Good Morning,
In the 1920s, cartographers planted invented towns in their maps. Two mapmakers might independently draw the same real village, but they can’t independently dream up the same fake one — so a phantom town turning up in a rival’s atlas was proof of theft (Open Culture).
Publishing could use the trick. A $2 million crime-novel deal collapsed this week not because the manuscript was bad — the agents called it dazzling — but because nobody could authenticate how it “evolved from origin to completion” (The Guardian).
Copying, meanwhile, keeps getting cheaper: a full leak of the new Spider-Man ran on X for seven hours and reached 5.9 million accounts while the box office went right on breaking records (The Verge). David Hockney copied too, and for his part, has never hidden what he took from the Louvre (The Atlantic).
Elsewhere: the Emily Wilson Odyssey fight rolls on (The New York Times), and artists are fighting to save a sculpture park in a city with more monuments to animals than to women (The Guardian).
All of our stories below.