Good morning. Raphael’s tapestries return to the Sistine Chapel for the first time in nearly 500 years: “The tapestries, which were weaved in Brussels by the famed studio of Pieter van Aelst from Raphael’s sketches, depict scenes from the Acts of the Apostles, such as The Stoning of St. Stephen and St. Paul Preaching in Athens. For the next week, they are back in the Sistine Chapel, where they were between the time Michelangelo finished painting the ceiling in 1512 and when he began painting the massive Last Judgement wall behind the main altar in 1536. All 12, made with silk, wool and gold and silver thread, have been painstakingly restored by Vatican Museum conservationists in the last 10 years.”

Wilfred Reilly writes about a “non-partisan black-led response” to The New York Times’s “1619 Project” called “1776”: “Three core elements of my view of slavery—and, I think it is fair to say, 1776’s as well—are: (1) recognizing that an anti-slavery movement led by white and Black people of goodwill existed in this country as long as slavery did, and won in the end; (2) recognizing that slavery did not ‘build the USA,’ but rather made the pre-bellum South into something of a backwater, due largely to the proud if subtle resistance of the slaves themselves; and (3) recognizing that America paid a diverse butcher’s bill of hundreds of thousands of lives, during the Civil War, in order to FREE the slaves.”

Andrew Ferguson reviews Fergus M. Bordewich’s Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America: “In the name of designating the Radicals as the forerunners of contemporary liberalism, Bordewich tries to draw a continuous line from the Civil War Congress to the New Deal and the Great Society. Yet the line has too many zigs and zags and ups and downs to clinch a causal connection. And in fact, many of the features of big government (19th-century style) fell away before long. Calvin Coolidge, for instance, 60 years after the Civil War and a few years before the New Deal, oversaw a federal government that was in most respects closer in size and scope to the antebellum government than to the modern state that was soon to emerge. If Bordewich oversells the legacy of the Radicals in Congress, his more fundamental misapprehension lies elsewhere: His version of events shortchanges the greatness that humanists of all stripes—not only historians—have found in Lincoln.”

Why are Italians unhappy? Walter Mayr attempts to explain: “According to official EU statistics, Rome is less livable than either Bucharest or Sofia if you ask the city’s own residents. The Facebook page belonging to the group ‘romafaschifo’ – Rome sucks – is full of posts about the aesthetic downfall of this ‘savaged’ city, as the journalist Corrado Augias would have it.”

Should Paris become a “15-minute city”? Its mayor, Anne Hidalgo, thinks so: “Hidalgo has been leading a radical overhaul of the city’s mobility culture since taking office in 2014, and has already barred the most polluting vehicles from entry, banished cars from the Seine quayside and reclaimed road space for trees and pedestrians. Now, she says, Paris needs to go one step further and remodel itself so that residents can have all their needs met—be they for work, shopping, health, or culture—within 15 minutes of their own doorstep. Even in a dense city like Paris, which has more than 21,000 residents per square mile, the concept as laid out by the Hidalgo campaign group Paris en Commun is bold. Taken at a citywide level, it would require a sort of anti-zoning—‘deconstructing the city’ as Hidalgo adviser Carlos Moreno, a professor at Paris-Sorbonne University, puts it.”

The converging careers of Henry Moore and Bill Brandt: “A new exhibition and book explore the intersecting careers of two renowned British artists of the 20th Century: sculptor Henry Moore and photographer Bill Brandt.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Atlantic, Amanda Mull writes about the surprising resilience of retail catalogs:

“The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated,’ says Hamilton Davison, the executive director of the American Catalog Mailers Association, which advocates for things like favorable postage rates and tax rules. ‘Isn’t that what Mark Twain said?’ In the late 2000s, a change in federal regulation raised mailing prices for catalogs, and as online shopping accelerated in the years afterward, a lot of companies abandoned catalogs in favor of email and social-media strategies targeting younger consumers. Those retailers included companies known for their direct-mail products, such as JCPenney, whose catalog had figured prominently in its branding since 1963 but was discontinued in 2010.

“Five years later, though, the JCPenney catalog was back, in defeated recognition that the physical world still matters. ‘You can’t make me open your email, you can’t make me open your website, you can’t make me go to your retail store, but you can send a large-format mail piece I have to pick up,’ Davison says. ‘It’s invasive, but it’s welcome.’ Davison has a vested interest in the future of the format, of course, but his claims are borne out by research suggesting that even though catalogs typically arrive unbidden, consumers find them less presumptuous and irritating than marketing emails. ‘The internet is too much like work,’ Davison says, while catalogs feel more like play. ‘The internet is great if you know what you’re looking for,’ he adds, ‘but it’s a lousy browsing vehicle.’ Instead of being followed around online for days by ads for a product you already ordered (or considered and ruled out), you can peruse catalogs at your leisure and disengage fully when you’re done. It’s so analog, it almost feels wholesome.

“Around the same time that JCPenney was returning to mailboxes, catalogs began gaining favor among newer companies. ‘You can think about a catalog as a push versus a pull,’ says Matt Krepsik, the global head of analytics for Nielsen’s marketing-effectiveness arm. ‘On the internet, I just have to hope that Matt discovers my website. When I send Matt a catalog, I’m reaching out to him one-to-one.’”

Read the rest.

Photo: Geiranger

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