By JACK DURA

MEDORA, N.D. (AP) — The day his young wife and mother died, Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his diary that “the light has gone out of my life,” and it was only through extended trips to the isolated Dakota Territory in the 1880s that he regained “the romance” of living.

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A library examining the country’s 26th president will open next summer in the North Dakota landscape remarkably similar to what Roosevelt would have experienced: far from any city and surrounded by rugged hills beneath a vast sky.

The isolation that was so appealing to Roosevelt remains today, and it raises a question.

How many people will visit a museum so distant from the rest of America?

“I think that’s a calculated risk that is being taken, and I actually think it’s a good one,” said Clay Jenkinson, a public humanities scholar and Roosevelt author who believes the area’s beauty will help draw visitors.

‘Library is the landscape’

The nearly 100,000-square-foot facility near Medora, North Dakota, is planned to open July 4, 2026, America’s 250th anniversary. All living presidents have been invited.

Library Foundation CEO Ed O’Keefe said he wants the library to be where “kids drag their parents,” a setting for picnics, weddings and even presidential debates.

The view atop the roof of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library shows the rugged Badlands landscape Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025, near Medora, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

Library boosters have a $450 million fundraising goal, with $344 million in cash and pledges so far, including from oil executive Harold Hamm and Walmart heir Rob Walton and his wife, Melani. Construction, design and related costs alone are pegged at $276 million. Other costs include millions for developing exhibits and digitizing archives.

The library rises from the flat, grassy top of a butte across a highway from Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which had more than 732,000 visits last year. A path leads onto the library’s sloping roof planted with grasses and flowers. Inside, enormous rammed-earth walls of layered colors represent the dramatic Badlands.

“This is a purposeful place. We like to say that the library is the landscape,” O’Keefe said.

Dakota days

Roosevelt came to the Badlands to hunt bison in 1883. He invested in a ranching operation and returned multiple times over several years following the deaths of his wife and mother.

Stories of his adventures live on, from riding with cowboys to knocking out a bully in a bar and apprehending three boat thieves.

In an Independence Day speech in Dickinson, Roosevelt gave his famous “I like big things” oration, which more or less was the beginning of his speaking career, said William Hansard, public historian at Dickinson State University’s Theodore Roosevelt Center.

Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation CEO Ed O’Keefe gestures to a model of the library and surrounding landscape at the library’s office in Medora, N.D., Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

“He goes on to talk about how all of the material prosperity that America has means nothing if it’s not backed up by morals and virtues. … All these big things in the world don’t matter if Americans don’t have good character to use them and to use them well and correctly,” Hansard said.

Roosevelt’s time in Dakota largely ended after cattle losses in the terrible winter of 1886-87. He later said he never would have been president were it not for his time in North Dakota.

Roosevelt is a favorite president of people across the political spectrum, and his use of executive power — such as conserving public lands and building the Panama Canal — has shaped the modern presidency.

“Roosevelt will frequently do things that he believes are morally and legally right, and let Congress debate it later,” Hansard said. “He rules very, very much by executive order, and again, this is something that’s been a huge debate over the past several presidencies on both sides of the aisle.”

‘Calculated risk’

The Roosevelt library might be the loneliest presidential center in the country. Medora has about 160 residents, and is hours away by car from North Dakota’s largest cities of Bismarck and Fargo.

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is shown under construction Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025, near Medora, N.D. (AP Photo/Jack Dura)

The Obama Presidential Center is going up on Chicago’s South Side. Florida Republican officials recently gifted nearly 3 acres of prime real estate in downtown Miami for President Donald Trump’s presidential library. Other presidential libraries include locations in Atlanta, Boston and Dallas.

Library boosters are hoping tourists visiting Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone and Theodore Roosevelt National Park will add the library to their itinerary.

But there’s no question North Dakota’s winters can be brutal with subzero temperatures and blizzards that close highways and make travel nearly impossible.

Still, Roosevelt admirers note that earlier attempts to create Roosevelt libraries in other places fell short, and it was in North Dakota where the idea really took root.

“We North Dakotans who justly feel that we created Theodore Roosevelt, that he became the Theodore Roosevelt of American greatness and memory during his time here in North Dakota, we feel that it would be very appropriate to have a presidential library in the heart of the Badlands,” Jenkinson said.

And beyond hardy winter travelers, O’Keefe said, library planners want to bring thousands of eighth graders from a five-state area to the library outside of summer, envisioning a “night at the museum” program.

“It’s not going to be as busy as the summer, but that’s the magic of it. You get a little more of the Badlands to yourself,” O’Keefe said.

