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VENICE — It is rare enough for a Venice Architecture Biennale , so often dominated by sleek new architecture and design-world celebrity, to confront fraught subjects like race, colonialism and climate change. Lesley Lokko ’s nervy, elegant edition, which opened to the public on Saturday, goes one step further, asserting that the three themes are inextricably connected in ways that have pressing implications for the profession. “The Black body was Europe’s first unit of energy,” Lokko, a Scottish Ghanaian architect, academic and novelist, said during a tour of the exhibition last week. Through slave labor and colonial expansion, she argues, Western powers built empires whose imposing architecture — often neo-Classical in style and claiming to represent universal aesthetic values — was itself an expression of political control. In this Biennale, officially the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, Lokko gives pride of place to two kinds of stories: those that allow Africa … [Read more...] about Radical Rethinking at Biennale: Africa and the Future Share Pride of Place

Vinícius Júnior has had enough. The Real Madrid forward, a magnet for racist chants from the stands in Spanish stadiums for the past two seasons, took to social media after the latest attack against him on Sunday, when he was called a monkey by fans in Valencia. This time, he took aim not only at his abusers but also at Spain itself. “It wasn’t the first time, nor the second, nor the third,” Vinícius Júnior wrote in a post on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. “Racism is normal in La Liga. The competition thinks it’s normal, the federation does too and the opponents encourage it.” Spain, he said, was becoming known in his native Brazil “as a country of racists.” On Sunday, Vinícius Júnior was met by fans chanting the word “mono” — monkey — before he even stepped off the Real Madrid bus outside the Mestalla stadium in Valencia. The match was briefly halted in the 71st minute as he pointed out some of his abusers to the referee, and an antiracism statement — part of a league … [Read more...] about Vinícius Júnior Says Racism Is ‘Normal’ in Spanish Soccer

OFF THE COAST OF NORWAY — There could hardly have been a more terrifying place to fight a fire than in the belly of the Losharik, a mysterious deep-diving Russian submarine. Something, it appears, had gone terribly wrong in the battery compartment as the sub made its way through Russian waters 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the First of July. A fire on any submarine may be a mariner’s worst nightmare, but a fire on the Losharik was a threat of another order altogether. The vessel is able to dive far deeper than almost any other sub, but the feats of engineering that allow it do so may have helped seal the fate of the 14 sailors killed in the disaster. The only thing more mysterious than what exactly went wrong that day is what the sub was doing in a thousand feet of water just 60 nautical miles east of Norway in the first place. The extraordinary incident may offer yet another clue to Russia’s military ambitions in the deep sea, and how they figure into a plan to … [Read more...] about A Deep-Diving Sub. A Deadly Fire. And Russia’s Secret Undersea Agenda.