“Criminal” architects and their journalistic supporters, called to answer for their abominations visible for all to be offended by in the City of Light:

Nor is this visual hell [in Paris] the consequence of the need to build cheaply. Where money is no object, contemporary architects, like the sleep of reason in Goya’s etching, bring forth monsters.

The Tour Montparnasse (said to be the most hated building in Paris), the Centre Pompidou, the Opéra Bastille, the Musée du quai Branly, the new Philharmonie, do not owe their preternatural ugliness to lack of funds, but rather to the incapacity, one might say the ferocious unwillingness, of architects to build anything beautiful, and to their determination to leave their mark on the city as a dog leaves its mark on a tree.

The perspicacious polymath Dalrymple reviews a book much to his taste in First Things.

The candidate I voted for, now mayor, looking more like the one I did not vote for in the pre-runoff election because of her hopping on the anti-cop bandwagon.

We opened the conversation by asking Lightfoot about statements she made last month during a “Chicago Newsroom” interview, in which she referenced a rumor she’d heard but not verified that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police told cops to take no action over Memorial Day weekend. In that May 30 interview, Lightfoot says the FOP told cops, “‘If you see some criminal activity, just lay back, do nothing.’”

We asked her to clarify.

“What I said then and what I’ll repeat now was ‘I hope that’s not true,’” Lightfoot told Schutz on Monday. “. . . my point in bringing it up was to simply say, ‘I heard this but I hope it’s not true.’ Unfortunately, the second part is the piece that hasn’t been reported.”

No. Unfortunately the second part does nothing to change her passing on a rumor without the slightest effort to shoot it down.

Hot off the Religion News Service desk.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (RNS) — Speaking at a black church Sunday (June 9) in a city that is nearly 75% percent African American, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, said white Christians who are racially insensitive are disregarding the gospel.

Actually, I heard that very thought quite a while ago.