‘Humanize’ Roosevelt

O’Keefe said the facility will “humanize, not lionize” Theodore Roosevelt.

“We’re not going to shy away from the controversies and things that, perhaps if this library had been built 125 years ago, wouldn’t have been mentioned,” O’Keefe said.

It would be a travesty to portray Roosevelt only as a wholly good figure, said Jenkinson, who called him a man of his times, a bully, an imperialist and perhaps a warmonger.

He invited Black leader Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. But he discharged “without honor” an entire regiment of 167 Black soldiers without due process, in connection with a shooting in a Texas town. Roosevelt encouraged photographer Edward S. Curtis in his photography of Native peoples, and some Native Americans were among Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

“But he also believed that Anglo-Saxon white America had a right and even a duty to dispossess Native peoples and install what he took to be a superior civilization. There was no ambiguity about that,” Jenkinson said.

Kermit Roosevelt said he hopes the library helps people understand the legacy of his great-great-grandfather.

“I really do think Theodore Roosevelt is important for us now because of his ability to appeal to people across the political spectrum and, in our polarized times, maybe bring people together and give them a sense of what it means to be American,” he said.

On another night, Alienated Majesty Books near the University of Texas at Austin campus might host a conversation with a novelist or a poetry open mic. But on this Saturday, the shelves and tables holding new releases have been pushed to the side, opening up the large polished cement floor. A drum kit sits in the corner, and an electric guitar leans against a microphone stand. When a three-man band takes the makeshift stage, the crowd that had been browsing the shelves turns its attention forward. The singers take turns screaming, “Check,” into the microphones, filling the previously sedate bookshop with the first vibrations of a concert.

The store—which sells books from small and indie publishers, plus works in translation, comics, and poetry—has developed a reputation over the past year for hosting bands from more-obscure musical subgenres: shoegaze, noise, hardcore punk. It’s hosted so many shows of a certain sort that the shop is now known among Austin’s underground music scene as “the screamo bookstore.” 

Screamo materialized as a subgenre of emo music in the 1990s, distinct for its experimental nature and—as the name suggests—screamed vocals. The genre is defined by dissonance, and the atypical concert setting continues that tradition. The bookstore’s shelves hold the collected works of Karl Marx, a history of the Black Panther Party, a novel exploring fatherhood and masculinity. The lyrics screamed in the store sometimes echo the same ideas—the genre has been a medium not just for emotional introspection but for political expression.

Bands sell merchandise and music at tables in the back of the store. (Michelle Pitcher)

When the first band, Rose Ceremony, starts to play, the sound resonates through the concrete floor. The energy from the feverish drumming, wailing guitars, and piercing vocals is enough to make my teeth rattle.

Everyone here is young. Teen boys wearing ski caps despite the July heat lounge on a couch; young girls with intricate makeup group together near the front of the crowd. 

I’m told the age-inclusivity is by design. In the past, there weren’t many places “baby punks” could go to hear their favorite bands play live. The bookstore’s shows are all-ages, and while some of the older members of the crowd sip Lone Star tall boys bought from the Rio Market across the street, most drink water or energy drinks. The music is rowdy, the crowd energetic, but above all, the space feels safe. 

As Rose Ceremony wraps up, one of the singers takes a moment to address the crowd: “We love it here. Respect this space.”

When the second band takes the stage, it becomes clear why the shelves and tables had been pushed to the perimeter ahead of time. As the band creates a wall of sound, members of the crowd spill into the empty space in front of the band, turning it into a mosh pit. They’re balls of limbs and energy, thrashing and bucking, nearly colliding with one another, then rushing back to the perimeter, flushed. Catharsis.

A performance at the Rio Market (Michelle Pitcher)

A tattoo artist named Lola has set up a station in front of the nonfiction section, offering a menu of designs people can select. It’s the first time she’s offered her services at the bookstore, and she, like most other people involved in the night’s logistics, is part of the close-knit emo music community in Austin. Everyone I spoke to was at most a few degrees removed from someone in a band or someone involved in Tiny Sounds Collective, one of the groups in the “DIY music scene” that make shows in atypical venues—like bookstores, highway underpasses, and houses—possible. These shows are unique for the audience and the performers, who take on responsibilities a concert venue might usually handle, like equipment setup, crowd management, and distributing everyone’s cut of the cover fees at the end of the night. 

Alienated Majesty is a relatively new DIY music space, but it’s already cemented its place. It fits easily into the existing map of unconventional venues. Between sets at the bookstore, people amble across the street to the convenience store, where another DIY concert is taking place in the store’s aisles.

