Mikel Arteta had to do something to breathe new life into Arsenal’s attack so we saw Trossard replace Martinelli on the wing.

The Gunners started brightly and after ten minutes the change paid off as Trossard delivered a perfect corner onto Gabriel’s head to give us the lead, but still no attacker on the scoresheet.

After that the game went a bit flat with Palace staying physical and Arsenal only getting a short time around the Palace keepers area.

After half an hour it was Palace laying on pressure and forcing a very loose pass out from Raya went straight to Lerma and suddenly Raya had to make a great save to stop the equalizer.

We than went straight down the other end, won a corner, and yet again Gabriel got on the end of it and suddenly we had doubled our lead.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The global transition to clean energy has a cost, but it may be a lot lower than the figures that sometimes get thrown around. The differences are large, amounting to trillions and even tens of trillions of dollars.

A new analysis from RMI, the clean energy research and advocacy group, identifies what its authors say is a basic flaw in many of those estimates: They don’t fully take into account the decrease in fossil fuel spending.

“This kind of narrative that there’s a massive surge in capital that’s required is simply incorrect,” said Kingsmill Bond, a co-author of the report and an analyst for RMI whose work covers the financial side of the energy transition.

The report finds that global capital spending (money used for equipment and property, among other things) on energy supply is on track to be about $2.5 trillion in 2030, up from $2.2 trillion in 2023.

On my way to Moms for Liberty’s New York City town hall last night, I passed a posh-looking elderly woman, decked out in a brown fur coat, matching fur hat, and bright red lipstick. 

This was a more typical sight on the Upper East Side—the wealthy enclave that has been home to characters like Carrie Bradshaw, Jared and Ivanka, and much of the cast of Gossip Girl—than the one I encountered at the end of the block. Outside the Bohemian National Hall—a Czech and Slovak cultural center on East 73rd Street that the right-wing group booked to great outrage—protesters wielding signs with slogans like “Moms for Bigotry” and “Protect Children From Hate” shouted down attendees who filed into the building (which included Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew, and disgraced former congressman George Santos) via a police-protected ramp. Moms for Liberty, the so-called parents’ rights group that has pushed book bans and helped stir the moral panic about pronoun usage in schools, promised the event would consist of “important discussions about education in NY.”

“They need to go back to Florida—take the bigotry back where it belongs,” said one protester. “If it works in DeSantis land, fine. It doesn’t work here.”

But the protesters were skeptical that the group had anything of substance to offer at its first formal event in deep-blue New York City. 

“They need to go back to Florida—take the bigotry back where it belongs,” said protester and Brooklyn resident Julie DeLaurier, who said her two kids were graduates of the city’s public schools. “If it works in DeSantis land, fine. It doesn’t work here.”

New York City schools, she added, need “full funding—not censorship.” (The city’s education department will face $100 million in new cuts during the next fiscal year, on top of $600 million in cuts Mayor Eric Adams already announced, Chalkbeat New York reported this week.)

Millionaires from around the world support wealth taxes as a way to curb extreme inequality, according to a new poll that was released to coincide with the meeting of the World Economic Forum wrapping up today in Davos, Switzerland. “Davos” has evolved into quite the place to be for the billionaire set, who fly in on their private jets to party and schmooze with government and business bigwigs from all over the planet—and basically get to feel important.   

The poll results were accompanied by a letter signed by 260 millionaires—including Brian Cox, who plays billionaire Logan Roy in Succession—and a few billionaires, asking world leaders to raise their taxes. It was conducted by UK firm Survation at the behest of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of affluent Americans that advocates for fairer tax policies.

The key takeaways:

More than half of respondents said extreme wealth is a threat to democracy, that it hinders social mobility and prevents others from improving their lots, and that it exacerbates climate change.Two-thirds said they would support higher taxes on themselves if the money were used to improve public services and infrastructure—70 percent felt such policies and investments would make their economies stronger.Three-quarters favored a 2 percent wealth tax on billionaires. Indeed, 58 percent said they would support such a tax for anyone with more than $10 million in assets.

