Looted Artifacts Returned

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Emma Varvaloucas: Cultural artifacts in France are finally going back to where they came from. A huge win for sexual assault victims in the United States. ALS is proven to be treatable with the help of a breakthrough medication, and America is apparently getting a lot safer.

Welcome to the What Could Go Right? Progress Report, where we dive into all of the good news that you probably missed because it was buried under the tsunami of bad news.

If you’re new here, I’m Emma Varvaloucas, and I’m the executive director of the Progress Network. Let’s get into it.

So, cultural artifacts. I know, not exactly the opener that has you white-knuckling your armrest, but stay with me, because what just happened in France is actually a pretty big deal. Back in 2017, shortly after starting his first term as President of France, Emmanuel Macron traveled to former French colony Burkina Faso.

While he was there, he stood in front of hundreds of students at the University of Ouagadougou and said, “African heritage cannot be solely in private collections and European museums.” The crowd gave him a standing ovation right then and there, and he vowed to make returning African cultural property to the continent one of his priorities.

The next year, his government issued a report that shocked many in the museum world, calling for the permanent return of looted art. And then nothing happened for over eight years, which, to be fair, tracks with how these things usually go. But here’s what makes it especially frustrating. During those eight years, France wasn’t completely averse to the topic of restitution.

There were conversations, and in some cases action, on returning art looted from Jewish families during World War II, and even human remains from other countries. Slow steps, but steps.

Last year, France returned three human skulls to Madagascar, kept in a Paris museum for 128 years after being looted during a colonial massacre. One was believed to be the skull of a Malagasy king, decapitated by French troops and brought back as a trophy. A trophy. That sat in the National History Museum along hundreds of other human remains from Madagascar. That is horrifying. But when it came to returning cultural artifacts to former colonies more broadly, the answer was a firm and furious “no.”

Because this stuff has been taboo for a long time, especially inside art institutions. We’re talking about places that are celebrated globally, that draw millions of visitors, and bring in enormous amounts of money. Some 90 to 95% of Africa’s cultural heritage is held in major museums outside of Africa. France alone holds at least 90,000 objects from Sub-Saharan Africa in its national collections, objects taken by armies, by colonial administrators, by so-called scientific explorers during the French colonial period in Africa.

And look, if you want a reference point for just how charged this conversation gets, remember that scene in the 2018 blockbuster Black Panther, where Killmonger walks into a British museum and grills the museum director?

Varvaloucas: If you forgot, Michael B. Jordan’s character and his team then take over the museum, break the glass, and take the artifacts back, essentially doing what the colonial European nations did to their colonies across Africa, South America, and Asia.That scene hit so hard because it wasn’t fiction. It was just someone finally saying the quiet part out loud, loudly, in a Marvel film.

The pressure hasn’t only been on France, by the way. Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and even Switzerland were all under scrutiny after Macron ignited a firestorm in 2017 with his comments.

And then some of those countries actually started to do something about it. Over the past few years, tens of thousands of objects have been repatriated, like Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes, a massive collection of plaques and sculptures that were taken during the British raid of Benin City in 1897 and ended up everywhere from Germany to Scotland.

In fact, the art world has been having its own reckoning recently that has led to the return of unethically acquired items in general, from artwork stolen by the Nazis that ended up with private collectors, to a dinosaur fossil taken from Brazil. Things started getting so competitive that people started calling it the Olympics of Restitution, and this might be the only Olympics where the gold medalist has a storm of angry people chasing them.

But despite all of Macron’s nice words and a few items that they sent back over the years, France was mostly sitting twiddling its thumbs. Why? French law prohibited anything in the public collection from leaving France. But then, in early May, a new law passed unanimously through both houses of the French Parliament.

This new law creates an exception for France to return cultural property that was unlawfully taken, and I quote here, “by theft, pillage, or gift, obtained by coercion or violence.” It covers a very specific window of time, 1815 to 1972. Those dates are not random. 1815 is when the Second Treaty of Paris ended the Napoleonic Wars, and France’s second colonial empire began.

1972 is when the UNESCO Convention on the Illicit Trade of Cultural Property came into effect—essentially the moment the international community agreed, at least on paper, that this stuff shouldn’t be happening anymore.

Now, does this cover France’s first colonial empire? No. Is that a little convenient? Yes. I’m sure that date range was very, very carefully negotiated. And it’s probably also worth mentioning that the move comes at a time when France is trying to reestablish its economic and military presence on the African continent. But honestly, we take what we can get. It’ll be very interesting to see what happens later this month when the law is expected to go into effect.

Hopefully, it’ll move the needle closer to justice for former European colonies. Thoughts and prayers for the future of the British Museum.

Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers that will make you smile. 104,000, that’s the number of museums worldwide, up from 22,000 in 1975. One, the cost in euro of university student meals in France now offered to everybody, regardless of income. 10%, Colombia’s multidimensional poverty rate, down from 30% in 2010. And 2032, Germany’s likely exit from coal, earlier than the set deadline.

And onwards and upwards to our quick hits. Here they are for today.

First up, all 50 states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico have enacted rape kit reform laws, slashing the backlog in half.

If you’ve ever watched Law & Order: SVU, you know Mariska Hargitay. She’s been playing badass detective Olivia Benson for two decades, our queen of the Special Victims Unit. And if you’re not a Gen X or Millennial woman who’s basically watched all 593 episodes, not me, guys, not me, the Special Victims Unit focuses on victims who are vulnerable, high-risk, or targeted by sexual offenses.

But what you might not know is that Hargitay didn’t just fight for justice in the TV show, which is the longest running TV show in history. She’s been fighting for it in real life, too. When she started on SVU in 1999, she began receiving letters from survivors. She trained as a rape crisis counselor after that, and learned that every 68 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States.

That statistic, along with all her work on and off camera, motivated her to start the Joyful Heart Foundation to support survivors of domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual assault. And when she learned in 2009 that there were hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits sitting in storage across America, evidence from real survivors just sitting on a shelf, she didn’t just tweet about it.

She started the foundation’s End The Backlog initiative, and she spent 16 years pushing for reform. Now, you might be wondering, “What is a rape kit?” Well, these deeply important kits are a collection of DNA evidence removed from a sexual assault victim. Now, why would they be sitting there rotting away? The reality is that a lot of sex crimes units are under-resourced and understaffed.

It’s expensive to test the kits, and wait times are long. Sometimes detectives don’t think testing the kit will be valuable, or they deem a victim to be less than perfect for whatever reason and don’t feel that the case merits further investigation. Hargitay’s Joyful Heart Foundation campaign focuses on breaking that cycle with the six pillars of rape kit reform, things like mandatory testing, statewide tracking systems, and the right for survivors to know where their kit is in the process.

And amazing news. Last week, Maine became the 50th state to enact at least one of those pillars. Now all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico have some kind of rape kit reform in place. As of the latest count, 21 states have enacted all six pillars, and 13 have cleared their backlogs entirely. After fighting for this for nearly 20 years, this is an incredible milestone.

Congrats, Captain Benson, a true she-ro. And of course, this is a big moment for sexual assault survivors across the US as well.

Next up, is America getting safer? Apparently it is. You might have heard differently, but violent crime fell sharply across the largest US cities in the first quarter of 2026. This continues a nationwide decline that began after crime spiked during the pandemic.

Here are some of the stats. Homicides dropped 17.7%, robberies fell about 20%, rapes declined 7.2%, and aggravated assaults decreased 4.8%. Before you angrily comment, “That can’t be true, that’s not what’s happening in my town or my state,” it’s very possible it’s not. This is data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, and it’s looking at the rates in the nation’s biggest cities.

But the data shows that many urban areas have become significantly safer over the past two years, beginning in the second half of Biden’s presidency and continuing under Trump. Despite what politicians might want you to believe, the great American crime decline probably doesn’t have that much to do with politics. In fact, no one really knows why it’s happening, although I have a theory… smartphones.

Last, a breakthrough for ALS that’s showing the world that it is treatable. ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of those diagnoses that until very recently basically meant a countdown to the end. The disease paralyzes you, steals your ability to walk, speak, breathe, and kills most patients within five years.

There have only ever been two approved treatments that do anything meaningful, and neither of them stops the disease. They just slow the clock a little. So when doctors say a drug is making some ALS patients improve, not stabilize, not decline more slowly, but actually get better, that’s not a small thing. That’s a sentence that hasn’t really been uttered before.

The drug is called tofersen, made by Biogen and marketed as Qalsody. It targets a specific genetic form of ALS caused by a mutation on the SOD1 gene, which accounts for about 2% of ALS patients. Not a whole lot of people, but a new study following patients for about three years found that nearly 20% of them showed improvement in breathing, strength, and function.

Even the patients who didn’t improve were declining significantly slower than expected, especially those who started treatment early. One of the doctors running the trial put it best, “It tells us that ALS is treatable.” That’s an enormous shift, especially for families who spent generations watching ALS take the people they love. Feels like a lot could go right.

And that’s all for this week’s progress report. I hope these stories remind you that there’s a ton of good going on out there in the world, so it’s super important not to be blinded by all of the bad. So if you got some value from this show, maybe something that you can bring up at your next NBA watch party, send this show to someone who could really use some positive news.

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