Art as message and message as art | The Incurable and (most likely) Irreversible Decline of Russian Science | The 90% of Russian Scientific Research deals only with the program of armaments.(!) | «Вы предлагаете, чтобы корабль плыл против течения и против волн, разведя огонь под палубой?" | Buyer of James Watson’s Nobel Medal Says He Will Return It - NYT
Greece wants its statue back from Britain. Britain lent it to Russia. Russia’s mad at the West. This could end many ways. Credit Anatoly Maltsev/European Pressphoto Agency, left; Pool photo by Dmitry Lovetsky President Putin and the Elgin Marble By TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG DEC. 8, 2014 Today, the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin , visited the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where one of the Parthenon sculptures called the Elgin marbles went on display Saturday . It was the first time any of the statuary had left Britain since 1801. That was when Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin (pronounced in Britain with a hard “g”) and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, paid to have the marbles shipped to England from Greece. Then, as now, the move was criticized as cultural theft. Lord Byron in his 1812 epic poem, “ Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ,” skewered the loss to “fair Greece”: “Dull is the eye that will not weep to see / Thy walls defaced, thy mou