The respondents consisted of 2,300 citizens of G-20 nations who have more than $1 million in “investable” assets—or net assets excluding a person’s primary residence. Globally, this puts them within the richest 5 percent, per Patriotic Millionaires—though only barely in the United States, where the average household in the top 10 percent has assets of $5.2 million, according to data from RealTimeInequality.org.  

There are 184,300 US households with average wealth of $141.5 million. I can’t imagine they would let their fortunes be taxed without making an epic stink.

The poll results accompanied PM’s Proud to Pay More report, which profiles a handful of very wealthy people who believe their class should be taxed much more heavily. “We have spent the last 50 years believing in and nurturing an economic idea: that intensifying investment in the individual and encouraging the personal protection of wealth will benefit everyone,” writes Giorgiana Notarbartolo, an Italian entrepreneur from an old, wealthy industrial family. “It’s not hard to see how much damage the reality of the application of this idea has brought to our society.”

While the tone during Friday’s proceedings in the civil suit brought by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev remained collegial—after all, Sotheby’s attorney Marcus Asner was questioning the house’s head of private sales Samuel Valette for the second day—the questioning was decidedly more aggressive.

While Asner’s questions were nominally directed at Valette, it was clear that his real target was Yves Bouvier, the Swiss art dealer who Rybolovlev has accused of overcharging him by $1 billion, with Sotheby’s help, on blue-chip art purchased between 2010 and 2014.

Bouvier, who is not a party to the ongoing trial, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with Rybolovlev. Courts in Hong Kong, Monaco, Singapore, and elsewhere have declined to hold a trial against Bouvier or dismissed charges against him. In December, the Geneva Public Prosecutor’s Office closed its case against Bouvier after he and Ryblovlev reached an agreement and the Russian billionaire withdrew the criminal complaint.

Still, evidence shown in court Friday seemed too blatant to call his dealings with Rybolovlev, or his business manager Mikhail Sazonov, above board.

In one example, an email presented to the jury from Bouvier to Sazonov dated Nov. 21, 2011, Bouvier said he had been negotiating with the owner of Rene Magritte’s Le Domaine d’Arnheim, and was fighting hard to get them down from their original asking price, $60 million. In the same email chain Bouvier asks if he is authorized to propose more than $40 million and says that a number as low as $42 million was “mission impossible.”

A museum in Anchorage has paused a controversial policy intended to offer free admission to Alaska natives.

The policy, announced on January 3, allowed Alaska Native visitors to self-identity at the museum’s ticket counter; no proof of tribal enrollment was required to receive complementary admission. 

In a statement shared Tuesday, the museum said the pause “is in the interest of making sure we are in line with our intention to honor Indigenous people and provide access to their cultural belongings while also fulfilling the broader community considerations and applicable museum guidelines and the law.”

Per local reports, the policy was divisive in the Anchorage community. In one Anchorage Daily News opinion piece, Donald Craig Mitchell, an attorney based in the Alaskan city, described the initiative as discrimination against non-Alaska Native visitors, according to his interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. 

Many praised the museum’s intention—the Native Village of Eklutna, the single federally-recognized tribe in the city, wrote on Facebook, “Great news for Anchorage’s original inhabitants!”—while others still raised concerns over the policy’s lax requirements for proving Native enrollment. 

The remains of a bronze age tomb were discovered along the Atlantic coast in County Kerry, Ireland. It was previously believed that the tomb had been destroyed.

Located on a hill outside of the village Ballyferriter on the Dingle peninsula, the sun altar, or Altóir na Gréine as the locals call it, was constructed about 4,000 years ago before it suddenly vanished in the mid-19th century.

The monument had been sketched by English aristocrat Georgiana Chatterton in 1838. Fourteen years later, however, antiquarian Richard Hitchcock reported that the altar was broken and subsequently taken from the site.

While recently filming the site as part of an archaeological mapping project, folklorist Billy Mag Fhloinn recorded a stone in the undergrowth as he converted the video into a 3D scan. It looks reminiscent of one from Chatterton’s Victorian-era sketch.

After sending the material to the National Monuments Service in Dublin, archaeologist Caimin O’Brien confirmed the stone once belonged to a wedge tomb dating to the early Bronze age between 2500–2000 BCE. Wedge tombs were used by bronze age peoples for both ceremonies and the burial of bodies.

