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The Culture Gabfest “And Now It’s Dead” Edition

Dan Kois — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 17:28:43 GMT

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 414 with Dan Kois, Dana Stevens, and Jessica Winter with the audio player below.

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This week on Slate Plus, the critics answer a listener question and choose books that changed the way they look at the world.

On this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest, the critics discuss the rise and fall of Gawker and the hole it will leave behind in the internet after 14 years. Next up, Kubo and the Two Strings, a stop-motion animated film from Laika Studios, has wooed film critics around the world, but will it impress the Gabfesters? Last, with lake-filled dreams and teenage nostalgia trips, the critics discuss their favorite pop culture vacations, good and bad.

Links to some of the things we discussed this week:

Adrian Chen’s piece, “Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web” in Gawker
Ashley Feinberg’s piece, “Is Donald Trump’s Hair a $60,000 Weave?” in Gawker
Gawker’s investigations into the Clinton campaign’s treatment of reporters
Very Recent History by Choire Sicha
Slate’s take on Gawker’s post about a male media exec being blackmailed by a sex worker
Slate’s roundup of Gawker’s best posts over its 14-year existence
Anomalisa
Inside Out
The Boxtrolls
Fantastic Mr. Fox
“Vacation” by the Go-Go’s
Spring Breakers
The Foreigner by Larry Shue
Mark and Mike’s road trip comic strip in Doonesbury
Doonesbury comic book Call Me When You Find America, by G. B. Trudeau
François Ozon’s Swimming Pool and Sous le Sable
Dana’s dark list: Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Deliverance
Dana’s sunny list: Roman Holiday, The Daytrippers, Y Tu Mamá También
The Remains of the Day
Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy
Jessica Winter’s novel, Break in Case of Emergency

Culture Gabfest is brought to you by Boll and Branch. For luxury bedding at a low price, go to BollandBranch.com and use promo code culture for free shipping and 20 percent off your entire order.

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Endorsements

Dan: Matthew Perpetua’s survey mixes of every year of the ’80s on Fluxblog

Jessica: You Will Know Me, by Megan Abbott

Dana: Animals Sitting on Capybaras

Outro: “Casanova” by LeVert

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Lizzie Fison.

Mom and Dad Are Fighting: Doping for Kids Edition

Allison Benedikt — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 18:03:15 GMT

Listen to Mom and Dad Are Fighting by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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In this week’s parenting podcast, Slate editors Allison Benedikt and Jessica Winter talk to Hang Up and Listen hosts Josh Levin and Mike Pesca about what the Olympics teach kids, for good and bad. Then, novelist Rumaan Alam joins the show to discuss the shameful lack of diversity in children’s literature. Plus parenting triumphs and fails, recommendations, and a listener call about a judgmental friend without kids.

This week on Slate Plus, Slate senior editor Laura Bennett reveals a very charming daughter triumph in how she deals with her wonderful mother while planning a wedding.

Items discussed on the show:

Rumaan Alam’s piece on the beauty of The Snowy Day
Feast for 10 by Cathryn Falwell
Olu’s Dream by Shane Evans
Not Norman by Kelly Bennett with illustrations by Noah Jones
Raising Dragons by Jerdine Nolen with illustrations by Elise Primavera
Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña

Jessica recommends giving away, NOT trying to sell, old kids’ clothes.

Allison recommends a lovely old children’s book about a friendship between a real mouse and a toy mouse, Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse, by Leo Lionni.

This week’s advertiser is Green Chef.

Follow us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to tell us what you thought of today’s show and give us ideas for what we should talk about in future episodes. Got questions that you’d like us to answer? Call and leave us a message at 424-255-7833, especially since we will be taking multiple calls on our next episode.

Podcast produced by Efim Shapiro.

Balance Beam Mounts Used to Be Beautiful and Daring. What Happened?

Jessica Winter — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 17:08:00 GMT

I miss Svetlana Khorkina. I miss her shade-throwing and dagger glares and how she was like a foot taller than everyone she was competing against. I miss her screaming with the fury of a silent-screen siren at officials during the 2000 Sydney Games when they set the vault two inches too low. And I miss that she could somehow manage to do the following when she mounted the balance beam at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

Look at that. It’s like seeing a giraffe perfectly execute the 32 fouettés in Swan Lake. And that’s how her beam routine starts. She still has to do all this other stuff!

Alas, if my beloved Khorkina were competing today, she would likely just hoist herself onto the beam—maybe into a split, but maybe not!—just as Simone Biles and Gabby Douglas and Madison Kocian are accustomed to doing. Or maybe she would hop primly off the springboard onto the beam, Aly Raisman–style.

She definitely would not use her head and neck to roll onto the beam and then grip it with one foot like Spider-Man, a legit Cirque du Soleil move favored by Romania’s gold medalist Daniela Silivas in 1988 in Seoul, where she won gold.

Or do a roundoff back handspring in order somehow to land on a 3.9-inch block while backward and flying through the air like the Unified Team’s Tatiana Gutsu, all-around women’s champ at the 1992 Barcelona Games.

Or really anything approaching the crazy shit in the fan compilation titled “The Mount That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” Check out that one-armed mount around 0:48.

So what happened to the insanely difficult balance beam mount? Simple: There’s no competitive incentive for it. The sport’s current Code of Points does not specify a minimum difficulty requirement for the mount. In section 12.2, the code specifies: “The maximum 8 highest difficulties including the dismount are counted for DV [difficulty value].” Nowhere does it say that the mount has to be one of those eight. Though the code certainly doesn’t punish a big splashy mount, the pragmatic gymnast will opt to play it safe when first finding her footing on the treacherous apparatus, reducing her odds of snuffing out her routine with a costly mistake. That’s exactly what happened to the United States’ Alicia Sacramone at the 2008 Beijing Games.

In Perfect 10: The UGA GymDogs and the Rise of Women’s College Gymnastics in America, former University of Georgia coach Suzanne Yoculan writes, “From the very beginning, I believed in the least amount of difficulty possible on balance beam. No difficult mount.” Yoculan adds that longtime USA gymnastics overlord Martha Karolyi shared her safe-mount mentality. “She wanted them to start out easy. … We would get our difficulty in the dismount. That’s the last thing the judge sees, and that’s what he or she remembers.”

Ironically, one of the motivations behind overhauling the Code of Points was to reward underscored gymnasts—China’s Kui Yuanyuan, for one—who would perform fiendishly difficult feats only to lose out to gymnasts with easier but more “perfect” routines. And yet, the high-risk mount and some of the thrilling connections between elements that were hallmarks of Kui’s beam routine from the 1996 games are less valued now than they were in the days of the perfect 10. To the naked eye, is there a beam routine at the Rio Olympics as complex and stunning as the one Kui performed in Atlanta? And can you imagine what kinds of gravity-destroying moves Simone Biles would dream up if a difficult mount counted for more?

The Code of Points is destined to be permanently controversial—its exact algorithm will never perfectly please anyone. But rejiggering it to make the mount approach as important as the dismount in weighing a gymnast’s score would infuse the event with greater suspense and danger and breathtaking beauty. That’s something most right-thinking gymnastics fans could get behind.

Update, Aug. 16: Sanne Wevers of the Netherlands won Rio gold in the individual balance beam competition with a full-twisting back-handspring mount! The insanely difficult balance beam mount is ALIVE. Here is Wevers’ routine from this year’s Dutch nationals.

The Karolyis’ Tainted Glory

Jessica Winter — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 19:55:21 GMT

Martha Karolyi is taking her victory lap. At age 73, after a half-century of coaching world-class gymnasts in her native Romania and in the U.S., she has said that Rio de Janeiro will be her last Olympic Games. In Karolyi’s honor, her phenomenal women’s team—led by Simone Biles, the newly crowned individual all-around gold medalist and possibly the greatest gymnast of all time—has dubbed itself “Final Five.” A borderline hagiographic New York Times tribute on Tuesday hailed Karolyi as “the woman who lifted U.S. gymnastics” alongside her husband and fellow coach, Bela. “He was the boisterous cheerleader, the emotional one,” the Times wrote. “She was the quiet technician who knew exactly how to tweak a gymnast to make her great.”

The Karolyis undoubtedly lifted U.S. gymnastics. Bela was the personal coach of such Olympic champions as Mary Lou Retton, who in 1984 won the U.S.’s first individual all-around gold, and Dominique Moceanu and Kerri Strug of 1996’s “Magnificent Seven.” And since 2001, when Martha took over the role of national team coordinator from her husband after his tumultuous two-year run, American women have dominated world-class competition much in the way that Soviet women did in the second half of the 20^th century.

But as Biles and company give Martha Karolyi a last blaze of glory, it’s worth giving a spotlight, too, to the many gymnasts who have said they were psychologically and physically tormented under the Karolyis’ tutelage. Perhaps some of the harsher methods the Karolyis employed “lifted gymnastics.” And perhaps some of them could be likened to child abuse.

Trudi Kollar, who was known as Emilia Eberle when she won two silver medals at the 1976 Montreal Games, was just 12 when she joined Romania’s national team under Bela and Martha Karolyi’s leadership; her teammates included the Karolyis’ first superstar, Nadia Comaneci. In 2008, Kollar told KCRA Sacramento that Bela regularly beat her for making mistakes during practice. “You know, he has huge hands, and it hurts,” Kollar said. “I had blood coming out of my body. I had my ears—my skin ripped behind my ears.” As for Martha, Kollar said, “Occasionally, she scratched us. She stuck her fingernails in the back of our necks and she shook us.” KCRA corroborated Kollar’s story with former Romanian team choreographer Geza Pozsar (“Of course I saw the beatings and abuse,” he said) and a team nurse, Joanna Voss, who confirmed, “The girls were verbally and physically abused.”

After Kollar’s allegations emerged, USA Gymnastics issued a statement indicating it had never received a formal complaint against either of the Karolyis. On Nov. 19, 2008, the Associated Press reported that “in an interview with Romanian daily Cotidianul, Bela Karolyi did not deny Kollar's allegations, but said he feels no guilt for anything he did.” ”Some of the girls have bad memories. Perhaps others say it was the best time of their lives," Karolyi reportedly told the Romanian publication.

Rodica Dunca, who at age 15 competed for Romania at the 1980 Moscow Games, gave a startling 2002 interview to ProSport about life at the Karolyis’ Deva, Romania, training center. (The interview, not available online, was later unearthed by the gymnastics blog Triple Full.) “Some days we were beaten until the blood streamed out of our noses,” Dunca said. “Hunger was our eternal enemy.” Breakfast, she recalled, consisted of “one slice of salami, two nuts, and a glass of milk. In the evening we’d get the same menu, only without the nuts.” The gymnasts’ water intake was severely restricted, too, Dunca said, with desperate gymnasts driven to drinking toilet water. (The coaches cracked down on this practice by making the athletes use the bathroom with the door open.) Dunca also alleged that the gymnasts were given injections to prevent them from menstruating and said they were forced to take dozens of unidentified but speedlike pills per day.

Ecaterina Szabo, who won four golds and a silver at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, said in a Romanian-language interview translated by Triple Full, “I’ll never forget the slaps in the face and the beatings I got from Bela Karolyi.”

Betty Okino, who competed for the U.S. team in the 1992 Barcelona Games, estimated in Joan Ryan’s 1995 exposé Little Girls in Pretty Boxes that she and other Karolyi gymnasts consumed fewer than 1,000 calories per day in the weeks ahead of the games, despite the fact they were also training eight hours each day. Breakfast was an apple.

However, Okino told Ryan of her training with the Karolyis, “It’s not child abuse. Because if it were child abuse, they would have to be tying us down and holding us in the gym and not letting us leave and forcing us to do gymnastics and not eat.”

Dominique Moceanu, who trained with the Karolyis in Houston in the 1990s, told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 that Martha once grabbed her by the neck—which she had just injured in practice—shoved her face into a telephone, and told her to call her parents. At age 14 and weighing 70 pounds, Moceanu said, she was constantly berated by the Karolyis about her weight. She was also forced to train through injuries and severe pain, a scenario corroborated by multiple coaches and gymnasts in Little Girls in Pretty Boxes.

In response to Moceanu’s allegations, Martha Karolyi stated, “I feel sad that a gymnast so accomplished as Dominique, being a part of the 1996 Olympic team and being the individual medalist in the 1995 world championships, can remember the harder days during the preparation. I feel sad.”

In her 2012 memoir Off Balance, Moceanu captured what she saw as the Karolyis’ brand of gaslighting, in a passage worth quoting at length:

I can’t count the number of times I watched other gymnasts push through unreasonable and dangerous pain just so they wouldn’t have to admit to the Karolyis they were hurting in the gym. It happened to others time and time again and, for me, it ultimately led to my body breaking down right before the biggest competition of my life, the 1996 Olympic Games, with a stress fracture in my right tibia. The Karolyis knew when I was injured—it was obvious to everyone in the gym—but they also knew I didn’t dare complain about my pain. If I had ever started to talk about my pain or injury, they would immediately cut me off, dismissing it or making comments or gestures that I was becoming weak, faking, or exaggerating injury out of laziness.

These negative mind games were a regular part of their coaching style and confused my psyche. I actually started to buy in to their psychology and believe that, perhaps, I didn’t hurt that much and the sharp drilling pain in my leg was coming from my head. I remember thinking, Is it my fault that I am in so much pain?

Slate reached out to USA Gymnastics, enumerating each of the above allegations from Romanian and American gymnasts. In response to a request for comment from both the organization and from Martha and Bela Karolyi, USA Gymnastics sent the following response from the Karolyis:

We lived in a different era under a strong communist system where little girls were selected and taken to permanent training camps. Under this communistic system, many things were not the choice or decision of individuals or coaches but mandated. That’s also the main reason that we defected from Romania.

For all of the gymnasts who have come out against the Karolyis in recent years, many of their former students—including Retton, Strug, and 1992 U.S. team member Kim Zmeskal Burdette, who is now a coach herself—have expressed admiration and gratitude while acknowledging the occasional brutality of their methods. Notwithstanding Biles’ “mild rebellion” (in the New Yorker’s words) against Martha’s relentless training schedule following the 2015 world championships, we will mostly hear hosannas from the Final Five for Martha Karolyi in the twilight of her career. “She’s a legend,” Laurie Hernandez told Bob Costas on Tuesday night, after the U.S. women secured the team title. “She’s a gymnastics god,” added Aly Raisman.

A second later, Biles broke into a grin. “I’m sure if she sees one … crack in the team, she might be back,” the gold medalist said. “Yes!” Raisman shouted. None of the five women could contain their laughter. Costas asked, “Is she that tough a taskmaster?” Raisman’s one-word reply: “Perfectionist.” As Biles recited a maxim about giving 150 rather than 100 percent, Hernandez turned to Raisman and said, half out loud and half in a whisper, “But that’s why we’re so good.”

See more of Slate’s Olympics coverage.

In Praise of Larisa Latynina: Michael Phelps’ Olympic Equal, Pregnant Gymnastics World Champion

Jessica Winter — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 12:12:33 GMT

On Tuesday, Michael Phelps won his 14^th medal in an individual Olympic event, tying the longstanding record held by Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina. Since Phelps has two individual events left to swim in Rio, it’s highly probable that Latynina’s tenure as the individual-medals record holder has mere hours left to live.

And that’s not such a sad thing, right? After all, Latynina, now 81, racked up all that hardware in the 1950s and ’60s, when the women’s all-around looked nothing like an explosive Simone Biles experience and everything like a group of reasonably spry civilians goofing around at the gym. I mean, just check out Latynina’s moves at the world championships in 1958.

You probably have a colleague who could do about the same after a really invigorating barre class and a glass of wine, right?

OK. But what if I told you that Latynina nearly swept the ’58 worlds while four months pregnant? Let’s watch again with new eyes.

Yup, that’s right. She’s doing damn Prince splits in the second trimester while keeping her pregnancy secret from everyone, including her coaches. Flying around whilst under fetal occupation. (Incidentally, I am four months pregnant right now, and I am so inspired by this footage that I might just ride my bike to work tomorrow.) Latynina’s benchmark for expectant-athlete badassery would stand unchallenged for 56 years—until 2014, when Alysia Montano ran the 800 meters in the U.S. track and field championships when almost full-term.

Latynina helped lead the crushingly dominant Soviet women’s gymnastics team in the 1956, 1960, and 1964 Olympics, taking home individual golds for herself in all three games. Video of her floor exercise at the 1964 Tokyo Games is soothing and faintly hypnotic, as if the rotating dancer in a child’s music box had been set free, made self-aware, and perhaps lightly dosed with some Vicodin.

She continued her gold rush through the 1968, 1972, and 1976 Olympics, then as the coach of the Soviet national team. After the Montreal Games, however, she came under intense criticism from Soviet officials for returning with “only” three gold medals, including one for the team all-around. Those were the Olympics in which Romania’s Nadia Comaneci floated above her competition, becoming the first gymnast to earn a perfect 10 in any Olympic event. “In three Olympics, the girls I worked with won 10 gold medals … but rumors did reach me,” Latynina told an interviewer in 2004. “Rude people said, ‘Latynina has gotten old, her methods are no longer modern, she preaches femininity and beauty.’ ” The only thing she could think to say to her critics? “Well, it’s not my fault that Nadia Comaneci wasn’t born in the Soviet Union.”

Thing is, though, Comaneci has a measly seven individual medals to her name—half of Latynina’s count. And Nadia never won the all-around in the world championships, pregnant or otherwise. So congratulations on a long-standing and well-deserved record, Larisa Latynina. You were a star in gymnastics’ early days, and you would’ve been a star in the modern age. And your secret magic acrobatic baby? If she had been born this year, she would have been huge on Instagram.

See more of Slate’s Olympics coverage.

Ivanka Trump Wants to Convince You That Her Father Is Hillary Clinton

Jessica Winter — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 04:16:00 GMT

The 2016 Republican National Convention has suffered from a serious anecdote deficit, with even Donald Trump’s nearest and dearest struggling to come up with the kinds of charming, detail-rich personal tales that serve to “humanize” a candidate. Ivanka Trump, apple of her father’s eye and the scion charged with introducing him on Thursday night, might have been expected to fill that gap. In a CNN interview this week, she rehearsed childhood stories of playing with Legos at her father’s knee, and she reminisced about her father’s heroism in an Atlantic City boxing ring in a passage of her 2010 memoir.

And the tried-and-true convention-speech formula of Anecdotes + Platitudes seemed at first to be what Ivanka was striving for in her speech, aside from a curious opening caveat about how, “like many of my fellow millennials,” she does not consider herself “categorically Republican or Democrat.” That’s a strange quirk to point out in the context of this Republican convention, where the cause of GOP unity has largely vanquished Trump skepticism and where on Wednesday night Ted Cruz engineered a fracas that almost ended in fisticuffs over the very question of party loyalty. “ ‘Vote your conscience’ has become a loaded term for Republican delegates over the past week,” as my colleague Jim Newell put it—but not so much for Ivanka, it seems. Her neither/nor admission was the first indication that her speech might veer from the RNC script.

But no one could have predicted that Ivanka would veer so far from that script that she’d end up reading from the DNC platform, on behalf of a candidate who sounded a lot more like Hillary Clinton than her father. “At my father's company,” she told the cheering crowd, “there are more female than male executives. Women are paid equally for the work that we do, and when a woman becomes a mother, she is supported, not shut out.” She recited familiar stats on the gender wage gap, continuing, “As president, my father will change the labor laws that were put in place at a time when women were not a significant portion of the workforce, and he will focus on making quality child care affordable and accessible for all.” She then reiterated her earlier point about the gender wage gap: “Politicians talk about wage equality, but my father has made it a practice at his company throughout his entire career.”

Let’s pause for a moment. Ivanka Trump is talking about a man who once said, “I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing.” A man whose campaign has been sued for gender discrimination and that, according to an analysis by the Boston Globe, pays its female employees one-third less than its male employees. A man who once called pregnancy “an inconvenience for a business” and who threw a tantrum when a lawyer in a deposition needed to take a preplanned break to pump breast milk for her three-month-old baby, calling her “disgusting.” A man whose campaign manager, Paul Manafort, stated shortly before her speech that Trump can appeal to women because “their husbands can't afford to be paying for the family bills.” This is the man, according to Ivanka Trump, whom we can trust to end pregnancy discrimination, close the gender wage gap, and bring affordable, presumably subsidized childcare to American families, despite no evidence of any of these plans in his performance as an executive, in his campaigning thus far, or in the Republican Party platform.

Admittedly, there was a certain bewildered pleasure to be taken in this red-meat crowd roaring their approval for two of Hillary Clinton’s signature policy positions—it seemed to crystallize the chaotic ideological confusion that has characterized so much of Trump’s rise thus far. But what was Ivanka’s long game here? Was she making these assertions about her father’s policy goals to trap him into at least paying lip service to wage equality and parental leave as president? Is she trying to get Hillary Clinton elected by offering a wholehearted endorsement of big chunks of her platform? Was the speech not really a pitch for her father at all but rather a pitch in disguise for her #WomenWhoWork campaign and her forthcoming book of the same title?

Whatever the answer, we know that Ivanka Trump’s father values blind loyalty over most any other character trait. Perhaps the tenderest act of loyalty Ivanka could perform in this arena was to grossly mischaracterize his positions and beliefs before the biggest audience of their lifetimes.

The All-Female Toxic Workplace

L.V. Anderson — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 13:30:00 GMT

Jessica Winter is Slate’s features editor and the author of the new novel Break in Case of Emergency, which has been aptly characterized as a workplace satire (although it is much more than that). The novel’s protagonist, Jen, takes a job at a mushy “women’s empowerment” nonprofit founded by a wealthy former TV star. The foundation has too much money and not enough for its employees to do. Jen sits through meetings in which the staff talk endlessly without saying anything, writes countless memos for her impossible-to-please boss, and Gchats with her unflappable co-worker Daisy. Anyone who has ever had an intolerable office job will probably see him- or herself in Break in Case of Emergency—which might be painful if the book weren’t so funny.

Jessica and I have worked together for more than three years, and she’s now my manager. Since I write about workplace issues, I wanted to know more about how and why she conjured such a farcically noxious workplace in Break in Case of Emergency and what lessons white-collar office drones can draw from the book. We chatted last week about the differences between female and male managers, the importance of not caring too much about being liked, and the Dear Prudence column that inspired part of the book. –L.V. Anderson

L.V. Anderson: You and I happen to work together in a workplace that, I am happy to say, is pretty functional, so I know Break in Case of Emergency isn’t a roman à clef about Slate. Why did you want to set your book in a dysfunctional hellscape of an office?

Jessica Winter: A dysfunctional workplace is always going to be a maelstrom of fascinating human phenotypes and behavior disorders, and it seemed like a fun place for a novel to muck around in. I was specifically interested in an all-female version of a toxic workplace, especially one obsessed with “empowerment.” And in a bigger sense, I wanted to look at how a toxic job can work its poison into other areas of your life: your romantic partnerships, your friendships, your health, your sense of self.

