TIME

Lonnie G. Bunch III

The 14th secretary of the Smithsonian on his new job, the value of pandas and how to make the past personal

You’ve said you can tell a lot about a place by what it deems worth preserving. What does the Smithsonian say about America? When I started in ’89 at [the National Museum of] American History, the collections reflected a 1950s interpretation of America—great men or women. Over the past 30 years, the Smithsonian has made strides to making sure the

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from TIME

TIME3 min read
Milestones
When King Charles III bestowed new honors on his family members on April 23, St. George’s Day, the batch of titles sounded as grand as can be: his son William, the Prince of Wales, became Great Master of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath; Charles
TIME12 min read
Holding Court
At the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., maybe the most prestigious nonmajor tournament on the global tennis tour, players conduct their warm-up routines on a patch of grass outside the stadium. Some toss medicine balls to their trainers, whi
TIME2 min read
A Man In Full, Adapted And Redacted
Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is a massive book, in more ways than one. The 742-page social novel about a swaggering Atlanta real estate mogul, which took Wolfe over a decade to write, sold a jaw-dropping 1.4 million hardcover copies after its publicatio

Related Books & Audiobooks