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FeaturesDecember 2012 The sad & sorry Smithsonian by Bruce Cole On the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
There it sits, rusting away on a base of weed-infested gravel, dwarfed by tall trees masking its silhouette and blocking any view from afar. A worse setting would be hard to imagine. Adding insult to injury, it’s filthy, strewn with trash, defaced with graffiti, and colonized by bird nests. Alexander Calder’s Gwenfritz (named after its socialite patron Gwendolyn Cafritz) was designed for the Constitution Avenue entrance of the Washington’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). Moved years ago from its original location to an obscure corner of the museum’s grounds, the thirty-five-ton sculpture has morphed over time into a metaphor for the museum itself: dis ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 December 2012, on page 19 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-sad---sorry-Smithsonian-7497
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The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
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