How to #Romanticize watching your 401(k) dwindle away
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If, through the pollen clouds this weekend, you think you glimpsed a woman in a preternaturally flowy sundress riding sidesaddle on her lawn mower, don't rush to check the expiration date of your Zyrtec; it was probably just Monica Hesse, #Romanticizing her life.
This is the trend Monica can't seem to escape on TikTok and other social media, where she is served women — always women — dressing up to de- or re-grout, or incorporating candles and Mason jars — always Mason jars — into a workaday kitchen routine.
And yes, Monica writes, the uniform is 'nonnegotiable'; many creators 'have at least one video in which they indignantly explain that ethereal dresses are actually the most practical attire for unclogging a drain.'
What are these women trying to teach us as they glamorize the tasks nobody instinctively wants to do? Should we fret that the trend has evolved to exalt almost exclusively stay-at-home life? Is it survival — or submission?
Monica was also my and Molly Roberts's guest on our most recent episode of the 'Impromptu' podcast, where we discussed another somebody's attempt at romanticization: President Donald Trump's order that the Smithsonian museum system expunge exhibits that reveal the United States to be as complicated a place as it is.
We each bristle at that idea, and share in some pride at how the country — especially via the Smithsonian — has had a pretty good track record of taking a hard look at itself in the mirror.
In an excerpt from the conversation, you can read the bit where I worry we're approaching Russia's museum culture. But you'll have to listen for the best idea: Monica's proposed 'Garden of American Harriets.'
Chaser: One of Trump's other big rewritings of history — his 'Gulf of America' push (discussed on another 'Impromptu' episode!) — is inspiring copycats across the world. Keith Richburg plots where names might be changing, from the East Sea to Aotearoa.
Until now, our writers have not been very bullish on Trump's tariffs, and … okay, they're still not on board — but some readers are, 401(k) figures be damned!
Eugene Dunn of Medford, New York, is not 'one bit nervous,' which sounds pretty great right now. David Lipton of Toms River, New Jersey, says 'we have become a very impatient society' — and that it'll probably just take a little time for the tariff gravy train to get going.
Salena Zito recently went reporting where you'd expect more people than just about anywhere else to be on board with the tariffs: a Pennsylvania steel plant full of workers shielded by them. Trump's taxes got big smiles at the mill, where he enjoys generous support, but the fungibility of workers' 'America First' sensibility surprised Salena, especially when she encountered the fervor with which workers wanted their mill bought by a Japanese company.
Karen Tumulty traces Trump's love for tariffs back to another instance of Japanese ascendancy: in the 1980s, when the country's carmakers threatened to supplant the domestic auto industry. Legendary Chrysler Corp. CEO Lee Iacocca at the time thought the answer was tariffs; Trump watched along and thought, bingo.
Chaser: Max Boot likens Trump's foreign policy to a dangerous philosophy from even further back in history — the 19th-century 'spheres of influence' thinking that set the stage for World War I.
From Will Leitch's essay on the New York Yankees' 'torpedo bats,' the fruit of MLB's lack of specification as to where the thickest part of the bat goes; a physicist recently figured out that maybe the bat should be biggest where it usually hits the ball — Nobel incoming, no doubt.
Now the Yankees are firing off early-season dingers, and the torpedo bats have been decried as fraudulent and ruinous. But Will makes it clear: 'There is nothing illegal about these bats. Maybe they work, maybe they don't, but one thing they definitely aren't is 'cheating.''
Then he zooms out to find a sorta-silver lining of the scandal: 'Baseball looms largest in the fan's imagination when we've all decided there's something wrong with it.' Even — especially — when there isn't.
Last week, Trump fired a handful of top intelligence community officials; this came right after he met with right-wing conspiracist Laura Loomer, who advocated the firings. It does not take CIA-level analysis to see some dots here that might deserve connecting. Indeed, the Editorial Board writes that Trump needs to provide some answers.
David Ignatius looks at those firings and a few other recent, highly political shake-ups made within the IC and sees bad omens. Politicization is rarely good anywhere, but David says that within the intelligence world, it is a uniquely 'special poison.'
It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's … The Bye-Ku.
