Good morning. Spring cleaning clears out space in our homes and heads. How will we fill it?

Spring fling

	By Melissa Kirsch

It’s the time of year when we become reacquainted with what’s been hiding out in the back of the closet. The weather’s turning, necessitating an unearthing, a rediscovery of clothes that have been hanging there silently, awaiting their turn. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, at the back end of May, there are gradually — almost begrudgingly — more warm days than cool ones. One day soon you’ll hang up your coat for the last time and won’t think about it again until fall.

I’ve been taking bags of clothes to the thrift store, stuff that I’ve hung onto for too long, that’s been occupying hangers and drawer space and head space. It feels good to part with things, to get that real estate back in both my apartment and my brain. No longer must I have a conversation with that green jacket every time I open the hall closet, no longer is it part of the consideration set. Get rid of enough old things and you can almost see your life a little more clearly. You think those old polo shirts are just sitting there, not harming anyone, but once they’re gone, there’s just less to contemplate.

My friend Minju told me she was cleaning out her closet recently and happened upon that big box of loose snapshots anyone who came of age before digital cameras has hiding in the recesses of their storage nook. She pulled the box down from the shelf and began going through them, photos of her as a child, in high school and college, old pictures of her family. She’d always planned to “do something” with the pictures, as we all do, but what? Put them in an album? Digitize them so they’ll be captured on our devices with the rest of our cloud-contained archives? Deciding she wanted to keep the photos close at hand so she’d actually look at them, Minju selected a bunch to put in a basket in her living room. Now, when she’s sitting on the couch, instead of scrolling on her phone, she might pick up the stack of photos. When visitors come over, they might flip through them.

Spring cleaning airs things out, replaces stacks of rarely worn sweaters with room to maneuver. It feels good to get rid of things, but it also feels good to purposefully decide what to fill the space with. What else are we storing in closets and crawl spaces, out of sight and mind, that we’d like to have present in our everyday lives? The old pictures, the love letters, the postcards and birthday cards and childhood artwork and binders full of mix CDs, maybe shoeboxes full of mix tapes. All those things we saved to do something with someday. What might we do with them now?

Trump Administration

Other Big Stories

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, says she wants to end the Trump administration’s standoff with Harvard.

The government accidentally sent the university an ultimatum last month: It had to make a raft of changes — enforcing political neutrality in its classrooms and syllabuses, for instance — or forfeit government support. Harvard sued, and the government has canceled billions in research grants. I sat down with McMahon in her office yesterday and asked how she could patch things up and what else she wants to achieve. Read about the interview here. Below is one exchange, condensed and edited for clarity. — Michael C. Bender

Are we witnessing a divorce between Harvard and the federal government?

No, that’s definitely not the goal. The goal is to … make sure [students] have the right skills that they need.

The government has a half-dozen investigations of Harvard. Is there anything it could do to reopen negotiations?

The first step would be: Let’s sit down and have a conversation. Let’s talk.

Has the administration asked for that?

It’s a little bit hard to have open negotiations when we’ve got a lawsuit pending. When you’re sitting and talking, do you have to have all your lawyers present?

Has the push against Harvard been a success? Is the administration winning here?

We did see the head of Middle Eastern Studies changed. … And I think that [Harvard President Alan Garber] is saying, We are moving in the directions that you want us to move in.

He has made some changes around student discipline and managing protests.

Yeah, and all that is good. And I think we have forced their hand to do that, because they weren’t doing it before. And so I think we have forced other universities to see that the president was serious with what he said.

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	By Desiree Ibekwe