Reviews and News:
Matthew Walther praises the “priceless work of university presses.”
Ian Bostridge considers English church music beyond the nave: “The Anglican choral tradition is one of the great successes of English cultural diffusion, to rank with Association Football (soccer), cricket, and the works of William Shakespeare. It has a cultural heft way beyond its parochial and very specific origins, and it turns up in the oddest places. The most incongruous example must surely be the upmarket gloss that Thomas Tallis’s forty-part motet Spem in Alium lends to a down-and-dirty scene in the film Fifty Shades of Grey.”
In The Paris Review, Alberto Manguel writes about unpacking his library: “The unpacking of books, perhaps because it is essentially chaotic, is a creative act, and as in every creative act, the materials employed lose in the process their individual nature: they become part of something different, something that encompasses and at the same time transforms them.”
You’re familiar, I assume, with the red, green, and blue LOVE statue in Philadelphia? Turns out it’s supposed to be red, green, and purple.
A short history of the hilly, boggy, and often inaccessible land on the border of Scotland and England: “Like the much-mythologised Wild West, the Debatable Land was terra nullius, where the writ of law was by and large ignored and bad men roamed at will.”
Is the contemporary art market bubble about to burst? Let’s hope so: “I always suspected I disliked Jeff Koons, until I saw one of his monumental pieces at Frieze London a few years ago. Then it was confirmed. Cynicism seemed to ooze out of every millimetre of his vast, shiny sculpture. It was vividly apparent that this artwork wasn’t about beauty or transcendence or emotion. It was about money.”
Essay of the Day:
In this week’s magazine, Katherine Kersten writes about how the public schools in Edina, Minnesota have replaced teaching core subjects and skills with progressive indoctrination:
“For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution.
“The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the ‘All for All’ strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to ‘racial equity.’
“‘Equity’ in this context does not mean ‘equality’ or ‘fairness.’ It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting ‘white privilege.’
“The Edina school district’s All for All plan mandated that henceforth ‘all teaching and learning experiences’ would be viewed through the ‘lens of racial equity,’ and that only ‘racially conscious’ teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap, which they attributed to ‘barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.’
“As a result, the school system’s obsession with ‘white privilege’ now begins in kindergarten. At Edina’s Highlands Elementary School, for example, K-2 students participate in the Melanin Project. The children trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cut-outs on a poster reading, ‘Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses!-[sic] Everyone is special!’
“Highlands Elementary’s new ‘racially conscious’ elementary school principal runs a blog for the school’s community. On it, she approvingly posted pictures of Black Lives Matter propaganda and rainbow gay-pride flags—along with a picture of protesters holding a banner proclaiming ‘Gay Marriage Is Our Right.’ On a more age-appropriate post, she recommended an A-B-C book for small children entitled A is for Activist. (Peruse the book and you find all sorts of solid-gold: ‘F is for Feminist,’ ‘C is for…Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures,’ and ‘T is for Trans.’)”
Photo: Moc Chau
Poem: Len Krisak, “Twenty”
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