Cities like Rome and Thessaloniki are chock-full of ancient ruins. Which ones should be restored and which ones ignored? “Greek tour guides can sometimes be touchy. Having studied for years to gain a licence, they protect their monopoly on the sharing of information about their country’s treasures. But Yannis Kiourtsoglou, a guide based in northern Greece, is generous with his knowledge these days. Every weekend he takes hundreds of people on free walks through Thessaloniki, drawing attention to the fine monuments that survive and the equally fine ones that were obliterated by archaeological crimes. He tells his followers, for example, about the temple to Egyptian gods, built in 250BC, rediscovered in 1917 and now buried under drab modern buildings. His tours are part of a campaign, supported by a broad swathe of the country’s archaeologists and academics, to keep intact a remarkable find. At stake is not one building or artefact but the entire central junction of the city as it existed in late Roman times: a covered, colonnaded space where carriages once rattled past, and copper-smiths, jewellers and silk-merchants did a roaring trade. Exaggerating only a little, some have called it the Byzantine Pompeii.”

French wood found in a Roman villa: “Researchers also determined that the French timber was harvested in about 40 to 60 C.E. And some of it came from trees already up to 300 years old when they were felled.”

The art of food: “A remarkable and imaginative exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800, documents just how obsessed our ancestors were with every aspect of their meals.”

Jewish boys after the Holocaust: “In the summer of 1945, a group of young Holocaust survivors, kitted out in suits donated by Burton, the men’s outfitters, were learning to be English gentlemen in a gloomy country mansion on the shores of Lake Windermere. In January, to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, the BBC will screen The Children, a new docudrama based on their story. The advance publicity promises a story of unparalleled friendship and survival, a ‘redemptive’ feel-good tale. Yet the truth behind the group that has become known as ‘the Boys’ is far more complicated—and Britain’s role in their fate rather less positive.”

“Cheap books make authors canonical,” Janine Barchas apparently writes in her study of Jane Austen paperbacks. This is patently false. It is interesting, however, to see how technology—the rise of cheap paperbacks and train travel—might affect an author’s popularity: “After Austen’s death, the copyrights to her novels were bought by the publisher Richard Bentley, who issued them in his Standard Novels series in 1833, in single volumes at six shillings each – much cheaper than the triple decker editions selling for a guinea and a half, but still out of reach of all but the affluent. He cut his prices in the 1840s, but already there were alternatives. By the late 1840s, there were what we would call paperback editions of her novels cheaply available and aimed at train travellers. Pioneering publishers such as Simms & M’Intyre produced Austen novels for a shilling a shot, and then for sixpence each in their Books for the People series.”

Essay of the Day:

Seeing everything in terms of race, Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal, is not only wrong, it is also unimaginative:

“America is among the least racist countries on the planet. There is not a single mainstream institution not trying to hire and promote as many underrepresented minorities as possible. Conservative philanthropists and corporations spend billions each year on social-uplift programs to close the achievement gap. Taxpayer dollars are as liberally distributed from government coffers. We so take these efforts for granted that we don’t even see them; they have no effect on the dominant narrative about white indifference and exploitation.

“We are in uncharted territory. How a civilization survives with so much contempt for itself is an open question. It is not wholly fanciful to see America’s drug-addicted malaise and rising mortality rates as a consequence, in part, of the nonstop denunciation of the white-male patriarchy. White identity politics is the inevitable result of this nonstop attack, and a logical one: if every other group celebrates its racial identity, why shouldn’t whites, if only as a matter of self-defense?

“The claim that every feature of our world rests on racial oppression—the thesis not just of social-justice education, but of the entire Democratic presidential primary field and of the New York Times’ high school-destined 1619 project—undermines the moral legitimacy of our country. All accumulation of wealth is suspect; every technological breakthrough and business success becomes nothing more than rank exploitation.

“Even Max Weber might not have foreseen where the politicization of education would land us. He would certainly have been astounded that the hard sciences are now worrying about microaggressions and heteronormativity. We are jeopardizing the creation of new knowledge. But the most important function of schooling is to pass on an inheritance, as Michael Oakeshott explained, and that function is now all but obliterated. Serious humanistic learning has been decimated. When I speak at college campuses, I ask students what their majors are and what their favorite classes have been. Their answers are profoundly depressing: a shallow stew of communications studies, psychology, presidential debate-scoring masking as political science, and syllabi featuring comic books and the young adult literature of dysfunction. The focus of student attention is relentlessly presentist.

“Our cultural past is full of wonderful mysteries, however: how, for example, did Western literature evolve from Medieval romance to the realistic novel—the romance peopled by allegorical figures who roam Classical landscapes, the novel showing acute attention to individual character and the details of everyday life? What did such a change mean for how human beings think of themselves in the world? The evolution of form, whether in literature, art, or music, is a grand adventure story, whereby we trace the ever-changing reflection of human experience in the mirror of human imagination. The greatest sin of the social-justice and diversity crusade is to teach students to hate this cultural inheritance. The social-justice crusaders are stripping the future of everything that gives human life meaning: beauty, sublimity, and wit.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge

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