Lifestyle

Mop-mop-swoosh-plop it's rug-washing day in 'Bábo'

Published

2 years ago

January 13, 2024

Mop-mop-swoosh-plop it's rug-washing day in 'Bábo'

A whole book about a bunch of kids washing rugs with their grandmother? Author Astrid Kamalyan says she’d understand if you heard that pitch and thought, “Huh?”

But — of course — it is so much more than that.

“It’s actually a book about Armenian joy and the beauty of Armenian family,” says Kamalyan. “It has so much of what made our childhoods so happy.”

In Bábo: A Tale of Armenian Rug-Washing Day, a little girl named Tato steals some cherry plums before grabbing a brush. She joins friends and siblings outside, where they soak, soap, and wash the rugs.

“We scrub. Brushes bop-bop-bop,” Kamalyan writes. “Until our hands are warm. Until our knees and toes tingle a little. Until it’s time to clear the foam. Time to slide!”

“I think it’s the most favorite activity in Armenia,” says Anait Semirdzhyan, who illustrated Bábo. Both Kamalyan and Semirdzhyan are from Armenia — they moved to the United States within three years of each other — and they both grew up washing rugs with their grandmothers.

Semirdzhyan says her grandmother would usually set it all up, and then leave her and her cousins to it. “And then she would come back and check if everything is done properly,” she says.

“There is no formal rules or ways,” Kamalyan explains. “You kind of just do it and have fun with it.”

“Swoosh. We glide. Swoosh. Droplets splash,” she writes. “We twirl. Bubbles pop-pop-pop.”

Bábo

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Kamalyan wrote Bábo in 2020, right before conflict broke out in Armenia. She says it was important to have her book illustrated by someone who shared her background. She recommended Semirdzhyan, whose work she had long admired.

Semirdzhyan was thrilled when she got the manuscript. “I never, ever expected that I will illustrate a book about my childhood,” she says. Plus, here was a story she could draw from memory — she didn’t need to research what the buildings or streets would look like, or what Armenian kids would wear. Kamalyan says she recognized so much of her own childhood in the illustrations, it was almost like they had communicated telepathically.

That balcony that Semirdzhyan based on her grandma’s house? “The balcony looks so much like my mom’s balcony,” says Kamalyan.

The gata — an Armenian pastry — on the table at the end of the story, when all the kids sit down for a treat? Kamalyan hadn’t even told Semirdzhyan about her grandma’s favorite gata recipe.

Even Semirdzhyan’s rendition of a chicken coop rang familiar to Kamalyan’s dad, who grew up in an Armenian village. “Apparently, what you have there is the classical — the right — way of doing a chicken coop,” Kamalyan says.

One thing both author and illustrator had to research in order to make this story ring true? The rugs.

“Because we never pay attention to what colors and patterns are used on the rugs,” says Semirdzhyan.

So Astrid Kamalyan met with a carpet weaving expert — and learned about pattern sizes and color combinations. One of the rugs in her story has a dragon motif — it’s red, white, and blue — a red curve weaves up and down and forms an S-shape. “If it were green, brown, and purple you would know something is a little off,” Kamalyan says she knows now, after looking at thousands of carpets.

Bábo, written by Astrid Kamalyan and illustrated by Anait Semirdzhyan

Another assist came from her grandmother — who caught one crucial omittance: in an early version of the story that Kamalyan was relaying, Tato and Bábo forgot to wash both sides of the rug.

“I felt like a five year-old girl again,” says Kamalyan. “You know, when parents say, ‘Don’t forget to wash behind your ears.’” So she added it to the book.

“‘Areg, help me turn this one over?’ Sevan asks. The pale mysterious backs of the carpets are like behind our ears. We must wash them, too.”

Anait Semirdzhyan illustrated Bábo digitally — she said the hardest part was that most of the action in this story centers around a single activity that takes place primarily in a single location. How to keep it from becoming boring?

“I realized, oh God, this is so difficult to illustrate,” Kamalyan says. “How do you show all the beauty?”

Semirdzhyan used perspective and angles. Some scenes zoom in on Tato’s feet, as she walks down stone steps to meet her grandmother. Other illustrations zoom out on a scene of the whole neighborhood chasing escaped chickens. There’s a bird’s eye view of the carpets as the kids roll them up — “Figures and patterns all shine bright — dragons, eagles, diamonds and crosses, leaves and flowers in wondrous weaves.”

After the rugs are clean, the kids roll them up and lay them on a bench. Once the water drips off, they’ll open them up to dry. Meanwhile, everyone hurries off for treats — gata, fruit, apricot pie, walnut preserves.