ART SG has officially returned to the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center for its second edition, and even if the exhibitor list was noticeably smaller than last year’s fair, the strong energy of 2023 was still present. Just before its 2 p.m. opening, a line had already formed in front of the entrance to its top floor. Inside, dealers seemed enthusiastic.

Several galleries, like Lehmann Maupin and White Cube, did report sales by the early evening. Thaddaeus Ropac, for its part, said it sold an Anselm Kiefer painting for 1.1 million euros, or just under $1.2 million. More than a dozen galleries also reported first-day sales of works under $100,000, with one art dealer noting the lower price point helped sell a higher volume compared to last year’s fair.

Still, several people told ARTnews the pace of buying continued to differ from fairs in other cities.

“People in Singapore take a little bit more time,” Hong Kong–based gallerist Daphne King-Yoo of Alisan Fine Arts told ARTnews. “We did the bulk [of sales last year] after the fair had closed.”

This year’s offerings include thoughtful meditations on the pain of immigration, visual tricks made using embroidery, and paintings produced via labor-intensive processes.

If you attended the 2022 Venice Biennale, chances are you still remember the penis. It looked like a seven-foot-tall anatomical model, with sores on its shaft and cancerous growths on its insides. Mounted on wheels, this tumescent, tumorous member was attached to a procession of sculpted giraffes, whose white bodies appeared to melt away, dripping apart as they trudged onward.

The artist behind this phallus was the young German phenom Raphaela Vogel, and the sculpture, titled Ability and Necessity (2022), troubled some viewers and energized others. New York Times critic Jason Farago wrote that the Vogel piece was one of the show’s “moments of stunning bad taste.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant that as a compliment or an insult.

Or maybe it was both. Vogel’s art tends to provoke and delight simultaneously, and she embraces the bizarre mix of emotions her work might elicit. “It’s not that I want people to be afraid or shocked,” Vogel said on a recent afternoon, speaking in a backroom of the New York gallery Petzel, which began representing her last year.

She pointed out that the penis of Ability and Necessity could not serve a purpose. It was being toted around like a parade float; it had outlived its function as a reproductive organ or, say, a symbol of the patriarchy. With a straight face, Vogel asked, “It’s a bit funny, right?”

Within Germany and the surrounding region, Vogel’s art has accrued a following. Ask five of her fans which aspect of her oeuvre is most successful, however, and you may get five different answers. Some may point to her videos, in which Vogel, often acting as the work’s director, editor, and performer, turns the lens on herself, creating situations in which she seems trapped by her device’s gaze. (One memorable video involved the usage of a drone that loomed high above, capturing Vogel playing the accordion on a rock in the middle of the sea.) Others may praise her paintings, which often resemble freestanding animal hides rather than traditional canvases hung on a wall. Still others may laud her installations, which she approaches like sets, reformulating their elements with a mind for how viewers move about them.

I’ve noticed that a striking number of the best children’s books have been written by people who had no children: Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon). H. A. and Margret Rey (Curious George). Maurice Sendak. Dr. Seuss.

I have a theory as to why. If you don’t have kids, you can only really experience the book from the child’s point of view. Parents can’t help but have all kinds of agendas when they read a book to their child. And who can blame them? As long as the child is a captive audience, why not teach them about something? Like patience, or the alphabet, or Who Simone Biles Is?

The best children’s books teach none of that. They aren’t advertisements for anything—not even the important things. They’re an advertisement for reading itself; for the entertainment value of the world itself. 

Consider Curious George. The first book in the series is a full-scale assault on the senses of young children with a relentless barrage of every thrilling and dangerous thing that primally fascinates them. On successive pages in a single book, George is kidnapped (from a jungle); goes on a boat; calls 911; gets a visit from the entire fire department; then is arrested by the police for placing the call; goes to jail; then escapes jail—by flying high above the city, carried by a bunch of balloons. These things happen in the same book, in a row. It is hard to imagine a responsible parent dreaming up such a sequence at bedtime, let alone a sequel (Curious George Takes a Job) in which George explores a hospital unsupervised and passes out in bliss from inhaling ether.