay—and even expand. State highway engineers still love straight, wide roads, and this inertia cannot be underestimated. At the very least, some state DOTs are becoming more sensitive to impacted communities. Lately, “cap parks” have emerged as compromise solutions that restitch neighborhoods bifurcated by highways by literally covering up their air and noise impacts. Denver’s much-protracted fight over I-70 came to a decisive moment last week, when the Federal Highway Administration approved Colorado’s plans to lower the highway below grade, widen lanes from six to ten, and put a grassy “cap” over a small section of it. It will adjoin a local schoolyard. The I-70 saga offers one illustration of the challenges in such highway facelifts: Many residents love the prospect of a grassy cap park, while others fear that hiding the highway beneath it could draw in a tide of gentrification and displacement.

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Slate: The Elephant Buried Under the Vatican

For decades, no one inquired further into the provenance of the elephant skeleton buried beneath the Vatican, until in the 1980s and ’90s, the Smithsonian's Historian Emeritus, Silvio Bedini, uncovered the elephant's history. He published the results of his research in 1997, in "The Pope's Elephant", the most thorough study to date of the elephant that lived in the Cortile del Belvedere.

His name was Annone—or, once anglicized, Hanno—and he belonged to Pope Leo X, who was elected pope in 1513. Hanno was not just a pet: He played a part in the politics of Portuguese expansion and made a cameo in the Protestant Reformation. But above all, Hanno was a wonder. No elephant had been in Italy since the Roman empire fell, and the entire country clamored to get a glimpse of him. [...]

At the time that Giovanni di Lorenzo de'Medici (of the famous Florentine Medici family) became Pope Leo X, the Portuguese king, Manuel I, was working to solidify his country's hold on the spice trade. The Portuguese expansion over the oceans had threatened the monopoly that overland traders had held, and Egypt, which had long benefited from that monopoly, was pushing the Pope to pull back on Portugal. Egyptian leaders did have leverage: They controlled Jerusalem and could destroy Christian holy sites if the Pope sided against them.

It was traditional for Christian rulers to send a gift to a new pope upon his election, and Manuel I knew that this was a political opportunity, as well. He could ask for money, to expand his fleet of ships and artillery, and he could obtain the Pope's blessing for Portuguese expansionism. He carefully planned what he would send—textiles, a gold chalice, a brocade altar cover, and other treasures wrought with gold and jewels. He sent a cheetah, leopards, parrots, strange dogs, and a Persian horse. And he sent Hanno.

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Quartz: Our obsession with GDP and economic growth has failed us, let’s end it

In my new book “Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World Without Growth” I point out that the “growth first” rule has dominated the world since the early 20th century. No other ideology has ever been so powerful: the obsession with growth even cut through both capitalist and socialist societies. [...]

Preserving our infrastructure, making it durable, long-term and free adds nothing or only marginally to growth. Destroying it, rebuilding it and making people pay for using it gives the growth economy a bump forward. Keeping people healthy has no value. Making them sick does. An effective and preventative public healthcare approach is suboptimal for growth: it’s better to have a highly unequal and dysfunctional system like in the US, which accounts for almost 20% of the country’s GDP. [...]

As a consequence, mitigating climate change forces industrial production to contract, thus limiting growth even further. What this means is that, on the one hand, growth is disappearing due to the systemic contraction of the global economy. On the other, the future of the climate (and all of us on this planet) makes a return of growth, at least the conventional approach to industry-driven economic growth, politically and socially unacceptable.

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Atlas Obscura: The WWI Memorial That Refuses to Glorify War

If this seems obvious now, it certainly wasn’t then. There are Grande Guerre monuments absolutely everywhere you go in France, and not by happenstance. After the war, the French government offered funds to every settlement in France—every city, town, village, hamlet, community—to build a Grande Guerre memorial. I’ve been told that in the entire country, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, only five settlements declined to do so. I cannot name any one of those five, and I’ve never met anyone who can, but even if they do exist, the participation rate was still, effectively, 100 percent. [...]

