POSTPONEMENT: Subway succumbs to eight inches of snow!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2026

Also, goodbye Kennedy Center: True story! 

Last Friday, we never made it to the medical mission. Making a long and frigid story short, we were wrong when we assumed that it doesn't snow in the subway. 

Once they determined that no trains would be running, further chaos ensued.

As a result, we're to the mission today on a makeup assignment. We won't be posting today, not even about this essay in the Washington Post:

The grave risk of Trump’s Kennedy Center shutdown

Last fall, workers at the Kennedy Center slapped a coat of white paint over the gold-hued columns that connect its upper terrace to its plaza, apparently at the direction of the man who effectively appointed himself chair of the center’s board, President Donald Trump.

It was a seemingly small intervention from a man who fancies himself a connoisseur of architecture, but of course, it made no architectural or visual sense. Now, the all-white columns disappear against the building’s white marble cladding, and so too the lovely symbolism of the narrow, modernist metal supports, which look more like the strings of a musical instrument than the traditional, heavy stone supports of a classical structure.

Now there is grave concern from artists and patrons that the institution itself may disappear. Sunday night, Trump announced a two-year closure for renovation beginning in July, which sounds ominously like a complete rebuild of the structure. Trump added Monday that he wasn’t “ripping it down” but then went on to describe a process that could tear the structure down to its steel framing.

Given Trump’s sudden demolition of the White House’s East Wing in October, and the mix of vague promises and bombastic language in his social media post, which promises “a new and spectacular Entertainment Complex,” it certainly seems possible that the 1971 building, designed architect Edward Durrell Stone, could be partially or completely erased...

And so on from there.

The column was written by Philip Kennicott, the paper's long-time art and architecture critic. A letter expressing a similar concern—"Watch for another wrecking ball"—has been published by the New York Times. The letter comes from a former chief editor of Architecture Magazine.

Is it possible that these fears are well-founded? We don't have the slightest idea. We can tell you this:

These peculiar events will keep occurring until we're prepared to discuss what seems to be sitting there right before us. Of course, these peculiar events would almost surely continue to happen even if we did decide to have that discussion.

This is the silence we've chosen. All in all, it seems like the best we can do.