Michelangelo, Pro Or Con

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Young Archer is a marble Renaissance youth with an amazing backstory: Thirteen years ago, it was declared by NYU’s Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt to be an early work of Michelangelo himself. Rival scholars howled, and art historians continue to pick over its anatomy and history for clues.”

With The Boom’s End, An Architectural Era Closes As Well

Nicolai Ouroussoff: “Yet as the dust settles on the last of these projects, what begins to emerge is a more complex image of America’s cultural values at the birth of a new century. The formal dazzle masks a deeper struggle by cities and architects to create accessible public space in an age of shrinking government revenue and privatization.”

Hollywood Studios Shed Management

“During the good years, right into 2008, Hollywood did what any fat and happy industry would do: It piled up managers, larding the ranks with two and even three people in jobs that had previously been done by one.” Now come the management cuts. “The cuts have been part of Hollywood’s general effort to reduce production as revenue, particularly from DVD sales, falls.”

The World’s Shrinking Languages

“The world has perhaps 5000 living languages – though estimates vary – so by the end of this century there will be only half this number. In North America alone, there were between 600 and 700 languages when Columbus landed in 1492. This number had fallen to 213 by 1962, of which only 89 languages had speakers ranging from children to the elderly.”