It seems like such a simple idea: a day to honor the women who bring life into the world. But  how do we square the ideal of celebrating and supporting mothers with the reality of how lawmakers and courts have acted to undermine maternal health and rights in the post-Dobbs era? Or make sense of all the money Americans spend annually on this one day—a purported $33.5 billion in 2024, according to the National Federation of Retailers, including $7 billion on jewelry and $3.2 billion on flowers—when so many mothers can’t afford food, housing, or health care? 

Anna Jarvis, who launched the Mother’s Day movement in 1908 in honor of her own remarkable mother, would have had very complicated feelings about what the day has become, says Katharine Lane Antolini, associate professor of American history at West Virginia Wesleyan College and author of Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day. Jarvis’s vision was childlike in its sentimentality, Antolini says: “To her, this was supposed to be the one day out of the year when you were just grateful for your mother.” But there was nothing sentimental about the way she fought to preserve that vision, whether she was battling the floral industry, Big Candy, or well-intentioned maternal health charities and the powerful people who supported them. I spoke with Antolini from her campus office in Buckhannon, West Virginia, about 40 minutes from the International Mother’s Day Shrine and Jarvis’s childhood home.

How did the idea of a day to honor mothers become such a focus of Anna Jarvis’ life?

The story of Mother’s Day really goes back to her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, who was a well-known social activist and community organizer during her time. They lived in the part of Virginia that split off during the Civil War to become West Virginia, part of the Union. Mrs. Jarvis had 13 children, only four of whom lived to adulthood. Anna, who was born in 1864, was the oldest surviving daughter. She never married or had children. She was never a mother herself. And that, I think, is an important part of her story.

In the 1850s, before Anna was born, it was very common for mothers in this part of Appalachia to die in childbirth and for babies to die. Poor sanitation was a major cause of death. Mrs. Jarvis organized what she called Mothers’ Day Work Clubs, where women would come together to educate themselves on issues of sanitation: what to do with sewage, where to put your outhouse so it wouldn’t contaminate your water supply or the milk from your cows. If there was a mini epidemic, they would help quarantine a family, bring them food, and help care for the sick. Mrs. Jarvis believed in a proactive kind of motherhood—in the book, I refer to it as “social motherhood,” where being a mother does not just mean taking care of your own children. You are caring for your community of children. By the time of the Civil War, these clubs were so well known that, according to local legend, a Union colonel asked Mrs. Jarvis if she could help the Union camps stop the outbreaks of disease that were killing so many soldiers. So, according to the story, Mrs. Jarvis organized mothers to help care for and stop the spread of diseases in the camps. 

Harry Kane has gone another season without winning a trophy. Today, Marcus tries to convince Luke and Jim that a trophyless career wouldn’t tarnish Kane’s legacy - he’s always been a romantic, has our Marcus.

Elsewhere, Luke makes the case for Sam Allardyce’s Bolton to return to the Premier League, Marcus shares his plans to stop time-wasting and Jim invents a new strange managerial version of Capture the Flag. It’s the Mailbag!

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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A 1917 drawing by Egon Schiele is at the center of a restitution case that will soon head to court in New York.

The work in question, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1917), depicts Edith Schiele with her hands folded in her lap. The drawing was made a year before both Edith and the artist, both at 28 years old, during the 1918 influenza epidemic. Portrait of the Artist’s Wife is estimated to be worth several million dollars.

The heirs of two Jewish collectors, Karl Mayländer and Heinrich Rieger, have both claimed ownership of the work. Mayländer was a textile merchant; Schiele made at least two portraits of him. Rieger was Schiele’s dentist. Both were killed by the Nazis during World War II, and their respective heirs both claim their relatives lost the work during the Holocaust.

