Good Morning,
Some of the most trusted political voices in 18th-century Britain didn’t exist. Writers invented personas, and readers believed the invented bylines more than the real ones — a tradition The Conversation argues never died, it just migrated to the accounts we follow now. Authorship was always partly a performance, and the audience was always a little in on it.
So the theme for today is fabrication. The city of Vicenza has spent generations admiring a Roman amphitheatre that turns out to be a 19th-century fabrication (Gramilano). Penguin Random House pulled a forthcoming book from sale after a plagiarism investigation (Washington Post). Prosecutors are pursuing Hermitage-linked archaeologists over digs in occupied Crimea (ARTnews) — excavation as a chain-of-custody crime. And thieves carried four Renaissance paintings out of a Messina museum while the city was at a festival (The New York Times), which at least has the candor of theft with the direct approach.
The through-line isn’t fraud. It’s provenance — the growing sense that what a thing is matters less than whose hands it passed through and who’s willing to vouch for it.
Meanwhile, a history of punctuation (The Wall Street Journal) notes that the exclamation point had to be invented in the 14th century. Someone decided enthusiasm needed notation, and we’ve been overusing it ever since. Emojis, anyone?
All of our stories below.