October 23, 2017

The Problem With Museums

What follows is a fairly petty gripe, and right at the start I want to say that I understand why things are the way they are. If I were in charge of a museum, I’d run things the same way. And yet….

I’ve long had sort of a nagging grumble about the professionalization of everything. Retail. Food. Magazines. Politics. Blogs. Blah blah blah. This is wildly hypocritical of me, since I personally insist on a pretty high degree of professionalism myself, but there you have it.

For some reason, this struck me harder than usual in the museum space on this trip. They are all basically identical. You approach the ticket counter, which seems to be staffed by the exact same cadre of well-scrubbed young people as the last one. You look at the tariff board, smartly printed in Univers or Helvetica for maximum readability. Not that you really need to bother: they’re all the same. It will cost €20 per person, maybe €19 if you’re over 60. You get a little pamphlet. Your ticket is scanned. You walk through the exhibits, guided by a very well-done audio tour. Everything is explained by neatly printed signs. You exit through the inevitable gift shop, all of them basically identical except with different details on their mugs and keychains. And then you leave.

It’s all well crafted and informative. But also somehow lifeless, simply because they all look so similar. The same tickets. The same prices. The same signboards. The same inoffensive, committee-written text.

I don’t know why, but the museum where this hit me the hardest was the Cabinet War Rooms. The rooms were all there, visible though plexiglass. The furniture was neatly arranged. The mannequins were realistic. The audio tour was competently done. The path from start to end was clearly laid out.

But I ended up with no real sense of what the place was like during wartime. Maybe there’s no way to do that. But somehow I felt like a bit of a robot walking obediently from station to station.

Maybe it’s just me. Anyone else feel the same way?

ON THE OTHER HAND: Kudos to the Cabinet War Rooms for entertaining me with my favorite form of communication: charts. Lots and lots of them. That was kind of cool.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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