People spill out into the parking lots to talk, smoke cigarettes, and meet their favorite bands, who tend to stick around after their performances. It feels as though this community—known for its love of extreme music but underappreciated for its camaraderie—has planted its flag on this small strip of Austin.

The post A Night at the Screamo Bookstore appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior adviser at the State Department and expert on Indian and South Asian affairs is accused by the Justice Department of printing out classified documents and storing more than 1,000 pages of highly sensitive government records in filing cabinets and trash bags at home.

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Ashley Tellis, who has also worked as a contractor in the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, was charged in federal court in Virginia with the unlawful retention of national defense information after FBI agents who searched his home over the weekend found what they said was a trove of records marked as classified at the secret and top secret levels.

He was ordered detained Tuesday pending a detention hearing next week. One of his lawyers, Deborah Curtis, told The Associated Press that “we look forward to the hearing, where we’ll be able to present evidence” but declined to comment further.

An FBI affidavit cites several instances over the last month in which Tellis is alleged to have printed on government computers, or asked a colleague to print, classified documents on topics including U.S. military aircraft capabilities. Surveillance video shows him on several occasions exiting the State Department and a Defense Department facility with a briefcase in which he was believed to have stashed the printed-out papers, according to court documents.

Tellis also met multiple times with Chinese government officials in recent years, according to the affidavit. Tellis arrived to one 2022 dinner with a manila folder while the Chinese officials he was meeting with entered with a gift bag, the FBI says. The affidavit says Tellis did not appear to have the manila folder in his possession when he left the restaurant, but does not accuse him of providing any classified information during his meetings with the Chinese.

Tellis is a prominent foreign policy expert with a specialty in Indian and South Asian affairs. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace lists him as a senior fellow and the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs. He also served on the White House National Security Council staff under Republican President George W. Bush.

Who’d have guessed that the place to find a killer spritz cookie recipe would be inside a cemetery?

But that’s just where Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s cookie recipe lives, etched in stone at her final resting place at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

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When archivist Rosie Grant, who was was completing an internship at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., learned about this recipe on a gravestone back in 2021, she decided to bake the cookies and share a video of the experience on her TikTok account, @ghostlyarchives. Comments poured in, and she learned that there were gravestone recipes scattered across the U.S.

So began her quest to cook the recipes and learn the stories of the people behind them — a project that eventually yielded an entire 40-recipe cookbook. Grant’s book is more than a cookbook copying over these recipes etched in stone, however. It also explores the intersections of food, legacy and memory, while providing background information and missing details to enable anyone to cook these recipes at home.

We recently caught up with her to learn more about her brand-new cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes” (Harvest, $26), which came out Oct. 7.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

“To Die For” cookbook author Rosie Grant is the creator behind @GhostlyArchive, a TikTok account she started while an intern at Congressional Cemetery. After finding and cooking a recipe she found on a tombstone, she kept discovering more recipes and made a cookbook out of the collection. (Courtesy of Jill Petracek)

Q: What inspires someone to put a recipe on their gravestone?

A: A lot of modern gravestones are very personalized. Maybe 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago, there would be one carver who would make a bunch of templated stones, and then just add someone’s name and dates. It was pretty standardized. Nowadays, it’s a blank slate that you get to fill in based on what was important to you. That might be a recipe, a music quote or even a call number to someone’s book in the library or a reference to their dogs. In a lot of cases shared in the book, these people were home cooks. They hosted the holidays. They loved food. There are a lot of central community figures, the ones who would do the volunteer event, host Christmas or Thanksgiving or make people’s special birthday treats. They used food to show love and celebrate other people.

Q: Were most of the recipe gravestones you found modern?

A: Pretty modern. The oldest one is from a gentleman, Joe Sheridan. He is attributed with inventing Irish coffee. The story goes that Joe was in Ireland, and this plane came in with a bunch of travelers. He was basically the airport chef, and it was raining. All the passengers were cold, and they asked Joe to make something to warm them up. So he made them his hangover cure, Irish coffee.

Joseph Sheridan, known for popularizing Irish coffee in the U.S., was a chef at the Foynes Airport in Ireland in the 1940s who introduced a plane full of stranded passengers to his hangover cure. Word spread to travel writer Stanton Delaplane, then the team at Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco, who worked with Sheridan to perfect the recipe. (Courtesy of Jill Petracek)

There was a travel and food writer named Stan Delaplane, who, when he went back to New York, wrote about the Irish coffee, and it became this whole thing. In San Francisco, the Buena Vista Cafe heard about it. They flew Joe to San Francisco, and he basically re-created it with the restaurant owner and with Stan. And now the Buena Vista is considered the birthplace of Irish coffee. He’s buried in Oakland, and his gravestone says he gave the gift to his world, his Irish coffee recipe. And so he doesn’t even have the recipe written on it, but I got permission from the Buena Vista Cafe to include it.

