Reviews and News:
George Washington in the buff: "The naked Washington is a not-quite-200-year-old plaster statue by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova — a 30-inch preliminary model for a life-size image of Washington that was going to show him in a Roman soldier's uniform (with the torso covered). The naked statue is coming to the United States for the first time for an exhibition called 'Canova's George Washington,' which is scheduled to open next year at the Frick Collection. A full-size plaster model will also make its American debut, along with sketches and drawings, all lent by the Museo Antonio Canova in Possagno, Italy."
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A fascinating history of eclipses.
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Dutch architects put concrete emojis on a building in Amersfoort.
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Maurice Martenot's complex ondes: "A trained cellist and composer working as a telegraph operator in the French army, [Martenot] was inspired by the sounds his valve-powered radio equipment made when he scanned the frequencies. It took a decade of development before the first iteration of the instrument that bears his name had its premiere in Paris. Meaning 'Martenot waves', the ondes Martenot is far from the earliest electronic instrument, yet most that came before were curiosities (like the clavecin électrique, a bell-ringing machine invented by a Jesuit priest in 1759) or highly impractical (it took 30 railroad flatcars to ship Thaddeus Cahill's 200-ton telharmonium, invented in 1896, from Massachusetts to New York)."
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Caravaggio's compassion: A recent exhibition in London shows "why the painter exerted such an overwhelming influence on patrons and colleagues alike, and why he is so passionately loved today. He can paint beautifully most of the time. He produced marvelous compositions of light beaming forth from the darkness, covered his canvases with luminous whites, full-blooded reds, velvet blacks, but above all, especially later in his career, he painted with restraint, and taste, and a gigantic, compassionate heart."
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Alvin Plantinga wins Templeton Prize.
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Seoul's Brutalist revival.
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Anthony Domestico reviews Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible.
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Essay of the Day:
In First Things, R.R. Reno argues that our current "political situation" is the result of a century-long metaphysical disenchantment:
"A young writer in Australia recently sent me an essay that ended with an arresting sentence: 'I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century.' I sympathize. We have reached a series of dead ends in the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans thought the world stage had been cleared for our benevolent power to lift others to the broad, sunlit uplands of liberal democracy and free-market prosperity. The European Union moved from strength to strength, heralding an era of international cooperation and soft power. But the hoped-for utopias have not come about, and what we once thought the ideal and even inevitable future now brings frustration, disgruntlement, and incipient rebellion, not just from non-Western forces that resist our triumphalism, but within our own countries and among our own people. For good and for ill, the last century is finally ending.
"One sure sign is the eclipse of the classic structure of modern Western politics. Since the Industrial Revolution, the fault line running through partisan politics has been the diverging interests of labor and capital. This is no longer the case. In Europe, establishment parties on the left and right frequently cooperate to fend off anti-establishment challengers—not always successfully, as recent votes for Brexit and against Italian constitutional reform indicate. The American constitutional system stands in the way of coalition governments, but our last presidential election featured an anti-Trump consensus among elites that transcended traditional left vs. right distinctions—here, too, the establishment consensus failed to carry the day. The wheel of history seems to be turning.
"In this changing political environment, the central and divisive issue is almost always the role and future of the nation. Will we enter into the shining future of a prosperous, globalized world without borders, managed by experts and guided by the high ideals of human rights? Or will we return to the dark days of racism, nationalism, war, and concentration camps?
"To put our present political situation in these terms is, of course, tendentious, though this is how the establishment side tends to express what is at stake. More than tendentious, it is also metaphysically insufficient. Our political struggles over nations and nationalisms are best understood as referenda on the West's meta-politics over the last three generations, which has been one of disenchantment. The rising populism we're seeing throughout the West reflects a desire for a return of the strong gods to public life."
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Photo: Earth and moon
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Poem: Matthew Buckley Smith, "The Dark Woods"
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