Patriarchy smashed
With recalibrated bat
Mason jar shards rain
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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London's V&A Storehouse museum lets visitors get their hands on 5,000 years of creativity
LONDON (AP) — A museum is like an iceberg. Most of it is out of sight. Most big collections have only a fraction of their items on display, with the rest locked away in storage. But not at the new V&A East Storehouse, where London's Victoria and Albert Museum has opened up its storerooms for visitors to view — and in many cases touch — the items within. The 16,000-square-meter (170,000-square-foot) building, bigger than 30 basketball courts, holds more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Wandering its huge, three-story collections hall feels like a trip to IKEA, but with treasures at every turn. The V&A is Britain's national museum of design, performance and applied arts, and the storehouse holds aisle after aisle of open shelves lined with everything from ancient Egyptian shoes to Roman pottery, ancient Indian sculptures, Japanese armor, Modernist furniture, a Piaggio scooter and a brightly painted garbage can from the Glastonbury Festival. 'It's 5,000 years of creativity,' said Kate Parsons, the museum's director of collection care and access. It took more than a year, and 379 truckloads, to move the objects from the museum's former storage facility in west London to the new site. In the museum's biggest innovation, anyone can book a one-on-one appointment with any object, from a Vivienne Westwood mohair sweater to a tiny Japanese netsuke figurine. Most of the items can even be handled, with exceptions for hazardous materials, such as Victorian wallpaper that contains arsenic. The Order an Object service offers 'a behind-the-scenes, very personal, close interaction' with the collection, Parsons said as she showed off one of the most requested items so far: a 1954 pink silk taffeta Balenciaga evening gown. Nearby in one of the study rooms were a Bob Mackie-designed military tunic worn by Elton John on his 1981 world tour and two silk kimonos laid out ready for a visit. Parsons said there has been 'a phenomenal response' from the public since the building opened at the end of May. Visitors have ranged from people seeking inspiration for their weddings to art students and 'someone last week who was using equipment to measure the thread count of an 1850 dress.' She says strangers who have come to view different objects often strike up conversations. 'It's just wonderful,' Parsons said. 'You never quite know. … We have this entirely new concept and of course we hope and we believe and we do audience research and we think that people are going to come. But until they actually did, and came through the doors, we didn't know.' The V&A's flagship museum in London's affluent South Kensington district, founded in the 1850s, is one of Britain's biggest tourist attractions. The Storehouse is across town in the Olympic Park, a post-industrial swath of east London that hosted the 2012 summer games. As part of post-Olympic regeneration, the area is now home to a new cultural quarter that includes arts and fashion colleges, a dance theater and another V&A branch, due to open next year. The Storehouse has hired dozens of young people recruited from the surrounding area, which includes some of London's most deprived districts. Designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the firm behind New York's High Line park, the building has space to show off objects too big to have been displayed very often before, including a 17th-century Mughal colonnade from India, a 1930s modernist office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and a Pablo Picasso-designed stage curtain for a 1924 ballet, some 10 meters (more than 30 feet) high. Also on a monumental scale are large chunks of vanished buildings, including a gilded 15th-century ceiling from the Torrijos Palace in Spain and a slab of the concrete façade of Robin Hood Gardens, a demolished London housing estate. Not a hushed temple of art, this is a working facility. Conversation is encouraged and forklifts beep in the background. Workers are finishing the David Bowie Center, a home for the late London-born musician's archive of costumes, musical instruments, letters, lyrics and photos that is due to open at the Storehouse in September. One aim of the Storehouse is to expose the museum's inner workings, through displays delving into all aspects of the conservators' job – from the eternal battle against insects to the numbering system for museum contents — and a viewing gallery to watch staff at work. The increased openness comes as museums in the U.K. are under increasing scrutiny over the origins of their collections. They face pressure to return objects acquired in sometimes contested circumstances during the days of the British Empire Senior curator Georgia Haseldine said the V&A is adopting a policy of transparency, 'so that we can talk very openly about where things have come from, how they ended up in the V&A's collection, and also make sure that researchers, as well as local people and people visiting from all around the world, have free and equitable access to these objects. 'On average, museums have one to five percent of their collections on show,' she said. 'What we're doing here is saying, 'No, this whole collection belongs to all of us. This is a national collection and you should have access to it.' That is our fundamental principle.'
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In the Trump era, where have all the protest songs gone?
