Charles Krauthammer has died. Read brief remembrances from George Will, Stephen Hayes, Bill Kristol, Steven Hayward, Cal Thomas, Michael Warren, and John Podhoretz. When Krauthammer announced—correctly as it turned out (no surprise there, I guess)—on June 8th that he had weeks to live, Jim Swift posted a little story about him on Twitter. It’s a touching vignette. May he rest in peace.
In the New York Times, Anthony Gottlieb reviews a new book about selfies, the self-esteem movement sham, and the lie of perfectionism.
What is time? Is it an impossible question to answer?
Robert Zaretsky reviews Agnès Poirier’s account of artists and intellectuals in post-WWII Paris. It is “a lazy person’s guide to writing history, one that amounts to the arbitrary stringing together of scenes and conversations one has collected, willy-nilly, from a few days of book-combing.” Ça va laisser une marque.
Most classical music competitions are rigged, says Norman Lebrecht. It needs to stop: “A young Korean, 22 years old, won the Dublin International Piano Competition last month. Nothing unusual about that. Koreans and Chinese, raised in a school of hard knocks and rounded off in western conservatories, are winning most prizes. A few — like the phenomenal Lauren Zhang who made child’s play of Prokofiev’s second piano concerto in the BBC Young Musician of the Year — are prodigious talents with bright futures ahead. Dublin’s winner Sae Yoon Chon is probably not one of them. His Prokofiev, an effortful shadow of Zhang’s electrification, trundled along at pedestrian pace with one or two stumbles. I was therefore surprised to see that Chon won. I also noticed that he is a student of the jury chairman.”
False monuments: “The Norwegian art historian Victor Plahte Tschudi began investigating Giacomo Lauro’s devious career when he was a graduate student on a fellowship in Rome. He discovered how cleverly the printmaker had pirated engravings of Roman monuments, altering a few details to avoid breaking the letter, not to mention the spirit, of emerging copyright laws. Strictly speaking, Lauro could argue that his slightly and deliberately altered copies were not really copies—never mind that the alterations he made to his images also turned them into less accurate, or flat-out inaccurate, representations of the monuments they depicted. Most of Lauro’s customers would never have noticed in any case, nor, for that matter, would most Romans; what counted above all to the collectors of these engravings was the suggestive idea, or the memory, of sights like the Colosseum or the temples of the Roman Forum. Lauro was no Piranesi, tormented by magnificent visions. He scratched out his engravings to make a living, not to court immortality. Tschudi’s book Baroque Antiquity addresses, with coruscating wit, a more challenging aspect of Lauro’s handiwork: the fact that so many of his reconstructions of ancient monuments fly in the face of archaeological accuracy, not just in the details, but entirely.”
Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of the magazine, Mark Bauerlein argues that the use of affirmative action in university admissions should be considered unconstitutional in 10 years.
“June 23 marks the 15th anniversary of Grutter v. Bollinger, the most important affirmative action decision since the Bakke case of 1978. We mark the date because Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told us to—and the deadline she set is only 10 years away now. In her majority opinion in Grutter, she upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s treatment of race as a ‘plus’ factor in admissions, but she also set a time limit for that policy: ‘We expect that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.’ Given what she said about the temporary nature of race-based decision-making elsewhere in her opinion, we know that the statement was not merely an expression of hope that colleges would by 2028 reach minority enrollments in proportion to the general population. It firmly decreed that affirmative action would be legal only for a set period of time, a quarter-century.
“Three months earlier, Atlanta attorney A. Lee Parks, who had won a case challenging affirmative action at the University of Georgia, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ‘Title VI provides a straightforward statutory basis for invalidating Michigan’s policy.’ In Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell famously elevated diversity into a compelling state interest that overrides Title VI, but as Parks noted, ‘no other justice joined in that part of his opinion.’ Instead, during oral arguments, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy pressed Michigan’s counsel on whether the term ‘critical mass’ amounted to a quota (if it did, it clearly violated what the court ruled in Bakke). She responded that at Michigan ‘there is no fixed number,’ but rather variation every year due to ‘the characteristics of the applicant pool’—at best, a thin justification.
“When the court’s 5-4 decision in Grutter came down, supporters of affirmative action claimed victory. The New York Times editorialized that the decision ‘essentially ratified an existing national consensus.’ A letter signed by a group of distinguished constitutional scholars began, ‘Affirmative action in higher education is alive and well.’
“But depicting the decision as an unequivocal victory for affirmative action meant deliberately ignoring the expiration date O’Connor had set. Justice Clarence Thomas said in his dissent, ‘I agree with the Court’s holding that racial discrimination in higher education admissions will be illegal in 25 years,’ but progressive supporters of affirmative action interpreted the 25-year horizon as conditional, or at least ambiguous enough for them to claim that if proportional representation of minorities isn’t reached by 2028, affirmative action won’t end.
“Harvard law professor Charles Fried, solicitor general under Ronald Reagan but later a supporter of Barack Obama, stated that O’Connor’s assertion ‘is no limitation at all,’ only an ‘expectation.’ Yale professor Robert Post argued that the timetable ‘sounds more like a pious wish than a conclusion of law.’ An article in a 2006 issue of the Ohio State Law Journal claimed that O’Connor cast the whole issue of durational limits ‘almost as an afterthought.’
“On the contrary, everything O’Connor wrote in her opinion suggests she intended the deadline as more than a mere suggestion or hope.”
Photos: The hats of the Royal Ascot
Poem: Maryann Corbett, “Creed”
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