Ripped from the Headlines: February 2020: This Week In Culture: February 15–21, 2020

Gymnast Epke Zonderland, who won gold on the high bar in London eight years ago, fell last year in a competition and lost his automatic spot in the Tokyo Olympics. He now has to qualify the hard way, working his way up through the World Cup circuit. If he does well in Melbourne this weekend, he'll have a good shot at returning to the Olympics. Blight is of unknown origin, and refers to any disease which suddenly afflicts or kills plants. It can also refer to anything harmful or damaging.

The Voynich manuscript, an illustrated book that's approximately 600 years old, is written in a mysterious, unknown language. So far, nobody has deciphered it, including a couple of recent efforts using A.I. and machine learning. The book is full of drawings of plants, with some animals and people, and looks sort of like an encyclopedia. There's a full-color scan available here if you want to take a crack at decoding it.

Touring musicians and big destination festivals produce a lot of greenhouse gases and waste. As a result, more and more bands are touring less or working to fund efforts to fight climate change by lowering their carbon footprints and donating a portion of their ticket sales to tree-planting and other climate charities. Eschew comes from Old French, where eschiver meant "to dodge."

While the Houston Astros were fined, docked draft picks, and had their management suspended, the baseball commissioner didn't punish any of the Astros players who originated the sign-stealing scandal. As a result, the Major League Baseball Players Association — the union that all MLB players belong to — is in a position where some of its members believe that other members did not receive sufficient punishment for cheating.

SpaceX has announced that it will be sending private citizens into space within two years. The venture will be a collaboration with Space Adventures, which has already helped seven tourists voyage to the International Space Station. It's not clear what training people will need to have before taking these trips, and the price has not been revealed. Two other companies, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, are both planning similar trips in the near future.

The recent discovery of a neanderthal skeleton that may have been buried with flowers has sparked new debate about how sophisticated these early relatives of humans were. The burial site dates from around 70,000 years ago; neanderthals died out about 30,000 years after that. Plaudere is Latin for "applause," and you can see most of "applaud" right there. Plausibilis meant "worthy of applause," and over time came to mean "something that sounds believable" in English.

Sonic The Hedgehog is out in theaters. After fan outrage at a trailer released back in April, the studio hedged it bets, redoing every scene Sonic was in, making him less humanoid and more furry. After Cats, this is the second film in a few months to be reworked at the last minute after widespread criticism of a trailer.

Actor and singer Ja'Net DuBois died at 74. She was most famous for playing the neighbor Wilona Woods on the 70s sitcom Good Times, and she also wrote and sang Movin' On Up, the theme song for The Jeffersons. She won two Emmys, and was the first African-American woman cast as a regular on a soap opera. DuBois is credited by many as being an influential pioneer who paved the way for those who followed her.

Ben Affleck is returning to screens in several films after a much-publicized separation and trip to rehab for drinking. He's talking honestly about his alcoholism and working to repair his reputation and career. Transgress means "to step over" in Latin, which gives a good sense of its meaning in English: to cross a line, break a law, do something wrong.

Dawn Mello, a legend in high-fashion retail, died at 88. In the 1970s and 80s she helped turn Bergdorf Goodman from a tired old store to a cutting-edge powerhouse by featuring designers like Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, and Kate Spade when they were just starting out. In the 1990s she helped revitalize a struggling Gucci by hiring Tom Ford to reinvent the brand, making him a superstar in the process.