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During his two terms from 1953 to 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly spent hours tucked away inside the teal-and-gold movie theater in the White Houses East Wing, watching more than 200 Western films. Years later, Bill Clinton used the theaterthen decked out in a very 90s combination of red and tanto view Schindlers List and Naked Gun. Even President Trump himself used the theater, now with an art-deco-inspired red-and-gold look, for a screening of Finding Dory back in 2017. Now, the historic landmark is just another part of the rubble that was once the East Wing. Since its construction more than 80 years ago, the White House theater has served as a kind of miniature window into the real lives of U.S. presidents, offering the American people a rare glimpse into moments of rest and personal time. According to Matt Lambros, a photographer whos spent years researching historic theaters and written three books on the topic, even the interior design of the theater itselfwhich was renovated multiple times over the yearsgives fresh insights both into each presidents taste and the historical context of theater aesthetics more generally. Now that the theater has been demolished by the Trump administration along with the rest of the East Wing, Lambros says a piece of theater history has been permanently lost. Here, we take a walk back through the theater’s various design eras. The theater prior to the Truman renovation, circa 1948 [Photo: Abbie Rowe/National Park Service/Harry S. Truman Library & Museum] FDR converts the Hat Box The White House theater, located in the buildings East Terrace, was created in 1942 when Franklin Roosevelt converted what was then a cloakroom, known colloquially as the Hat Box, into a viewing area. Given its history as essentially a glorified closet, the theater could seat just 40 guests. The earliest photos of the theater are exclusively black-and-white, so its difficult to get a full picture of what the room looked like in person. Two details are clear, though: Unlike the movie theater seating of today, Roosevelts guests were sitting in small, wooden seats; and, along the walls, large curtains hung from the ceiling to the floor. The curtains were likely added to block light from the domed windows that lined the original room, Lambros says. But, he notes, curtained walls were actually a trend in theaters around the time. As the stylized, ornate plasterwork and paneling inside historic theaters went out of style, the curtains became an easy way to modernize interiors. That is actually what happened in a lot of movie theaters across the country, Lambros says. You had these big ornate theaters, and instead of like, Oh, let’s paint them a different color, during the fifties and sixties, they were like, Let’s just put curtains up over it. The theater during the Truman renovation, 1950 [Photo: Abbie Rowe/National Park Service/Harry S. Truman Library & Museum] Trumans rococo revival refresh Harry Trumans presidency appears to be the first time the theater was renovated. The old carpeting was removed, revealing tiled flooring; gold sconces with candlestick lighting were added to the walls; and a row of plush, wide chairs lined the front of the theater. The whole space used an almost rococo-esque palette of gold and blue, including gold curtains, which remained lining the walls. This look would stay in place for several decades. According to logs kept by White House projectionist Paul Fisher, who held the post for seven different presidents, it was in this version of the room where Eisenhower watched Gary Coopers High Noon on repeat, and where John F. Kennedy viewed the film From Russia With Love the day before he was assassinated in 1963. This iteration of the theater also played host to hundreds of screenings held by Jimmy Carter, who watched more than 400 movies during his terma presidential record. [Photo: Jack E. Boucher/United States Library of Congress] Clintons 90-era living room In the early 90s, the theater got a renovation that traded its former color scheme for a combination of orange carpet, tan seating, and red accented curtains. The total effect was something akin to a grandmas living room. President Bill Clinton in 1994 [Photo: Dirck Halstead/Getty Images] It was really ugly, Lambros says. But that kind of humanizes it. Thats one thing I really like about the history of this theater, is that you really get insight into each president. Bushs historic theater homage The theaters final renovation came courtesy of First Lady Laura Bush in the early 2000s, who used the opportunity to pay homage to historic theater aesthetics. Her version of the screening room was completely decked out in red and gold, from the carpet to the chairs and walls. The curtains were finally removed and replaced with a repeated, golden art deco motifsimilar to the kind of decorations that wouldve been covered up in local theaters throughout the mid-20th century. From top: President George W. Bush in the theater in 2002 and 2006 [Photos: Eric Draper/White House/Getty Images] According to Lambros, the modern association of a red and gold palette with movie theaters actually traces all the way back to an interior designer named Anne Dornan, whose work in the 1920s helped establish theater design. She had very specific ideas of what certain color palettes should be used in certain theaters depending on their locations, Lambros says. She thought that major metropolitan downtown area theaters were reds and golds, and she came up with something called the Theater Decorator’s Color Chart. Laura Bushs design nods to that history, he says, while adding art-deco-style touches that werent there before, more in line with theaters like the Paramount in Oakland than the original design ever was. President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan in 1986 [Photo: Reagan Library] A piece of history no more For Lambros, the White House theater was one of the reasons that he developed an early interest in historic theaters in general. As a kid, he remembers, he was fascinated by the idea that the president might be watching the same film as him from inside the White House. First lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama in 2009 [Photo: Pete Souza/White House Flickr] It was a connection point between the president and the American people, Lambros says. There are photos of the presidents and their children and grandchildren sitting in the theater watching TV or watching movies, and we all can relate to that. It’s a piece of history that humanized the president, and it was erased.