Philanthropist and art collector Robert Owen Lehman Sr., known for heading the Lehman Brothers investment firm through the Great Depression, bought Portrait of the Artist’s Wife from the London gallery Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd. for £2,000 ($5,600) in 1964. He then gifted the piece to his son, the award-winning documentary filmmaker Robert Owen “Robin” Lehman Jr., as a Christmas present. It remained with him until 1972, when Lehman Jr. briefly lost the work during his divorce; when his ex-wife died in 2013, the work was recovered from under her bed. In 2016, Lehman Jr. gifted the work to the Robert Owen Lehman Jr. Foundation.

The trial over the work’s ownership began in Rochester, New York, on Tuesday, with testimony expected to last until the end of May. In his ruling, State Supreme Court judge Daniel J. Doyle will consider circumstantial evidence, decades-old records, and a spotty provenance. Expert witnesses are expected to weigh in, with each party presenting evidence on their behalf.

A painting by Eramus Quelliness II stolen more than four decades ago was recently returned to its owner after being spotted at a regional auction house in a southern French town.

Chatsworth House in the English town of Derbyshire had lent A Double Portrait of Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1640s) to the Towner Art Gallery for an exhibition focused on works by Anthony Van Dyck, a Flemish Baroque artist.

The oil on wood painting was taken by thieves on May 26, 1979 after a “smash and grab” raid on the gallery’s exhibition. The burglars left several original drawings by Van Dyck that had also been on display and were much more valuable. (Christie’s sold a Van Dyck drawing for $2.1 million in February.)

“Some of the priceless drawings were left and they took this which I suppose looked more expensive,” Alice Martin, head of the Devonshire collections at Chatsworth House, told The Art Newspaper, which first reported the news Friday.

The painting was originally painted in preparation for an engraving and not for display on a wall. After the theft in 1979, it was assumed lost. An art historian spotted A Double Portrait of Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony Van Dyck listed for sale in Toulon, France, and alerted the British country house.

Steve Bannon’s odds of going to prison ticked up on Friday when DC’s Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal of his 2022 conviction for contempt of Congress. But more than 18 months after a federal district court judge sentenced the former Donald Trump adviser to four months behind bars for blowing off subpoenas from the House’s January 6 committee, Bannon has not yet exhausted his legal options. 

The “War Room” host can still ask the full bench of the DC Circuit to consider his appeal, or petition the Supreme Court. Those are long shots, but a DC Circuit panel said its ruling will not take effect until a week after any further appeals are resolved. That could buy Bannon some time. He also benefits from a ruling by US District Judge Carl Nichols, who, even as he handed Bannon a stiff sentence, agreed to postpone his prison term while Bannon appealed.

Former White House adviser Peter Navarro, by contrast, is serving a four-month sentence imposed in January by US District Court Judge Amit Mehta, after Mehta declined to let Navarro remain free while he appealed. 

Bannon’s continued freedom—much like the delays in Trump’s federal prosecutions caused by the Supreme Court and the rulings of an inept Trump-appointed judge in Florida—is a frustrating reminder that the justice system often functions slowly, or not at all, for rich and politically connected defendants. The Trump and Bannon prosecutions are linked, because Bannon is doubtless trying to stave off imprisonment in the hope that Trump, who pardoned him in another case in 2021, will do so again if reelected. The Washington Post reported that Bannon’s “vociferous support” for Trump’s election fraud lies helped secure the earlier pardon. 

But Bannon, like Trump, has additional legal problems, including some that no president can fix. He faces fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy charges in New York related to the same scheme—which involved raising private funds to build a wall along the US-Mexico border—for which federal prosecutors indicted him in 2020. That case is before Juan Merchan, the same judge overseeing Trump’s ongoing trial for falsifying financial records to hide his alleged payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels. 

The website for Christie’s was taken offline by the auction house on Thursday evening after a “technology security issue” was discovered to be impacting some of its systems.

As of Friday afternoon, the website was still offline. A single webpage was available with the company’s name and a message reading, “We apologise that our website is currently offline. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible and regret any inconvenience.”

