Leonardo da Vinci, St. John the Baptist, 1513–16, Louvre Museum, Paris

 

Recent links of note:

An adult has finally intervened in the childish Cecil Rhodes debate
Douglas Murray, The Spectator
Last week we lamented the movement afoot at Oxford to wash away history by quite literally tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes. As in Macbeth, the "remove Rhodes" gambit "is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing." Despair not, however. As Douglas Murray tells it, a mature and dissenting voice has emerged in the personage of Chris Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University. His reply to the aggrieved? "Think about being educated elsewhere."

Why Connecticut Lost GE
Aaron M. Renn, City Journal
It's official: after the persistent circulation of rumors, General Electric has officially announced that the company is leaving Connecticut for Massachusetts. You might think that the Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy's aggressive raising of corporate taxes might have something to do with the move. And it does. But, as Aaron Renn tells it, it's not the whole story. As American cities have been revived, jobs have moved back into urban centers. Connecticut both lacks its own major cities and is located between two of the country's major metropolitan areas, which hurts its ability to retain employers. Which, of course, is more than enough reason to keep corporate taxes down to give the state a fighting chance.

How do you clean a masterpiece? Louvre to restore Leonardo da Vinci's St John the Baptist
Margot Boutges and Victoria Stapley-Brown, The Art Newspaper
Restoring paintings is a fraught business, made even more so when the work in question is a treasured, well-known piece. To begin, there is the issue of expectations. How will a restoration change the work's appearance, an appearance that in the case of certain works has come to be accepted as definitive? This is just the issue facing the Louvre as they pursue a restoration of da Vinci's St. John the Baptist (1513–16). And so the museum, hoping to avoid the controversies that surrounded their recent restoration of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (1503–19), has announced that this latest restoration will be a completely transparent process.

The Cologne Portent
Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal
That the recent attacks in Cologne and other cities across Germany and greater Europe haven't received much press is disappointing but no surprise, as reporting on the roving hordes, many of them in Europe as part of refugee agreements, does not dovetail nicely with the liberal idea that the supposed refugee groups are blameless angels. But as Bret Stephens points out, we should also be unsurprised by the attacks themselves. Islamist thought conditions the mistreatment of women and allowing this insidious ideology to fester in the West puts us all in peril. "In the spirit of Christian charity, Angela Merkel and other leaders have imported a culture of Muslim misogyny. In the name of humanity, the benefactors are asked to close their eyes to the brutishness of so many of their beneficiaries." We would do well to stop this nonsense immediately.

From our pages:

The dereliction of duty
Daniel Johnson
The editor of Standpoint describes how deliberate neglect of our civic virtues has left our institutions hollowed out.

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