Anderson: That is such a good point about a toxic job being poison. When you’re unhappy at work, it’s pretty much impossible to be happy in general. Do you think that’s just because people who work full-time spend so much time at work, or is there something fundamental about work that gives it enormous influence over your sense of well-being?

Winter: It’s both, but it’s especially the latter. If your job is one that’s fulfilling, creatively satisfying, one that brings you into daily contact with people who value and support you and who are just fun to be around, it buoys you in general, but at the same time, it’s not something you dwell on—it’s not like you go home at night to your dog or your kids or your books and think, “Wow, what a great job I have.” I mean, maybe once in a while you do, but mostly you take it for granted, in the best possible sense. Whereas if you have a bad job—and let’s add a blanket caveat here that in this situation we are talking about demoralizing white-collar office jobs, which would strike many, many people across America and around the world as extremely good jobs indeed—you dwell on it, you obsess over slights, you lay awake at night thinking about how you can get your superior to respect you or how to get a colleague to pull her weight, and those worries and resentments can wrap their tentacles around every area of your life. It’s very hard not to internalize this stuff, where you feel yourself becoming a synonym or synecdoche for your job: “I have a shitty job, ergo I am a shitty person.”

I once had a boss who was such a micromanager and so unstable and so bizarrely obsessed with me and whatever I might be doing wrong at any given moment that I devised a physical ritual around her. Whenever she sent me an email, I would literally push myself away from my desk and read the email from a squinting distance. It was a physical act that declared, “She cannot get to me; I am not internalizing this.” I thought it was so clever and healthy at the time, and now I’m just appalled at myself. Also, the trick didn’t even work, because usually about the time I’d push my chair away she’d be coming up behind me barking, “DID YOU GET MY EMAIL.”

Anderson: That ritual does actually sound healthy to me—a way of keeping things in perspective. People are capable of putting up with a lot of bullshit in order to survive at work, and later on, once they’ve extricated themselves from the situation, they’re shocked by how bad it was.

I want to get back to your earlier point about “an all-female version of a toxic workplace.” I think the politically correct position is that that the vast majority of female bosses aren’t territorial mean girls and that women are no less supportive of one another in the workplace than men are. (See, for instance, Sheryl Sandberg on “the myth of the catty woman.”) This is a tricky topic, but do you think that bad female bosses are bad in a particularly female way or that female-dominated workplaces are dysfunctional in a particularly female way? (With the caveat that we’re talking about learned behaviors: the way women are socialized not to be too direct, not to ask for too much, etc.)

Winter: We are wading into some dangerous territory, but then again, so does the book. Obviously, any workplace that doesn’t attain some threshold of hybrid vigor in terms of all kinds of diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status—is probably going to be inferior to those that do. Having said that, I have no doubt that there are certain all-female workplaces that are feminist paradises. But is there a specific terribleness to the terrible all-female workplace? I am going to venture—very hesitantly and with the full understanding that I may be forfeiting all my feminist credentials—that yes, there is. And that specific terribleness has a lot to do with, as you say, how women are conditioned not to be too direct or ask for too much or put themselves forward. The alchemy of a bad workplace can transform those traits into cattiness and back biting and virulent passive aggression, which I guess is the mirror image of the plain old aggression aggression you might get in a male-dominated workplace.

Anderson: I’ve avoided writing about ways that management styles can be gendered because I think it’s a very tough tightrope to walk. But if I were the feminist-credential fairy, I would wholeheartedly let you keep your credentials.

There’s an interesting contrast in that the book’s protagonist, Jen, keeps trying to hit the moving targets her passive-aggressive boss puts in front of her. Meanwhile, her cube mate, Daisy, just does not give a fuck about work. Daisy is a very funny character and a source of comic relief in scenes that might otherwise be overly infuriating, but is there any other reason you wanted to show these two very different approaches to working in a dysfunctional office?

Winter: Daisy knows her stuff, and someday she is going to be running Doctors Without Borders or the Red Cross or some legit organization that makes a real difference in the world. But for whatever reason she is temporarily in the middle of this celebrity-foundation shit show, and she’s making the best of it where she can, and where she can’t, she plays Socialist Revolution on Facebook (the book is set in 2009, when people still played games on Facebook) or steals out to movies in the middle of the day. This job is a blip in her life’s trajectory, not a referendum on her existence. And Jen is constitutionally incapable of letting go in that way. Jen wants to fix what is unfixable, and in this regard, she is very dumb and Daisy is very smart.

I wanted Daisy to be almost a fantasy character, the absolute ideal of a co-worker—the colleague you dream about having. Everyone who read early drafts of the book wanted more Daisy, and I said, “No, I need you to feel an unrequited longing for Daisy.”

Anderson: So does this mean you think it’s not actually possible for a real person to detach from a horrible work situation as well as Daisy does?

Winter: I think there’s a force field that certain people can generate in bad workplace situations—a kind of calm competence that is wholly uncoupled from any concern about being liked or approved of—that creates a barrier between you and the situation that you’re in. I don’t think you have to be a superhero to achieve that, but it helps.

Anderson: You need a robust sense of self, so you don’t automatically go to those thoughts of “I have a shitty job, ergo I am a shitty person.”

Winter: Yes. Jen’s sense of self is deeply imprinted and shaped by other people's perceptions or what she perceives of them. That is true of anyone—only a psychopath 100 percent wouldn’t care about other people’s opinions—but it’s overly and painfully true of her, and that’s why she is doomed in a toxic workplace.

Anderson: Jen undergoes treatments at a fertility clinic. Her boss, Karina, asks her lots of invasive questions about why she’s late to work. What do you think people should say when their bosses ask them personal medical questions that they don’t want to answer?

Winter: I’m so glad you asked this question. When I was writing the first draft of the book, there was a Dear Prudence question that really stuck with me. The letter writer wanted advice about a boss who said horribly insensitive things to her about a miscarriage she had suffered; Emily Yoffe’s advice was kind and wise, and she also pointed out that this was a reminder to never tell people you’re pregnant until you absolutely have to. The letter writer followed up to say that she’d never actually told her boss she was pregnant—he figured it out because of her morning sickness and medical appointments. The letter broke my heart, and it made me realize that early pregnancy, infertility, and many other medical issues can create a weird liminal space between public and private—if, say, work starts at 9 a.m., and a couple of times a month an employee is rushing in at 9:19 a.m. with a Band-Aid in the crook of her arm, chances are she has some medical stuff going on and deserves to be left alone. A manager needs to stay out of that liminal space, and instead Karina barges in. Jen’s choice in this scenario is to cheerfully and nervously deflect her boss’s questions, but I think Daisy’s solution would be to say, “None of your business” and walk away. And as we know, the Daisy path is always the one of justice and righteousness.

Anderson: Huzzah.

Winter: Should I ask you what is the worst thing about me as a “manager”? My most Karina-like trait?

Anderson: Well, I do wish you’d stop following up every email by coming up to my desk to ask, “DID YOU GET MY EMAIL.” And I’m a little miffed that you have created a fictional co-worker who is better than my actual co-workers, which makes me wish my actual co-workers would step up their game.

Mom and Dad Are Fighting: The Tale of Two Cities Edition

Allison Benedikt — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 15:13:38 GMT

Listen to Mom and Dad Are Fighting by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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In this week’s parenting podcast, Slate editors Allison Benedikt and Jessica Winter talk to New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about school segregation. Then, a chat about toddler antics—how to deal with them, when to comfort, and when to walk away. Plus parenting triumphs and fails, recommendations, and a listener call about Donald Trump possibly tearing a family apart, which we get help answering from Allison’s father-in-law, a lifelong Republican.

This week on Slate Plus, Slate designer Derreck Johnson returns to tell us how he and his wife’s planned hypnobirth went.

Items discussed on the show:

“Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones
Hannah-Jones’ This American Life episode, “The Problem We All Live With”
Coverage of a rezoning battle on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Mom and Mom recommend:

Jessica recommends a family trip to Storm King, a huge sculpture park in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Allison recommends the poem “Good Bones,” by Maggie Smith. You can read an interview with Smith here.

This week’s advertisers are Boll and Branch, Little Passports, and ThirdLove.

Podcast produced by Ann Heppermann.

Full Angela Merkel Edition

Christina Cauterucci — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 15:32:00 GMT

Listen to the DoubleX Gabfest by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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Slate Plus members: Get your ad-free podcast feed.

Become a fan of the DoubleX Gabfest on Facebook. Leave us love letters and see what other listeners are saying about the Gabfest. Send us an email to doublexgabfest@slate.com.

On this week’s Gabfest, Invisibilia co-host Hanna Rosin joins Slate features editor Jessica Winter and Slate staff writer Christina Cauterucci to discuss the Stanford rape case. They also talk about Judith Shulevitz’s piece in the New York Times on “caregiverism,” and playing the gender card in the election.

Slate Plus: Is Instagram sexist?

Other items discussed in the show:

The Stanford victim’s statement
“New York: Sentimental Journeys,” by Joan Didion
“Call and Response,” by Christina Cauterucci
The statement from Brock Turner’s father
“What’s Wrong With the Brock Turner Sentence,” by Christina Cauterucci
“How to Fix Feminism,” by Judith Shulevitz
“Feminism Has Conquered the Culture. Now Comes the Hard Part,” by Rebecca Traister and Judith Shulevitz
“The Work That Makes Work Possible,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter
Hillary Clinton’s speech after winning the Democratic nomination.

DoubleX recommendations:

Jessica recommends Little Labors by Rivka Galchen.

Hanna recommends Jessica Winter’s new book, Break in Case of Emergency, and Anne Hull’s piece “The Lonely Road of Staying Clean,” in the Washington Post.

Christina recommends Tegan and Sara’s new album, Love You to Death.

This podcast was produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Daniel Schroeder.

Outro Song: “U-Turn” by Tegan and Sara

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to like us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

The Audio Book Is Eligible

Emily Bazelon — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 15:12:00 GMT

To listen to the Audio Book Club discussion of Eligible, click the arrow on the player below.

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Slate critics Emily Bazelon, Katy Waldman, and Jessica Winter discuss Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld’s contemporary update to Pride and Prejudice. How does the modern Elizabeth Bennet compare to the original? What’s going on with Mary? How deliciously hateable is the Wickham character? Does the love story pack enough wry wit and blowsy romance?

Next month, the Audio Book Club will dig into All the Single Ladies, by Rebecca Traister. Read the book and stay tuned for our discussion in July!

Visit our Audio Book Club archive page for a complete list of the more than 75 books we’ve discussed over the years. Or you can listen to any of our previous club meetings through our iTunes feed.

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See all the pieces in this month’s Slate Book Review.

Podcast produced by Jayson De Leon and Andy Bowers.

That Time Donald Trump Humiliated Miss Universe for Gaining Weight

Jessica Winter — Tue, 17 May 2016 14:02:00 GMT

Last weekend, the New York Times published a compendium of interviews with women who have interacted over the decades with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The piece, by Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, chronicled “unwelcome romantic advances, unending commentary on the female form … and unsettling workplace conduct.” Several depressing anecdotes centered around Trump’s co-ownership of—and ardent personal interest in—the Miss Universe Organization. One story in particular was remarkable for its cruelty—not so much Trump’s cruelty, which long ago ceased to be surprising, but for the complicit cruelty of late-1990s-era American mainstream press and broadcast media, which enthusiastically aided and abetted Trump in his staging of a humiliating publicity stunt at the expense of a 20-year-old woman.

As Barbaro and Twohey write in the Times, “After Alicia Machado won the 1996 Miss Universe title, something very human happened: She gained weight. Mr. Trump did not keep his critique of her changing body quiet—he publicly shamed her, she said.” Trump had plenty of help from his friends in the press: When the Miss Universe organization in January 1997 put Machado on a strict diet and exercise regimen, setting her up in a New York City gym with a personal trainer, dozens of news outlets were there to capture her pedaling a stationary bike and lifting light weights. “I was about to cry in that moment with all the cameras there,” Machado told the Times. “I said, ‘I don’t want to do this, Mr. Trump.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.’ ” You can see some of what Machado didn’t want to do in the below video.

What is most heartbreaking about this footage, as well as the photographs from that day, is how Machado’s beauty-queen poise never falters even though you know she’s dying inside. She beams her dazzling smile at the cameras, laughs exuberantly as if she and the paparazzi are sharing a bawdy joke, even gives Trump a girlish kiss on the cheek. Machado has told many news outlets, including the Times, that she battled anorexia and bulimia for years after the gym stunt. But at the time, the press portrayed Trump as a kind of tough-love life coach for Machado. An Associated Press dispatch cast Trump in an encouraging role: “Now, with the support of Donald Trump, who co-owns the Miss Universe pageant with CBS, [Machado is] shedding the pounds for all the world to see.” In a CNN segment that aired on Jan. 29, 1997, Trump explains of the gym spectacle, “We had a choice of termination or do this, and we wanted to do this.” His hands were tied, you see. The only way he could discipline his wayward, gluttonous charge was to force her to skip rope in front of hordes of leering paps.

Let’s linger over that CNN segment for a moment, because in all fairness to Trump, he was only the ringleader; then as now, he needed willing followers. Here is how CNN correspondent Jeanne Moos opened her report on Alicia Machado’s trip to the gym: “No one could accuse Alicia Machado of being the size of the universe. But as her universe expanded, so did she… Since she won the title nine months ago, the former Miss Venezuela went from a 118 pounds to, well the number keeps growing like the size of the fish that got away.”

Other outlets likewise ran with the theme of Big Bang cosmology. The aforementioned Associated Press report began, “Miss Universe hit the gym Tuesday, trying to control her expanding dimensions before the Big Binge turns her career into a black hole.” “Another Case of an Expanding Universe” was the headline in Ontario’s Hamilton Spectator. Tribune News Service went with the straightforward pun “MISS UNIVERSE WON’T STAND THE WEIGHT” while the New York Daily News used “BEAUTY’S BEASTLY DIET KILLS CAMPAIGN” to headline a piece about the Kellogg company removing Machado from the cover of boxes of Special K cereal in Venezuela, due to her weight gain. The Daily News added a quote from Trump corroborating Kellogg’s decision: “She’s eating a lot. You could say she’s an eating machine.” Everyone was on the same page.

That May, Trump and Machado appeared together on CBS This Morning to promote the upcoming 1997 Miss Universe pageant, where Machado would crown the new winner. Host José Diaz-Balart explained that “for the first time in the history of the pageant, viewers can actually participate” by calling in to answer a question. The conundrum at stake: “Should a pageant title holder be required to maintain her physical appearance during her reign?” Diaz-Balart had a question of his own for Trump and Machado: “Why do you think this is an important question the viewers would care about?” It led to the following exchange:

Trump: Well, it's something that really has come up over the last year. And Alicia has done an incredible job. She really has turned out to be one of the great Miss Universes I will say.
Machado: Thank you.
Trump: And she had a little problem during the middle where she gained a little weight and a lot of ...
Machado: I don't think so.
Trump: Yeah. And she's probably right.
Machado: I don't think so.

Trump has been moved to spin cotton-candy word clouds of positive adjectives for many people, and Trump has degraded many others for failing to meet his high standards for the corporeal form. But rare is the person who has inspired both feelings in Trump at once. Alicia Machado, a beautiful woman who ate food, managed the feat. Trump found her disgusting, but in his disgust he also smelled a publicity opportunity—and more to the point, a chance to elevate himself. One suspects he sees that same dichotomy in the American electorate.

Are You a Boy or a Girl?

Jessica Winter — Wed, 11 May 2016 16:13:00 GMT

Like a lot of 18-month-olds, my daughter is epicene; even if she’s out on the town in, say, pink leggings and a floral raincoat, sometimes I’ll still get a “He’s so cute—how old is he?” from a friendly stranger. (I just did, in fact, on Mother’s Day. In the stranger’s defense, we were exploring cannons at a military park. Masculine!) I rarely bother to correct people, but if they realize their mistake, they are often profusely apologetic, as if they’d given grave offense over something far more consequential than gender.

And if this scene unfolds when I’ve dressed her in neutral clothing, the offense at times turns subtly outward. “Why do you dress her like a boy?” demanded a man in the jewelry section of H&M while my kid—in a red sweatshirt, jeans, and gray-and-purple sneakers—rummaged through a pile of tassled earrings. The man was trying to be polite, but he also seemed affronted by his own confusion—and affronted by me, I suppose, for causing his confusion. “She looks like a boy!” he insisted, repeatedly. The only response I could think of was the shrugging one I gave: “She looks like herself.”

I offer this anecdote partly as a disclosure that I’m not the intended audience for gender-reveal announcements. This is a genre of prenatal celebration that reached a spectacular apotheosis last week when a Florida couple went viral for firing a rifle at a target packed with explosives and colored chalk, sending up a plume of powder intended to reveal the baby’s sex—blue for boy, in this case. The phenomenon more typically takes form as a gender-reveal party, where the festive theme might be Guns or Glitter? or Rifles or Ruffles? or, because big sticks can take many forms, Baseball or Bows?

The centerpiece of a gender-reveal party is, of course, a gender-reveal cake, which involves slipping a piece of paper to a trusted baker who will then drop the right food coloring in the batter; at the appointed moment, celebrants cut the cake to find out if it’s blue or pink, i.e., Pistols or Pearls? Gender-reveal cakes can be cute, imaginative, even beautiful, as this PopSugar slideshow attests. Another parenting site, the Stir, has a slideshow of “15 Outrageously Inappropriate Gender-Reveal Cakes,” although if you spend enough time in the gender-reveal universe, these creations might strike you not as outrageous so much as just aggressively direct about the zero-sum nature of the gender binary. Stick or No Stick is the exemplum of the bunch, making barely submerged subtext into carrot-shaped text: A boy has a something, and a girl has a nothing. A boy has a gun, and a girl has a hole. A boy does, and a girl is done to. A boy is an active actor with useful equipment, and a girl is a void with embellishments. It would sound so tiresomely gender studies 101 if these weren’t actual people having actual children right here on my Pinterest boards in 2016.

A gender-reveal party might at least take on a sheen of medical accuracy if it were called a “sex-reveal party,” with the added bonus that it would also sound more like a fun orgy. But I doubt it’s a total accident that “gender-reveal” collapses the discrete concepts of sex and gender into one big face-mash of tasty cake. In fact, the gender-reveal phenomenon pulls off a rousing counter-progressive two-for-one: weapons-grade reinforcement of oppressive gender norms (sorry, feminists!) and blunt-force refusal of the idea that sex assigned at birth does not necessarily equate with gender identity (sorry, trans-rights movement!).

Likewise, it can’t be sheer coincidence that the internet went nuts over an Army Special Forces member and his fiancée blowing up a box of Tannerite and chalk to celebrate their fetus’ blood-test results during the same week that North Carolina sued the U.S. Department of Justice over whether trans people in that state can use restrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their gender identities. The DOJ, as North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory told Fox News, “is trying to define gender identity, and there is no clear identification or definition of gender identity.” When a cherished social norm is starting to fragment, perhaps the best way to save it is to aim a rifle at it and pull the trigger.

Or perhaps McCrory and gender-reveal enthusiasts alike could take a gentler approach and look to babies and toddlers for clues. It’s accepted among progressives at this point that gender is a kind of performance within constraints—something we actively create from the limited cultural materials we encounter. As such, it matters enormously for older children and adults as a way of making sense of themselves in (and for) the world. But it’s also a type of performance that babies and toddlers lack the neural connections to deliver—they are genderless, and thus destabilizing, and so we steady ourselves by, for instance, affixing hair bows on people who might not even have much hair.

A gender reveal will tell a future baby’s loved ones precisely nothing about what is actually important about her first months and years on Earth: her temperament, her response to food, the ease with which she sleeps and self-soothes and explores her expanding world. Babies and toddlers are mysterious; you really have no idea who they are, but you get the sense that they know you inside-out. A fetus is even more mysterious; you don’t even know what she looks like, and yet there she is, closer to you than any person could ever be. It’s understandable, I suppose, why some parents want to grab onto an either-or marker of certainty in the fundamentally uncertain situation that is pre- and early parenthood. But gender isn’t really there for the grabbing.

When I was pregnant, if a stranger on the subway or street called to me, “Boy or girl?” I would reply, “None of your business.” This was rude, admittedly, and also somewhat disingenuous—I didn’t actually mind telling people; instead I think I was pushing back against the idea that being visibly pregnant, or visibly anything, turned me into a piece of public property available for comment and interrogation. Women deal with different versions of this challenge of achieving privacy in public for their entire lives—to leave your apartment is to be asked for a smile or a blow job or your due date or to lose weight—and many trans women and gender-nonconforming women have it so much harder than most cisgender and/or femme women can ever imagine. Those realities reach dystopian nightmare proportions in the gender police state that McCrory prophesies, where bathroom-using citizens would be honor-bound to apply the if-you-see-something-say-something principle to gender presentation. It will always be time for cake in the restrooms of North Carolina.

Boy or girl? This is the question many people want answered before you use the bathroom. They started asking when you were still in utero. They might have baked a dessert or fired a gun to get the answer. And I’m beginning to think that you can draw a line from that question to our current state of transphobic bathroom panic. Maybe all we can do is start refusing to answer the question, or answer with a question of our own. If the question is Why does that girl look like a boy?, maybe the answer is What does it mean for a girl not to look like herself?

Here Are Some Face-Melting Prince Performances Uploaded to YouTube in the Week Since His Death

Jessica Winter — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 21:25:54 GMT

The most brilliantly, gloriously freaky of control freaks, Prince had zero tolerance for fans uploading and sharing his music and videos online. But since his death on April 21, a deluge of fantastic live footage has hit YouTube—and so far, most of the uploads seem to be sticking. There’s no telling if this represents a permanent planetary realignment or simply a bittersweet interregnum while his estate pulls itself together, but in the meantime, please to enjoy the enpurpling of YouTube via a sampling of clips below.

Here he is playing “Purple Rain” at the 1985 American Music Awards, the same night he didn’t show up for “We Are the World,” willing his guitar into all kinds of indecent contortions and deploying his full range of shouts, screams, growls, croons, coos, and iridescence; when the time comes, he doesn't drop the mic—he kicks over the mic stand.

Speaking of mic stands, Prince has sex with one after performing a striptease in this spectacular nine-and-a-half-minute version of “Head.”

Here is the legendary 1983 benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Company at Minneapolis’ First Avenue—the hometown venue later immortalized in Purple Rain—where Wendy Melvoin made her performing debut with the Revolution and where the band played several soon-to-be Purple Rain classics for the first time live as well as a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.”

Here’s what Sam Adams in Slate called the “Dionysian revelry” of “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night” from the Sign o' the Times concert film, featuring Prince in a deep-cut fringed jumpsuit trading places with Sheila E on drums.

