BRAVE NEW WORLD

When my parents, Croatian nationals born and raised in Zagreb, were college students in the 1950s, they spent their nights watching Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movies or dancing to the music of Glenn Miller and Louis Armstrong. At such times they were not, as Stephens put it, “garbed in their traditional costumes” of knee boots and narrow-brimmed felt hats. Rather they wore Italian-style clothes, ate Hungarian food, idolized American movie stars, drove German cars, drank French liqueurs and read Russian authors.

Stephens dreams that Madonna, McDonald’s and M & Ms will lead the world toward a better future by making the old cultures forget about their boring old individual histories. But it’s been longer than he thinks since cultures such as those in the former Yugoslavia were exposed to ethnic cuisines or different cultural entertainment, yet it didn’t make them any less individual.

SANJA BRIZIC ILIC

Venice

Mitchell Stephens responds: I wrote that “many,” not all, Croats still wore traditional costumes in the 1950s, and that global culture, around at least since World War I, is growing stronger. I certainly did not conclude that this intensifying “cultural homogenization” is cause for celebration.