“To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes,” by Rosie Grant (Harvest, $26) showcases 40 recipes carved into gravestones, and tells the stories of the people behind them. (Courtesy of Harvest)

Q: You went and visited all of these gravestones and interviewed family members. What were some of the things you learned while doing this research?

A: The first recipe I just thought was a one-off. But it was during the pandemic, so I thought I would try to make it, because, why not?  So I cooked it, and I posted about the process, and things kind of exploded overnight. People were sending all these messages, asking lots of questions, thinking through what they would put on their gravestone if they had a recipe, or even talking about people in their lives who had passed away and the recipes that they cooked to remember them.

After I learned there were others, I made a big Google doc and map, and I started pinning where these folks are buried. I used Find a Grave, which is like the Wikipedia of gravestones and obituaries. The obituary listed out their next of kin, so from there, I would reach out to friends and family. I would send them a note. Sometimes I would just contact as many people as I could find. I would get email addresses that bounced, or in one case, I messaged this one woman on Facebook every six months for two years and later learned she’d been dead for four years.

The families have all been so lovely. It’s a fine tightrope to talk to people who have lost someone, and I wanted to be thoughtful about what they wanted. Some people just wanted to communicate via email or Instagram messenger because it hurt to talk about.

I also had to test the recipes. Usually, the first time, I would make it extremely wrong, reading it directly from the gravestone. And then I would do more research. I would meet with the families, and in some cases, cook with them. I would learn the tools that they would use.

Q: Some of the recipes were incomplete?

A: Yeah. I mean, an epitaph only has so much space. Most of these recipes are pretty simple. It’s not a lasagna or something that would take four gravestones to write out. But in some cases, the families got creative. So with Naomi, they didn’t put the instructions. They just put the ingredients to her spritz cookies. Another family had a handwritten recipe card lasered onto a woman’s gravestone, and they knew all the background details of how she would make her chicken soup. I, as a stranger, had to work with them to get the full recipe, and then that would be what ended up in the cookbook.

Q: Is it usually the person who dies or the surviving relatives who decide on the gravestone recipe?

A: It’s about half and half. In some cases, it was the relatives of the person who had passed away, trying to memorialize someone who was, in a lot of cases, larger than life and very giving. Sharing a recipe does more than just communicate, ‘She loved baking,’ or ‘She was a great host.’ It shares the tools for someone else to now partake in this tradition. It’s such an embodiment of who each of these people was.

Three of the recipes in the book are actually from women who are still alive. One is a woman named Peggy who lives in Arkansas. Her husband had passed away, and they were putting up their gravestone together, since they share a marker. On his side was his hobbies and things that he liked. Asking herself, ‘What do I want to be remembered for?’ for her side of the marker, she was like, ‘I’m really darn proud of my cookie recipe.’

When I met with her and cooked with her, all of these people showed up. I thought it would be for the novelty of some random TikToker making cookies. But they told me, ‘No, we heard Peggy’s making cookies. We drop everything when we know she’s making these cookies.’

In Ferndale, California, Christine and her husband are doing pre-planning and have already purchased and engraved their gravestones in a beautiful cemetery. His says, ‘I should have listened to my wife.’ And hers says, ‘Yeah, look where we ended up.’ Her carrot cake recipe is on the back.

Q: How has this project changed how you reflect on death?

A: My parents are both ghost tour guides. We talk about cemeteries all the time, and we love a good ghost story. But when it came to the actual death side of things, I hadn’t been aware of the death-positive movement, the idea that it’s healthy to talk about death, loss and our own mortality.

Where do you look for the people you’ve lost? There’s still so much of them with you, and it shows up in a lot of really joyful ways. For me, it’s been a very positive side to something that I personally found really scary.

Q: Anything else?

A: If anyone knows of any interesting gravestones, I’m always all ears.

Gravestone recipes from ‘To Die For’

Rosie Grant’s Clam Linguine
Joe Sheridan’s Irish Coffee
Annabell’s Snickerdoodles

Details: Follow Rosie Grant on TikTok at @ghostlyarchive and Instagram at @ghostly.archive. Her cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes” (Harvest, $26) is out Oct. 7.