Good morning. Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews a new book supposedly explaining boys, but it tells us far more about the author and her political beliefs: “At the outset of her new book, Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein recounts walking down a high-school hallway to meet an 18-year-old named Cole who was sitting outside the library: ‘He topped six feet, with broad shoulders and short-clipped, dirty blond hair. His neck was so thick that it seemed to merge right into his jawline.’ Her first reaction to the sight of the boy was this: ‘Oh no.’ Orenstein describes her instinct as ‘a breach of journalistic objectivity, a scarlet letter of personal bias.’ But she has written a whole book that confirms it—a book whose thesis is that young men, particularly those who are white, straight, athletic, and reluctant to gush openly about their feelings, pose a nightmarish threat to American society. Hiding behind an authorial guise of a sympathetic observer trying to help this population and the adults who care about them, Orenstein gets the boys with whom she talks in the book to spill the most intimate details of their lives—and then throws them under the bus.”

This Frank Stella painting was used as a lunch table for nearly 20 years.

The EU may ask Britain to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens post-Brexit: “The museum told the newspaper The Times of London that the classical Greek structures were taken from the Parthenon temple lawfully and were ‘accessible to the 6 million global visitors the museum receives each year.’ The Times, however, reported that the EU’s draft negotiating guidelines for a trade deal with the UK included a commitment to the ‘return or restitution of unlawfully removed cultural objects to their country of origin.’”

The Whitney Houston hologram sounds great, looks great, and is “super creepy”: “The voice was recognizably that of one of pop music’s greatest singers; the costume’s fringe swayed in a lifelike manner as the body beneath it moved across a stage. But just when you were thinking about letting yourself buy into the idea that Houston, who died in 2012, was somehow performing in front of you, she uttered a few words that disrupted the illusion.”

Scott Beauchamp reviews Laszlo Foldenyi’s Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears: “A professor of art theory at the University of Theater, Film, and Television in Budapest and a member of the German Academy, Foldenyi is among the handful of contemporary European cultural critics focused on cultivating among their readers a feeling for the metaphysical foundations of reality. Working in a similar vein as the Italian publisher Roberto Calasso, Foldenyi asserts that humans are by nature spiritual creatures. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we crave the wholeness that comes with spiritual awareness. Western culture since the Enlightenment, Foldenyi claims, has tried to cast out de Chirico’s ‘ghostly and metaphysical’ shadows in favor of the light of earthly reason, seeking the total annihilation of melancholy, anxiety, terror, and even unbridled joy. But, he warns, these things inevitably come sneaking back to us.”

Guillaume Apollinaire’s Alcools is great. Donald Revell’s translation of it is not: “He sees Apollinaire as championing ‘aimlessness, the total surrender of language to the immediate moment,’ and sees himself as entitled to do the same thing. He is wrong on both counts. In Apollinaire’s best verse there is no aimlessness or total surrender but an electric tension between innovative impudence and the formal French poetry he knew and loved. And even if Revell were right about Apollinaire, he would be wrong about what a presenter of Apollinaire in English ought to do. Apollinaire needs scholarship, modesty, fidelity. He wants lovers, not apes.”

Essay of the Day:

“Gerard Lhéritier built one of the largest rare books collections in history — and sold shares to investors at unheard-of prices.” David Segal tells the story in The New York Times:

“A letter from Frida Kahlo, signed and twice kissed with red lipstick, fetched just over $8,800. A page of scribbled calculations by Isaac Newton sold for about $21,000. A 1953 handwritten speech by John F. Kennedy took in $10,000.

“‘Adjugé!’ said a gray-haired auctioneer, over and over, as he gaveled away nearly every one of the 200 lots for sale at Drouot, an auction house, in Paris in mid-November. The sale generated $4.2 million, which might sound like a triumph.

“Actually, the sale was a fiasco, or, more precisely, one part of an ongoing fiasco. All of the items came from a now-defunct company, Aristophil, which starting in 2002 built one of the largest collections of rare books, autographs and manuscripts in history — some 136,000 pieces in all.

“The buying spree turned the company’s founder and president, a stout 71-year-old named Gérard Lhéritier, into a celebrity. He opened the stately Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in a pricey neighborhood in Paris, and surrounded himself with French luminaries. They included former presidents, authors and journalists, who crowned him the ‘king of manuscripts.’

“Today he’s widely known by a less flattering name, ‘the Bernie Madoff of France.’

“Six years ago, the French authorities shut down Aristophil and arrested Mr. Lhéritier, charging him with fraud and accusing him of orchestrating what amounts to a highbrow Ponzi scheme. As he bought all those rare manuscripts and letters, he had them appraised, divided their putative value into shares and sold them as if they were stock in a corporation. Those shares were bought by 18,000 people, many of them elderly and of modest means, who collectively invested about $1 billion.”

Read the rest.

Photos: The Sphinx of Giza

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