The New Museum is on an inner-kid-friendly roll this year, first with worms and now with a slide. A 102-foot-long plastic tube, to be precise, connecting the fourth floor of the SANAA-designed museum to the second. Visitors can do more than touch the Carsten Höller artwork-they can suit up in helmets and pads and take the three-story slide for spin.

To celebrate its Independence Day, Ukraine yesterday officially opened the first, and most likely only, nuclear missile museum in the world there, the Pervomaisk Strategic Missile Forces Museum. Visitors can check out intercontinental ballistic missiles like "Satan" and "Sandal", as well as have a look around original bunkers. In the ITN video tour above, you also see a Soviet shitter that was used when the present day museum site was an active nuke silo. I'd go.

Egyptian state television has been blasting reports about the looting and other mayhem caused by crazy chaotic protesters with no sense of decency. They vandalized ancient artifacts and released prisoners, these monsters. But how many of them are secret police?

Three years ago the National Archives took control of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and an extensive new Watergate exhibit was due to open on July 1st. But history revisionists from the Nixon Foundation are trying to whitewash it.

Prior to the World Cup, officials in South Africa were bracing for an influx of up to 40,000 prostitutes to handle horny soccer fans. But the need never materialized, with visitors largely choosing "cultural" activities, like art museums, instead.

Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's personal stash of pictures, letters, and office furniture will be housed in the future National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington, DC. A cop museum… cool. But will they have a taser section? [NYT]

Just in time for the demographic shifts that will turn suburbs into America's new slums, the folks in Johnson County, Kansas are planning a National Museum of Suburban History. What do you put in there?

Vanity Fair boss Graydon Carter is "hot and heavy" about opening a photography museum on Manhattan's far West Side. Geez, multiple restaurants, a magazine, a museum, and amazing fucking. Hot and heaviness pays off! [NYO]

Need vacation ideas? Take the kids to DC. See the monuments, the Smithsonian, and then Ted Bundy's serial killer VW Beetle of Doom in which multiple women's lifeless bodies were transported to their grisly fate. Then Ben's Chili Bowl. [WP]

It's official: Jeffrey Deitch is the new LA MOCA director. See Kelsey Keith's backgrounder here.

Beginning in January, the Museum of Modern Art will morph into a club—with DJs spinning house music, "specialty cocktails," a $20 cover, and everything—on the first Thursday of each month. Please mind the artwork, clubgoers. Oh, and come early: This new nightspot is only open till 8:45pm. [NewYorkology]

Tom Hoving, the former head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died this morning, reports Michael Gross, the author of Rogues' Gallery, the tell-all about the museum that was published this past spring. A "scholar, curator, commissioner of parks in New York City, bestselling author, magazine editor, raconteur, and perennial thorn in the side of the museum mafia," Hoving long had testy relations with the man he picked to succeed him, Philippe de Montebello. But the two men settled their differences in the days leading up to Hoving's death, says Gross. "The city of New York and the museum world will be far less fun without him." [MGross.com]

Most museums across the city have been battered by the economic downturn, as corporations and wealthy donors have cut back on charitable contributions and attendance has declined. One way to make up the difference: Invite people to sleep over at the museum and charge them a good deal for the privilege.

The High Line—the railroad-track park running through Manhattan's meatpacking district—will soon be more than a place for rich people fundraisers and ill-placed weddings. The Whitney museum is coming! As soon as they can raise half a billion bucks.

The junior committees at major cultural institutions around town are designed for younger—or youngish—people, right? Well, it seems some old-timers have been trying to slip by at the Museum of Modern Art, according to the WSJ's Speakeasy blog, and the museum isn't taking it anymore:

Writer Fred Bernstein took his 7-year-old twins to P.S. 1 in Queens recently to take in a little contemporary art. The problem was that he missed the tiny sign at the entrance which warned that the galleries contained "graphic imagery," which meant he had to usher his sons out of the room when he realized one of the exhibits contained "a giant photo of Katie Couric delivering the evening news with her genitalia exposed." Really? No, not really. It's Couric's head attached to Britney Spears' body. But who knew the museum was home to such a cultural treasure? If you're not working today—or you are at work, but you have a boss who appreciates the boundary-pushing nature of contemporary art—the photo can be seen in all its glory here. [NYT/City Room]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art laid off 357 people today. This will save them $10 million—$28,000 per layoff. They still have 2,200 employees. Several uncultured questions:

Meet Glen Whitney. The 40-year-old Long Island native made a fortune working at a hedge fund, but he quit his job recently so he could pursue a dream he's been nursing for years. (Although the article doesn't indicate where he worked, it was Jim Simons's nerd-factory, Renaissance Technologies.) Whitney's lifelong—and as-of-yet unrealized—goal? He's hoping to open a math museum in the middle of Manhattan. Can't you just feel the excitement?

[Artist Damien Hirst's "In this terrible Moment we are victims clinging helplessly to an environment that refuses to acknowledge the soul" on display at a soon-to-open new modern art museum in Munich; image via Getty]

Our nation's finest art museums are crumbling to pieces, thanks to the global financial crisis. But more specifically, thanks to cheapskates like you.