Flagship

Beyond the Sistine Chapel

“Not everyone in the Sistine Chapel. Please! We are much more,” Barbara Jatta, the first woman to head the Vatican Museums said. “We have so many things that speak of history, it is important to get to know them too.” Jatta is on a mission to lead the millions of tourists who visit the Vatican beyond the chapel and into the dozens of other galleries that house the museum’s priceless art collection, she told Reuters. As part of her program, Jatta could try night tours: That’s when the shadows from millennia-old statues “dance at light’s command,” according to an engrossing account of a visit in The Atlantic.

Coffee standard bearers

The Q exam may sound like something spies or navy seals are required to take. In fact, it’s what the Coffee Quality Institute’s assessment has come to be known. The Q assesses takers using 22 different parameters. Those who have the palate and knowledge to pass, go on to become coffee sommeliers. Unlike with wine somms, however, you won’t find coffee somms at your local café. They are more akin to technicians at a winery, working behind the scenes and setting the rising standards for the coffee we all drink. “It is a difficult test,” CQI’s director of education resources told Food52. “Most people have to come back and do retakes.”

The vanishing Van Gogh

Even for the obscure world of high-end art sales, the story of Still Life, Vase with Daisies and Poppies is unique. The Vincent van Gogh painting — originally given as a gift to a doctor in southern France who hosted the artist after he infamously cut his left ear — was last seen hanging at a Beijing museum. It got there after Wang Zhongjun, a film producer, paid $62 million for it at auction, the most ever spent on a van Gogh still life. Wang, however, was revealed to be a cover for a Chinese billionaire who fell afoul of Beijing. Since his imprisonment, the painting hasn’t been seen, even though it’s rumored to have been put up for sale. “Nobody needs a $62 million van Gogh, and nobody wants to buy a lawsuit,” an art lawyer told The New York Times.

The science of sleep

Research shows that early risers are better-off than night owls. Right? Not quite. Prior studies highlighted links between waking up earlier and happiness, punctuality, and educational results, whereas those who stay up late are ostensibly more impulsive, angrier, and have worse diets. But separating people into those two, ostensibly neat categories does a disservice to how much complexity lies within them: An individual’s sleep preference changes over the course of their life, and aspects of a person’s personality may shift at various points of the day. “Humans don’t always fit neatly into one of two categories,” Time magazine noted, “even when it comes to their sleep preferences.”

The never-ending TV story

A bevy of TV shows aired their series finales this past week to laudatory reviews: Succession, Ted Lasso, Barry, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Another category of shows never get their just due, however, because they never, well, end — at least on their own terms. “Take Star Trek,” The Ringer’s Brian Phillips argues, “You’re always encouraged to imagine that more will be coming, whether or not it actually arrives.” And that’s part of the point of television, a process that is “iterative and makeshift,” borne out of years of broadcasts in which characters, actors, and audiences change. These shows don’t build to a Sopranos-style cut-to-black, but instead keep plugging away, “inventing new stuff until they reach the outer limits of profitability or their creators’ patience.’

Maryum Saifee is a U.S. diplomat. She texted with Semafor’s Prashant Rao about The Diplomat, which is available on Netflix.

• Top U.S. officials want a direct line to Beijing to de-escalate tension, but China is refusing. Diego Mendoza talked to experts about why setting up a hotline isn’t so easy.
• There’s soaring demand for AI chatbot therapy, and a number of startups have decided the benefits of the tech outweigh the apparent downsides. Louise Matsakis looked at some of the new tools trying to change mental health care.
• U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. advised a firm that pitched investments to a business tied to a Venezuela scandal, our Semafor Business team reported.

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— Prashant Rao and Jeronimo Gonzalez.

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