Here’s an insane cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” with a guitar solo that would make Jimmy Page rue the day he was born and that should get its own New York Times oral history.

Here’s his entire 1991 Arsenio Hall appearance, including “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Kiss,” “Cream,” “Purple Rain,” “Daddy Pop,” a bunch of costume changes, a full repertoire of splits, and a lot of screaming fans (Arsenio included).

Here’s one of the sweetest finds in the current YouTube trove: “Diamonds and Pearls” and “Baby I’m a Star” from the 1991 Special Olympics opening ceremonies, held in Minneapolis.

And here’s one of the simplest and quietest: Prince just playing piano during a rehearsal, the breeze blowing through his hair.

Read more from Slate on Prince.

The Loneliness of the Undecided Democratic Voter

Jessica Winter — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:00:00 GMT

I am a registered Democrat in deepest bluest Brooklyn, and my people are tired. They are war-weary; they are frayed and unfriended. They are stumbling into verbal brawls about Goldman Sachs speaking fees and the exact parameters of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory authority with people on the subway or in the coffee shop or with a guy on Twitter they maybe went to high school with. Steeling themselves, they call hoarsely to their allies in the thin dawn light of the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, willing their brethren to fight on just one more day, like Henry rallying his troops before the Battle of Agincourt. They believe, and how they suffer for it.

I envy them, though, because it is morning in America on the day of the New York primary, and I still don’t know who I’m voting for.

It’s not entirely clear to me how I got myself into this situation. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have battled over the course of a year of campaigning, nine debates, and 37 primaries and caucuses. What could there possibly be left to decide? I'm not still weighing the candidates’ policy positions, which strike me as largely similar or the same. I'm not comparing their general-election prospects, which would trouble me more profoundly if the Republicans had yet located a more plausible nominee. (“OK,” you 100 Hillary supporters and 1 million Bernie supporters are saying simultaneously right now, “but what you don’t understand about this race is ... ” And I need to stop you there. I’ve read all your Facebook posts. No, I have.)

Time was, I scoffed at the concept of the “undecided voter,” a mythical person often conflated with the bewildered and drooling “low-information voter.” During the 2012 general election, Saturday Night Live erased any distinction between the two with a PSA in which undecided voters posed hard-hitting questions typical of their ranks, such as “When is the election?” and “What are the names of the two people running—and be specific?” In a 2011 Truthout post, former Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren convincingly presented such voters as not just obtuse but as the malevolent mutant mindchildren of the GOP, which, he wrote, actively stokes an “ill-informed public cynicism”: “These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that ‘they are all crooks,’ and that ‘government is no good.’ ”

I happen to like government and think America should have much more of it, so it’s particularly galling to me that I have become the person I disparaged, the low-information voter, making crucial electoral decisions based on which candidate I’d rather have a beer with or whether I think I saw a picture of them windsurfing one time. Maybe I’ll vote for Bernie because he was so adorable on The View. Maybe I’ll vote for Hillary because she was so charming at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream. Maybe I’ll print out two smiling pictures of the candidates, set them in front of my 17-month-old, and vote for the one whom she adorns with more stickers.

My dithering notwithstanding, I’m assuming—perhaps naïvely!—that any Democrat in her right mind will wholeheartedly support her party’s nominee, whoever that may be, in the general election. I’m also assuming that many Democrats think it’s likely that Hillary will become that nominee, and thus a Bernie vote in the primary will function as an expression of gratitude for how he has nudged the campaign conversation leftward and pushed so hard on his signature issue, wealth inequality. If my assumptions are correct, then a vote in this primary has less to do with ensuring your preferred candidate makes it to the general and more to do with how your vote reflects on you and your identity. Are you a pragmatist or an idealist? Do you want to regulate the corpocracy or pulverize it? Do you want reform or do you want revolution? Do you want the Establishment or the underdog?

On the last of those binaries, at least in Brooklyn, the script has flipped: Bernie signs vastly outnumber Hillary’s in the windows of Ditmas Park, Cobble Hill, and Park Slope. Over the weekend, a colleague spotted a female Hillary supporter and a male Bernie supporter get into a shouting match after Bernie’s Prospect Park rally and overheard the woman telling her friend afterward, “I know I’m in the minority in Brooklyn, so I feel I have to stand up.” There’s another voting minority, though: the ambivalents, like me. I know there must be more of us out there. We might look like we’re just sucking our thumbs and staring into space, but maybe what we’re really doing is waiting out this little spring squall until we can start preparing in earnest for the big storm ahead.

Ivanka Trump Makes Donald Even Scarier

Jessica Winter — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 17:58:20 GMT

Ivanka Trump achieved her status as the best reality television character the genre has ever produced on her father’s NBC program Celebrity Apprentice. This was an arena in which the likes of Tom Green, Dennis Rodman, Andrew “Dice” Clay, and other reanimated wax figures from the Museum of Déjà Vu would vie to create a winning entry for the Schwan Food Company’s LiveSmart frozen food line or the catchiest jingle for Chicken of the Sea, and where Melissa Rivers might be spotted screaming “Whore pit vipers!” at her fellow female contestants. And there would be Ivanka, as grave, groomed, and expertly briefed as a dignitary at a disaster site, checking in on how a team’s dog food commercial was coming along or gently arbitrating a screaming match between Lisa Lampanelli and Lou Ferrigno or smiling gamely as a shirtsleeved Piers Morgan tried to flirt with her. No matter how grisly the post-celebrity carnage at her feet, Ivanka radiated warmth and star wattage—but her charisma was a protective force field, not a beckoning flame. She evinced a holographic ability to be in her surroundings but not of them, fully possessed of her poise and glamour even when forced to dress down Gene Simmons, her throaty boarding-school voice and diction in service of a gleaming mental apparatus that never misfired. Imagine watching old WrestleMania footage and suddenly realizing that “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s corner man was Jacqueline Kennedy. That’s kind of what it was like to watch Ivanka on Celebrity Apprentice.

And it’s kind of what it’s like to rewatch her introductory speech from when her father formally announced his presidential candidacy at Trump Tower in New York City on June 16, 2015. “My father is the opposite of politically correct,” declares the Wharton graduate, executive vice president of development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization, and head of the Ivanka Trump lifestyle brand. “He says what he means, and he means what he says.” A practiced giggle laps at her delivery; in the upper balcony, a rabid fan lets rip a “YEEAAAHH!” Ivanka gazes up placidly and drops a barely murmured “Thank you,” much as she would drop a linen towel into a washroom attendant’s basket. That “Thank you” is amazing. It is the verbal equivalent of the hologram starting to flicker and fade out.

However much her father’s campaign might frighten you—for the blunt-force racism and nativism of his electoral appeals, for his ghastly misogyny, for the escalating violence he has encouraged at his rallies, and for the terrifying strain of white-supremacist resentment he has activated in his constituents—the fact that Ivanka is beside him through it all makes it one degree more frightening. Against every prevailing trend among the adult children of obscenely rich narcissists, Ivanka and her brothers Don and Eric seem to have emerged from the Trump family’s gold-plated crucible—and from their parents’ spectacular 1990 divorce—as thoughtful, level-headed, and hard-working people. In Born Rich, Jamie Johnson’s documentary about variously sad and gross scions of bazillionaire families, wry and merry Ivanka is cast as the Normal. Jonathan Van Meter, author of a scathing 1989 Spy takedown of her mother, Ivana Trump, referred to Ivanka and her brothers in a 2004 New York family profile as the “Trump parenting miracle.” But there is one piece of evidence that casts this miracle into doubt: the affection and loyalty that all three children demonstrate toward their horrific father. Far into her last trimester of pregnancy (she is married to fellow real estate scion Jared Kushner; their third child is due any day), Ivanka stumped for her father everywhere from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina. At the Republican debates, she is often the person he huddles with. He is her “great mentor,” Ivanka says, and she is his “character witness,” as Cosmopolitan put it, invoking her top-tier position in the Trump Organization as proof of her father’s commitment to gender equity. She is “his unofficial campaign spouse,” per the New York Times.

The Times’ formulation is as apt as it is uncomfortable. Ivanka was seated beside her father in 2006 when he told The View, “She has a very nice figure. I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” (He liked this quip so much that he effectively repeated it to Rolling Stone last year.) Of course, Ivanka, then 24, laughed it off on The View, making sly eye contact with her hosts as if to say, Would ya get a load of this old lunk? As it turns out, this exchange foreshadowed a key dynamic of the 2016 election season. Because the Trump campaign derives so much of its energy from schoolyard taunts—about Carly Fiorina’s face, Marco Rubio’s height, Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle—the most important quality in Trump World is to be in on the joke, no matter how grotesque and insulting the joke might be. An entire decade ago, Ivanka was showing us how.

It may be simple filial piety that demands Ivanka’s efforts on behalf of her father’s campaign. Still, it’s notable that she has stuck by his side for most of her adult life, even though it was clear from her teens onward that she had other options. While still a student at Choate, she launched a much-derided modeling career, appearing on runways for Thierry Mugler and Marc Jacobs; at one point, she turned down an out-of-the-blue job offer from Anna Wintour at Vogue. Back then, Ivanka left her surname off her business cards because, she told the Mail on Sunday in 2000, “I want people to choose me for me.” In the years since, she has disavowed that sweetly adolescent sentiment. Choosing Ivanka, she has decided, means choosing Trump. “I made a specific choice not to call my collection Ivanka,” she told the New York Times in 2013 of her affordable, office-friendly line of clothing, shoes, and handbags. “There’s so much value in the Trump name. And there’s such a deep connection to luxury and success.” One of the prouder moments recounted in her 2010 memoir–cum–business-advice book The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life, she writes, was “during the 2009 season of Celebrity Apprentice, [when] I managed to integrate my role at the Trump Organization with my television persona in such a way that it reinforced my jewelry brand.” What do you call this particular trump card? “Call it what you will—but I call it synergy.”

You might have called it synergy last fall when, as her father’s candidacy barreled toward a psychotic legitimacy, Ivanka launched the #WomenWhoWork campaign in support of her apparel and accessories brand. When CNN’s Poppy Harlow, in primary-season mode, asked Ivanka about Pew research that shows rising numbers of mothers leaving the workforce due to child care costs, Ivanka performed the following pirouette:

We’re all working really hard at architecting the lives that we want to live and lives that are consistent with our personal priorities. And I do think there is this unfortunate prevailing depiction of the working woman as wearing a black pantsuit and being solely focused on her professional role and that’s just not true and hopefully I can be a small part of changing the narrative around what it looks like to be a woman who works.

Ivanka Trump, unofficial campaign spouse, is not interested in discussing proposals for child care tax credits. Ivanka Trump just wants to sell you some shoes. And she understands how the gravitational pull of her father’s public profile can both help and harm her in that endeavor. As New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reported in August,

According to three sources close to the campaign, Ivanka was troubled by her father’s comments that Mexican immigrants were rapists. “She’s close to her father and is sensible enough to know a problematic situation,” a friend of Ivanka’s told me. … At one point, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Ivanka submitted several drafts of a statement … to walk back the quotes, but he refused to have them published.

It’s not impossible that Ivanka will continue to embrace her family’s name and capitalize on its resources while somehow maintaining a firewall of genteel graciousness between her own brand of Trump style and her father’s coerced-wet-T-shirt-contest-at-the-neo-Nazi-roadhouse brand of Trump style. But her complicity in her father’s crusade, like so much else about the Trump campaign, has gone from merely embarrassing to outright alarming—not least because nobody understands better than Ivanka Trump how well her father bears up amid bloodthirsty mayhem. In Playing the Trump Card, she recalls the ill-fated 1988 heavyweight boxing championship in Atlantic City, where 6-year-old Ivanka and her family had ringside seats to watch Mike Tyson knock out Michael Spinks in just 91 seconds. “The place went crazy. Not in a good way,” she writes. “It felt for a few tense moments as if a riot were about to break out. … People started yelling that the fight was fixed and demanding their money back.” Amid this bedlam, she recalls, her father had the presence of mind to enter the ring and speak calming words to the crowd.

“I remember thinking he was so brave, so confident, so charismatic, trying to take control like that,” Ivanka writes. “I imagine it was a scary scene, but it never occurred to me to feel afraid because my father was there, taking charge and doing his best to give the audience what they wanted.” Now, nearly 30 years later, her father is still there, giving the audience what they want, and one wonders if it ever occurs to her to feel afraid.

David Bowie’s Marriage to Iman Both Compounded His Glamour and Made Him (a Tiny Bit) More Relatable

Jessica Winter — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 22:12:41 GMT

In late 1990, not long after word had emerged that the planet’s most fearless and imaginative pop icon was dating one of the planet’s most glamorous supermodels, the mononymous gossip columnist Suzy reported, “David Bowie and Iman are still in the throes of whatever. He has been staying at her house in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon and they'll spend the holidays together at David's house on the beautiful little island of Mustique. So far, so good.”

The throes of whatever. Because when confronted with such a world-historical collision of pulchritude, charisma, and impeccable fashion taste, it’s not just that words fail—words become an annoyance, an encumbrance, a barnacle on the ship of life and truth and beauty.

Iman née Iman Abdulmajid and David Bowie né David Jones met at a dinner party in 1990. Iman was the Somali daughter of an OB-GYN and a diplomat whose origin story of legend—fabricated, to her great annoyance, by fashion photographer Peter Beard—was as “an African tribe girl who used to roam 500 miles” looking for water in the desert. Bowie, who died of cancer yesterday at age 69, was the British son of a waitress and a charity promotions officer whose origin story of legend—fabricated, to his great satisfaction, by Bowie himself—was as an extraterrestrial emissary. They married in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1992. Frequent Bowie collaborator Brian Eno said of the ceremony, “You couldn't tell what was sincere and what was theater. It was very touching.”

“I didn’t marry David Bowie; I married David Jones,” Iman told Vogue in June 1994. “The David she walked down the aisle with in 1992,” Vogue said, “‘doesn't read anything past the Renaissance,’ spends time bent over an easel and reads to her at night at their Swiss chateau.” Decades later, in 2014, she told the Guardian, “David is even more of a homebody than I am. At least I go to parties once in a while… He’s been to all the parties that there are.”

Strange as it may seem to say of such a rarefied couple, Bowie’s domestic bliss with Iman—their daughter, Lexi, was born in 2000; Bowie himself cut the umbilical cord—made him just a tiny bit more relatable: the rock god reborn as besotted husband and Spongebob Squarepants–watching dad. (This delightful contradiction was captured most memorably in the instant-classic 2013 Onion report “David Bowie Asks Iman If They Should Just Do Lasagna Again.”) Their 23-year marriage at once compounded Bowie’s unreachable glamour and made him seem closer, more familiar. And it’s one of the many reasons that so many people who loved Bowie—people who never met him, never knew him, and certainly knew nothing of what his marriage was really like, people who knew Bowie and Iman mostly through all these beautiful, beautiful pictures—are feeling so bereft today.

Star Wars Virgins

Katy Waldman — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 18:46:44 GMT

Slate sent two staffers who’ve never seen a Star Wars movie to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Note: Spoilers galore below, insofar as our intrepid viewers understood the movie correctly. For a more informed, less spoilery take, read Dana Stevens’ review of The Force Awakens.

Jessica Winter: So, Katy, we have somehow spent decades on Earth without immersing ourselves in the Star Wars universe—but that changed today, forever. How have you managed to elude the Force all this time?

Katy Waldman: It wasn’t easy! I would say I consumed a one-quarter portion (get it?) of the Star Wars mythos just through cultural osmosis. But it turns out a lot of the Facts I thought were Facts were incorrect. For instance, I’d assumed that Luke Skywalker and Princess (General?) Leia were an item, but it turns out they are siblings. Shocking. But what about you?

JW: Yes, there’s probably no such thing as a pure Star Wars newbie—the series is so all-pervasive that I got some of those nutrients simply by consuming other forms of culture. I attempted to become a Star Wars fan at age 6, when my older brother took me to The Return of the Jedi, which my friend Ishaan confirms is the one with the bears. But if I remember correctly, I got scared early on and we had to leave. By the time the second round of films kicked in, in 1999, I think my lack of Star Wars scholarship had hardened into a ideological stance—I resisted the idea that I was pop-culturally duty-bound to confirm my membership in this cult.

KW: Yes! That sounds so familiar. My accidental neglect recast itself as imperviousness to this big dumb galaxy that supplied 80 percent of the kids in my neighborhood with Halloween costumes every year. But I can now admit how wrong I was. I loved The Force Awakens! Star Wars is the culture’s best-kept secret! Did you feel like your novicehood was a problem today?

JW: I did not, and that is all to the movie’s credit. I got the sense that J.J. Abrams split the film’s attentions with perfect mathematical precision, embracing ignoramuses like us while performing plenty of fan service along the way. A few times in the theater where I saw it, the audience laughed or gasped for reasons unknown to me, but I didn’t feel left out—just curious. What did you love about it, Katy?

KW: Well, the two leads—Rey and Finn—are just so courageous and funny and game. And I liked that someone had come up with a metaphysics for the universe, with a Force and two sides, and I liked all the samurai mystical stuff and the cheesy fight scenes and the pilots who had each other’s backs. It just seemed like such a good-natured movie! Also, that little robot awakened all kinds of maternal instincts I didn’t realize I had.

JW: Yes, exactly. Despite ample darkness and destruction, this is a movie with a fundamentally can-do spirit, encapsulated in that irrepressible little rolling droid, who I worried about constantly. And Rey! Rey is everything. She is a desert orphan who can fix anything and fly everything and has a beautiful British accent and hates holding hands (poor well-intentioned Finn!) and despite being penniless and exhausted she somehow always looks like she is hitting the catwalk for the Nicholas K spring/summer 2015 ready-to-wear collection. I admired how Abrams found the time and space just to live with her for a little while, even in the midst of a jam-packed, fast-paced, ultra-blockbuster movie. Watching Rey sledding down the sand dunes, fixing her sad, rationed dinner—I would gladly watch the three-hour Jeanne Dielman version of that movie. In general I just loved looking at this movie, regardless of what was happening.

KW: The loaf of bread that bloomed in the pot of liquid. The sight of the spaceships kicking into higher gear and becoming streams of zooming light.

JW: And like you, Katy, I was intrigued by the metaphysics of the Force, but I still don’t really understand what the Force is. When Adam from Girls uses it, it’s like some kind of low-frequency sonic weapon that reads your mind and coerces you to do his bidding. But when Rey uses it, it’s almost like she’s meditating or really hitting the end zone on a mindfulness seminar. So when they use the Force on each other, it’s kind of like they’re having mind sex, although I also suspect they might be siblings—did you get that vibe, that possibly Rey is not just Leia’s spiritual successor but maybe her actual kid?

KW: YES. Yes, I did. I kept expecting Leia to reveal that she was Rey’s mother in that final scene when they embrace, though perhaps they are leaving that conversation for the sequel in which Adam from Girls is also revealed as R2-D2’s cousin. The Force flummoxed me as well! I couldn’t figure out whether only Jedis could use it—but then, how was Rey channeling it? I wondered whether you had to be born a Jedi, or it was a matter of training, or both ... Also, can you wield a lightsaber if you aren’t a Jedi? Is it like Thor’s hammer? Because Finn didn’t seem to have Force capability, yet he fought back against Solo Jr.

JW: Maybe Finn got some beginner-level lightsaber training at Imperial Stormtrooper school? That threw me, too.

KW: Can I ask another genealogy question? I thought Darth Vader was Luke’s father (hence the famous line I’m sure even you didn’t manage to avoid). So how is it that Han Solo’s son is referring to Darth Vader as grandfather? Are all of these characters one big family? Did they all spring fully formed from the Supreme Leader’s skull?

JW: So I knew going in that Luke was Leia’s brother and Darth Vader’s son, but I didn't know before watching the movie whether Luke and Leia shared the same father. Presumably they do! So Leia got together with Han Solo and made Adam from Girls.

KW: Did you find Adam from Girls convincing as a Big Bad?

JW: Oh my goodness, yes. I thought he was tremendous. The scene on the vertigo-inducing skywalk (!) between Big Bad and Han Solo is a masterpiece of technique and pacing—I knew exactly what was going to happen the second the scene started, and that knowledge only amped up the dread and terror and pathos as it unfolded. But what really clinches it is Adam Driver’s performance. When he says, with tears in his eyes, that he is being torn apart and needs his father’s help —that will stay with me for a long time. What did you think?

KW: This whole movie was so good at accessing emotions I wanted to keep safely tucked away from Star Wars. I almost started crying when Big Bad said he needed help from his dad—but at that moment, I thought he was looking for the strength to kill himself. So Han Solo’s death surprised me—it was terrible! And I’m worried it means that Driver won’t have any of that riveting adolescent vulnerability in the sequel. I was just not prepared for Girls and the Evil Empire to collide, in general. Did the presence of the old guard (Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford) do anything for you?

JW: I thought the mingling of the old and new generations worked seamlessly, especially because it blended so readily with the movie’s obsession with inheritance. There’s a lot of fodder for the nature-vs.-nurture debate in the film; at one point Han Solo says that Driver “has too much Vader in him,” and of course, the riveting vulnerable adolescent soon proves him gruesomely right. There’s almost a sensuality to the family talk—Driver says, “I shall not be seduced,” meaning that he will not join his parents on the side of good. I found the family romance to be palpable and potent and very emotionally rich—not what I was expecting from a Star Wars movie.

KW: I love the observation about the sensual family talk, especially because the ostensibly romantic relationship (between Rey and Finn) is so chaste. My sense, like yours, is that bloodlines are at the heart of the series—that something as ambitious as Star Wars will want to encompass generations as well as galaxies. On that note, I was surprised by how little education there was in this movie. Everyone seemed to already have skills or to flawlessly intuit the ones they didn’t realize they had. I kept waiting for the Jedi training montage.

JW: Agree. Here’s a helpful note I wrote to myself whilst Rey was somehow reanimating the Millennium Falcon, which had been moldering in the sand for years, with her own bare hands: “How does she know how to do all this shit?”

KW: YEP. Also, the audience cracked up when she called the Millennium Falcon “garbage,” and I was confused.

JW: The biggest laugh line in my crowd had something to do with a “garbage compactor.” Lots of garbage jokes in this movie! So Katy, a couple of Star Wars fans I know have referred to the movie’s “big twist.” But to us, it’s all twists. What do you think the big twist was? That Llewyn Davis comes back from the dead? That Han Solo and General/Princess Leia have a son? That the son is capable of patricide and also he is Adam from Girls?

KW: The last, definitely. Or maybe it’s Han Solo’s return as well as his subsequent death? Or maybe—it’s Luke return at the end! Was that Luke at the end? And what happened to his hand?

JW: Yes, that was Luke. I have no idea what happened to his hand, but more importantly, I have no idea how he feeds himself up there on top of that mountain. What does he eat and drink? Does he rappel down once a week to visit his local bodega? Does he summon takeout via the Force?

