Art

Trump’s presidential library is predictably crass

Maybe a tad prematurely for a term that ends only in 2029, the Trump Organization has released a short video on Truth Social revealing, with a dizzying CGI fly-throughs, proposals for the Donald J. Trump presidential library. Any great memorial should be both surprising and inevitable. The Donald J. Trump presidential library is neither, being woefully predictable in its crassness and feeble as a design It’s not about Making America Literate Again: there’s not a book in sight. I could not even see a reference to Trump’s own great contribution to world literature: The Art of the Deal. By contrast, the Ptolemies’ great library in Alexandria had perhaps 700,000 papyrus

library

Palm Beach gets a European twist

In these parts, it is always said that the most disappointing aspect of Palm Beach life is… well, the beach itself. Yes, it has sand, sea, minimal surf (and, as often as not, “dangerous marine life,” as the deep purple flags flown at the lifeguard stations indicate). But that is all. There is nothing like what you get, for example, in the north shore of the Mediterranean where, from Gibraltar in the west to Bodrum in Turkey, thousands of miles to the east, every few hundred yards you have a chic café or a ritzy restaurant, or boutiques selling everything from bikes to bikinis. No, the beaches of Palm Beach

The predictable politics of the 2026 Grammys

When Billie Eilish declared, during her acceptance speech for song of the year with “Wildflower” at last night’s Grammy awards, that “I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter,” she was speaking in the approved register. “Fuck ICE,” she added but it was more of the same. In contrast to the Golden Globes, where the neutral tenor of the event was made up of tame jokes about the age of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, the Grammys have turned into an opportunity for musicians to express political outrage. The awards themselves went as expected last night. Kendrick Lamar and Bad