Category:
E-Commerce
Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong. Today, we are at a similar juncture, and there are worrying parallels to the 1920s, including paradigm-shifting technologies, a revolt against immigration, globalism, income inequality, and even a global pandemic. Now, like then, the choices we make will shape our future for decades to come. We need those who create the future to be rooted in the world we live in. Theyre not. Building for a rational universe In the 1920s, a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna, much like many of the Silicon Valley digerati today, became enamored with the engineering mindset. By this time, the technologies like the ones that Morgan invested in had begun to reshape the world. Much like Descartes, three centuries before, they thought that logic and rationality should rule human affairs. Their patron saint was Ludwig Wittgenstein, and their bible was his Tractatus, which described a world made up of atomic facts that could be combined to create states of affairs. He concluded, famously, that Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent, meaning that whatever could not be expressed in a logical form must be disregarded. The intellectuals branded their movement logical positivism and based it on the verification principle. Only verifiable propositions would be taken as meaningful. All other statements would be treated as silly talk and gobbledygook. Essentially, if it didnt fit in an algorithm, for all practical purposes, it didnt exist. Unfortunately, and again much like Silicon Valley denizens of today, the exuberant confidence of the logical positivists belied serious trouble beneath the surface. In fact, while the intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna were trying to put the social sciences on a more logical footing, logic itself was undergoing a foundational crisis that threatened the entire positivist project. At the root of the crisis was something called Russells Paradox, which created strange, self-contradictory statements, such as The barber shaves every man in town who does not shave himself. Assume such a barber exists and youre tied in a knot. It seemed like a small technical wrinkle, but it was a crack in the foundation that demanded repair. Broken logic David Hilbert, one of the most prominent mathematicians of the day, proposed a program to solve the foundational crisis. It rested on three pillars. First, mathematics needed to be shown to be complete in that every statement could be shown to be true or false. Second, mathematics needed to be shown to be consistent, no contradictions or paradoxes allowed. Finally, all statements need to be computable, meaning they yielded a clear answer. Hilbert and his colleagues received an answer sooner than most had expected. In 1931, just 11 years after Hilbert laid out his program, 25-year-old Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. The result shocked the mathematical world. Gödel showed that any sufficiently powerful logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both. Put more simply, Gödel proved that every formal system will eventually break down. It will contain true statements that cannot be proved within the system itself. Logic would remain permanently limited, and the positivists hopes were dashed. You cant engineer a society based on a logical system that is itself inherently incomplete. For better or worse, the world would remain a messy place. Yet the implications of the downfall of logic turned out to be far different, and far more strange, than anyone had expected. In 1936, building on Gödels proof, Alan Turing published his own paper on Hilberts computability problem. Much like the Austrian, he found that all problems are not computable, but with a silver lining. As part of his proof, he included a description of a simple machine that could compute every computable number. Ironically, Turings machine would usher in a new era of digital computing. These machines, constructed on the basis that they would all eventually crash, have proven to be incredibly useful, as long as we accept them for what they areflawed machines. As it turns out, to solve big, important problems, we often need to discard our illusions first. Building dwelling thinking Underlying the positivist project was the rationalist assumption that we could overcome the flaws of human nature with pristine, faultless logic. Yet just the opposite happened. The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of ideologies that claimed to be more scientific, only to see the world descend into an abyss of war and genocide. In the aftermath, amidst the rubble and horror, the world needed to be rebuilt. That, in turn, demanded some thought about how and in what image. It was in this period that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote his essay, Building Dwelling Thinking, in which he argued that to build for the world you need to know what it means to live in it: Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both building and thinking belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice. There is a fundamental difference between something designed for the way people actually live and dwell, and something designed to serve