Good morning. President Trump came into office promising to end wars — but with no clear path forward, Iran is starting to seem like the next “forever war.” The United States and Iran traded strikes for a sixth straight day. There’s more news below. First, though, let’s go west.
Teddy’s placeI was out in the North Dakota Badlands recently, bird-dogging for our architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, as he took in the spectacular new $450 million Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, population 160. The library’s not a library, really. Roosevelt’s papers are scattered all over the country. It’s more of a Teddy museum. A celebratory examination of his complicated legacy, it’s raised high in, to use Michael’s words, “93,000 square feet of mass-timber and rammed-earth — a huge Hobbit house hugging the precipice of a grassy butte.” From the Theodore Roosevelt National Park next door, you can barely make the structure out on the horizon. It looks just as its architect, Craig Dykers of Snohetta, suggested at the start of the project: two pebbles under a leaf. They blend seamlessly into a beautiful landscape of banded hills and deep, eroded ravines edged with touches of green. We sat in our truck looking at it one morning, absolutely alone below a towering sky, and laughed at our luck to see it at all. Presidential libraries are having a moment, Michael notes. Barack Obama’s opened on the South Side of Chicago last month, an $850 million campus surrounding a granite monolith some have called the Obamalisk. And President Trump has said his will be in a skyscraper in downtown Miami, and home to a museum and a luxury hotel. Roosevelt’s library is in Medora because that’s where he wound up in 1884 after the near-simultaneous deaths of his wife and mother. Grief took him west and hunting and ranching in the Little Missouri River Valley brought him solace. The log cabin Roosevelt built sits at the entrance to the national park, which covers just some of the millions of acres of America he eventually preserved as parkland, sometimes at the expense of the Native Americans who lived on it. Talking with the presidentI’m not a Roosevelt expert and nor is Michael. He came for the building. I was just along for the ride. But the exhibits within it appeared well balanced between laudatory and honest about the 26th president’s faults. (I guess?) And we both had fun with the A.I.-powered multimedia exhibits, especially a talking hologram of Teddy himself. How often do you get to speak to a dead president? Trump, when he visited the library at the start of the month, asked 26 about the Panama Canal. Not me. I asked about his first cousin John Ellis Roosevelt, whose Long Island summer estate, Meadow Croft, sits 35 miles or so southeast from Teddy’s old home at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay. Had the president, as a Meadow Croft docent once told me, really ridden his horse down from the North Shore one morning to visit? Hologram-Teddy was hazy on that, but he imparted some fine memories of his relationship with Cousin John and his wonderful home near the beach. Also, he called me Sam. Folks are going to line up for that.
EnchantmentIt’s not easy to get to Medora on a whim. We flew into Bismarck via Minneapolis and only barely made the connecting flight. Then it’s 130 miles, a straight shot west on Interstate 94 — two hours of driving if you follow the speed limit, which nobody does. As Michael and I made our way back to Bismarck, we slowed down and pulled off the highway at exit 72, beneath a towering steel sculpture of geese in flight. A ribbon of empty road stretches south from the sculpture, through farm fields and prairie toward the tiny farming town of Regent. This is the Enchanted Highway, 32 miles in length, and one of the great folk art attractions in the United States. Along it stand monumental scrap-steel sculptures by a self-taught local artist named Gary Greff, who has been working on them since 1989.
About halfway down, we pulled into a dusty lot to look at one of Greff’s creations, “Grasshoppers in the Field.” These were skyscraper-tall metal grasshoppers, yellowed green and rusted and beautiful, standing on freshly mowed grass. I found them breathtaking. I felt shy about saying that to Michael, who was an art critic before he covered architecture. Instead I asked him what he thought of the work. Michael smiled broadly. “Pretty neat,” he said, and together we laughed again below the wide-open sky. Read Michael’s review of the library here.
Last night in England’s pubs, glory turned to horror, then heartbreak. The national team was eliminated from a World Cup once again, conceding two goals in the final minutes against Argentina. In a way, England’s fans were expecting to fall short — it’s all they’ve known since their only World Cup victory in 1966. But every four years they still chant the same anthem: “It’s coming home.”
What’s next? Argentina will play Spain on Sunday with a chance to become the first country in 64 years to win back-to-back men’s World Cups. It will be a something of a peculiar reunion for Argentina’s national hero, Lionel Messi, and Spain’s teenage sensation, Lamine Yamal. In 2007, when Messi was a rising star, he gave a bath to a 5-month-old Yamal for a charity calendar. Read the remarkable back story.
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Mara Gay spoke to residents in New York’s Hudson Valley about the midterms. One concern came up time and again: the cost of living. Click the video above to watch. How worried should you be about the Cyclospora stomach bug? Not very, Emily Oster argues. Here’s why. Deeply reported journalism needs your support. The Times relies on subscribers to help fund our mission. Become a subscriber today.
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