Charley Crockett performs onstage during the Class of 2023 Medallion Ceremony at Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on October 22, 2023 in Nashville.

Terry Wyatt/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

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Terry Wyatt/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

Charley Crockett performs onstage during the Class of 2023 Medallion Ceremony at Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on October 22, 2023 in Nashville.

Terry Wyatt/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

Country music singer Charley Crockett was born and raised in Texas, grew up in a single-wide trailer with his mom and says his family lineage traces all the way back to the frontiersman Davy Crockett.

This Sunday is the music industry’s biggest night — the Grammy Awards. And Crockett is up for an award for the first time — Best Americana Album — for his record “$10 Cowboy.”

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This episode was produced by Kira Wakeam and Marc Rivers, with audio engineering by Kwesi Lee .

It was edited by Christopher Intagliata.

Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

Prolonged desk work can lead to musculoskeletal problems ranging from annoying aches and pains to injuries. This month, we launched a six-part series showing you how to stretch and strengthen your body parts to prepare them for marathon sitting sessions at your desk. We’ll roll out a new exercise routine every week, each focusing on a different area of the body, that will help alleviate desk job-related woes.

Last week we published exercises for the shoulders and chest. This week we’re tackling hands, wrists, forearms and elbows.

To learn more about how sitting affects the body, and why these exercises are important, read our first piece in the series.

A routine for your hands, wrists, forearms and elbows

Typing and mousing for long periods is stressful for the finger and wrist muscles as well as the forearms. The forearms are designed to pick up sticks and pull fruit off of trees, not to tap a keyboard for eight hours straight. As a result, developing inflammation in the area is common. Scar tissue can also develop from long-term inflammation, often where the muscles of the forearm attach to the elbows. The result is stiff fingers and wrists, achy joints and tennis or golf elbow — painful, inflamed tendons — among other conditions.

Do these exercises to help stretch and strengthen your hands, wrists, forearms and elbows. They’re demonstrated by trainer Melissa Gunn, of Pure Strength LA, whose team trains desk workers on how to protect their bodies through exercise.

1. Put all five fingertips together on one hand, as if grabbing a pinch of salt. Put a rubber band around your fingernails and open your fingers, pushing into the resistance of the band and spreading your fingers as far apart as possible, until you have a wide-open hand. Repeat 5 times on each hand.

2. Standing or sitting, put the palms of your hands together in front of your chest, at chest height, as if praying. Slowly raise your elbows, with your thumbs against your body, and your hands will naturally drop down. Do it until you feel a stretch in your fingers and forearms. Repeat 5-10 times.

3. Place your hand flat, palm down, on a desk or table. Gently lift one finger at a time off the table and then lower it. You can also lift all your fingers at once and then lower them. Repeat 5-10 times on each hand.

4. Lay your arm flat on a table or desk with your wrist hanging over the edge. Keep your arm straight while lifting your wrist up toward the ceiling and hold for 5-10 seconds. Gently lower your wrist down toward the floor and hold for 5-10 seconds. Repeat this 5 times for each wrist or do both together.

5. Slowly roll your wrists inward and outward, 5-10 times on each side.

(Exercises came from Dr. Joshua T. Goldman, UCLA sports medicine; Melissa Gunn, Pure Strength LA; Tom Hendrickx, Pivot Physical Therapy; Vanessa Martinez Kercher, Indiana University-Bloomington, School of Public Health; Nico Pronk, Health Partners Institute; Niki Saccareccia, Light Inside Yoga.)

Last year, the Thai government sent a letter to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco requesting the return of four ancient bronze statues depicting Buddhist spiritual figures — buddhas and bodhisattvas.

“ We did some initial research on these,” said Natasha Reichle, the museum’s associate curator of Southeast Asian art. “It was not too difficult to determine that they were looted.”

Stolen around 60 years ago in a massive art heist, the statues are soon heading home to Thailand. But before they leave, the museum is explaining how these artifacts wound up in its collection in the first place in the exhibition Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities. This effort is indicative of a growing trend: Museums opening up about dark truths.

