18th-century French painting galleries at the Louvre. © Musée du Louvre 2015 / Antoine Mongodin
Recent links of note:
U.K. Labour Party’s Anti-Austerity Image Cost Votes, Poll Finds
Thomas Penny, Bloomberg
As the United Kingdom’s Labour Party slouches closer to selecting Jeremy Corbyn as its leader, it may want to consider the findings of a recent appraisal of the May election. Yes, we all know how wrong the polls were leading up to the vote, but when a party’s own polling arm declares that it lost because it is not “trusted to manage the country’s finances,” a little soul-searching may be in order.
A Great Gift to Charter Schools—and to Gotham
Myron Magnet, City Journal
Perhaps the single positive part of the de Blasio mayorship is that some day it will end. As we approach the next election (unfortunately still two years away), it is becoming increasingly clear that New York will take advantage of its opportunity to correct its mistake of 2013. Who will fill the void? Myron Magnet, ever sagacious, suggests Eva Moskowitz, head of the wildly effective Success Academy charter schools. The recent recipient of an eight million dollar donation from John Paulson, Moskowitz “knows that Gotham stands for a hand up, not a handout.” If only we were currently so fortunate.
Here’s more evidence that the left might be screwed
Douglas Murray, The Spectator
The media’s continued and seemingly ever-increasing leftward slide is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Anyone who reads James Bowman’s monthly column in our pages knows this to be the case, but Douglas Murray offers another, new example from that citadel of right-thinking leftism, The Guardian. Murray surveys two interviews, one with a leader of an Islamist cabal and another with a former leader of the same group, now an ardent opponent of malicious Islamism. Can you guess who gets the praise?
Louvre freshens up galleries of French paintings first
Victory Stapley-Brown, The Art Newspaper
A few weeks ago, I praised the Morgan Library for its commitment to organizing shows surrounding its permanent collection. Could this be the beginning of a miniature trend? While many museums seek to entice visitors with expensive traveling exhibitions, the Louvre has taken a different course of action. Following the renovation of the nineteenth-century French painting galleries, the Louvre has set to work on the eighteenth-century rooms, a tribute to the masterful era of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau. Several eighteenth-century exhibitions are to follow in 2016, proving that the greatest crime a museum can commit is to bury the strengths of its collection.
From our pages:
The empire business
Robert D. Kaplan
A review of Flood of Fire: A Novel (The Ibis Trilogy) by Amitav Ghosh.