Last week, I mentioned Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, which argues that "the rate of Western accomplishment is currently in decline."
David Frum responds, "Murray underscores this assertion by challenging his readers and listeners to name even one artistic or scientific achievement … of the past 50 years that will still matter to people in the year 2200." Here's Frum's list, "in no particular order, of 10 things from 1950 to 2000 that will still matter two hundred years hence:"
1. A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
2. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao.
3. The paintings of Jackson Pollock.
4. The Godfather I & II
5. C. Milosz, The Captive Mind.
6. West Side Story.
7. M. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
8. The collected “I Love Lucy.”
9. VS Naipaul, A Bend in the River.
10. Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA.
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