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2 hours ago
London's V&A Storehouse museum lets visitors get their hands on 5,000 years of creativity
LONDON -- A museum is like an iceberg. Most of it is out of sight. Most big collections have only a fraction of their items on display, with the rest locked away in storage. But not at the new V&A East Storehouse, where London's Victoria and Albert Museum has opened up its storerooms for visitors to view — and in many cases touch — the items within. The 16,000-square-meter (170,000-square-foot) building, bigger than 30 basketball courts, holds more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Wandering its huge, three-story collections hall feels like a trip to IKEA, but with treasures at every turn. The V&A is Britain's national museum of design, performance and applied arts, and the storehouse holds aisle after aisle of open shelves lined with everything from ancient Egyptian shoes to Roman pottery, ancient Indian sculptures, Japanese armor, Modernist furniture, a Piaggio scooter and a brightly painted garbage can from the Glastonbury Festival. 'It's 5,000 years of creativity,' said Kate Parsons, the museum's director of collection care and access. It took more than a year, and 379 truckloads, to move the objects from the museum's former storage facility in west London to the new site. In the museum's biggest innovation, anyone can book a one-on-one appointment with any object, from a Vivienne Westwood mohair sweater to a tiny Japanese netsuke figurine. Most of the items can even be handled, with exceptions for hazardous materials, such as Victorian wallpaper that contains arsenic. The Order an Object service offers 'a behind-the-scenes, very personal, close interaction' with the collection, Parsons said as she showed off one of the most requested items so far: a 1954 pink silk taffeta Balenciaga evening gown. Nearby in one of the study rooms were a Bob Mackie-designed military tunic worn by Elton John on his 1981 world tour and two silk kimonos laid out ready for a visit. Parsons said there has been 'a phenomenal response' from the public since the building opened at the end of May. Visitors have ranged from people seeking inspiration for their weddings to art students and 'someone last week who was using equipment to measure the thread count of an 1850 dress.' She says strangers who have come to view different objects often strike up conversations. 'It's just wonderful,' Parsons said. 'You never quite know. … We have this entirely new concept and of course we hope and we believe and we do audience research and we think that people are going to come. But until they actually did, and came through the doors, we didn't know.' The V&A's flagship museum in London's affluent South Kensington district, founded in the 1850s, is one of Britain's biggest tourist attractions. The Storehouse is across town in the Olympic Park, a post-industrial swath of east London that hosted the 2012 summer games. As part of post-Olympic regeneration, the area is now home to a new cultural quarter that includes arts and fashion colleges, a dance theater and another V&A branch, due to open next year. The Storehouse has hired dozens of young people recruited from the surrounding area, which includes some of London's most deprived districts. Designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the firm behind New York's High Line park, the building has space to show off objects too big to have been displayed very often before, including a 17th-century Mughal colonnade from India, a 1930s modernist office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and a Pablo Picasso-designed stage curtain for a 1924 ballet, some 10 meters (more than 30 feet) high. Also on a monumental scale are large chunks of vanished buildings, including a gilded 15th-century ceiling from the Torrijos Palace in Spain and a slab of the concrete façade of Robin Hood Gardens, a demolished London housing estate. Not a hushed temple of art, this is a working facility. Conversation is encouraged and forklifts beep in the background. Workers are finishing the David Bowie Center, a home for the late London-born musician's archive of costumes, musical instruments, letters, lyrics and photos that is due to open at the Storehouse in September. One aim of the Storehouse is to expose the museum's inner workings, through displays delving into all aspects of the conservators' job – from the eternal battle against insects to the numbering system for museum contents — and a viewing gallery to watch staff at work. The increased openness comes as museums in the U.K. are under increasing scrutiny over the origins of their collections. They face pressure to return objects acquired in sometimes contested circumstances during the days of the British Empire Senior curator Georgia Haseldine said the V&A is adopting a policy of transparency, 'so that we can talk very openly about where things have come from, how they ended up in the V&A's collection, and also make sure that researchers, as well as local people and people visiting from all around the world, have free and equitable access to these objects. 'On average, museums have one to five percent of their collections on show,' she said. 'What we're doing here is saying, 'No, this whole collection belongs to all of us. This is a national collection and you should have access to it.' That is our fundamental principle.'
