Fantasy Islands Travel and Leisure's thirtieth-anniversary issue this month features "New Classics: The Art Pilgrimage," an article by MHC English professor Christopher Benfey, who served as an art critic for Slate magazine for two years and writes about art for the New York Times Book Review. In the piece, part of the issue's theme of "new classics” of today's travel, Benfey examines the trend of the past few decades for museums to "return to the spirit of nineteenth-century world expositions, a refashioning based on a commercial model that seems newly appropriate in an increasingly mercurial marketplace." Benfey argues—using the redesign of Berlin's Museumsinsel, the Guggenheim's plans for a new headquarters in downtown Manhattan and its intent to create branches in Brazil, and plans for the Musée des Arts Premiers on the site of the Universal Exposition of 1937 as examples—that today's museums are becoming places of fantastic architecture, "wonderland" exhibition spaces, and showplaces of exotic costumes and objects. These "global islands," he writes are often disconnected from their individual locales. He suggests that the museums of the twenty-first century are being designed not as the traditional massive, permanent storehouses for the world's treasures, but as institutions that aspire to "weightlessness and spirituality, impermanence and constant change." At the conclusion of the piece, Benfey hints that he is not so sure that museum-goers will appreciate these "fantasy destinations." Writes Benfey, "Will cultural pilgrims flock to the reconfigured Museum Island in Berlin or to Jean Nourvel's tribal retreat on the Island of the Swans? Maybe, for a few years. But then there will be a hunger for newer Islands, in ever more exotic or ‘gritty' locales." The April 2001 issue of Travel and Leisure featured another piece by Benfey, this time a look at the history and spirit of Saratoga Springs.