Good Morning,
Start with the day’s best story: a volunteer at Britain’s National Archives, working through an uncatalogued box, found a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence — the only known example outside the US (BBC). The timing is almost too good. America just turned 250, and the question of who keeps the national story and who gets to tell it is suddenly everywhere. Playing skunk at the party, the White House issued a 162-page attack on the Smithsonian’s American History museum for insufficient patriotism (The New York Times). Artists are running the more useful version of that argument: asking what the Statue of Liberty actually stands for (Hyperallergic), while critics and scholars survey 250 years of building to ask what makes architecture American at all (Architectural Record).
In ideas: our craving for the handmade isn’t nostalgia, argues one essayist. It’s a bid for agency in a world of infinite cheap copies (Aeon).
And in San Francisco, a gloriously trashy Dracula ballet packed the house with audiences in corsets and top hats (San Francisco Chronicle). “Rocky Horror” redux? It’s an audience strategy.
All of our stories below.
Doug