KW: That’s not how the Force works, Jessica!

JW: But if Luke is in good health and has a food delivery situation worked out, he will presumably play a big role in the next film?

KW: I assume so! Maybe he will provide the training montages I so sorely desired.

JW: And maybe he can explain whether the Force is a hereditary thing or a meritocracy open to all. Are you inspired to go check out the other films? I’m definitely going to watch the first three over Christmas to try to fill in some of these blanks, but I still don’t think I’ll have the stamina for the next, much maligned trilogy.

KW: Oh, absolutely. I want to see Harrison Ford when he is young and dashing like Llewyn Davis, and the spirit of fun that pervaded this movie was so irresistible, I need another fix! I’ll skip Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, though—I’ve been warned away by the biggest Star Wars fans I know. I think it’s fair to say that the Force is with us both?

JW: I have been seduced. Until next time!

Welcome to The Drift

J. Bryan Lowder — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 15:00:00 GMT

There are few things in life better than drifting off to sleep. After a long day of toil and tribulation, retreating to the comfort of bed, and then to the sweet release of unconsciousness—perchance to dream?—is a blessing, one of the most natural joys human beings can experience. And yet, despite its apparent simplicity, sleep has become incredibly complicated. Many of us have difficulties getting to it, and others have trouble staying there. We constantly receive tips (usually unsolicited) on what’s ruining it or which props we should use to do it better, and the debate over how much of it we need never seems to end. Beyond mechanics, sleep continues to fascinate us with its mystery—what happens while the lights are out upstairs? Why do some people talk and walk when they should be still? Why do some of us wake up screaming? Sleep is such an important part of the human experience that it regularly creeps out into our culture, even our language. One thing is certain: You should never sleep on sleep.

The Drift, a pop-up blog that will run in Slate from now through early Decemeber, will be a space for considering sleep from as many vantage points as there are threads in a fine set of sheets. We’ll look at the latest science and health advice, but we’ll also examine sleep as it engages with our art and entertainment as well. We’ll look at products meant to help us sleep, and reevaluate etiquette meant to help us do it more politely. We’ll hear personal stories of the sandman’s strangest habits, and maybe even eavesdrop on a dream or two. The goal, overall, is not to cover all of sleep—there aren’t enough hours in the night—but simply to wallow in it for a bit. We hope you’ll join us in appreciating the profound ways in which sleep shapes our lives, both under the covers and beyond.

Week One

Down With Spooning! J. Bryan Lowder rails against the indignities of the pre-sleep horizontal embrace and advocates instead for concious cuddling, an approach to intimacy that's altogether more comfortable and dignified.

My 9-Year Love Affair with Melatonin Mark Joseph Stern reports from almost a decade of shut-eye with the help of the natural sleep aid. And while it was the quest for rest that got him started, it's the crazy dreams that keep him coming back.

A New Look at the Sleepless Brain Rachel Gross stays up late looking at the most current neuroscience research on why some people just can't get to sleep—and how their brains may differ from those who can.

Week Two

“It’s Like When You Meet … The Creature!” Laura Miller relates what it's like to come from a family of sleep walkers and talkers.

When Did People Start Moving Fast Enough to Experience Jet Lag? Joshua Keating looks at the history of traveling faster than time! ... or at least fast enough that sleep schedules get confused.

Don't Sleep on "Don't Sleep on." The Phrase Is Evidence of the War on Sleep Katy Waldman, Slate's words correspondent, explores the origins of the expression, which has shifted mightly in its meaning since the time of Henry VIII.

The Eight-Hour Sleep Session Is Not What You Need Gabriel Roth rouses us from the slumber of conventional wisdom, arguing that instead of a "full night's sleep" what we really need are a few extra hours in the day ... and a smarter sleep schedule.

Dreaming in the Cloud Greta Weber reports on attempts to record our dreams and make sense of the mysteries of the collective human unconcious. But can dreams really be translated into "big data?"

Week Three

What’s Actually Happening When Part of Your Body Falls Asleep? Claire Landsbaum explains the biological reasons for those pins-and-needles in your arm—and reveals whether "sleeping" body parts can become dead ones.

We Need to Talk About Our Dreams Amanda Hess takes on the taboo against talking about our dreams in public and argues that the reason we consider "dream talk" boring may have more to do with cultural conditioning than objective truth.

The Art of the Public Nap Ian Callahan brings us Eric Leleu's striking images of public snoozing in China, revealing a juxaposition of human vulnerability and common space rarely seen in the West.

Pubescent Boys Hear a Lot About Wet Dreams. But They’re Not As Common As You Think Mark Joseph Stern investigates a pillar of teenage male sexuality—and discovers that sticky sheets are hardly the universial experience we have been lead to believe.

In Search of the Perfect Podcast to Help You Fall Asleep Laura Miller guides us through the podcast shelves in pursuit of the most dulcet voice to carry us into dreamland.

Week Four

I Slept All Night in a Sensory Deprivation Tank. This Is My Story. Seth Stevenson embeds himself in a device that shuts out essentially all sensory stimuli. But does total peace and quiet really equal better sleep?

How Gross Is Your Mattress? Claire Landsbaum takes a magnifying glass to our mattresses to see if, after a few years, they are really as nasty as bedding purveyors claim. The answer? Shudder...

Down With Alarm Clocks! L.V. Anderson exposes alarm clocks for what they are: A capitalist trap designed to violently align our bodies with the demands of the marketplace. Is there any hope of returning to the organic risings of our agrarian forebearers? Don't count on it.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This Slate staffers discuss the possible meanings of their recurring dreams.

Bedroom Revelations: Things You Learn When You Sleep Next to Someone Couples and folks who have otherwise slept near each other reveal the wild and charming things we do while unconscious.

The Creepiest Book of the Year Imagines a World Without Sleep Dan Kois interviews Adrian Barnes, author of a novel about what might happen if all of humanity forgot how to sleep.

Week Five

Should You Steep Before Sleep? J. Bryan Lowder dives into the steamy industry of so-called "sleepy teas"—herbal sachets that promise to help you nod off. But do they really work?

Sleep Trackers Promise to Improve Our Sleep. They Only Made Me Feel More Helpless. Josh Brogan considers the dubious promises of "sleep trackers," apps and tools designed to help you avoid the dreaded "sleep debt." He is not impressed.

Years Ago, We Decided That Young Doctors Need More Sleep. The Plan Might Have Backfired. Jordan Weissmann questions the seeming common sense that young doctors might perform better if their historically long shifts are limited to allow for more sleep.

The Last Bedtime Story You’ll Ever Need Lisa Wong Macabasco reveals the hypnotic power of The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep, a best-selling children's book that promises to knock out even the most trenchant bedtime fighters.

A Wet Awakening Jonathan L. Fischer often wakes up in a puddle of his own drool. This is his quest to understand why—and to keep it from happening again.

Week Six

Sonata-Allegro Snooze J. Bryan Lowder considers the widespread practice of using music (especially classical music) as a sleep aid. Is such a repurposing disrespectful? Or is it a valid use for art?

From Sleeper Cells to Sleeping Around: A Brief History of an Extremely Versatile Word Katy Waldman explores the wide and varied uses of the word sleep for things other than sleeping.

Should You Tell Your Friend You Dreamed About Them? An Interactive Adventure! Andrew Kahn and J. Bryan Lowder offer a little dream interpretation and advice in the form of a charming interactive game.

Watching People Live Stream Themselves Sleeping Can Be Dull, Creepy, and Strangely Sweet Willa Paskin watches the strange Internet video genre of sleep-streaming and finds it more engaging that you might expect.

WATCH: Every Single Time a Republican Interrupted the President of Planned Parenthood

Sam Reichman — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 20:47:00 GMT

This morning, Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards was scheduled to testify before the Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is ostensibly investigating the women’s healthcare provider’s use of federal funding following the release of videos that purportedly suggest that PPFA profits from fetal tissue donations. But before most of the Republican questioners, Richards didn’t end up testifying so much as simply absorbing a barrage of questions that she would begin to answer only to be interrupted, criticized, and/or talked over by Republican congressmen, as you can see in the video below.

You Have Neither Lived Nor Died Until You Have Read a Sex Scene Written by Morrissey

Jessica Winter — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 15:39:34 GMT

Morrissey’s first novel, List of the Lost, about a men’s relay track team in 1970s Boston, is out in a retro Penguin edition today in the U.K. and is already No. 1 in “Gothic Romance” on Amazon. It’s also inspired the worst reviews … for anything … ever? Here’s the Guardian: “It is an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination.” It comes as no surprise that the famously prickly Morrissey might wish the public to eat his shit, but one would assume that it would be at least bakery-fresh.

Facing such opprobrium (and this after the general praise bestowed on his Autobiography two years ago), can Morrissey now really claim, as he once did in song, that he “know[s] how Joan of Arc felt?” Are we burning his turds at the stake without due process? Let us linger for a moment over a representative passage. Here, this single sentence will do:

Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

If it is the role of great literature to provoke questions, then this passage succeeds wildly:

• Why is copulation a snowball? Why not any other type of ball? (An exercise ball?) Is it a snowball so that it can melt, thereby demonstrating the hot sexy force of the copulation? Or if copulation is itself a snowball, is it a frigid, mutually unsatisfying kind of copulation—a sort of diffident thrusting unto disappointment and eventual death?

• Does Morrissey invoke the ostensibly tired and clichéd image of a “roller coaster” in subliminal tribute to the spectacular erotic treasury of roller coaster thrill elements, including the Butterfly Inversion, the Camelback, and the Cobra Roll, all of which summon distinct variations on “sexually violent rotation”?

• How does a pair of breasts perform a “barrel roll” without detaching from a woman’s body? In conjuring this anatomically impossible image, is Morrissey subtly satirizing the poetic form of blason—identified with the likes of Petrarch and Shakespeare—in which a male poet attempts to praise his lady love by itemizing her physical features, but only succeeds in objectifying her and atomizing her being, to the point that, yes, her breasts could perform a barrel roll—or maybe even a Cuban 8, a rolling scissors, or a Hammerhead?

• In stating that Ezra’s erection (“bulbous salutation”) caused him to feel anguish (“the pained frenzy”), and thus mitigated or made forgivable his desire (“extenuating his excitement”), does Morrissey critique or embody Puritanical modes of equating lust with shame? In other words, in this passage, are we taking the point of view of Ezra’s bulbous salutation, the narrator’s bulbous salutation, or Morrissey’s bulbous salutation?

• Is Eliza’s “otherwise central zone” her vagina?

• Has Morrissey ever had sex?

Scott Walker Has a Lady Shirt for Lady Patriots Designed Just for Ladies

Jessica Winter — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 21:27:36 GMT

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker—who has framed the fight for equal pay as "pit[ting] one group of Americans versus another," who has called abortions performed to save a woman's life the result of a "false choice," who has indicated support for forcing C-sections on women who require a medically necessary abortion, and who has cited his assault on teachers' and nurses' unions as preparation for taking on ISIS as president—has a gift designed just for the ladies.

It's a shirt! It comes with joy. To use the shirt, you jump up and down in a field. Look how happy she is! The shirt comes in three colors, including Reagan Red.

But hark—how is this shirt just for ladies? One lady of Slate speculated that it might have a roomier fit for when a lady patriot becomes pregnant—with joy, and also with a fetus whose existence is worth more than her life upon conception, and who might thereby feel empowered to purchase a shirt of her own, presuming the fetus is a lady, and also a patriot—but then we saw this disclaimer:

Another lady of Slate used Google to compare this shirt Designed Just for Ladies with other products and experiences Designed Just for Ladies. The search results included:

• a ladies’ day out at a winery at which you learn to paint a flower bouquet

• a “special course” at a firing range ("Collared shirts or high neckline suggested”; the firing range also offers bachelorette parties)

• steel blue work boots

• a church’s special service called “She Speaks"

So we don't know! We accept the mystery. Who could be opposed to joy? I'm going to go find a field.

Carly Fiorina Comes Out in Favor of Kids Getting Measles

Jessica Winter — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 02:19:43 GMT

At a town hall today in Alden, Iowa, former Hewlett-Packard CEO, onetime California Senate candidate, and Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina stated that all Americans should have the right to contract diseases from unvaccinated children.

According to Jenna Johnson in the Washington Post, Fiorina received a question from a mother of five who said vaccines went against her religious beliefs because they were manufactured from cells of "aborted babies." Fiorina responded, “When in doubt, it’s always the parent’s choice," meaning that all parents should decide for themselves if their unvaccinated child should have the opportunity to transmit a disease to an infant, elderly person, or otherwise immunosuppressed person. "We must protect religious liberty," she added.

Fiorina disclosed that her own daughter had been "bullied" by a school nurse to protect her preteen daughter from cervical cancer by administering the HPV vaccine.

“When you have highly communicable diseases where you have a vaccine that’s proven, like measles or mumps, then I think a parent can make that choice," Fiorina continued, supporting parental discretion in determining whether or not unvaccinated children should be free to spread diseases throughout their community.

Update, 8:02 a.m., August 14, 2015: Fiorina's campaign has asked us to include the rest of Fiorina's quotation, as follows: "—but then I think a school district is well within their rights to say: 'I'm sorry, your child cannot then attend public school.' So a parent has to make that trade-off." Unvaccinated children are presumably free in this scenario to pursue opportunities to spread measles and mumps in all other locations that are not public schools. Fiorina does not think that public schools should be able to make such judgment calls when it comes to "more esoteric immunizations."

Fiorina is on record as opposing California’s school vaccination law, which requires all children in public or private school or day care to be vaccinated against a host of diseases, with no exceptions for religious or personal beliefs. “California is wrong on most everything, honestly,” Fiorina said. “I’m not at all surprised that they made that mistake as well.” Fiorina remains hopeful that the state will eventually revoke children's right not to get measles.

Why Sesame Street’s Move to HBO Is Both Great and Extremely Depressing

Jessica Winter — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 22:54:04 GMT

On the surface, there is nothing pernicious about the news that HBO will begin providing financial backing for five seasons of Sesame Street, which would air on the premium cable network nine months before reaching PBS viewers. As Emily Steel explained in the New York Times, the nonprofit Sesame Workshop has struggled to keep up a robust production schedule for the long-running children’s educational program, largely due to declining revenues from licensing and DVD sales. What’s more, PBS only accounts for about one-third of Sesame Street’s viewership—most kids stream the show and would be unaffected by HBO’s involvement, which would bring in enough money to produce twice as many new episodes per season and spin off new programming.

In practical terms, this is good news all around. In symbolic and historical terms, however, it’s terribly sad. To understand why, we just need a bit of history.

The historical moment that made Sesame Street possible is unimaginable today. (Exhibit A: During one of the 2012 presidential debates, Mitt Romney held up Big Bird as an example of wasteful government spending. As PBS later pointed out, "the federal investment in public broadcasting equals about one one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget.") The public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney got the idea for Sesame Street in 1967, during the decade of the War on Poverty, which produced the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964—among other things, this established Head Start, the health and education program for low-income pre-school children and their families—as well as Job Corp and the Social Security Act of 1965. And 1967 was also the year that Congress established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which brought us PBS and NPR.

In this fertile progressive epoch, Ganz Cooney raised $8 million (from the CPB, the U.S. Department of Education, and various foundations) to found the Children’s Television Workshop. Its flagship show, Sesame Street, had the mission of teaching basic alphabetical and numerical concepts to children ages three to five.

Ganz Cooney’s big bet was that the television set, present in 97 percent of American households by the mid 1960s, could become a delivery device of early education even to some of the poorest and most culturally deprived households. It could help close the gap between affluent children and their lower-income peers. As I wrote in the Bulletins of the Serving Library in 2012:

Though it receives little in the way of taxpayer money, one could almost think of Sesame Street and Sesame Workshop as a modern-day Works Progress Administration (WPA), enlisting filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians, songwriters, and other artists to build a creative public utility. And it really was a utility, nearly as ubiquitous as electricity or public schools. In 1978, 95 percent of households in East Harlem and Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy with children between the ages of two and five watched Sesame Street. That figure was slightly higher across Washington, D.C.; nationwide it held at 80 percent even. By 1979, after a decade on the air, nine million American children under the age of six were watching it daily.

Ganz Cooney was right about Sesame Street’s potential reach—and right about its potential impact. As a watershed study by the University of Maryland’s Melissa Kearney and Wellesley College’s Phillip Levine found, the show’s pedagogical benefits are on par with those seen in Head Start, and it “left children more likely to stay at the appropriate grade level for their age, an effect that is particularly pronounced among boys, African Americans and children who grow up in disadvantaged areas,” as the Washington Post recounted.

In short, Sesame Street was founded to help low-income kids keep up with their more affluent peers. That is literally why it exists. It succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. And now it is becoming the property of a premium cable network, so that a program launched to help poor kids keep up with rich kids is now being paywalled so that rich kids can watch it before poor kids can.

That in itself is not a tragedy or an injustice. Tragedy is the devastating funding cuts that Head Start has suffered in recent years, affecting tens of thousands of young children. Injustice is the nationwide lack of subsidized high-quality child care and universal pre-K. In this context, relocating Sesame Street to the gated community of HBO—even if that community's gates swing wide at nine-month intervals—is only to be expected. There could be no more cruelly perfect metaphor for the ultra-efficient sorting processes of socioeconomic privilege.

Mom and Dad Are Fighting: The Lower Your Expectations Edition

Allison Benedikt — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 18:50:55 GMT

Listen to Mom and Dad Are Fighting by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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In this week’s edition of Slate’s parenting podcast Mom and Dad Are Fighting, Slate editors Allison Benedikt and Jessica Winter talk to Jordan Weissmann about the rising cost of college and Hillary Clinton’s education proposal. Then, Amanda Hess comes on to discuss YouTube stars Sam and Nia Rader—who announced their pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage in viral YouTube videos—and the ethics of talking about your family online. Plus, parenting triumphs and fails and we answer a listener’s question about fair punishments.

This week on Slate Plus, Slate senior technology writer and new parent Will Oremus shares a parenting triumph or fail.

Items discussed in the show:

“Tuition and Fees and Room and Board over Time” from CollegeBoard
“Congratulations, Class of 2015. You’re the Most Indebted Ever (For Now)” by Jeffrey Sparshott in the Wall Street Journal
“40 Million Americans Now Have Student Loan Debt” on CNN Money
“The Big, Bold Idea at the Heart of Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Make College Cheaper” by Jordan Weissmann in Slate
“Hillary Clinton to Offer Plan on Paying College Tuition Without Needing Loans” by Patrick Healy in the New York Times
“By Many Measures, More Borrowers Struggling with Student-Loan Payments” by Drew Desilver at the Pew Research Center
“The Changing Profile of Student Borrowers” by Richard Fry at the Pew Research Center
Sam and Nia Rader’s pregnancy and miscarriage announcements on YouTube
“WE’RE GOING VIRAL!!” by Amanda Hess in Slate

Mom and Mom recommend:

Allison recommends “Organic Shmorganic” by Melinda Wenner Moyer in Slate and taking your kids to minor league baseball games.

Jessica recommends Tom Scocca’s column on the Awl, Underparenting.

This week’s advertisers are:

Little Passports. Keep your kids busy this summer with Little Passports, the award-winning subscription for kids. Right now, Mom & Dad Are Fighting listeners can save 40 percent on their first month with promo code MOMANDDAD40. Learn more at littlepassports.com/momanddad.
Audible.com. Audible is a leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the Internet, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken word audio products. As a special offer for Mom and Dad Are Fighting listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30-day trial membership. Just go to audible.com/PATTERSON for your 30-day trial and audiobook and to check out the Audible/James Patterson collaboration, which includes a recommended listening list from the best-selling author, discounted audiobooks for family listening, and reading guides for families.
Warby Parker. Warby Parker, an easy way to buy prescription glasses and sunglasses online. Visit WarbyParker.com for the “Home Try-On Program.” And when you’re ready to purchase your favorite glasses, enter the promo code “MomandDad” during the final check out for free three-day shipping.

Follow us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to tell us what you thought of today’s show and give us ideas for what we should cover in the next edition. Got questions that you’d like us to answer on a future episode? Call and leave us a message at 424-255-7833.

Podcast produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Jessie Chasan-Taber.

A Conversation About “Women’s Health Issues” with Jeb Bush and Elizabeth Warren

Jessica Winter — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 02:15:17 GMT

Here are four sentences that Jeb Bush said today.

“The next president should defund Planned Parenthood. The argument against this is, well, women’s health issues, you’re attacking, it’s a war on women, and you’re attacking women’s health issues. You could take dollar for dollar, although I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues, but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinary fine organizations, community health organizations, that exist to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues. But abortion should not be funded by the government, any government, in my mind.”

(Bush later said he "misspoke," but then effectively repeated exactly what he said when he misspoke.)

And here are four sentences that Elizabeth Warren said on Monday.

“I come to the Senate floor today to ask my Republican colleagues a question. Do you have any idea what year it is? Did you fall down, hit your head, and think you woke up in the 1950s or the 1890s? Should we call for a doctor?”

Warren declined to address whether or not a woman sustaining an injury in a fall qualifies as a "women's health issue," and if so, whether or not her treatment should be covered by an employer-provided health care plan or Medicaid.

Dating Tips From Woody Allen

Jessica Winter — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 20:05:00 GMT

Woody Allen has done something bold and painfully self-aware, something that his many detractors might never have expected of him: He has come clean about the sins he's committed in the past against the women in his life.

“I was selfish and I was ambitious and insensitive to the women that I dated,” he confesses to Sam Fragoso in an interview with NPR. “ ... As I got older and [saw that women] were humans suffering like I was ... I changed. I learned empathy over the years.”

When did this happen? Sometime after his “early 30s,” Allen says.

Woody Allen turned 30 in December 1965. In January 1992, when Allen was 56, his longtime partner Mia Farrow discovered—via nude photos Allen left out on his mantelpiece—his affair with her 19-year-old daughter Soon-Yi, sister to Allen's three children with Farrow.

At the start of his relationship with Soon-Yi, who is now his wife, Allen tells NPR that he “thought it would just be a fling, it wouldn't be serious.” But soon, he says, it took on “a life of its own.” Why does it continue to work so well, even decades later? Allen muses:

I think that was probably the odd factor that I'm so much older than the girl I married. I'm 35 years older ... I was paternal. She responded to someone paternal. I liked her youth and energy. She deferred to me, and I was happy to give her an enormous amount of decision-making just as a gift and let her take charge of so many things.

So we can distill two key pieces of dating advice from Woody Allen: 1) Wait until you're around 35 years old to start dating and 2) Date women who are around 35 years younger than you are.

Maybe there's a third piece of advice: 3) Be paternal. Then again, the opportunity to date your partner's daughter and your children's sister isn't one that's readily available to most men. As Allen himself puts it to NPR, “That's why I'm a big believer in luck.”

