Culture

From a man in Japan who has romantic attachment to a pillow, to boom in realistic baby dolls, to a movie about a man who falls deeply in love with a life-size silicon woman, our craze for surrogate objects reveals more than simple fetishism.

We might be tempted to dismiss the entire legacy of an artist or thinker whose political position or moral beliefs do not accord with our own enlightened views. We forget that we, like they, are products of an age—and that what we are throwing away might be worth far more than the pieties we cling to.

The quintessential protest musical, Hair, is back on Broadway some forty years later, with the spotlight on what many consider to be the biggest civil rights issue of our era: marriage equality.

The brand-new Acropolis Museum, designed to showcase the repatriated plunder of another century, has instead a few other things to offer—among them, views of other museum-goers from beneath, as well as a newly censored video showing Greek Christians hard at work destroying Classical art.