Camelot's kooky crusader

What museums can learn from contemporary technology

"I grew up wanting to be an astronaut,” Robert Stein, the National Gallery of Art’s recently appointed chief information officer, tells me. “I studied electrical engineering, and I got a job doing high-performance computing. And then one day, I did a project with an art museum, and I thought, ‘Wait a second, this is an area of the world that needs more technology in order to connect more people together.’ And the rest was kind of downhill from there.” The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC — the NGA — is now ranked the most popular art museum in America.

Francesca Peacock

What makes Berthe Morisot’s nudes so unique?

In the years before the French Revolution saw heads roll down the boulevards, revolutionaries murdered in the bath, and endless numbers of fluffy lap dogs forced to fend for themselves after their mamans met their untimely ends, one art critic made his name with his fearless criticism of Paris’s annual art exhibition, the “Salon.” The prominent style in mid- and late-eighteenth century France was Rococo — think impossibly ornate, gold-swirled furniture; paintings of pink, fluffy nymphs in gilt-edged, asymmetrical frames; and portraits of women in dresses so large, and so embellished, that they resemble iced wedding cakes more than human beings. In the face of endless walls of this style of art, the critic Denis Diderot was caustic.

Mitchell Jackson

How Madonna turned pop culture Catholic

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone is embarking on her first greatest-hits tour, but she has forgotten why she was great. In her announcement video for the Celebration Tour, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Madonna’s self-titled debut, the queen of pop and a random assortment of B-list celebrities — Jack Black, Amy Schumer, Diplo and Meg Stalter, to name a few — reminisced about the queen of pop fellating an Evian bottle in her documentary Truth or Dare. A few days later, Madonna introduced Sam Smith’s and Kim Petras’s striptease at the Grammys. “Are you ready for a little controversy?” Madonna screamed at the crowd, holding a dominatrix cane in the air. The audience was too bored to respond.

Robert S. Erickson

Bringing back Stephen Sondheim and enduring a new Andrew Lloyd Webber

On Sunday April 16, the curtain went down on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera for the last of 13,981 performances on Broadway, a titanic thirty-five-year run grossing north of $1.3 billion. The end of an era? Not quite — dating back to the 1979 opening of Evita, Lloyd Webber musicals have run continuously on the Great White Way for forty-four years. That streak is now hitched to the fortunes of Bad Cinderella, which opened just weeks before Phantom closed. The show gets a lift from a lush score and some winning numbers, as well as sumptuous set design. The whole premise, however, turns out to be a pumpkin, and it may spell midnight for the composer’s magical run within the year.

Alexander Larman

Where will the vogue for censoring our best-loved authors lead?

It was recently announced in the Daily Telegraph that the novels of P.G. Wodehouse — much beloved by millions, including me, for their combination of wit and soufflé-light evocation of an England that never really existed but which almost might have done — are the latest to fall foul of that new scourge of writers the world over, the “sensitivity reader.” New editions of Wodehouse’s masterly works Right Ho, Jeeves and Thank You, Jeeves have been reissued with the craven disclaimer “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s, and contains language, themes and characterizations which you may find outdated. In the present edition, we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.

Philip Womack

Tom Hanks should stick to acting

The French novelist Michel Houellebecq recently appeared in a pornographic film. As one does, of course, although he claims that it was by accident. Nevertheless, there aren’t many authors-turned-actors, even by design. (Graham Greene had a small cameo in Truffaut’s Day for Night; Maya Angelou pops up dispensing folksy wisdom in How to Make an American Quilt.) You will, however, lose count of the thespians who clamor to adorn the printed page; I will not mention any, but you can look them up, should you wish to. Tom Hanks (the actor) has produced his debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. The title is, I think, supposed to be arch, in a David Eggers, Heartbreaking-Work-of-Staggering-Genius kind of way.

Katrina Gulliver

Inside the world of multilevel marketing

Emily Paulson felt lost. A young mother with several small children, she’d stepped away from the career ladder and found herself stuck juggling childcare alone when her husband traveled for his corporate job. She was trapped in a circuit of sweatpants and Spongebob. So when an old high school acquaintance invited her out for wine, she was thrilled at the chance to get dressed up, go somewhere swish and feel like herself again. It turned out to be a trap. Although she wasn’t swept into the back of a van by kidnappers, she was propelled into the world of Multilevel Marketing (MLM), also known as a pyramid scheme. The drinks invitation was a lure, first to be wowed by the fabulous cosmetics she could buy (at a discount!! And didn’t her friend’s skin look amazing?

Fred Sculthorp

How refugees saved a town in upstate New York

Utica was once home to the American Nightmare. In the 1960s, the upstate New York city was a vibrant manufacturing hub, home to 100,000 people. Then the great unwinding began. General Electric pulled out in the early 1990s, and shortly after that the Air Force base closed. Entire streets burned as fleeing residents tried to claim insurance payouts. Families moved out as gangs from New York City moved in. Walking through the rubble in 1999, the mayor joked to an interviewer he had been having a nightmare of his own: “I dreamed I was the mayor of the city of Utica.

Christopher Sandford

The king and queen who saved the British monarchy

In some ways, the world of George VI and his consort Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, from 1936-52 was very different from how we envision that of today’s British royal family; its rituals seem to belong to an era of Jurassic antiquity. In George’s day, Britain was still a global power, and its monarch ruled over both an empire and an elaborate court system with a “Page of the Backstairs” and a “Yeoman of the Pantry” — not to mention a fully staffed, oceangoing yacht — at his disposal. His coronation in May 1937 was as protracted as that of any maharajah. The Edwardian braid and sashes on display during more recent military pageantry look sadly Ruritanian by comparison. In other ways, their lives resonate more clearly with our own.

Jenna Stocker

The dauntless spirit of Richard Halliburton

A sailor; a conqueror of the most treacherous mountain peaks; a man who wades defiantly under the stars of the Far East sky; a dashing writer who pursues his mark as a hunter on safari; an explorer who rides elephants through the Alps. This is not a collection of young men, newly emancipated by the end of the Great War and a new era of global empires. It is the nearly improbable life of one man, Richard Halliburton, whose swashbuckling existence was inspired by everyone from Daniel Defoe and Rupert Brooke to Odysseus. Halliburton was the self-proclaimed protagonist of his own heroic epic. He decided in the days before his graduation from Princeton in spring 1921 that he would forgo a life of tedious expectations and “let those who wish have their respectability.

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