Today’s Highlights: The lines between our media diets are dissolving. If you thought the “pivot to video” was a relic of 2016, look at YouTube, which has effectively swallowed the podcasting star (The Atlantic), transforming intimate audio into background wallpaper and pushing creators toward constant broadcasting. The ghost of platforms past is haunting us: a group is attempting to legally wrestle the “Twitter” trademark from Elon Musk (Ars Technica) to relaunch the bird, arguing the brand was legally abandoned.
Threats to institutions are escalating from performative to professional. Museums accustomed to activists with soup are now facing armed heists worth over $100 million (Wall Street Journal), a shift that changes the security calculus. On the ethics front, the Smithsonian is returning looted Khmer artifacts to Cambodia (The New York Times) after records confirmed they lacked export licenses—a reminder that the repatriation wave is far from over.
Finally, justice delayed is still justice. Ennio Morricone is getting a posthumous opera premiere, correcting a decades-old snub that dismissed him as a mere “film composer” (The New York Times). And Dick Van Dyke, now 100, offers the best argument for longevity: outliving your critics, your co-stars, and even the jokes about your accent (The Guardian).
All of today’s stories, sorted by topic, are below.