In a statement emailed to ARTnews, a spokesperson for the auction house said, “Christie’s confirms that a technology security issue has impacted some of our systems, including our website. We are taking all necessary steps to manage this matter, with the engagement of a team of additional technology experts. We regret any inconvenience to our clients and our priority is to minimize any further disruption. We will provide further updates to our clients as appropriate.”

The news was first reported by the New York Times on Friday at midday, calling the incident a “cyberattack” by hackers, though it was not clear on what that characterization was based.

The incident comes just days ahead of the May sales week in New York, a crucial period for the auctions houses and an important bellwether for the art market. On Tuesday, Christie’s will hold the Rosa de la Cruz Collection evening sale and its 20th/21st Century evening sale, which figure to be its sales of the season. One of the top lots for the latter sale is the Brice Marden diptych Event (est. $30 million–$50 million), apparently being consigned by Richard Schlagman, the enigmatic former owner of Phaidon Press.

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.

For four decades, I’ve had a recurring nightmare in which a nuclear blast occurs. The scenario is not always the same. Occasionally, the detonation is an escalation in an ongoing conventional war. More often, it’s a bolt out of the blue: I and others are on the street, and we spot incoming missiles and have but a moment to realize what is about to transpire before the warheads explode.

These dreams began, not surprisingly, when I was a reporter-editor in the 1980s for a now-defunct publication that covered arms control issues. After several years in the job, I found the task of constantly thinking about nuclear warfare psychologically burdensome and moved on—though I have dutifully maintained an interest in the subject. During my stint at that magazine, I met victims of the nuclear era, including downwinders (people suffering severe medical ailments due to exposure to radioactive contamination and nuclear fallout from nuclear tests) and survivors of the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Their tales were haunting and cautionary, descriptions of the past and foretellings of a possible and awful future. Given all this, when I visited Japan as a tourist last month, I felt compelled to go to the first of the only two cities that have experienced nuclear devastation.

On the day I visited, it was full of life and people: families, tourists, young couples, street performers. It is a testament to resilience.

Hiroshima is a wonderment. At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, on the orders of President Harry Truman, an American B-29 dropped a bomb that contained 141 pounds of uranium-235 over the center of the city. Hiroshima had been selected as a target by a committee comprising military officials and scientists from the Manhattan Project because it was an industrial center and home to a major military command—and its surrounding hills, according to the committee, would likely “produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.” The bomb detonated about 1,900 feet above ground. The blast leveled a 4.5-square-mile area and set off a firestorm that spread throughout the city. Tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated or injured that day. An estimated total of 140,000 Hiroshima residents were killed by the bombing or the ensuing radioactive fallout over the next few months. Many more died in succeeding years.

Today, 79 years later, Hiroshima, founded as a castle town in 1589, is a thriving city of 1 million people that boasts an active port and assorted industrial facilities and that is renowned for its delicious oysters. After the bombing, experts proclaimed that nothing would grow for at least 75 years in the wasteland created. Yet today the main avenue that leads to the blast site—Peace Boulevard—is lined with large leafy trees that were donated to Hiroshima from cities across Japan. And Peace Memorial Park, located where the bomb fell, is lush with flora. On the day I visited, it was full of life and people: families, tourists, young couples, street performers. It is a testament to resilience. What was once a hellscape is now a lovely spot where one can watch a Japanese troupe performing traditional Hawaiian dances alongside the Motoyasu River and eat takeout sushi beneath the iconic Atomic Bomb Dome, the only structure that was left standing in the blast zone. It was hard to reconcile the utter pleasantness of this Saturday morning with the horrific destruction that had occurred here merely a single lifetime ago.

Two climate activists smashed a part of the glass case protecting the original text of the Magna Carta, England’s historic charter of human rights, in the British Library in London on Friday. The pair, identified as Reverend Dr Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, 85, were detained by security staff. 

In a video posted to social media  by the climate group Just Stop Oil, Parfitt holds a chisel to the glass as Bruce hits the instrument with a lump hammer several times. Parfitt then brandished a banner bearing the words, “THE GOVERNMENT IS BREAKING THE LAW.” The document was not damaged according to a statement from the library.