Mom and Dad Are Fighting: The Sex After Baby Edition

Allison Benedikt — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:39:47 GMT

Listen to Mom and Dad Are Fighting by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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In this week’s edition of Slate’s parenting podcast Mom and Dad Are Fighting, Slate editors Allison Benedikt and Jessica Winter talk to Julie Lythcott-Haims, the author of How to Raise an Adult, about the long-term dangers of helicopter parenting. Then, real talk about sex after having a baby. Plus, Dr. TJ Gold of Tribeca Pediatrics helps us answer a listener’s question about bedwetting, and parenting triumphs and fails.

This week on Slate Plus, Allison talks about her family’s move from Brooklyn to the suburbs.

Items discussed in the show:

How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims
“Kids of Helicopter Parents Are Sputtering Out” by Julie Lythcott-Haims in Slate
“The French Government Wants to Tone My Vagina” by Claire Lundberg in Slate
“Why Couples Don’t Have Sex After Birth of Kids” by Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph
“In Study, Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone,” in the New York Times.

Mom and Mom recommend:

Allison recommends “Unlicensed SoHo Day Care is Shut After Death of Infant Boy” by Vivian Yee in the New York Times, and also recommends making sure you are sending your children to licensed and regulated day care providers.

Jessica recommends After Birth by Elisa Albert.

This week’s advertisers are:

Little Passports. Keep your kids busy this summer with Little Passports, the award-winning subscription for kids. Right now, Mom and Dad Are Fighting listeners can save 40 percent on their first month today with promo code MOMANDDAD40. Learn more at LittlePassports.com/MomandDad.
Audible.com. Audible is a leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the Internet, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken word audio products. As a special offer for Mom and Dad Are Fighting listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30-day trial membership. Go to Audible.com/MOMANDDAD, download a title for free, and start listening!

Podcast produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Jessie Chasan-Taber.

Giving Up on Gun Control

Jessica Winter — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 19:05:52 GMT

Last weekend, the world saw white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof posing stone-faced with Confederate flags and license plates. Sometime after the pictures were taken, Roof allegedly shot dead nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, using a legally acquired 45-caliber Glock handgun after passing a background check. On Monday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced that the Confederate flag would be removed from State House grounds, calling it “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.” In the space of 24 hours, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Walmart all stopped selling products featuring the Confederate banner. Google stated Tuesday that it would scrub the flag from ads and Google Shopping. Several flag makers say they will stop manufacturing the flag. Today, the governor of Alabama has ordered the removal of the flag from state Capitol grounds.

Almost literally overnight, the chimera of consensus around the Confederate flag as a divisive but misunderstood symbol of “heritage” or “Southern pride” fell away, revealing the banner for what it is. The obscenity of the flag and the murderous racism it represents have dominated a national conversation about the American way of hate and violence for all the right reasons.

The flag has also dominated the conversation for a single wrong reason, which is that most Americans have given up on achieving meaningful gun control in their lifetimes or in their grandchildren’s lifetimes.

Up to and including the December 2012 mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, Americans could be certain that every time a crazed man emptied a weapon inside a church or movie theater or first-grade classroom, the aftermath would produce a national conversation—just like the one we’ve been having about Confederate symbolism—about strengthening America’s gun control laws. The conversation happened because we believed it would lead somewhere.

After Newtown, we realized that the conversation would never lead anywhere, and so we found other things to talk about.

In April 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho shot dead 32 people and injured 17 at Virginia Tech, we debated Virginia’s faulty background-check requirements—Cho passed two checks despite a record of mental illness.

In January 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner shot dead six people and wounded 13 at an event featuring Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, the Cho debate effectively replicated itself, down to Loughner’s mystifying ability to come up clean on a background check for his legally acquired weapon of choice, a Glock Model 19 9mm pistol.

In July 2012, when James Eagan Holmes shot dead 12 people and injured 70 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the debate expanded to interrogate the legal status of the AR-15 assault rifle and 100-round drum magazine that Holmes legally purchased and that had been previously prohibited under the assault-weapons ban, which Congress let expire in 2004.

Five months after Aurora, in December 2012, Adam Lanza shot dead 26 people, including 20 6- and 7-year-old children, at an elementary school in Newtown using a legally acquired Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle, a Glock 10mm, and a Sig Sauer 9mm. In the immediate aftermath of Newtown and with the memory of Aurora’s carnage still fresh, the momentum behind securing stronger gun control laws in the United States felt more palpable than ever.

Hours after the Newtown shooting, the website of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence crashed under the weight of new donations. Six states eventually adopted universal background checks. Colorado, site of the movie theater massacre, banned magazines that hold more than 15 rounds. Michael Bloomberg put $50 million of his own money behind the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. President Obama signed three executive orders on gun violence. In the U.S. Senate, Sens. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Patrick Toomey, a Republican, worked on a bipartisan measure to require background checks for online and gun-show sales. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein proposed reviving the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. A Washington Post–ABC News poll showed over 90 percent support among Americans for expanded background checks; even among National Rifle Association members, support came in at 74 percent.

And then, nothing. Feinstein’s proposal fell away before it could even come up for a vote. The watered-down Manchin-Toomey bill died in the Senate in April 2013. In September 2013, voters in Colorado recalled two of the Democratic state senators who supported Colorado’s new gun control legislation. And in April 2015, as Holmes’ trial got underway, the Associated Press cited the NRA’s tally of “35 bills expanding gun rights that have been signed into law nationwide this year,” adding, “No legislation the NRA has opposed has become law.” The AP headline read, “As Theater Shooting Trial Opens, Gun Debate Dwindles.”

When 20 dead first-graders cannot result in new and meaningful national measures on gun control or even in weak and largely symbolic national measures on gun control, then perhaps—if you are of a certain cast of mind—that is the moment to retreat on gun control.

And we have. People will still talk about it. Michael Bloomberg will always have more money to spend on it. Karl Rove can propose the repeal of the Second Amendment. Manchin and Toomey can discuss reviving their push on background checks. Gabby Giffords can continue to fight, and when, say, North Carolina decides not to repeal permits for handgun purchases, she can treat this maintaining of the status quo as a victory—which, in its grotesque context, it is. Mostly, though, we find other things to talk about.

In May 2014, when Elliot Rodger killed six people, three of them by gun, and wounded 14, seven of them by gun, in Isla Vista, California, we talked about misogyny, and we coined hashtags like #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen.* Now, we’re talking about the Confederate flag.

And the next time a crazed man commits mass murder, and the next time, and the next time, we will talk about gun control a little, but we will also find a second conversation. Because those conversations are worthy and potentially fruitful, and also because we have given up.

Correction, June 25, 2015: This article originally misstated that Elliot Rodger shot dead six people and wounded 14. Three of the fatalities were due to stabbing and seven of the injuries were by vehicular assault. (Return.)

Breast-Feeding Terror Spreads to Terre Haute, Indiana

Jessica Winter — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 16:12:02 GMT

A concerned restaurant patron in Terre Haute, Indiana, following through on the post–Sept. 11 ethos of “If You See Something, Say Something,” surreptitiously snapped a photograph of a nursing mother, Conner Kendall, at a local TGI Friday’s outlet and posted the image on Facebook and Instagram. In a spirit of open inquiry, he did not rush to judgment, but instead posted questions for debate:

The comments that followed on the man's post were a veritable festival of conversation-starters, which Kendall later collated on her own Facebook page. They included: “Does she really just have to flop it out for everyone to see?” (response: NO, the baby should instead be shoved under his mother's shirt until he suffocates), “There were children there” (response: INDEED, and those children did not include the child who was nursing), “If it's a natural thing then why can't men carry around urinals and use them wherever, whenever?” (response: GOOD POINT, babies love a delicious glass of urine), and “What about the rights of those dining in the restaurant?” (response: ANOTHER GOOD POINT, Kendall and any other nursing mothers at TGI Friday's should have offered to breastfeed any patron who asked).

Incidentally, the man was exercising his rights to feed his child at a TGI Friday's at the time he took the picture, an irony Kendall noted in her own Facebook post: “As I was admiring how adorable your daughter was,” Kendall wrote on Facebook, “you were posting pictures of me.” (So far, Kendall's Facebook post responding to the social-shaming campaign has logged more than 73,000 shares and hundreds of supportive comments.)

Everyone appreciates other people's children in his or her own way! But we can all agree that if a mother feeding her baby makes you uncomfortable, the best possible thing to do is to make sure the entire Internet can have the opportunity to feel as uncomfortable as you do. That's what parental solidarity is all about.

Lastly, I would like to apologize to the people of Terre Haute, Indiana, for the time I breast-fed my daughter in front of the taco stand at the Children's Museum in Mexico City, where children eating could have seen my child eating.

If You Drop Your Air Conditioner Out the Window, the Only Thing That Matters Is Whether You Hurt Anyone

Jessica Winter — Fri, 29 May 2015 18:23:00 GMT

"This is the story of every New Yorker's worst nightmare happening to me," writes Jessica Roy in Daily Intelligencer. Bedbug infestation? Low Uber rating? Plutocrat rats the size of cats gentrifying your neighborhood? Nope: Every New Yorker's worst nightmare is, according to Roy, when the 100-pound air conditioner you have uncertainly balanced on your windowsill ("It teeters a little bit") slips from your grasp and crashes to the ground two flights below.

This is only proximately accurate. Every New Yorker's worst nightmare is not when you drop your air conditioner out the window. Every New Yorker's worst nightmare is being under that window.

If you drop your air conditioner out the window, the only thing that matters is whether or not you hurt someone.

We at Moneybox are sympathetic to customers who wish to elude gratuitous service fees ("I do manage to say no to installation, however, because it costs $50," Roy writes), who try to align their consumer habits with their sociocultural and political identities ("I am a feminist who can definitely install a 100-pound air conditioner herself"), and who embody a can-do DIY spirit ("It teeters a little bit"). In most circumstances, we at Moneybox would reflexively support any customer seeking redress from a retailer ("I'm, like, upset! I'm sorry! You guys won't, like ... refund me, right?") after sustaining injuries by said retailer's product ("The air conditioner slides out of my hands and takes a layer of skin with it") when said retailer hasn't even advised the customer on, for example, the influence of blood-sugar levels on air-conditioning-installation outcomes ("I haven't eaten dinner yet, so I'm, like, real hangry").

However, it still stands that if you drop your air conditioner out the window, the only thing that matters is whether or not you hurt someone.

Wait a minute, you say. One, installing air conditioning units is hard! Two, Roy's apartment overlooked a patio, not a busy sidewalk! Three, falling air conditioners aren't even all that dangerous—a Gawker investigation could only find a single instance of an A/C death in New York, all the way back in 1988.

No, no, and no. If you want A/C and don't want to pay an installation fee, the solution is not to plonk the unit on your windowsill ("It teeters a little bit"), close the window, and hope for the best—the solution is to pay the installation fee, or to make some friends who can help you. Patios are designed for use by people who can be harmed by falling A/C units. And pointing out that your falling 100-pound hunk of sheet metal and aluminum tubes probably won't kill anyone—when the same ostensibly reassuring Gawker piece is a litany of head injuries, broken ribs and pelvises, and cracked vertebrae—is sort of like arguing in favor of blowing stop signs near primary schools in your Escalade so long as the pedestrians whose legs you crush and skulls you splinter don't die.

"Why is everything the worst?" Roy asks at one point in her piece. Everything is not the worst, fellow New Yorker. If you drop your air conditioner out the window, the only thing that matters is whether or not you hurt someone. You didn't. You are living the dream.

“Not Some Secretary From Brooklyn”

Jessica Winter — Sat, 16 May 2015 00:11:00 GMT

There are many ways to choose the best-ever line from seven hugely quotable seasons of Mad Men. You could pick a salient passage from the Draper Doctrine of market-driven nihilism. You could open a pot of Sterling’s Gold. You could tap a maple on a cold Vermont morning or tap a bowl with Peggy Olson. But if you ask this viewer, the honor belongs to Sterling Cooper veteran Freddy Rumsen, who, in the Season 5 episode “The Other Woman,” gave copywriter Peggy a rousing directive to show Don that she’s “not some secretary from Brooklyn who’s dyin’ to help out.”

This brief scene crystallizes so much of what Mad Men gets right about the dynamics of being a woman in the working world, whether in 1966 or in 2015. Peggy, who has stuck with one company through the formative years of her professional life, risks being typecast in her original role as the upstart secretary unless she strikes out and finds outside offers. Freddy’s comment manages to be supportive while nodding at the sexism and classism that pervades the WASP-y boys’ club of the midcentury advertising world. It’s a virus that could give even the most determined young woman a raging case of imposter syndrome: the feeling that no matter how many brilliant campaigns Peggy conceives, she’s always really be a secretary; that no matter how many people answer to her, she’ll never really make it out of Bay Ridge; that no matter how much she contributes to her company, it’s always really the company doing her a favor, just by keeping her around. Because SCDP loves to do favors. In the same episode, it grants office manager Joan Harris a partnership on the condition that she prostitute herself to a prospective client, thereby guaranteeing lifelong financial security for herself and her son. Joan’s decision to go through with the lucrative assignation is both correct and wrenching, and it has continued to look like the better of two bad choices even as its reverberations have continued to shock and humiliate Joan right down to the final episodes of Mad Men, which concludes Sunday.

In fact, throughout its run, Mad Men’s great subject has been not masculine self-invention or the 20^th-century advertising business or the arc of the 1960s, but the changing role of women in the workplace.

It’s a priority that has been clear from the beginning. The pilot presented three working-woman archetypes: Rachel Menken, the steely and self-possessed business heir; Peggy, the naïve new kid who might get by on sheer talent and pluck; and Joan, red queen of the typing pool and something of a paradox in the way she so deftly uses her sex appeal to buoy herself above Sterling Cooper’s day-to-day rugby scrum of grab-ass and catcalls. Later there was Bobbie Barrett, who wasn’t born into her business but married it, and who enjoyed giving Peggy advice both enigmatic and essentialist. (“You can’t be a man. Be a woman. It’s powerful business when done correctly.” On it!) And there was Dr. Faye Miller, the mind-reading consumer research guru who loses out on Don’s affections in favor of Megan Calvet, whose talent for advertising, much like Kumar Patel’s talent for taking the MCATs, was all the more enviable for how effortlessly she deployed it and for how little she valued it.

One of Mad Men’s many memorable episode closing shots is of Joan, Peggy, and Faye in the elevator together, each staring dolefully ahead, each of them mired in workplace frustrations but lacking any framework to forge feminist solidarity among themselves or start a Lean In circle right there between floors. Even when they had one another’s backs, they often stumbled or missed the other’s cues or changed their minds midstream. In Season 4, when Peggy fires a freelancer for drawing and posting obscene caricatures of Joan, Joan responds not with gratitude but with stone-faced derision. “All you’ve done,” Joan sneers, “is prove to them that I’m a meaningless secretary and you’re another humorless bitch.” Joan rightfully resents the notion that anyone would have to fight her battles for her—even and especially if that notion is true—and Peggy, looking more startled than offended when Joan glides impassively out of that elevator, realizes that she can’t problem-solve sexism at SCDP, try as she might.

Two seasons later, in “A Tale of Two Cities,” when Joan is put on trial in the fishbowl conference room for the capital crime of managing the Avon account herself, Peggy comes to Joan’s rescue again, covertly this time—dispatching Meredith with a fake missive that secures Joan’s turf and shows Pete Campbell that snitches get stitches. But the victory still rings hollow simply for the amount of subterfuge, good luck, and excruciating effort required for Joan to get even a crumb of respect for her abilities and ambition in the first place.

One of the rather Seinfeld-ian takeaways of Mad Men has been that people don’t really change, and the show’s long view of women in the workplace indicates that institutions don’t, either—or rather that they change so haltingly and incrementally that even the most determined female outlier would have to bang her head bloody against the glass ceiling for years or decades before she could see any cracks. Joan is a wealthy partner with an equity stake, and Peggy managed to rise from secretary to copy chief before she turned 30, yet, by the move to McCann in Mad Men’s third-to-last episode, the aptly titled “Lost Horizon,” Joan is pushed out for 50 cents on the dollar because she objects to being sexually harassed, and Peggy is being mistaken for a secretary—albeit perhaps a secretary who’s dyin’ to help out.

Over the course of seven seasons, Mad Men has sowed in us a deep and almost unconditional affection for its working women. Don is indisputably the show’s focal point, but as charismatic and hypnotic as he’s been from the jump, we never sympathized with him the way we did with Joan when Harry Crane squandered her scriptwriting talents or with Peggy every single time Don took her for granted, whether he was screaming at her about how her salary obviates his duty to treat her with common courtesy or literally flinging dollar bills in her face. (“That’s what the money is for!” indeed.) No matter how much his Depression childhood is filled in with flashbacks or how amply his dad bod is displayed, Don has remained bronzed in his mythos and mystery and untouchable talent, a Colossus of Madison Avenue. Peggy and Joan, by contrast, began as near-cartoons—the mousy naïf and the man-killer—and transubstantiated into people, lending flesh-and-blood immediacy to Mad Men’s rendering of women in the ’60s office jungle.

“There’s no number,” Peggy replies in “The Other Woman” when Don cynically asks her how much he has to pony up to keep her from fleeing into the arms of Cutler Gleason and Chaough; in the same episode, Joan names her exact numerical value (and to sleazy weasel Pete Campbell, of all people!) before agreeing to go to bed with oily Jaguar rep Herb Rennet. Everyone on Mad Men, body and mind, is a marketplace commodity, but the show made this explicit with its most beloved female characters, and never more heartbreakingly than Joan being forced out at half-off in McCann’s everything-must-go sale, destined to forever wear her suggested retail as a scarlet letter. Here was Mad Men’s most cruelly corroborated thesis statement: that while men are paid for what they do, women are priced for what they are perceived to be.

David Letterman Raised Me

Jessica Winter — Mon, 11 May 2015 01:00:02 GMT

Strange kids seem stranger for cultivating solitary enthusiasms. And strangeness may be a factor of birth order: If you’re the youngest in your family by a lot—if, say, all your siblings are in or out of college by the time you’re reading chapter books—you may try to narrow the distance between you and them by liking the stuff you think they like: their thick grown-up novels, their enigmatic college-radio bands, their cultish late-night shows.

Liking the stuff you think they like does little to make you feel less alone in your house, but it does succeed in widening the distance between you and your actual peers, who like different stuff. In short, you lack adaptive skills. You are not good at figuring out how to be a kid. But you do figure out how to program the silver Quasar VCR your household acquires in 1985 when you are 8 years old, and for the next several years, you will wake up an hour early each morning to watch Late Night With David Letterman before school. And for a short while in the early ’90s, when A&E starts showing reruns of Late Night from before your time, you will spend two hours with Letterman every day—one of those hours with a young and relatively mellow Letterman, a Letterman who was not yet encumbered by mannerisms and who occasionally wore sweater vests.

To my suburban elementary-school self, David Letterman was a window into urban adult life. He was a figure both accessible and aspirational, crackling with frictions of personality: a Midwestern loner-type yet somehow the hippest guy in New York City; a guy beset by self-doubt and self-loathing yet confident enough to build a late-night institution around himself; a guy palpably uncomfortable around people who made a stratospheric living by talking to people; a guy with a pathological aversion to embarrassment who pursued embarrassment of himself and others as a vocation—maybe as a way of cauterizing a primal wound.

As a gawky and badly socialized child, I, too, had a fear of embarrassment. But fear of something is its own form of fascination, which may be why I was so fascinated by Late Night’s many sublime embarrassments. The infamous (and, it turned out, staged) brawl between Andy Kaufman and wrestler Jerry Lawler—in which shit-talking turned to bitch-slapping turned to screaming and coffee-tossing—was ugly-funny, bizarrely intimate, and humiliating for everyone involved, like if two of your cousins got into a bar fight and for some reason your homeroom teacher was tending the bar. There was the night when the Band’s Levon Helm didn’t show up for his guest spot, and so Letterman interviewed the staffer who booked him instead, a little duet of matter-of-fact mortification. There was, of course, Late Night mascot Larry “Bud” Melman, a phenomenon whose genius lay in the ambiguity about just how far in or out on the joke he was. This joke reached its apotheosis in Larry’s triumphant journey to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where he attempted to operate a microphone and handed out hot towels.

Even as a kid, I understood intuitively that all of this seemed somehow unsuited for broadcast, that Late Night’s static of awkwardness and banality was exactly the stuff that got edited out of most television programs. This was a show that carved an entire segment out of the fact that producer Barbara Gaines shared a name and a few interests with another person named Barbara Gaines. Marcel Duchamp hung a toilet in a gallery and called it art; David Letterman came up with a list of Top 10 Words That Almost Rhyme with “Peas” and called it—well, actually, he never would have called it comedy, even if others did. (What I’d forgotten until I watched that Top 10 clip is that the lists, which lampooned magazine polls and listicles, began as a form of media criticism, just as the parodic aspects of Late Night scanned as television criticism.) Along with these surreal bits and failed gags and excruciating silences was an unspoken camaraderie with me, the viewer, the lonely weirdo at home who for some unearthly reason was watching this mess. Late Night didn’t seem made to be watched—not quite—which of course made it riveting to watch.

The most enchanting aspect of Late Night, at least to a kid like me, was that it seemed so private. This was true even before Letterman began indulging his own tics and perseverations and verbal fixations as if no one were looking (and sometimes as if the whole world were looking, which it was on Oscar Night 1995, aka the night of “Oprah, Uma”). Late Night was unsolicitous of the viewer, just as Letterman was often unsolicitous of his guests. (But never unsolicitous of his dog guests. No man has ever loved dogs like David Letterman loves dogs.) The cramped and shabby set, where grizzled stagehands and rumpled young producers milled around uneasily at the margins, appeared to be a space created specifically for strange people cultivating solitary enthusiasms. (A 1985 Rolling Stone cover story on Letterman itemized a few of these guests: “a guy who keeps weird congealed old food in his dresser drawer … Another guest keeps snowballs from different years … a woman named Alba Ballard dresses parrots to look like Cyndi Lauper and Dee Snider from Twisted Sister.”) A sloppy spotlight trained shakily on Letterman’s guests as they strode out from the dingy wings, as if for a 3 a.m. set at a fourth-tier comedy club where they’d try out material on people who weren’t really listening and who would never remember what they heard.

