Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, admires Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground (1950) in Tehran. Photo: Bernd Von Jutrczenka/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Recent links of note:

Meet the intellectuals leading France to the right
Patrick Marnham, The Spectator 
France is the last place one would expect a group of right-wing, traditionalist thinkers to gain traction. This is, after all, a country with (despite what Jeb Bush might say) a sacred thirty-five hour workweek. But as political correctness (la bien-pensance) ascends in France, turning schools into “gulags of knowledge,” a new class of thinker, “les nouveaux réactionaires,” has come to the fore. As Patrick Marnham of The Spectator tells it, these public intellectuals are France’s best hope to counter “France’s diminishing status and influence.” That the voting public thinks so, too, is promising.

Sorry Benedict Cumberbatch, but you're wrong about politicians
Boris Johnson, The Daily Telegraph
Actors are a funny bunch. There may be no demographic of people that is simultaneously so often unqualified and yet so prone to commenting publicly on political issues. Benedict Cumberbatch, currently starring in Hamlet on the West End, is no exception. Just last week, he took to the Barbican theater’s stage to voice his thoughts on the Syrian refugee crisis, passionately intoning with the help of a choice expletive directed towards politicians who have sought to limit refugee immigration. Boris Johnson, writing in The Telegraph, disapproves. He says, “I am glad I wasn’t around . . . I might have shouted ‘rubbish.’” Johnson readily acknowledges the need for action regarding the migrants, but urges nuance, something Cumberbatch seems to have left backstage. “There may be a case for immigration; there is no case for lack of control.” Well said.

Whatever Happened to High Culture?: An inquest
Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard
This week in The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein, who was featured in The New Criterion’s inaugural issue, offers some reminiscences of the magazine’s founders, Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman. They were men who, when it came to popular culture, weren’t “willing to confer upon it even the dignity of the droppings of a bull or a horse.” In this vital piece Epstein performs an autopsy of high culture, identifying the many blows it has suffered in the recent decades.

Tehran's Modern art could travel to the US
Javier Pes and Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper
The ink is barely dry on President Obama’s “Iran deal” (the latter word is of course a misnomer; capitulation would be more appropriate), but the effects are already being felt. Major pieces from The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection of art will be lent internationally for the first time since 1979. The first prospective agreement is with the State Museums Berlin, but Washington D.C.’s Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has also begun preliminary discussions. The international showing of the impressive collection, which includes Picassos, Rothkos, Bacons, Gauguins, Pollocks, and more, is surely to be lauded. But at what cost?

From our pages:

State of nature
Dominic Green
Is nature writing making a comeback in Britain? 

 

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