“What you see on the table is what I usually would eat at my grandma’s house,” says Semirdzhyan.

Even though Kamalyan has very faithfully and accurately described the process of rug-washing, she does have one word of caution for readers: Do not try this at home!

“If you have heirloom carpets, have them professionally cleaned,” Astrid Kamalyan says. “You have to be careful with the dyes and everything. You can spoil the rug.”

But if you choose to ignore this advice, at least listen to Anait Semirdzhyan.

“When the rug is soaped, it’s very slippery,” she cautions. “So be careful running on that rug.”

Lifestyle

But first, coffee: The drink that energized the American Revolution

Published

5 hours ago

July 4, 2026

Press Room

But first, coffee: The drink that energized the American Revolution

An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Hulton Archive/Getty Images

A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.

The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.

But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.

Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.

As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.

A table setting of a meal typical for working-class people in 18th and 19th-century Annapolis is displayed at Hogshead Trades Museum. A wooden table has two place settings along with plates of flat breads, small pies, large ceramic mugs and a cast iron pot situated underneath a window. Metal carafes and a green glass vase sit on the window sill.

Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed

Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.

“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.

“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”

How Coffee Influenced The Course Of History

The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.

The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.

Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.

The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.

To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.

In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.

” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.

Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.

She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”

A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”

Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.

And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.

“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”

And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”

Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas

A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.

Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images

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Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images

In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.

“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.

In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.

Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.

“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”

Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.

Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.

But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.

“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”

Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”

The cost of America’s revolutionary drink

Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.

Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.

Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.

As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.

Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.

“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”

There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.

The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.

Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.

“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”

Lifestyle

You know the Mayflower. What about the White Lion? Here’s the story of ‘Two Ships’

Published

15 hours ago

July 4, 2026

Press Room

You know the Mayflower. What about the White Lion? Here’s the story of ‘Two Ships’

Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.

Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.

As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.

To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.

In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.

The 400 Years Project Looks At Native American Identity Through The Native Lens

But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.

Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:

It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.

In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.

Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”

Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”

By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.

Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.

That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Lifestyle

A historically hot Paris Fashion Week photographed with a kid’s camera

Published

16 hours ago

July 4, 2026

Press Room

A historically hot Paris Fashion Week photographed with a kid’s camera

I took a kid’s camera to Paris Fashion Week, because was it ever really that serious? Yes and no. This men’s season happened during one of the hottest weeks in France’s recorded history, which inspired that specific brand of collective hysteria brought on by living through yet another unprecedented moment together — taking over our brains and ruining our plans to wear boots — and a grander reflection on what we were doing there and why. The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week. If the world is ending, you might as well swim in dirty water and have fun doing it, no?

As far as the shows went, there was the coastal stoner energy of Tokyo-based Auralee — brightly colored leathers and furry flip-flops — that reminded me of the low-key elegance of hanging out in Southern California. At the Rick Owens show, Rick-heads made minimal weather-restrictive tweaks to their usual uniforms — platforms, leather, ground-grazing garments — making you appreciate the beauty in that level of ascetic dedication. Louis Vuitton built a literal beach as its runway, complete with sand and a giant wave that felt like a mirage: Is this a heat-induced hallucination or yet another buzzed-about set design under men’s creative director Pharrell Williams? At the Dries Van Noten show, there was an ice-cold beer fridge and popsicles, a chic and inspired detail only rivaled by a collection that was a breath of fresh air during a week where I Googled the symptoms of heat stroke more than once. The Willy Chavarria show was air-conditioned, pumped with Xinú perfume and felt expensive. Sven Marquardt, a Berlin photographer and Berghain’s most famous bouncer, was sitting in front of me, which I took as an incredibly good omen. The painted blue feet and Oakley collab sunglasses at the Kiko Kostadinov show felt auspicious as well.

A model walks with his hands in his vest

There were conversations floating around about how apocalyptic it felt sitting at a fashion show in over 100-degree Fahrenheit weather, our backs soaked, our minds dizzied, when the industry is responsible for something like 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The cognitive dissonance contributed to the thickness in the air that week.

At the Comme des Garçons show, called “If the War Were to End..,” models danced and ran and skipped out onto the runway for the finale, soundtracked by the joyous sound of children singing “You’re So Good to Me” by the Langley Schools Music Project. In that moment, we were happy, we were clapping, we might have even been hopeful. Humans have the capacity to hold a lot — a fan in one hand while attempting not to completely melt in the front row, and a fantasy that there might still be a future where we get to wear those leopard-print Dries shoes we fell in love with on the runway.