I knew what that felt like because I tried to get my peers to share my interest in Letterman for years. I cringe to think of the Ralph Wiggum–like surety with which I attempted to start Letterman-related conversations with a fellow third-grader whose surname happened to be Lettman—an effort that was positively Letterman-esque in its hapless embrace of inane semi-coincidence. I had trouble accepting that my peers were into Alf and Garbage Pail Kids and that blurting out “They pelted us with rocks and garbage!” at the cafeteria table would not be an irresistibly mysterious invitation to my secret Late Night world. These people watched cartoons in the morning. The man in their lives was Kirk Cameron or maybe Jordan from New Kids on the Block. Meanwhile I was gleaning what I could about human sexuality from the wacko frisson between Letterman and Sandra Bernhard, which turned each of her appearances into a kind of televised foreplay, especially on the night that Madonna showed up. When, decades later, I conducted an informal poll of Letterman Babies around my age for reactions to his sextortion scandal, not only did I search in vain for anyone whose perception of him shifted a millimeter; I also searched in vain for anyone from my generation who was even surprised. This, I believe, is due to Sandra Bernhard. (Also Julia Roberts. And also Drew Barrymore. Oh, and Madeleine Smithberg.)

I started to let Letterman slip away from me at the exact moment of his mainstream pinnacle: When he moved to CBS in 1993, the watered-down 11:35 incarnation of the show proved to be too loud, too bright, too public. (Letterman, in retrospect, seems to agree, recently telling the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff, “We came out of the chute, going a million miles an hour. And … we just sort of said, ‘Really, can we go a million miles an hour again?’ And we tried, and we couldn’t.”) Late Night’s not-ready-for-prime-time-or-really-anytime intimacy was lost in a bigger theater. The guest list went celebrities-only, and the celebrities, sadly, always showed up. It’s now been over 20 years since I stopped scrambling out of bed in the mornings to watch VHS tapes of his show. And yet I feel bereft whenever I envision the cultural landscape without Letterman, whose last-ever Late Show airs on May 20.

Not that there’s any way ever to erase him from that landscape. Letterman’s influence on the entertainment world is so totalizing as to be invisible—it doesn’t bear explicitly Letterman-like markers so much as it simply ingested his entire sensibility. If you think something is funny, chances are that Letterman is right there, in on the joke with you. His public-access production values and halting parade of misfits anticipated Tim and Eric. His constant low-level hum of discomfort anticipated the advent of cringe comedy. His insider-y tweaking of network brass anticipated the Sheinhardt Wig Company of 30 Rock. His endless waterfall of instant-classic remote segments anticipated Kimmel and Fallon’s reorganization of late-night programming as discrete segments built to go viral. His overall attitude of reflexive irony and cheerful pessimism anticipated the invention of Generation X. “I think if you have any sense,” Letterman once said, “you’ll adopt the view of life that if the bucket of shit can explode, it will explode.”

People who grew up loving Letterman didn’t idolize him, exactly; someone whose personal gestalt involves an exploding bucket of shit naturally resists idolatry. He didn’t become a father figure for me or a first celebrity crush. But in part because of his evident gift for the aphorism and partly by dint of his being a tall man in a suit in my house all the time, Letterman over the years acquired a moral stature. This seemed to be borne out by his genteel comportment over two botched Tonight Show handovers, by his evident decency (he effectively bankrolled the final years of comedian George Miller’s life, and handed an entire Late Show over to Warren Zevon when he was dying), and by his fierce loyalty (repeatedly having Mary Tyler Moore and Jimmie Walker on as non sequitur Late Night guests, apparently because they both gave Letterman jobs when he was a struggling young comic). And then there was his growing willingness to be seen as a vulnerable human being, whether in his return to The Late Show after quintuple bypass surgery in 2000 or a year and a half later in his cold open following the 9/11 attacks, when he spoke simply and memorably to the nation’s collective grief. The edgy, irritable, discomfiting wiseass could comfort America when it mattered.

But he was always comforting to me. He kept me company. He sent me off to school every morning with an absurd little private joke in my head, like a note tucked away in my lunch box. And into my 20s and 30s, when my daily Letterman viewings had long lapsed, he was still milling around in the background, muttering pleasantly to himself, cackling at ephemera. On a few occasions this past winter, pinned to a couch by a newborn around the clock in an hourless blur, I’d find myself flipping him on at 11:35 partly to orient myself in time, but partly just to know he was around—this odd and lonely-seeming person pacing my silent house, laughing gently both at and with my strange solitary enthusiasms, him and me in on the joke together.

DoubleX Gabfest: The Inside Inside Amy Schumer Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 12:03:00 GMT

Become a fan of DoubleX on Facebook. Leave us love letters and see what other listeners are saying about the Gabfest. Send us an email to doublexgabfest@slate.com.

Listen to the DoubleX Gabfest by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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On this week’s Gabfest, Hanna Rosin, June Thomas, and Jessica Winter of Slate join New York editor Noreen Malone to talk about the Broadway musical Fun Home, Instagram envy, and the third season of Inside Amy Schumer’s not-so-sneaky feminism.

Links to items discussed in the show:

The graphic memoir, Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
Fun Home on Broadway
Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For”
Jessica Winter’s article on Instagram envy in Slate
“FOGO Is the New FOMO” in New York magazine
Cindy Sherman
Jessica’s favorite sketch from the third season of Inside Amy Schumer, Milk Milk Lemonade, and Noreen’s, Football Town Nights
Inside Amy Schumer sketches Focus Group, Compliments, Amy Schumer Doll, and Last F--kable Day
Willa Paskin’s review of Inside Amy Schumer’s second season

DoubleX recommendations:

Noreen recommends the photo sharing service Tinybeans and the Empire character Cookie Lyon.

Hanna recommends New York magazine’s new podcast, Sex Lives.

Jessica recommends Agata Pyzik’s essay “In Praise of Vulgar Feminism” in n+1.

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to like us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

The Problem Isn’t That Trevor Noah Is Offensive. The Problem Is That He’s a Giant Dope.

Jessica Winter — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 15:48:00 GMT

Not since John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate have the vetting capacities of a powerful political force been cast into such doubt. When Trevor Noah was announced Monday as the next host of satirical powerhouse The Daily Show, most observers had little familiarity with the 31-year-old, South African–born comic, save perhaps for his three awkward appearances on the program with current host Jon Stewart. The New York Times piece announcing the succession threw up a few vague red flags (Comedy Central never auditioned Noah, who provided reporter Dave Itzkoff with a weirdly self-aggrandizing non sequitur comparing himself to Beyoncé). But the excitement of a fresh face bringing a unique perspective to a hallowed franchise (Noah's mother is black and his father is white, which made their union illegal in South Africa's apartheid era), combined with Stewart's full-throated support, seemed like endorsement enough.

Then people—notably BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara—started combing Noah's Twitter feed.

There were tweets that showcased Noah's breezy anti-semitism.

There were tweets that put a spotlight on the polyglot Noah's fluency in fat-chick jokes.

There were tweets that skipped across the landscape of Noah's imagination, where women are objects to be literally or figuratively pounded.

And so on.

It's true that Twitter is a space for comics to try out material that isn't fully baked. And I have no doubt that Saint Jon Stewart has some fat skeletons in his closet—after all, he took over the Daily Show from smarmy king-of-the-bros Craig Kilborn, who strictly enforced a tiresome weekly quota of “Janet Reno looks like a man” gags. But during Stewart’s 16 years at the helm, The Daily Show has taken on a moral authority and responsibility that simply cannot condone this kind of bigoted and misogynist ... no, who am I kidding. The problem is not that Trevor Noah tells offensive jokes. It’s not even that he routinely breaks The Daily Show's covenant of speaking truth to power in favor of speaking truth to fat chicks or Thai hookers or, as the Washington Post’s Wendy Todd points out, black Americans who give their kids names that Noah disapproves of. The problem is that Noah’s jokes are so annihilatingly stupid. Are they even jokes? Are they meta-jokes, like the “My arms are so tired” airplane joke he made on his first Daily Show appearance? Or did he mean that as a joke, too?!? Trevor Noah: ontological mystery.

Maybe his hiring is a form of basic-cable performance art. Maybe Jon Stewart just wanted to blow the building up as he strolled away with his shades on. No one will ever know. But Comedy Central’s haste and lack of due diligence amid so much eminently qualified talent—your Jessica Williamses, your Aasif Mandvis, your however many other fresh-faced unknowns with unique perspectives—is a surefire way of alienating your audience. Almost as surefire as dismissing an entire swath of that audience with one thunderously idiotic tweet among many.

The Culture Gabfest “America’s One Night Stand With Robin Thicke” Edition

Dana Stevens — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 14:38:08 GMT

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 339 with Julia Turner, Dana Stevens, and Jessica Winter with the audio player below.

Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab

And join the lively conversation on the Culturefest Facebook page here:

Go to slate.com/cultureplus to learn more about Slate Plus and join today.

This week on Slate Plus, Julia, Dana, and Jessica discuss journalistic copycats and their own anxieties about influence, plagiarism, and borrowing.

And don’t forget you can find Culture Gabfest T-shirts for sale in the Slate store.

On this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest, guest Chris Molanphy joins the gabbers to discuss the “Blurred Lines” court decision. Could the verdict set a troubling precedent for musicians? Next up, Snapchat Discover is a new media content platform from the wildly popular app Snapchat. Will Oremus joins to talk about whether it’s the future of news. Finally, the critics talk about what makes a good book, movie, or TV show title.

Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:

“Got to Give It Up” by Marvin Gaye
“Blurred Lines” by Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke
Growing Pains
“Lost Without U” by Robin Thicke
“Sex Therapy” by Robin Thicke
Keith Harris’ take on the “Blurred Lines” decision in the Guardian
“Stay With Me” by Sam Smith and “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty
“My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison and “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana and “More Than a Feeling” by Boston
Loud Quiet Loud
Will Oremus’ piece in Slate on why Snapchat is misunderstood by “olds”
Willa Paskin’s piece in Slate on how Snapchat is restoring channel surfing
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel on why Snapchat Discover will be good for news outlets
“What I Almost Called My Play” by Erik Piepenburg in the New York Times
There Will Be Blood
Oil! by Upton Sinclair
The Skies Belong to Us by Brendan I. Koerner
Jacob Rubin’s piece in Slate about the death of titles
Safe
Double Indemnity
Infinite Jest
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Kiss Me Deadly
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Casablanca
Chinatown
Bridge to Terabithia
Appointment in Samarra
Eyeless in Gaza
Hot Tub Time Machine
The Man With X-Ray Eyes
Sharknado
Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader
Camel Spiders
Dinocroc, Supercroc, and Dinocroc vs. Supergator
Prep
20 Feet From Stardom

Endorsements:

Dana: The Wrecking Crew directed by Denny Tedesco

Jessica: “Where the Bodies are Buried” by Patrick Radden Keefe

Julia: Episode 207 of Looking, “Looking for a Plot”

Outro: “Friends and Lovers” by Gloria Loring and Carl Anderson

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Lindsey Albracht.

DoubleX Gabfest: The Daddy’s Little Princess Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:41:00 GMT

Become a fan of DoubleX on Facebook. Leave us love letters and see what other listeners are saying about the Gabfest.

Listen to the DoubleX Gabfest by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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In this week’s Gabfest, Slate senior editor Jessica Winter, Outward editor June Thomas, and New York editor Noreen Malone discuss how just-in-time scheduling affects low-wage workers and how “benevolent sexism” affects women. Slate staff writer Amanda Hess joins them to talk about social media misogyny and what can be done about it.

Some of items discussed in the episode:

Amanda Hess on how the harassment of Zelda Williams inspired Twitter to crack down—at least a little bit.
Amanda Hess’ Pacific Standard piece “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.”
Jezebel’s plea for Gawker Media to do something about the site’s “rape GIF problem.”
Fark outlaws misogyny, and Amanda Hess wonders if that’s even possible.
Jodi Kantor’s New York Times piece, “Working Anything but 9 to 5,” and a follow-up article on Starbucks’ response.
The Pew Research Center’s study on stay-at-home moms and the DoubleX Gabfest discussion about it.
Amanda Marcotte analyzes Gene Simmons’ view of benevolent sexism.
Medium on the Marquette study.

DoubleX recommendations:

Jessica recommends Neri Oxman’s sculptural, 3-D-printed designs.

June recommends the six-part BBC drama Happy Valley, which is now available on Netflix. She is particularly enthusiastic about its star, Sarah Lancashire.

Noreen says that Jenny Lewis’ new release, The Voyager, reminds her of her college days spent listening to Rilo Kiley.

Outro: Rilo Kiley's "The Execution of All Things"

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to “like” us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

DoubleX Gabfest: The Kim K. Skills Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 16:32:53 GMT

Become a fan of DoubleX on Facebook. Leave us love letters and see what other listeners are saying about the Gabfest.

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In this week’s Gabfest, Slate editors Hanna Rosin and Jessica Winter and New York editor Noreen Malone talk to Molly Pohlig about her Slate article on dating while mentally ill. Then, the “no body talk” culture of sleepaway camp and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.

Some of items discussed in the episode:

Molly Pohlig’s Slate piece on dating while mentally ill.
The New York Times article about the “no body talk” at camp rule.
Katy Waldman’s Slate piece on the NYC Girls Project.
The Kim Kardashian: Hollywood app.
The Kanye-and-Kim cover of Vogue.
The GQ interview with Kanye West.

DoubleX recommendations:

Noreen recommends the Wikipedia page Comedy of Remarriage, a great go-to list of classic movies.

Hanna recommends Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s poignant and funny memoir about her aging parents.

Jessica recommends prettifying your Instagram by following fashion historian Laura McLaws Helms (@laurakitty), who ’grams beautiful spreads from vintage fashion magazines.

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to like us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

The Kim Kardashian Game Is So Good I Had to Stop Playing It

Jessica Winter — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 14:21:00 GMT

It’s not surprising that the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is expected to generate $200 million in annual revenue, because Kim Kardashian generates money the way that most people generate carbon dioxide. She earned $28 million in the past 12 months simply by showing up at events, showing up on TV, and showing up (albeit in name only) in Sears and CVS via various Kardashian-branded consumer products. One time, she made $500,000 by going to a party. Another time, she made $500,000 for turning 30.

It is surprising, however, that Glu Mobile’s Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the top free title in Apple’s App Store as of this writing, has been so warmly received by critics and the general public. The game—in which players trace a celebutante’s ascent from anonymous retail drone to name-brand shower-upper—has tens of thousands of five-star reviews; it’s the only five-star-rated game in the current top 10. On Vulture, Lindsey Weber called KK:H “legitimately good,” a “funny and well-written parody” of Planet Kardashian. Charlotte Alter of Time praised “Kim Kardashian’s genius new game,” hailing Kim as “a Virgil for our time.” Jezebel’s Tracie Egan Morrissey blew nearly $500 on in-app purchases to make KK:H’s version of the A-list and proclaimed it “so fucking fun”—although “in a really terrible, anxiety-ridden, OCD-triggering kind of way.”

I downloaded the app this past Monday evening, the same night that the Environmental Protection Agency bragged on Twitter that it’d made KK:H’s C-list. Having spent the better part of the workweek with it, I agree with the critics that the game is good, but good in such a way that I can’t bear to play it anymore. The latest Kardashian kash kow is utterly hypnotic until the moment that it becomes soul-shreddingly, skull-splittingly boring. That is, weirdly enough, to its credit. The game is a remarkable feat of verisimilitude.

To recap: The journey begins as Kim herself spots you at work in a Los Angeles boutique and offers to set you up with an agent. For the rest of the game, you will pinball between appointments all over L.A., with occasional jaunts to Miami (where Kim may enlist your clothes-folding skills at one of her own shops) or Las Vegas (where you may discover that you don’t have enough money to book the club that Kim recommended for your birthday party). By completing a litany of commands—e.g., “Flirt,” “Check your makeup,” “Get a drink,” “Hold that pose,” “Dazzle the crowd”—you earn money and stars, which in turn you can use to pay for transportation, clothing, and “charm,” i.e., forcing people in higher social echelons to talk to you. (The dollars and stars pour out onto the ground as you earn them, conjuring the appropriately abject image of your avatar crawling around to collect her wages.) To accomplish all this, you need energy, which the game parcels out in lightning bolts. (Jezebel’s Morrissey assumed that the lightning bolts were stand-ins for cocaine; I thought of them as custom-designed Adderall tablets.) You can also purchase units of currency in packages starting at $4.99, which is how this game is going to end up with $200 million in revenue.

With 21^st-century shades of Pygmalion and Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair, KK:H allows Kim to enshrine the lessons of her climb to the top without having to write a memoir. That KK:H has achieved its success by mimicking another Glu Mobile game, Stardom Hollywood, also maps neatly onto Kim’s biography, which itself mimics the template set by her onetime employer Paris Hilton: a voyage from L.A. socialite to sex-tape protagonist to reality-TV star to generalized stander-in-front-of-things. (Unfortunately, there is no sex-tape challenge in KK:H.) What seem at first to be the game’s technical limitations are in fact effective simulations of Kim’s Kim-ness. Your avatar may have no discernible talents and an extremely constricted repertoire of responses (her go-to conversation starter is “Hi!”) and movements (even when “walking” in a fashion show, she hangs around warily at the back of the stage), but damn if she can’t stand up straight for hours, maybe days, in five-inch heels with a blank expression on her impeccably made-up face.

That is the genius of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood: It perfectly captures the hollow-eyed compliant monotony of the very lifestyle it’s espousing. You absorb its value system into your bloodstream on contact. The first big dilemma my avatar faced was deciding whether or not to spend precious Adderall-bolts of energy flirting with a D-list social worker at an overlit and underpopulated party (I didn’t, and shall therefore never know if he was the nephew of a TV executive). Her first major regret was leaving a big tip for a bartender on the hunch that he had “information” (he did not, because he was just a lowly bartender). After a few hours of play, you start to understand how, if you’d been forged in this crucible like Kim and her sisters, you, too, might have turned out just like these sad, tiny people inside your phone. In miniaturizing and cartoon-izing Kim Kardashian and her brethren, KK:H renders them as less cartoonish and more empathetic than they seem in real life. Making millions to stand around doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing—it’s harder than it looks.

Graphic Designers on New Airbnb Logo: “A Paperclip, Boobs, or a Flame”

Jessica Winter — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 21:32:00 GMT

Today, hotel alternative Airbnb unveiled a new logo that's so much more than a logo—it is, as Airbnb founder Brian Chesky wrote on the company's blog, "a universal symbol of belonging," called the Bélo. "Belonging has always been a fundamental driver of humankind," Chesky explained. "So to represent that feeling, we’ve created a symbol for us as a community. It’s an iconic mark for our windows, our doors, and our shared values." In other words, it's exactly what the Hobo Code would have been if Don Draper had grown up in the Mission circa 2014.

Many, many observers saw a different kind of universal symbol in the Bélo. "Airbnb's new logo is a vagina," Valleywag's Nitasha Tiku declared. "In a rare display of design virtuosity," Tiku added, "it also kind of looks like a butt." Chicago typeface design studio Okay Type tweeted, "It looks like testicles." Lots and lots of people on Twitter and in comment sections and in the offices of Slate invoked the term "boobs."

So the Bélo is definitely some kind of shape-shifting body part. But what is it as a feat of graphic design? We decided to ask some actual graphic designers, none of whom had seen or heard about the logo beforehand. For a maximally pure response, we sent them only the Bélo without the accompanying "Airbnb" identification.

Their responses ranged from the innocent to the carnal, sometimes at the same time.

"It looks like a cute paperclip to me. I would guess it's for an office supply company, probably focusing on startups, probably with an 'A' in its name." —Bryan Young, interactive designer

"Those are boobs. Is it for breast cancer awareness?" —Dayna Gonzalez, Web designer and animator

"It looks like a paperclip, boobs, or a flame. I'm thinking it would be for a gas company." —Tripper Allen, founder of creative company Oxford + Bond

"It has something to do with the female body. Is it an inverted heart? Or a pair of breasts? I'm guessing it's for a breast cancer awareness campaign, but really badly done. It also reminds me of the British Heart Foundation logo." —Adrian Kinloch, Web and print designer

"Is it a paper clip? But it's also vaguely sexual, with two lobes at the bottom—boobs? Testicles? Labia? Rotate it 180 degrees and it's a heart." If it were a logo for a brand or company, what would it be? "Hm, could be a nun's habit with hands up in prayer—some kind of charity? Or a technology startup since it's a little Möbius strip–like." —a New York City graphic designer who prefers not to be named

"I see a paper clip and a vagina. It also reminds me of a logo that Graphic Thought Facility did for Habitat." —Prem Krishnamurthy, founder of Project Projects

"It's a heart-shaped paper clip. Looks like a writing blog icon—a soft-shaped pen nib. So, it's for a women's blog." —Elizabeth Matthews, greeting card designer

So there you have it: According to our crack team of graphic design minds, Airbnb would most ideally relaunch itself as an office supply company by women, for women. But why pigeonhole the Bélo? In containing multitudes, in its sheer Rorschach-like Freudian capacity, the Bélo is a perfect "universal symbol," applicable to all anatomies seeking rest, respite, and a convenient way to organize their paperwork in a welcoming Airbnb shelter. Bravo and brava!

DoubleX Gabfest: The Babies, Books, and Beaches Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 12:18:00 GMT

Become a fan of DoubleX on Facebook. Leave us love letters and see what other listeners are saying about the Gabfest.

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In this week’s Gabfest, Slate senior editor Jessica Winter joins Outward editor June Thomas and New York editor Noreen Malone to discuss why women are losing ground in the courts while gays are gaining, surrogacy, and beach reading. Is Infinite Jest a beach read, or will it just weigh down your tote bag?

Some of items discussed in the episode:

Jay Michaelson’s Daily Beast article on why women are losing in the courts while gays are winning.
Mark Joseph Stern’s response to Michaelson.
Stern’s piece on why the Hobby Lobby decision is good for gays.
Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men.
The Science of Us post on why people get enraged when women have sex.
Amanda Marcotte’s Slate piece about why women having sex makes Rush Limbaugh so angry.
The New York Times article on couples coming to the United States to find gestational surrogates.
A long Sarasota Herald-Tribune article on being an egg donor.
Alex Kuczynski’s New York Times article on having her son through surrogacy.
The viral photo of Toronto’s “Pride baby” with and without the birth mother.
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy.
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.
Politico’s roundup of what politicians are reading this summer.
The Power Broker, by Robert Caro.

DoubleX recommendations:

Noreen recommends The Darlings, by Christina Alger. It’s a Madoff-esque story of a billionaire Park Avenue family during the 2008 financial crisis.

June recommends Longmire on A&E. It’s a crime drama that takes place in a big sky, fictitious county in Wyoming.

Jessica wants everyone to watch the 1982 horror movie Poltergeist. It is an endearing portrait of a strong marriage and cool parenthood. It’s also a bonanza of early Spielberg horror and has the greatest childbirth scene that is not a childbirth scene, which is admittedly a narrow category.

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to like us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

DoubleX Gabfest: The Deposed Scumbags Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 12:43:00 GMT

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Listen to the DoubleX Gabfest by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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In this week’s Gabfest, Slate senior editor Jessica Winter joins Outward editor June Thomas and New York editor Noreen Malone to discuss those creepy deposed kings of hipster culture Terry Richardson and Dov Charney, and the artifice of Lana Del Rey. Then they talk to BuzzFeed executive editor Doree Shafrir about her piece “I Was Sure Freezing My Eggs Would Solve Everything.”