“I would love audiences to think of the return of these objects not as in any way a loss,” Reichle said, noting that the exhibition explores complex questions to do with cultural heritage, ownership, and restitution.  ”And it’s also, I hope, a way to form relationships with countries in Southeast Asia that’s based on equity and collaboration.”

Turning a blind eye to questionable provenance

Reichle said these statues were among the many stolen in the mid-1960s from the ruins of a temple in a remote part of northeast Thailand.

The looted statues were sold to private collectors and museums around the world by a London art dealer. Four of them were gifted to the Asian Art Museum by a major donor.

One of many panels on the gallery walls explaining what happened to the statues and what will happen next.

Kevin Candland/Asian Art Museum San Francisco

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Kevin Candland/Asian Art Museum San Francisco

Even back then, Reichle said, her institution had suspicions about their sketchy provenance. “You can see in the correspondence that they were concerned about the legality of this, but pretty much ignored it, put it to the side, and went ahead.”

Changing values

Until about a decade ago, most museums in the West didn’t think too deeply about questions of provenance when it came to acknowledging — let alone making amends for — looted works in their collections.

“The museum sector stance was much more, ‘We’re the authorities, we’re the experts, we’re going to talk about these things we’ve studied in other cultures,” said Elizabeth Merritt, the founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums.

But a growing number of requests from overseas authorities for the return of stolen artifacts, along with prominent investigations in the U.S. media and government around a few of these cases has led to a shift in the public’s understanding of what museums do — and a shift in museums’ own values.

Many museums are now re-evaluating their traditional role as universal custodians of the world’s heritage and culture.

“There’s a larger public consciousness now about what museums are,” said Stephen Murphy, a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, who researches looted Southeast Asian art. “Like, ‘Why do you have all this material from different cultures around the world? And how did you get it?’ “

Murphy said that’s why museums are not only having more open conversations with the countries and communities whose artifacts were stolen, but also with the museum-going public.

“There’s such an appetite with the general public to understand how objects came into their collections,” Murphy said. “And I think if museums engage more openly with this, they will be able to develop a greater understanding among the museum-going public of the issues that museums face.”

The challenges facing museums

Those issues are substantial.

Many museums, including the Asian Art Museum, don’t have the money and staff to deeply research questions of provenance. And sometimes it can be difficult to identify what government or group has standing to receive these artifacts.

Figuring out the answers to these questions takes significant time. And museums may have thousands of objects, only some of which are on public display. Many are in storage, awaiting potential research.

Also, some museums still worry that the countries requesting these objects won’t be able to look after them.

As the American Alliance of Museums’ Merritt points out, caring for and researching significant cultural heritage is what museums do.

“I think it’s really important that the public understand that museums steward these vast collections for the benefit of the public, and what it takes to take care of those things,” Merritt said.

One of the statues on display in the Moving Objects exhibition: Standing Buddha, 750-850 CE, Thailand, likely from Prasat Hin Khao Plai Bat II, Buriram Province, Bronze.

Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

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Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Talking to the public

The Asian Art Museum is just one institution confronting these competing forces out in the open.

There’s also an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., which tells the story of sculptures stolen during a British raid on Benin City, Nigeria, in the late 1800s. The Smithsonian repatriated 29 of these co-called “Benin Bronzes” in its collection in 2022, and borrowed nine back from the Nigerian government for the exhibition.

An artifact on display in the Benin Bronzes exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.

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And the Museum of Food and Drink in New York recently held a public event ahead of the repatriation of more than 50 antique Mesoamerican artifacts to Mexico and other countries.

“It’s really a celebration of the way that we are retelling history from the perspective of the people who made the history and not necessarily the people who came in and changed the history,” said Catherine Piccoli, the museum’s curatorial director.

The global museum community has been watching the evolution of American attitudes towards repatriation with interest.  Udomluck Hoontrakul, the director of the Thammasat Museum of Anthropology at Thammasat University in Thailand, said she admires the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s efforts to engage its visitors around these issues.

“This helps audiences understand the broader situation in which these objects were taken,” Hoontrakul said. “And it highlights the violence and exploitation involved in the illicit trade of cultural property.”

Jennifer Vanasco edited the broadcast and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner produced the audio.