Good morning. Italians and Spanish sing from their balconies in locked-down cities.

A new fad for rich collectors. “‘Collecting meteorites is basically three different markets,’ said Darryl Pitt, a photographer and musicians’ manager in New York whose interest started when he visited Meteor Crater in Arizona as a boy, and who acquired his first one in the 1980s: a piece of the Canyon Diablo meteorite that made that crater. ‘There are the folks who just want to have a piece of something extraterrestrial and they’re not collectors per se, and there are those who appreciate the science and implications of meteorites.’ And then there are those who regard them as art sculpted by the universe, as he did when he started assembling what he described as ‘the world’s foremost collection of aesthetic iron meteorites.’”

Allison C. Meier writes about the imagery of tombstones. “A viewer cannot forget that all that made them human will one day dissolve and become indistinguishable from dirt.”

The fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Museum of the Bible in DC are fakes, experts say. “The experts spent six months analyzing each fragment, concluding a study born from 2017 revelations that the lucrative international trade in Dead Sea Scroll pieces was awash in suspected forgeries and indications that at least five pieces bought by Green, the museum’s chairman, for an undisclosed amount ahead of its opening that year, were fake. ‘After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is evident that none of the textual fragments in [the] Museum of the Bible’s Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic,’ wrote Colette Loll, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights, the Washington company contracted to examine them.”

WFB on skis: “When Buckley “discovered that skiing was a halfway station between earth and heaven” he headed, in 1961, to Alta and, starting in 1978, joined economist Milton Friedman and entrepreneur Lawry Chickering there every January for seventeen years.”

A publisher writes about living in isolation in Italy: “It’s not a war we’re living through, we have everything we need: food and distractions, books, music and technology to communicate with the rest of the world. But for the past few days I have woken with a drone in my ears. I get up, drink coffee, sit at the computer, talk and downplay things with my husband, make lunch, work some more, make dinner and the drone is always there, a thin veil that separates me from what little I can still see and touch. I am a robot, performing the actions for which I was programmed. My mind attempts to establish contact with a new, static body—for now we are permitted to go out for a walk, but alone and never far from home—a body that does not do the things it once did. It’s the isolation, I tell myself. The uncertainty of tomorrow. The lack of oxygen.”

Essay of the Day:

In City Journal, Myron Magnet writes that however good the Constitution of the United States might be, it cannot protect us from tyranny if it is weakened by a corruption of morals:

“America’s unique gift to the world is the idea of a democratic republic, in which citizens live under laws that they themselves have made through their elected representatives. We are not ruled. Our 1787 Constitution, perfected by the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote, details the mechanism for such a republic, but it is inert machinery until animated by a culture of independence, a spirit of liberty, that brings it to life. George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention, made this point repeatedly. No constitution, however wisely designed, he warned—prophetically, it now seems—can protect a people against tyranny or conquest if it weakens itself by unchecked ‘corruption of morals, profligacy of manners, and listlessness for the preservation of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind.’

“Manners, morals, and beliefs: you couldn’t find a more succinct definition of ‘culture’ than this. It is our inherited reservoir of assumptions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, proper and improper—our largely unexamined ideas and habits, absorbed from our families and communities, that we so take for granted that they seem to come to us by instinct or intuition. They spring from the accumulated wisdom and experience of the human race, refined in America by the Western tradition and by our own exceptional history. This inherited cluster of beliefs and feelings, this moral imagination, forms the glue of society, the oil that smooths the friction of the social machinery, the rules of the road for self-government at the individual level, essential to a self-governing nation.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Oklahoma

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