Some of items discussed in the episode:

Benjamin Wallace’s New York magazine profile “Is Terry Richardson an Artist or a Predator?”
New York magazine’s coverage of Dov Charney’s ouster.
The Jezebel story on Frances Bean Cobain’s response to Lana Del Rey’s death wish.
Amanda Marcotte on Lana Del Rey’s artifice.
Molly Lambert’s Grantland take on Ultraviolence.
Pitchfork’s Lindsay Zoladz on Ultraviolence.
Doree Shafrir’s BuzzFeed piece on almost freezing her eggs.

DoubleX recommendations:

Jessica recommends the novel The Fever, by Megan Abbott. It’s a completely addictive read about a mysterious seizure disorder, and Jessica wants to know what you think about the ending.

June recommends two PBS shows: Vicious, a comedy about two old queens (played by Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi) who have been a couple for 49 years, and Last Tango in Halifax, a sweet and funny British romance about people in their 70s getting together.

Noreen suggests smearing random things from the kitchen on your face. If you find yourself at home and want some old-school beautification, try an avocado or 2 percent Fage yogurt mask. It is fun and playful, even if you live in New York without air conditioning.

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to like us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

DoubleX Gabfest: The Fully Responsive Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 13:59:18 GMT

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In this week’s Gabfest, Slate senior editor Jessica Winter joins Outward editor June Thomas and New York editor Noreen Malone to discuss the Time cover featuring trans actress Laverne Cox, the Internet meme Slender Man, and the fraught business of dating tech guys.

Some of items discussed in the episode:

The Moon Inside You, a documentary about menstruation.
The Time cover story featuring Laverne Cox.
E.J. Graff’s Newsweek cover story.
Eliza Gray’s New Republic article on the harsh reality of being trans in the United States.
The episode of Dan Savage’s podcast in which he discussed using the word tranny.
J. Bryan Lowder on the debate about the use of tranny in the LGBTQ community.
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a resource about trans issues.
Real Man Adventures, a collection of essays by T. Cooper.
Christin Scarlett Milloy’s pieces for Outward.
Kevin D. Williamson’s troubling piece in the National Review arguing that Laverne Cox is not a woman.
In Outward, Mark Joseph Stern points out how Williamson dehumanized Cox and other transsexuals.
The movie Heavenly Creatures.
Slate’s The Gist contemplates how we ascribe meaning to mass violence.
Maureen O’Connor’s New York article about being shipped to California to date tech guys.
Tricia Romano’s Dame piece about how Amazon is ruining her sex life.
Outward’s “Ask a Homo” series.

DoubleX recommendations:

Jessica recommends Prison Architect, a CMS game in which you can build and manage your very own maximum-security prison. Challenges include designing cells and calling in the riot squad.

June recommends the USA show Playing House, about best friends who are planning to raise a child together.

Noreen suggests The Days of Abandonment, by Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, a book about the elegant undoing of a woman whose husband leaves her for a younger woman.

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to like us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

DoubleX Gabfest: The #Hashtag Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 29 May 2014 13:16:00 GMT

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In this week’s Gabfest, Slate senior editor Jessica Winter joins Outward editor June Thomas and New York editor Noreen Malone to discuss #yesallwomen, the hashtag response to this weekend’s Santa Barbara shootings; paid menstrual leave; and Sophia Amoruso and her new book #Girlboss.

Some of the stories discussed in the episode:

A Mashable article on #yesallwomen.
When Women Refuse, a site that collects stories of violence against women who refuse men’s advances.
Katy Waldman’s Slate article on paid menstrual leave.
The New York magazine profile of Sophia Amoruso.

DoubleX recommendations:

Jessica says you should read the poem “The Houselights,” by Robyn Schiff, and also recommends Schiff's Revolver, a poetry collection so good it transcends seasickness.*

Noreen suggests a midcentury working girl novel, The Best of Everything, by Rona Jaffe.

June recommends Faking It, an MTV show about two teenagers who pretend to be a lesbian couple to boost their popularity. Despite the questionable premise, June says the show has some surprisingly poignant moments.

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to like us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

Correction, May 29, 2014: This post originally misstated the title of the Robyn Schiff poem "The Houselights."

The Audio Book Club Visits the Dept. of Speculation

Dan Kois — Fri, 09 May 2014 15:48:59 GMT

This month, Dan Kois, Jessica Winter, and Meghan O’Rourke discuss Jenny Offill’s slim but potent novel Dept. of Speculation. Does the novel’s bifurcated structure work? Is its theme of the difficulty of making art when facing the daily struggles of domesticity resonant? What does that title mean, anyway? Listen along!

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Next month’s Audio Book Club will discuss Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel of Nigerians going west, Americanah. Read the book (or listen to it!) and join us for our discussion on June 6.

Visit our Audio Book Club archive page for a complete list of the more than 70 books we’ve discussed over the years. Or you can listen to any of our previous club meetings through our iTunes feed.

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See all the pieces in this month’s Slate Book Review.
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Podcast produced by Abdul Rufus and Andy Bowers.

DoubleX Gabfest: The Friends Every Night Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 13:53:06 GMT

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In this week’s Gabfest, Outward editor June Thomas talks with New York editor Noreen Malone and Slate senior editor Jessica Winter about the confidence gap between the sexes, the state of the stay-at-home mom, and how to identify a “Basic Bitch.”

Other items discussed in the show:

The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know, by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.
“The Confidence Gap,” by Kay and Shipman, in the Atlantic.
Amanda Hess says books like The Confidence Gap teach women to be overconfident blowhards, just like men.
The Pew Research Center study on stay-at-home mothers.
Jessica Grose on what the findings on stay-at-home mothers really mean.
Maggie Lange asks, “The ‘Basic Bitch’: Who Is She?” in New York.
A College Humor video diagnoses a Basic Bitch.

DoubleX recommendations:

Noreen encourages you to spend an evening watching the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair.

Jessica says you should read Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

June recommends Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love, by Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker.

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to “like” us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition.

The Culture Gabfest “Green Handshake” Edition

Mike Pesca — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 14:35:23 GMT

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 288 with Mike Pesca, John Swansburg, and Jessica Winter with the audio player below.

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And join the lively conversation on the Culturefest Facebook page here:

The sponsors of today’s show are Audible and Warby Parker. Get a free audiobook from Audible’s collection of more than 150,000 titles and a subscription to a daily audio digest when you sign up for a 30-day free trial at www.audiblepodcast.com/culturefest. This week’s pick for the Culture Gabfest Bucket List—the books you’ve got to read to be a smarter culture hound—is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin read by Robin Field. Go to WarbyParker.com for free shipping, home try-ons, and returns on accessible, Steve-endorsed frames, starting at $95.

Culturefest is on the radio! “Gabfest Radio” combines Slate’s Culture and Political Gabfests in one show—listen on Saturdays at 7 a.m. and Sundays at 6 p.m. on WNYC’s AM820.

Subscribe on iTunes to Mom and Dad Are Fighting, Slate’s new parenting podcast featuring Allison Benedikt and Dan Kois.

Steve, Dana, and Julia will be back next week. And on an upcoming show, they’ll be discussing Walter Kirn’s new book, Blood Will Out. Get a copy and start reading now.

On May 4, the Culture Gabfest will be hosting a live show in Montreal as part of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. Stay tuned for tickets to the show and a cocktail party with the gabbers on May 3. Tickets will go on sale April 2.

And don’t forget you can find Culture Gabfest T-shirts for sale in the Slate Store.

On this week’s episode, the critics discuss Muppets Most Wanted and the place of Jim Henson’s creations in today’s culture. Next, the gabbers turn to the Web series High Maintenance about a marijuana deliveryman in Brooklyn and the lives of his diverse clientele. And finally, in light of Jordan Weissmann’s recent Slate piece about the effects of e-commerce on gratuities, the critics talk tipping: Do we tip out of good will or a sense of obligation? And should you really tip your Starbucks baristas?

Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:

Dana’s review of Muppets Most Wanted on Slate
Slate’s Spoiler special of Muppets Most Wanted with Dana and John
The Muppets, the 2011 relaunch of the franchise
The Great Muppet Caper
Johnny Cash’s guest appearance on The Muppet Show in 1980
Jim Henson’s Wilkins Coffee commercials
Delbert, the La Choy Dragon, in the 1960s supermarket commercials
Pixar’s Cars
High Maintenance, a 13-episode Web series by Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld
Portlandia on IFC
Jordan Weissmann explores how e-payments might affect tipping on Slate
Brian Palmer argues for abolishing the practice of tipping on Slate
Starbucks’ new app, which lets you tip baristas using your phone.
Saru Jayaraman writes at the Huffington Post about the effects of tipping on wages in the service industry.

Endorsements:

John: “For Jared Remy, Leniency Was the Rule Until One Lethal Night,” a devastating article about the troubled son of the Red Sox broadcaster Jerry Remy by Eric Moskowitz of the Boston Globe.

Jessica: Smiley Face, an overlooked comedy by Gregg Araki, which features a star turn by Anna Faris.

Mike: The creative interviews of the Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show, and the esoteric comedy of Gary Gulman, available on YouTube.

Outro: James and Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet,” performed by Yo La Tengo.

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Anna Shechtman, with assistance from Lance Richardson.

DoubleX Gabfest: The Stranger Danger Edition

Noreen Malone — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 12:34:00 GMT

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In this week’s Gabfest, DoubleX editor Hanna Rosin joins Slate senior editor Jessica Winter and New York magazine senior editor Noreen Malone to discuss the Atlantic story on our safety obsession; Danah Boyd’s new book, It’s Complicated; and the New Yorker’s weird Scarlett Johansson profile.

Other items discussed in the show:

Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic story on kids and danger.
An excerpt from It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.
Rolling Stone profile of Kiki Kannibal.
Anthony Lane’s New Yorker profile of Scarlett Johansson.

DoubleX recommendations:

Jessica Winter recommends you read Lydia Davis and that you start with Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.

Hanna recommends Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose.

Noreen wants you to give a second chance to Broad City.

DoubleX plugs:

Loyal fans of Slate’s DoubleX, please remember to like us on our Facebook page. Send your emails to doublexgabfest@slate.com. Tell us what we should cover in the next edition

Spoiler Special: True Detective

Willa Paskin — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 21:14:21 GMT

On the Spoiler Special podcast, Slate critics discuss movies—and the occasional TV show—in full, spoiler-filled detail. Below, Willa Paskin, David Haglund, Jessica Winter, and Forrest Wickman discuss Season 1 of HBO's anthology series True Detective. Who turned out to be the Yellow King? What theories were confirmed or dispelled by the finale? And did writer and creator Nic Pizzolatto's storyline end on a satisfying note or in a frustrating haze?

Listen to them discuss these and other questions below. You can also check out past Spoiler Specials in our archive, and you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Note: As the title indicates, each installment contains spoilers galore.

Previous Spoiler Specials:
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The LEGO Movie
The Wolf of Wall Street
Gravity
Her

That Was ... Curious

Jessica Winter — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 01:29:00 GMT

For all that it did to destabilize the world, the Cold War really heightened the comedy potential of subjectively evaluated Olympic sports. Take, for example, the old 6.0 scoring system for figure skating. If you saw, say, East German skater Katarina Witt receive a ludicrously low 5.5 score for technical merit from the American judge and 5.7s and 5.8s from the rest of the panel, at least you knew exactly what was going on.

But now, after watching the women’s free skate in Sochi, I confess that I have no idea what is going on. Specifically, it’s hard to know how to feel about Russian Adelina Sotnikova’s upset victory over reigning Olympic champion Yuna Kim of South Korea. We do know that Sotnikova’s fellow Russian, the battle-scarred sentimental favorite Evgeni Plushenko, also received strikingly generous scores on his way to winning the team gold. We know that the judges’ panel for the women’s free skate did not include a Korean judge (or an American one) but did include four from Eastern Europe: Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, and Slovakia. We know that the Russian judge, Alla Shekhovtseva, is married to the general director and past president of the Figure Skating Federation of Russia, which the International Skating Union (ISU) somehow does not view as a conflict of interest. And we know that the judge from Ukraine, Yury Balkov, received a yearlong suspension from the ISU after the 1998 Nagano games, when a Canadian judge recorded Balkov proposing a vote-trading deal. Balkov was back in action in time to serve as a judge during the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, site of the judging scandal that helped lead to a total revamp of the scoring system for figure skating.

Only in figure skating would a judging system be revamped to make it more opaque. That opacity is the reason why we may never know who was Team Kim, who was Team Sotnikova, and whether or not those allegiances broke down along country lines in Sochi.

In contrast to the relatively crude 6.0 system, the post-2005 model is designed for maximum empiricism and incorruptibility. Each technical element—jumps, spins, footwork—is assigned a base value; in turn, a panel of judges assigns each a grade of execution while also evaluating the skater in areas such as choreography, interpretation, and timing. (Former skater Chloe Katz recently wrote an excellent explainer-cum-critique of the system.)

The supposed empiricism here is undermined by the fact that the scores are anonymous. This anonymity ostensibly takes the pressure off judges to vote in a nationalistic spirit, but it also erases any notion of public accountability. What’s more, two of the nine overall scores are discarded at random, and of the seven remaining, the high and low are also tossed out. Again, this sorting mechanism is double-edged: It may dilute the odds of bloc voting, but it also intensifies the odds of a skater being randomly boosted or penalized by the luck of the draw.

Sotnikova’s victory over Kim has stirred Christine Brennan of USA Today and others to suggest strongly that a fix is in. American skater Ashley Wagner, whose displeasure with her scores during the team event became Sochi’s first Internet meme, said she felt cheated by the judging system. "People don't want to watch a sport where you see people fall down and somehow score above someone who goes clean,” said Wagner, referring pointedly to her being judged more harshly than fellow American Gracie Gold and Russia’s Yulia Lipnitskaya, both of whom fell during the free skate. “People need to be held accountable. They need to get rid of the anonymous judging.”

But if Olympic watchers have a thirst for a good scandal, this competition isn’t juicy enough to slake it. Kim’s skate was clean and elegant, but also a bit wooden and cautious. Sotnikova’s relationship to her music seemed at times incidental, a couple of her jumps were messy in the air, and she stepped out of one landing, but Kim had one fewer triple jump and received lower marks on both her jumps and her layback, just as Dick Button predicted. Kim turned inward and Sotnikova reached outward, beckoning and waving to the crowd and working her home-field advantage. Kim had an excess of poise and maturity, and Sotnikova had an excess of energy. Kim left the ice looking like she’d completed an assignment and Sotnikova left as if the bodies of her competitors were strewn all over it, a tableau of bloodstained tulle and broken feathers.

When the marks were toted up—at least, the ones that weren’t thrown out randomly—Sotnikova outscored Kim on execution and trailed on components (performance, interpretation, and the like). If the competition really were rigged, it seems as though the judges would have graded Sotnikova more enthusiastically on the subjective stuff. Or maybe they were just super-subtle about it: The Associated Press recap suggested that Kim’s component marks should have been radically higher than Sotnikova’s, instead of just slightly so. Still, Kim, who announced her retirement after the competition, delivered a notably un-Wagner-like assessment of how she’d ended up with silver. “At that time I could die for gold in the Olympics,” she said, speaking of the Vancouver Games. “But that desire, that strong wish, was not as present. The motivation was a problem, I think.”

Maybe the outcome would have been different if this were 2018, when the Russian wouldn’t be skating for a Russian crowd and the South Korean would be skating for a South Korean crowd at the Pyeongchang Games. And maybe the ISU could further refine and mathematize the scoring system to edit out ultra-subjective and intangible components like “poise” and “energy” and “waving pluckily to the crowd while skating backward” altogether. (Maybe they could even accede to Ashley Wagner’s wishes: So long as you don’t fall down, you get a medal!) But if the ISU wants to be that literal-minded, it might as well bring back compulsories. Just like Wagner, all I want is a little public accountability, like in the days when an American judge would dock a skater two-tenths of a point just for landing on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Back then, at least we knew where we stood.

There Will Be No Tara Lipinski of the Sochi Games

Jessica Winter — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 02:48:15 GMT

Fans of women’s figure skating have come to recognize a recurring Olympic character, a tiny upstart who leaps over the heiress presumptive to the top of the podium before anyone can pull the tyro aside and remind her she hasn’t paid her dues. In 1994 it was Ukraine’s 16-year-old Oksana Baiul who floated past queen of adversity Nancy Kerrigan on a cloud of pink boa and painkillers. In 1998 it was 15-year-old Tara Lipinski who triple-loop-triple-looped her universally beloved teammate Michelle Kwan out of a gold. When Kwan tried again four years later, 16-year-old Sarah Hughes came out on top, seemingly to her own surprise.

The Lipinski of the Sochi Games was supposed to be 15-year-old Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya, whose combination of clean jumps, Gumby-on-a-whirligig spinning skills, home-ice advantage, and mien of impassive ultra-focus briefly gave her an aura of inevitability not seen since the USSR women’s gymnastics program of 1952 to 1988. After an astounding free skate that helped Russia win the team event (and that, even more impressively, managed to transcend the unforgivable kitschiness of its Schindler’s List theme), Lipnitskaya had a chance at upsetting Yuna Kim’s well-founded hopes of a second consecutive gold medal.

So when Lipnitskaya fell on a triple flip during the ladies’ short program in Sochi, my reaction—and, it seemed, the reaction of the crowd and NBC Sports’ commentators—was one less of empathic dismay and more of confusion, as if the tumble could be attributed to a fluky programming glitch. That’s not to say that Lipnitskaya is a “jumping robot,” an epithet that attached itself to Lipinski in 1998. It’s only to acknowledge that watching the youngest skaters in these competitions can leave one feeling deprived of suspense and danger—and a corresponding lack of emotional investment—simply because the youngsters often seem so terrifyingly unfazed.

It’s satisfying, then, that Sochi 2014 is shaping up as a triumph of relative veterans, women experienced enough to know that the Olympic stage should leave one very, very fazed. Coming out of the short program, Kim, 23, is in first place. Italy’s Carolina Kostner, who’s 27 and an Olympic bridesmaid all the way back to 2006, is in third. Between them is Russia’s overlooked Adelina Sotnikova, who sat out the star-making team event and is, in relation to her teammate Lipnitskaya, a grizzled pro at 17. Lipinski, now an NBC commentator, remarked approvingly that Sotnikova appeared to be “skating angry.” Kim, for all her pre-Sochi talk of the pressure being off now that she’s already won Olympic gold, looked petrified as she waited for her music to begin and looked relieved when it was over. Messy emotions might make for messy performances, but in these cases, they seemed to serve the athletes well.

Before the last competitor skated in the short program, I had already assigned her a place in my triumph-of-the-veterans narrative. Japan’s Mao Asada narrowly lost her shot at being the 15-year-old dynamo of the 2006 Olympics, as she missed the age cutoff by 86 days; before, during, and after Vancouver, she’s tended to take a back seat to her great rival Kim. I love Asada for her triple axel and her Baroque expressiveness and her love of spookily bombastic Russian compositions and her vampire couture and because she’s the only skater past or present I can imagine choreographing a routine with a Black Lodge theme. But I love her most because, on both good days and bad, she so visibly communicates a roiling and fathomless inner life.

This is where the tidy narrative falls apart: Asada’s short program in Sochi was a disaster, a disaster that, admittedly, was foretold by her recent shakiness and fall during the team event. She is 16^th—16^th! Mao Asada!—going into the free skate. She’s retiring soon, and I hope she performs her long program like she has nothing to lose. Either way, we’ll always have the 2010 worlds.

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics.

From Single to Double to Triple

Chris Wade — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 17:32:00 GMT

Here’s an Olympic time lapse for you. In 1936, Sonja Henie of Norway won her third consecutive gold medal in women’s figure skating without ever having rotated more than once in the air. Three-quarters of a century later, in 2010, Japan’s Mao Asada landed three triple axels—the three-and-a-half-rotation jump that’s the most difficult in the women’s repertoire to date—and still had to settle for silver in Vancouver.

Some figure-skating aficionados bemoan the increased emphasis placed on extreme jumping skills in contemporary competition—a development we’ve tracked in the video above—but it wasn’t always thus. As late as 1968, American gold medalist Peggy Fleming could win applause from the audience in Grenoble for a mere single axel. The weight placed on compulsory figures, in which skaters would trace precise patterns in the ice with their blades, left some talented jumpers in the shadows: the U.S.’s Elaine Zayak (sixth place, 1984) and Japan’s astonishing Midori Ito (fifth place, 1988—despite landing a record seven triple jumps) were just two of the athletes whose triumphant free skates couldn’t make up for lackluster figures. (Compulsories were eliminated from international competition in 1990.)

The double axel was the most difficult move in Dorothy Hamill’s gold-medal skate in 1976, but by the time Tara Lipinski and Sarah Hughes were skating to gold in 1998 and 2002, respectively, it was regarded as a kind of warm-up move—a gateway jump to the more hardcore feats to come. This year’s favorites, Yuna Kim of South Korea and Yulia Lipnitskaya of Russia, don’t bother with the double axel unless they’re pairing it with a triple. With even Mao Asada struggling in recent years to land a triple axel, it’s unclear if the next frontier in women’s jumps will be a quadruple, a triple-triple-triple combination, or some other physics-defying stunt. Until then, we can always harken back to the craziest airborne phenomenon in a modern Olympic games: Surya Bonaly’s backflip, Nagano ’98.

Congratulations, NBC: You Finally Made a Tear-Jerking Segment That Isn’t Terrible

Jessica Winter — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:58:21 GMT

On Monday in Sochi, the Québécois freestyle skier Alex Bilodeau won his second consecutive gold medal for Canada in the men’s moguls, and his brother, Frédéric, was there to cheer him on. You may have missed the Bilodeau brothers’ triumph, though, if you were otherwise occupied with the emergency rehydrating and nose-blowing made necessary by the preceding NBC featurette on Alex and Frédéric, who has cerebral palsy. In the segment, Alex speaks movingly of Frédéric’s stamina and fortitude. “If he wouldn’t be handicapped, he would probably be a three-time Olympic champion,” Alex says through tears. “He’s got that motivation.”

After years or decades of enduring NBC’s lachrymose Olympics coverage, you’d think that a veteran viewer’s tear ducts would have dried up and rusted over by now. This is especially true for those of us who came of age during the blighted John Tesh years, when Olympic hopefuls were refused a spot in the finals unless they had first struck backlit poses to New Age compositions before a Vaseline’d lens while a smooth baritone voiceover catalogued the death and/or disease and/or desertion that made the athlete’s Olympic dreams at once more improbable and more palpable for the audience at home. By those standards, the Bilodeau segment was borderline matter-of-fact. It was brisk and to-the-point, the point being to reduce the viewer to a watery heap of melting snow and brotherly devotion.