The Magna Carta was a 13th century English treaty which established that no person, including monarchs, are above the law. Only four original copies of the treaty exist, two of which are held in the British Library, one in Salisbury Cathedral and the other in Lincoln Castle. 

Just Stop Oil actions have hit cultural institutions across Europe, as its members target famous artworks and world heritage in a bid to bring attention to the ongoing environmental collapse. 

In October 2022, two activists  glued themselves to Johannes Vermeer‘s The Girl with the Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. The following year, arrests were made at London’s National Gallery after  The Toilet of Venus by Diego Velázquez was attacked with what appeared to be emergency rescue hammers. Both paintings were reported as undamaged by their respective stewards. The protests, meanwhile, have remained divisive in the art world and greater museum-going community, though show no sign of abating. 

At the hush-money trial of former President Donald Trump in Manhattan, Stormy Daniels’ story is, in a sense, a proxy battle for the actual debate about bookkeeping: If you believe Daniels’ accounting of the affair she alleges they had, then you must find Trump—who denies any such encounter—unbelievable. If you don’t believe Daniels, then it becomes much easier to accept the defense narrative that this is all one big con.

The sexual encounter that Daniels described in precise and disturbing detail under oath this week is technically irrelevant to the questions at hand. But she is the hook for the story that no one can ignore. And with no television cameras allowed inside, people will go to great lengths to hear her out. In the courthouse, I met a man who’d shown up at 3:30 a.m. just to snag a seat in the overflow room. “It’s Stormy,” he explained. He didn’t need to say anything else.

Daniels is the star. So at Thursday’s cross-examination, the defense set out to destroy her. Susan Necheles, who is also representing Trump in two federal cases, handled the task. She spent a long time trying to get Daniels to say that her motivation for telling her story publicly was born from personal malice toward the president because of political beliefs, and a desire to make as much money as she could. Daniels’ various money-making ventures during the Trump years, we heard, included a role on the reality TV show Surreal Life and a national tour in which she appeared at strip clubs, which Necheles insisted on calling the “Making America Horny Again” tour as many times as possible. (Daniels insisted that wasn’t her slogan—and just “what a club in North Carolina called it.”)

Various exhibits that followed detailed Daniels’ merchandise deals. It was a cornucopia of bad Yankee Swap gifts: there was a comic book, Stormy Daniels Political Power; a black-and-purple #TeamStormy t-shirt; and a “Stormy Saint of Indictments” candle, which sold for $40 but which Daniels said she only received $7 per item on.

“You’re celebrating the indictment by selling things from your store,” Necheles said.

Moms for Liberty, the most prominent group in the right-wing movement against “woke” public schools, is well known for its crusades against LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and anti-racism initiatives in classrooms. Since 2021, the group, which counts 130,000 members, across 48 states, has claimed—at school board meetings, conferences, and on social media—that left-wing teachers are turning students into social justice warriors.

Those efforts—of playing politics in public schools in the name of excising politics—has proved great preparation for its leaders’ current project: Railing against what they see as an antisemitic agenda in certain public schools, even as Moms for Liberty itself reels from allegations of antisemitism in its own ranks.

Earlier this week, leaders of several public school systems testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in the latest hearing on antisemitism in America’s educational institutions. High-up officials from New York City, Berkeley, CA, and Montgomery County, Maryland defended their schools against the allegations of Republican lawmakers. Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) said they had “been accused of doing nothing and turning a blind eye” while students and teachers were “spewing Nazi propaganda” in the months since Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent siege in Gaza.

After the hearing, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice connected current concerns about antisemitic activism to one of the group’s most successful battle cries: That schools focus on left-wing politics at the expense of academics.

“Parents thought they were sending their kids to school to get an education, ‘ABCs. One, two, threes,'” Justice told the conservative news site Just the News. “And at some point, the schools started becoming factories for little activist social justice warriors.”