an abstract ideal. You feel it when trying to navigate an AI-powered customer service experience, or a self-service menu at an airport bar. When I lived in Moscow in 2003 and 2004, I was struck by the constant reminders that the city wasnt designed for living, but for something else. Theres just something dehumanizing about a world built solely for thinking and detached from dwelling. Thats probably why companies like Apple, Pixar, and Patagonia, that are able to harmonize building, dwelling, and thinking so deeply and consistently, win such devotion, because something that feels built for us validates us in a profound human way. Careless people In Careless People, former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams describes the Silicon Valley executives she worked with as so wealthy and powerful that they had grown out of touch with many of the worlds realities. At one point, during discussion about how much to charge for internet service for refugees, she describes a senior leaders surprise with the realization that the inhabitants of refugee camps dont have jobs. Today, we increasingly live in the world of the visceral abstract, where the technologies that shape our lives are deeply rooted in concepts, such as quantum mechanics and natural selection, that cant be experienced directly. This is especially true for the next generation of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing. When you design for the physical world by, say, building a bridge, there is natural feedback if the building and thinking are out of harmony with dwelling. People can get to where they want to go or they cant. The path is smooth or bumpy. The view is beautiful, or it is ugly. We notice flaws, if not immediately, then eventually. But they come to light and can be corrected. But in the world of the visceral abstract, things arent so concrete. Nation states can manipulate us on social media, our chatbots can shift our psychology and our genomes can be engineered to interact with our environment in new and different ways, without us being aware of it. As technologies grow more powerful, the potential for good and evil multiply. This requires us to be not only careful, but connectedto not only think and build, but to dwell. We need to be suspicious of those who sell us visions of flawless logic; those visions are not only incomplete, they are inhuman. At some point, something has got to break.
Category:
E-Commerce
Step outside your front door on any given day, and say goodbye to money without even trying. Just commuting into the office now sets workers back a whopping $55 a day, data suggests. Thanks to the workforce-wide return-to-office push, many workers are back in the office at least a couple of times a week. With it come the coffee runs, desk salads, and after-work drinks that can quickly add up. Videoconferencing company Owl Labs has done the math and broken down the real cost of physically going into work. When in the office, in-person and hybrid workers spend an average of $55 a day, according to the 2025 State of Hybrid Work report: $15 on commuting, $18 on lunch, $13 on breakfast and coffee and $9 on parking. For those with pets, factor in an additional $10 a day for dog walkers or pet sitters. The total cost dropped from $61 in 2024, but is still up from $51 in 2023. For remote workers, who tend to make meals at home and only need to commute from their bed to their desk, their daily costs are considerably lower, averaging just $18 a day at home. This is also down slightly from $19 in 2024, but up from $15 in 2023. These numbers are depressing. Theyre frustrating. But theyre not surprising. Daily commutes to the office can be both costly and time-consuming, given the elevated price of gas and fare hikes. These days, a large coffee costs the best part of $10 in major cities after accounting for tax and tip, while a limp salad can easily set you back $20. Yes, of course you can bring lunch in with you but who wants to eat last nights leftovers three days in a row? Hybrid workers, on the other hand, save an average of $37 when working from home. Given the price gap, its unsurprising workers are willing to quit their jobs for more flexible work, with 17% quitting in the past year because of changes to their working arrangements. Owl Labs’ findings on the costs of in-person work come as companies including Amazon, Dell, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, are doubling down on RTO at least three (if not all five) days a week for their workforce. At the same time, workers have been hit where it hurts in the wallet) by years of inflation, rising cost of living, and stagnating wages. As companies plan 2026 budgets and RTO policies, balancing in-office expectations with cost support will be key to keeping employees engaged and loyal, Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs, told Fast Company. In fact, 92% of workers said the right incentives could convince them to return to the office; one-third want commuting or parking covered, and another third want free food and drinks. They say theres no such thing as a free lunch. But itd go a long way for workers who have to spend money to simply show up to work.
Category:
E-Commerce
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