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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Aesthetics and History of the Freedman’s Memorial

Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins explain
Emancipation Memorial

What, exactly, “is the message of the Emancipation Memorial? And is it true that the views of African Americans were not taken into account by the artist and the patrons responsible for setting up the statue in 1876?” Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins answer these and other questions in the latest issue of The New Criterion:

The work’s sculptor, Thomas Ball, was not a black man—unsurprisingly, since there were no established black sculptors in the 1860s and ’70s when the monument was made. But the original impulse for the work came from a freedwoman, Charlotte Scott; the statue was entirely funded by the contributions of former slaves; the design of the statue was thoroughly revised in response to African-American sentiment; and the celebrations for the unveiling of the statue in 1876 were almost entirely the work of Washington D.C.’s African-American community. No work of American sculpture in the nineteenth century, in fact, was more the product of collective African-American agency than the Freedman’s Memorial.

In other news: The Met has canceled its 20-21 season. “The decision is likely to send ripples of concern through New York and the rest of the country, as Broadway theaters, symphony halls, rock venues, comedy clubs, dance spaces and other live arts institutions grapple with the question of when it will be safe again to perform indoors.’

Tom Wolfe’s final words: In 2017, Tom Wolfe talked with François Busnel and Gay Talese. The interview was published in French in 2018. Here it is for the first time in English.

“J. K. Rowling’s new Robert Galbraith thriller Troubled Blood sold almost 65,000 copies in just five days last week, amid widespread criticism of the author’s decision to include a serial killer who dresses in women’s clothing in the novel”—which is far more than any other Galbraith novel has sold in the first week of publication. Good.

Why does Netflix keep canceling shows after two seasons? Data.

The satirical novel is alive and well, says John Self: “Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment where English has been replaced by management-speak, and interest in your colleagues has been replaced by ‘wellness’ and ‘resilience’ will take joy in Helen DeWitt’s 2012 satire Lightning Rods, where a workplace takes dramatic steps to relieve its employees’ sexual tension, or Magnus Mills’ 2008 novel The Maintenance of Headway, where performance targets have become an end in themselves, divorced from the larger purpose of the business. Satire is even winning awards these days: Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, about a man who tries to reintroduce racial segregation to the USA, took the Booker Prize in 2016 for what the judges called its ‘evisceration of every social taboo and politically correct … sacred cow’.”

The high stakes of quantum computing: “Quantum computing, which exploits the entanglement of particles that so infuriated Einstein (“spooky action at a distance”), is not a receding mirage like cold fusion, feasible in theory but not in prac­tice. It is already with us as Google, IBM, IonQ, Rigetti, and Honey­well have assembled working specimens of suitably otherworldly appearance. We are thus entering the qubit era. In succession to the familiar bits, the ones or zeros produced by the off-or-on switches of our present computers, qubits exist in a superposition of both states one and zero simultaneously. Each additional qubit contributes exponentially more power, which is the key to the enormous computing capa­bilities of quantum machines.”

Photo: Speyer

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