By Walt Hickey

Notre Dame

The French culture minister — which I must assume is basically the second-most important person in the country based on my extremely limited understanding of the French political system and their general national demeanor — is pushing the idea of a €5 fee for visitors to Notre Dame in Paris upon the reopening of the cathedral in December. This would, she argues, raise €75 million in revenue annually. Given the historically complicated Gallic dispositions toward the church and the state, this is naturally extremely controversial and arguably extremely illegal, based on a 1905 law separating the state and churches which stipulates churches must remain open to the public with no charges or dues. The Paris diocese is ticked off, too, but there’s a reason for floating the fee: There are 40,000 churches in France, mostly managed by small towns, with 5,000 in poor condition and 1,300 considered to be in serious peril. Anyway, I’m sure this large, powerful European country will have absolutely no difficulty navigating a dispute between the Catholic Church and the government; there’s never been any issues before, especially when finances are involved.

Vincent Noce, The Art Newspaper

Karigar

In 2017, Amazon launched a brand in India called Karigar designed to specifically work as a marketplace for Indian artisans to sell their handcrafted wares. There are 200 million artisans in India and exports hit $3.6 billion last year, but only 1.6 million vendors are on Karigar. A new investigation found that the attempt to sell handicrafts at scale isn’t really a clean fit, as the actual artisans working at small scales can’t produce on the industrial level that such a marketplace demands, and made-to-order items don’t work well with the large inventories that such an industrial site requires.

Nipun Prabhakar, Rest of World

Fab

Sketchfab is a digital repository of open-access 3D models, which has been used by artists, researchers, scientists and archivists, among others, as an open way to upload digital models of the objects that they study. In general, the 3D model library space has been rolled up by game companies like Epic Games, which produces the Unreal Engine and has bought up services like Quixel, ArtStation and Sketchfab to fuel asset libraries from which Unreal Engine customers can buy digital 3D assets for their games. This month, Epic began its plan to fold the three libraries into a single marketplace called Fab, which is bad for the scientists, archivists and other niche and nerdy users because it means that the licensing will be all screwed up — a bunch of it is under Creative Commons licenses, noncommercial, which is bad for a commercial asset store — and potentially all this data will not be accessible or usable for their purposes. Digital Life is one affected nonprofit: It’s made 152 high-quality 3D models of living organisms available on Sketchfab for research and education, but a transition to Fab would mean they’ll no longer be available.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media

Browns

The Cleveland Browns are suing the City of Cleveland over the “Art Modell law,” or Revised Code 9.67, which was passed after Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore in 1995 and prohibits Ohio-based professional sports teams who use a tax-supported facility from fleeing. It was designed to prevent the good people of Cleveland from again having their guts ripped out by a callous owner who wants to make more money elsewhere by moving the team out of Cleveland. This law interferes with the plan of the Browns’ current callous owner, which is to make more money elsewhere, by moving the team out of Cleveland. This presents a bit of a legal impasse that he seeks to extricate the Browns from by suing the city and getting the law deemed unconstitutional. The complaint contains six counts, five of which are demands to declare the Modell law unconstitutional.

Michael McCann, Sportico

Subway

A proposed class-action suit filed Monday alleges that Subway grossly misleads customers by advertising sandwiches that have at least three times as much meat than is actually on their sandwiches. Comparing ads for the chain’s Steak & Cheese sandwich to its actual serving size, the plaintiffs allege that the sandwiches contain more bread than filling, counter to their ads that show meat as high as the surrounding bread. The suit was brought by a Queens woman who said that Subway’s ads show 200 percent more meat than customers actually receive, and seeks damages for New Yorkers who bought the sandwich in the past three years.

Jonathan Stempel, Reuters

Pot

New research out of FAU found that the percentage of teens who used marijuana dropped from 23 percent in 2011 to 15.8 percent in 2021, an overall decline across the board. There’s also been an interesting shift: In 2011, boys were significantly more likely to smoke pot than girls, with 25.9 percent of boys using marijuana and just 20.1 percent of girls. As of 2021, that’s flipped, with 17.8 percent of girls using marijuana compared to just 13.6 percent of boys. There are all sorts of possible theories behind this — pandemic-era cannabis supply chain problems reverberating across a generation of teens, a shift in the cyclical straightedge-rebel trend cycle, the fact that pot is now annoyingly strong which means there’s no solid entry point for new smokers — but at the end of the day, the reality is that anything that’s legal and popular among adults is inherently uncool for teenagers, so this was all just a matter of time.

Bruce Gil, Quartz

Skin

A new study found that skin is still really, really good at what it does compared to synthetic alternatives. In a new study published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, researchers put pig and human skin samples to a puncture test and compared them to a synthetic mimic, a high-rigidity gel 4 millimeters thick representing skin with a blubbery silicone gel underneath it. They compared it to pigskin, which is actually 2.5 millimeters thick, but still managed to outperform even the state-of-the-art skin replacement in the puncture test. Despite being thinner, pig skin reduced damage by 60 percent compared to the gel at lower speeds, and reduced damage by 73 percent at higher speeds. It’s a credit to eons of evolution to optimize a material to withstand puncture.

Diana Yates, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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