How Europe’s Exiled Artists Changed America

“European and American culture have always been a two-way interchange and to talk about either of them exclusively is like trying to cut water with a knife. Joseph Horowitz says that Stokowski’s dream of a democratic high culture never arrived. But it couldn’t, because such a thing, as an aim, can exist only in theory. In practice, a successful artistic event deals with the anomaly by removing it.”

Huxtable: World Trade Center Project Is A Monumental Fiasco

“I would say that this has probably been the greatest planning fiasco in the history of the world. Daniel Libeskind’s prize-winning design, a flexible, schematic concept that established a framework of achievable, creative possibilities, has been progressively purged by political pandering and economic pragmatism. The Port Authority’s own brutally detailed report earlier this year gave some cogent reasons why a strong, unified vision of civic and urban renewal on a plane worthy of a great city could not survive.”

The World’s Ten Most Endangered Languages

“There are more than 6,900 languages used around the world today, ranging in size from those with hundreds of millions of speakers to those with only one or two. Language experts now estimate that as many as half of the existing languages are endangered, and by the year 2050 they will be extinct. The major reason for this language loss is that communities are switching to larger politically and economically more powerful languages, like English, Spanish, Hindi or Swahili.”