And that’s the one thing that almost all French Great War memorial statuary has in common: romanticism. Not a trace of fear in the men’s faces, even the dying. They clutch their chests, thrust their arms out toward heaven, call out for their men to carry on!, stare out at the battle still underway. But they are not afraid. They do not experience regret. They may be a few seconds from death, but they are still fiercely alive, and looking only forward, never back. Even the dying figures seem more vibrant than I feel some days, and more noble than I am on my best ones.

That’s not what Landowski was going for. Rather than gone to a better place, he focused on: gone. Those empty dinner chairs, vacant bedrooms. He worked in granite, not marble or terra cotta. It took him 15 years to create eight figures, each standing in for roughly 170,000 poilus killed. They huddle together, eight towering stone men around 25 feet tall, arms hanging down, heads listing forward or to one side, eyes neither open nor closed. A Lebel rifle rests against one; another cradles a machine gun to his chest. The figure next to him carries two sacks full of grenades. Another rests his fingertips on a pick handle. A couple of them still wear their packs. Seven are in uniform; one appears to be naked. They are dead, but alive, but dead. Gone, to be sure, but definitely still right here. He called them Les Fantômes—the phantoms.

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Al Jazeera: Why young South Koreans are turning away from religion

Her trajectory of straying from religion in early adulthood is increasingly common among South Koreans, and is reflective of a national trend towards increasing secularism, particularly among young people.

Experts say that young South Koreans are too wrapped up in a demanding education system and job market to spend much time on religious activities.

In many South Korean cities, there are more churches than convenience stores. Around 20 percent of South Koreans identify as Protestant, the largest group in the country, followed by 15 percent who identify as Buddhists, and nearly eight percent as Catholics.

The abundance of churches is a legacy of how people turned to organised religion, mostly brought by US missionaries, for structure and guidance after the 1950-53 Korean War devastated the country and tore apart families. But according to Statistics Korea, a government body, the percentage of South Koreans identifying as having no religion rose from 47 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2015. This falling religiosity is especially pronounced among young adults: a poll the same year by Gallup Korea found 31 percent of South Koreans in their 20s identifying as religious, down from 46 percent 10 years earlier. [...]

Francis Jae-ryong Song, a professor at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, has conducted research into the phenomenon of churches attempting to retain young congregants, and argues that churches, like so much else in South Korea, are a competitive ecosystem.

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Quartz: How the world’s largest rodent became a superstar in Japan

Capybaras are typically described as the “world’s biggest rodent,” but their murine roots are rarely spoken of in Japan, where they are arguably the country’s favorite animal. According to recent data from the Japanese Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the number of capybaras kept in facilities around Japan increased to 422 in 2016 from 125 in 2006, far outstripping the growth in the number of animal parks. Capybaras, which are native to South America, can now be found in 59 parks across Japan, according to the association, up from 21 in 2006.

Katsuhito Watanabe, a capybara photographer in Japan, told Quartz that capybaras have been kept in zoos in Japan since the early 1960s. But how an animal that calls the tropical jungles of South America home became a bathing superstar in Japan is often attributed to one park in particular: Izu Shaboten Zoo in Shizuoka prefecture. The zoo pioneered the practice of keeping capybaras in hot springs, or onsen, in the winter. According to the zoo (link in Japanese), in 1982 a worker was cleaning an exhibition area with hot water when he found that a group of capybaras had congregated around a small pool of hot water, thus discovering that capybaras could survive the Japanese winter if zoos provided onsen for the critters.

Today, capybaras can be found soaking in hot springs in zoos all around Japan. There was even a capybara bathing competition earlier this year held in four animal parks in Japan to see which capybara could sit in an onsen for the longest, after the parks in 2015 signed a “capybara open-air-onsen agreement” to promote capybaras in Japan (link in Japanese). They also organized a watermelon speed-eating contest for capybaras in 2016—won by a rodent in Nagasaki Bio Park, also known by some as the “Holy Land of capybaras.”

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