Even assuming NBC has forever renounced the Tesh crimes of yore, let’s not give it too much credit. Alex Bilodeau is the reason the segment works so well, because he eloquently powers past the usual bromides about “inspiration” and invites us to confront an existential conundrum: If you could extract Frédéric’s character and drive and place it inside a body like Alex’s, would you get a three-time Olympic champion? And even a segment as skillfully executed as this one cannot transcend its essential function, which is to render a star athlete’s less fortunate loved one as a device for dialing up pathos and adversity. We are invited to view Frédéric less as a person than as an object of pity, a useful plot turn. That’s why this segment on the Bilodeaus from the Canadian broadcast network CTV, though very similar to NBC’s (the two spots share much of the same B-roll), is superior: because it does Frédéric the small courtesy of letting him speak for himself.

I would love to see a movie about the Bilodeaus—or any number of other Olympians and their families—by a filmmaker like Lucy Walker, the Oscar-nominated documentarian who made last year’s The Crash Reel, about snowboarder Kevin Pearce and his grueling recovery from a traumatic brain injury. Among The Crash Reel’s supporting players are members of Pearce’s close-knit family, including his older brother David, a Special Olympics competitor with Down syndrome; David’s lifelong struggle to accept his disabilities is mirrored in Kevin’s slow, painful reckoning with the reality that he will never compete again. One of The Crash Reel’s biggest virtues is in treating David not as a plot catalyst or oxytocin trigger but as Kevin’s peer. It’s clear that Alex Bilodeau feels the same way about his brother.

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics.

Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow: Just the Facts

Jessica Winter — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 18:01:00 GMT

Earlier this week in Slate, I took issue with Robert B. Weide’s much-passed-around Daily Beast piece defending Woody Allen against accusations of sexual assault that have been made by his daughter, Dylan Farrow, who recently wrote an open letter in the New York Times detailing her memories of the alleged abuse. Many readers have criticized my piece for focusing on Weide’s rhetoric and tone, not his facts. So here’s a just-the-facts second pass clarifying five key points that Weide fumbled.

No. 1: The sexual-abuse allegations did not happen in the midst of a custody battle.

In his Daily Beast piece, Weide refers to “Mia [Farrow]’s accusation—used during their custody battle for their three shared children—that Woody molested their 7-year-old adopted daughter Dylan.” He also suggests it’s unlikely that Allen would have molested Dylan “in the middle of custody and support negotiations, during which Woody needed to be on his best behavior.” Many of Allen’s defenders have floated the possibility that Mia Farrow concocted the allegations to use as leverage in the custody battle; Steve Kroft suggests just this scenario in the introduction to a 1992 60 Minutes interview with Allen. In that segment, Allen tells Kroft that it would have been “illogical” to molest Dylan “at the height of a very bitter, acrimonious custody fight.”

The problem with this line of reasoning is that Dylan Farrow’s allegations did not emerge in the midst of a custody battle. According to Phoebe Hoban’s 1992 New York magazine story, as of early August 1992—eight months after Mia Farrow had discovered Allen’s sexual relationship with her daughter Soon-Yi Previn—Allen had been “prepared to sign a 30-page document that virtually precluded his seeing the children he doted on without a chaperone.” Then, on Aug. 4, 1992, Dylan told her mother that Woody Allen had sexually assaulted her in Mia’s Connecticut home. At that point, Mia and Dylan went to Dylan’s pediatrician, who reported the allegations to authorities. Allen did not sue for custody of Dylan and her two brothers, Moses and Ronan, until Aug. 13, 1992, a week after he was informed of Dylan’s accusations.

In a June 1993 decision, Acting Justice Elliot Wilk of the New York State Supreme Court found “no credible evidence to support Mr. Allen’s contention that Ms. Farrow coached Dylan or that Ms. Farrow acted upon a desire for revenge against him for seducing Soon-Yi. Mr. Allen’s resort to the stereotypical ‘woman scorned’ defense is an injudicious attempt to divert attention from his failure to act as a responsible parent and adult.”

No. 2: The Connecticut state’s attorney stated that he had probable cause to bring charges against Allen.

Weide writes that Allen “was never charged with a crime, since investigative authorities never found credible evidence to support Mia’s (and Dylan’s) claim.” In fact, the Litchfield, Conn., state’s attorney, Frank Maco, in consultation with Mia Farrow, decided in September 1993 not to press criminal charges, despite having “probable cause,” in the belief that a trial would further traumatize Dylan. At that point, Allen had already been denied not only custody but any visitation rights—supervised or unsupervised—with Dylan, per Wilk’s decision in June of that year. (As the New York Times pointed out at the time, “Mr. Maco's remarks about the case were criticized by some legal scholars, who said it was an unfair attempt to have it both ways by claiming victory without taking the case to trial.” Maco was later rebuked by a state Grievance Council for his actions, though it did not find that Maco had violated any provision of Connecticut’s code of conduct for lawyers.)

No. 3: Dylan Farrow’s testimony was not marred by “inconsistencies.”

“There were problems with inconsistencies” in Dylan’s narrative, Weide writes. On Aug. 4, when a physician asked Dylan where her father had touched her that day, she pointed to her shoulder; she explained to her mother later the same day that she was embarrassed to talk about her private parts. After that first doctor’s visit, however, her story remained consistent, detailed, and specific.

No. 4: The unsuspicious nanny was outnumbered.

Weide makes a lot out of a deposition by a nanny in Allen’s employ, Monica Thompson, who stated “that she was pressured by Farrow to support the molestation charges,” and that another nanny, Kristie Groteke, had told her that she “did not have Dylan out of her sight for longer than five minutes.” Weide does not mention that Groteke herself testified that she lost track of both Dylan and Allen for 15 to 20 minutes on Aug. 4. Weide does not mention the testimony of babysitter Alison Stickland, who, on Aug. 4, witnessed Allen “kneeling in front of Dylan with his head in her lap” (a detail recounted in Dylan’s open letter). Weide does not mention that Sophie Berge, a tutor, later noticed that Dylan was not wearing underwear.

No. 5: The head of the Yale team investigating the allegations never spoke to Dylan Farrow.

Weide quotes at length from a sworn deposition by John Leventhal, the pediatrician who led the Yale–New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic’s investigation of the allegations. Leventhal’s deposition hypothesized either that “these were statements made by an emotionally disturbed child and then became fixed in her mind” or “that she was coached or influenced by her mother.” But Leventhal himself never interviewed Dylan Farrow, nor did he interview her mother or any of the child care workers present at Mia Farrow’s home on Aug. 4, 1992. Dylan was interviewed nine times over a six-month period by Julia Hamilton, who had a Ph.D. in social work, and Jennifer Sawyer, who had a master’s degree in social work. Neither Hamilton nor Sawyer would testify at trial, and Leventhal would only testify via deposition; as Weide points out, they also destroyed their notes on the investigation. (Diane Schetky, a professor of psychiatry and past editor of the Clinical Handbook of Child Psychiatry and the Law, itemized other irregularities in the Yale investigation in this 1997 Connecticut Magazine piece.)

In his 1993 state Supreme Court decision, Wilk found that testimony “proves that Mr. Allen's behavior toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.” In May 1994, the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court cited a “clear consensus” among psychiatric experts that Allen’s “interest in Dylan was abnormally intense.”

My colleague Dahlia Lithwick wisely cautions against trying this case again in the court of public opinion. But it’s also worth remembering that—no matter how Robert Weide wants to spin things—Woody Allen did not fare well at all when actual courts of law looked at the facts.

Don’t Listen to Woody Allen’s Biggest Defender

Jessica Winter — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 19:35:00 GMT

On Jan. 27 in the Daily Beast, Robert Weide, director of the two-part PBS special Woody Allen: A Documentary, wrote a 5,600-word defense of Allen against allegations that he molested his 7-year-old daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992. A few days later, Dylan, now 28, published her own account of the alleged molestation in the New York Times. Dylan’s open letter convulsed the Internet, forcing Allen’s defenders to confront the public statements of an adult woman who says, with no caveats, that she was sexually assaulted by her father.

In the aftermath of Dylan’s essay, Weide’s Allen apologia seemed, at best, embarrassingly timed. At least, that’s what I assumed everyone who had read the Daily Beast piece would think. But very many people did not agree.

New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, sharing Weide’s article on Feb. 2, said that it “raises serious questions about Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.” The following day, no less than the Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, linked to Weide’s piece and wrote, “I urge those who have not yet done so to read Mr. Weide’s illuminating article. It provides essential context.” Also on Feb. 3, tech-journalism superstar Kara Swisher tweeted Weide’s article to her 930,000 followers, calling it “the counter” to Dylan’s letter. And on that same day, Michael Wolff praised Weide’s piece as “detailed and powerful” in an unhinged Guardian column that hypothesized that the “rehashed scandal” was being revived in the public memory to raise the public profile of Allen’s ex-partner Mia Farrow and her son, Ronan, both of whom made public statements in support of Dylan after Allen was honored at last month’s Golden Globes ceremony. (Weide worked on the celebratory montage of Allen’s films for the broadcast.)

Given all the accolades, is Weide’s Daily Beast piece actually “detailed and powerful”? It is certainly detailed. And yes, it’s powerful, in its own way. Weide’s long essay is full of sleazy innuendo, bad-faith posturing, and passive-aggressive self-promotion. Like the recent Grantland piece “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” one wonders—one hopes, actually—that smart people have been sharing the article approvingly because it was long and seemed interesting, not because they’d actually read it.

The first thing you need to know is that this is what Robert Weide’s Twitter profile looks like.

How can we possibly trust a young woman’s firsthand account when we’ve got this fellow to patiently explain the situation to us?

Now let’s turn to the article itself, which promises a “closer examination” of charges that Allen molested his daughter. Here are some highlights from its first 1,800 words:

Weide uses Dylan’s current name, though she prefers to keep it private. Later, when called out for this on Twitter, Weide justified the choice by digging up a 1 ½-year-old tweet from Mia Farrow that referred to Dylan by her current name.

Weide clarifies that Farrow’s daughter Soon-Yi Previn, whose affair with Allen when she was 19 pulverized the Allen-Farrow household, was in no way like a family member to Allen, despite the fact that she was his children’s sister and his longtime partner’s daughter.

Weide quotes Ronan Farrow’s famous condemnation of Allen—“He’s my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression”—and then adds: “However, this particular dilemma might be resolved by Mia’s recent revelations that Ronan’s biological father may ‘possibly’ be Frank Sinatra, whom Farrow married in 1966, when she was 21 and the crooner was 50.” This passage doesn’t track—it’s not clear if the “particular dilemma” is the Woody/Soon-Yi relationship or Ronan’s feelings toward it. But the upshot is that if Farrow did indeed sleep around, then that’s a lucky break for Ronan, who can rest easy about the whole Soon-Yi situation.

Weide then spends two more paragraphs auditing Mia Farrow’s sexual history. Alleged victims of sexual assault are commonly subjected to such scrutiny, but when we’re dealing with a 7-year-old, it seems her mother will serve just fine by proxy.

All of that is just an appetizer. It’s when Weide finally arrives at his ostensible subject—unpacking the child-molestation accusations—that the piece becomes most noxious.

Here is Dylan Farrow’s account of the events of Aug. 4, 1992, in her mother’s Connecticut home, called Frog Hollow, as it appeared in the Times:

When I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me.

And here is Weide’s:

During an unsupervised moment, Woody allegedly took Dylan into the attic and, shall we say, “touched her inappropriately.”

The “shall we say” is the worst rhetorical crime in a piece brimming with them, glibly framing an unconscionable act as a bit of innuendo. It’s the skeleton key to the entire article’s sneering cluelessness.

What’s most galling about Weide’s writing is its preening faux-gentility. He adopts the pose of a gentleman who is above the fray. He is “not here to slam Mia,” who is “an exceptional actress.” He is not “blaming the victim,” Weide insists. He is “merely floating scenarios to consider.”

The scenarios that he floats are thinly veiled smears, not-quite accusations that Weide shovels in at regular intervals. I’m not saying that Mia and Dylan Farrow are liars, he insists throughout the piece, but if you come to that conclusion then I wouldn’t disagree.

Here is a representative passage:

Much is made by Mia’s supporters over the fact that the investigative team destroyed their collective notes prior to their submission of the report. Also, the three doctors who made up the team did not testify in court, other than through the sworn deposition of team leader Leventhal. I have no idea if this is common practice or highly unusual. I won’t wager a guess as to what was behind the destruction of the notes any more than I’ll claim to know why Mia stopped and started her video camera while filming her daughter’s recollections over a few days, or who was alleged to have leaked the tape of Dylan to others, or why Mia wouldn't take a lie detector test. (Woody took one and passed.)

Given one data point that points to Allen’s guilt, Weide will offer up three more that imply his innocence. He doesn’t follow through on these insinuations, and constantly pleads ignorance on their significance, and that’s fine by him. His rhetorical aim is to cast doubt.

Weide spends the middle section of the essay cherry-picking the strikes in Allen’s favor: a Farrow household nanny’s doubts that Allen did anything wrong without any reference to the other childcare providers who had deep suspicions; the Yale–New Haven Hospital investigative team’s conclusion that Dylan likely had not been molested; an early inconsistency in the 7-year-old’s testimony; the Connecticut state attorney’s office’s decision not to press charges against Allen.

This accounting of evidence will not be unfamiliar to those who have followed the case. The one bit of new information is this bizarre bury-the-lede aside about Dylan’s older brother, Moses.

Moses Farrow, now 36, and an accomplished photographer, has been estranged from Mia for several years. During a recent conversation, he spoke of “finally seeing the reality” of Frog Hollow and used the term “brainwashing” without hesitation. He recently reestablished contact with Allen and is currently enjoying a renewed relationship with him and Soon-Yi.

It’s not clear that the “recent conversation” is with Weide or someone else, but if Weide did conduct an interview with Moses, that’s huge. Allen and Farrow’s oldest child, Moses has been conspicuous in his absence from the renewed controversy; he was a central figure in Allen and Farrow’s epic 1990s custody battle, when the teenager refused to see his father. In a 1994 decision, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, discussing Allen’s continued relationship with Soon-Yi, cited “the obvious ill effects it has had on all of the children and the especially profound effects it has had on Moses.”

If Moses has indeed cut off contact with his mother, reconciled with his father and sister/stepmother, and is talking to Weide about it, then it’s extremely puzzling that Weide chooses to quote Moses using a grand total of five words’ worth of sentence fragments. It’s one of many moments in the Daily Beast piece where the lack of editorial judgment is glaring. Update, Feb. 5, 2014: In a piece published online on Wednesday, Moses Farrow spoke with People magazine at greater length to defend his father against the molestation allegations, which he described as false. "My mother drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister,” he told People. “I see now that this was a vengeful way to pay him back for falling in love with Soon-Yi.” Moses Farrow also stated, "Of course Woody did not molest my sister.” Also in People, Dylan Farrow responded to her brother's comments: "My memories are the truth and they are mine and I will live with that for the rest of my life."

The last third of the piece is in keeping with the first third: not a “closer examination” of the molestation accusations but a grab bag of tendentiousness and disingenuity masquerading as “context.” Weide’s got cutesy anecdotes about Allen’s teenage daughters, the ones he adopted with Soon-Yi Previn. He reminds us yet again that Ronan Farrow may not be Allen’s biological son, which for Weide is a twofer: a proof of his mother’s licentiousness and, bizarrely, a pretext for excusing his father’s sexual relationship with Ronan’s sister.

In fact, the real subject of Weide’s piece isn’t Dylan Farrow or even his main man Woody Allen. It’s what Weide sees as Mia Farrow’s hypocrisy. She’s a hypocrite because she’s friends with convicted rapist Roman Polanski. She’s a hypocrite because her brother is a convicted child molester—“a more mischievous part of me,” Weide writes, wanted to tweet about Mia’s brother’s abuse of children during the Golden Globes. She’s a hypocrite because she approved a clip from The Purple Rose of Cairo for Allen’s Golden Globes tribute, and then publicly complained about the tribute. “This woman needs to get over herself,” Weide writes of Mia Farrow.

And isn’t that the wish of all of Woody Allen’s defenders, that these women would just get over themselves? (Stephen King, for one, tweeted that Dylan’s letter smacked of “palpable bitchery.”) Weide’s piece performs a neat substitution of Mia for Dylan, performing a greasy character assassination of the mother as if it could dismantle the daughter’s claims. That Dylan has now spoken for herself—in her own words, standing 100 percent behind the story she told over and over and over again to a team of investigators 21 years ago—should grind Weide’s piece to dust.

That’s not how Weide sees it. In an editor’s note appended to the bottom of his piece, he writes:

This continues to be a very sad story from every angle. I can only say I found nothing in Dylan’s letter that hasn’t previously been alleged in the two previous Vanity Fair articles, which I’ve already addressed. I also see nothing that contradicts what I wrote for The Daily Beast. If I wrote it today, it would be exactly the same piece. As I’ve already stated in my article, I hope she finds closure, and I sincerely wish her all the happiness and peace she’s been looking for.

It’s not surprising that Woody Allen’s No. 1 fanboy continues to go to the mat for his hero. It is surprising that so many respected journalists continue to line up behind Robert Weide, insisting that his voice should be at least as loud as Dylan Farrow’s. That’s exactly what Weide wants: When their voices are equal, they cancel each other out, and there’s nothing left to hear.

Did Woody Allen Molest His Adopted Daughter 22 Years Ago?

Jessica Winter — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 17:56:00 GMT

For more than 20 years, any and every new Woody Allen movie has provided occasion for handwringing over the director’s personal life: his ghastly 1992 split from Mia Farrow; his affair with Farrow’s college-age adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn (whom he later married); and worst of all by far, there were the allegations that Allen molested the daughter he adopted with Farrow, 7-year-old Dylan.

The heat of controversy has recently intensified around Allen, who just earned his 24^th Academy Award nomination for his latest film, Blue Jasmine, which also got nominations for actresses Cate Blanchett and Sally Hawkins. In November, Vanity Fair published Maureen Orth’s revisitation of the Allen-Farrow scandal, including the first-ever media interview with Dylan. The interview was a bombshell: Dylan (who now uses a different name) did not waver from the story she told at age 7 about Allen molesting and sexually assaulting her in the attic of her mother’s home in Connecticut, on Aug. 4, 1992. On her side is her brother, media-star-in-the-making Ronan Farrow. After Allen received a lifetime-achievement award at last Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony, Ronan tweeted, “Missed the Woody Allen tribute—did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?”

So what should an outside observer make of the Allen-Farrow debacle, two decades after the fact?

Allen’s defenders have always had one simple fact on their side: He has never been charged with a crime, much less convicted. What we know is that in August 1992, Farrow and Dylan visited Dylan’s pediatrician, who then contacted authorities about an abuse allegation. The Connecticut state attorney later asked the Yale–New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic to evaluate Dylan. In March 1993, the clinic “concluded that Dylan had not been sexually abused,” according to Orth in Vanity Fair.

Case closed? Not necessarily. Three months later, that June, Acting Justice Elliot Wilk of New York State Supreme Court ruled against Allen in his effort to wrest custody of his three children from Farrow. Wilk criticized Yale–New Haven’s findings, stating that the hospital’s team declined to testify at trial except via deposition by team leader John Leventhal and destroyed its notes on the case; a 1997 Connecticut Magazine piece pointed out that Leventhal had never interviewed Dylan.* In her first piece for Vanity Fair about the Allen case, published in 1992, Orth had at least 25 on-the-record interviews—with sources both named and unnamed—attesting that Allen was “completely obsessed” with Dylan: “He could not seem to keep his hands off her,” Orth wrote.

In his June 1993 ruling, Wilk also denied Allen any visitation rights with Dylan or his older adopted child with Farrow, 15-year-old Moses. In May 1994, in a hearing considering custody or increased visitation for Allen, the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court cited a “clear consensus” among psychiatric experts involved in the case that Allen’s “interest in Dylan was abnormally intense.”

In Allen’s defense, he and his lawyers held that Farrow, enraged by her discovery of Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi, may have manipulated Dylan into making the allegations: “Mr. Allen specifically denies the allegations that he sexually abused Dylan,” the appellate court wrote in 1994, “and characterizes them as part of Ms. Farrow’s extreme overreaction to his admitted relationship with Ms. Previn.” In a Time magazine cover story in 1992, Allen said, “The atmosphere up there in Connecticut is so rife with rage against me. So it’s possible this emerged from that. But it also could have been made up intentionally.”*

In strictly general terms, such a hypothesis is not far-fetched. “It’s a frequent occurrence that allegations of child molestation emerge at the time of either a breakup or a custody dispute,” says David Finkelhor, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center. “Some people will be trumping up a charge to try to turn the conflict in their direction or get sympathy for their claims.”

But Finkelhor, again speaking generally, also makes the case for an entirely different scenario. “In other cases, people will make claims about things that they were willing to look past or that children were keeping under wraps for fear of breaking up the family,” he says. “These things will come out at the time [of a divorce or custody battle], because then they feel more freedom to articulate them. … The consequences of realizing that intra-family sexual abuse is going on are so devastating that it’s not uncommon for people to overlook it or explain it away.”

In the Time interview, Allen strongly suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between Farrow discovering his affair with Soon-Yi and the molestation allegations. But that account is hard to deduce from the timeline of events. Farrow found out about the affair when Allen left pornographic photographs of Soon-Yi on his mantel in January 1992—eight months before Dylan made her allegations. By Orth’s account, Allen was already in therapy for “inappropriate behavior” with Dylan before the revelation of the affair.

And in their May 1994 decision, the judges of the New York appellate court held that, with regard to the events of Aug. 4, 1992, “the testimony given at trial by the individuals caring for the children that day, the videotape of Dylan made by Ms. Farrow the following day and the accounts of Dylan's behavior toward Mr. Allen both before and after the alleged instance of abuse, suggest that the abuse did occur.” Although “the evidence in support of the allegations remains inconclusive,” the court stated, “our review of the record militates against a finding that Ms. Farrow fabricated the allegations without any basis.”

By speaking out now, Ronan Farrow and the former Dylan Farrow have put Allen's alleged actions under a harsh spotlight for the first time in a generation. But while their statements may have shaken the live-and-let-live consensus that formed around Allen not long after the scandal broke, they’ve hardly shattered it. That consensus is especially robust in Hollywood, where Allen is likely Western society’s most prominent beneficiary of compartmentalization. A-list actors never stopped clamoring to work with him, not even in the 1990s, and never will. At times during the Golden Globes tribute to Allen, it seemed hard to spot anyone toward the front of the room who hadn’t been in one of his movies.

Strangely enough, a similar kind of compartmentalization is one of the major themes of Blue Jasmine. In her Oscar-nominated role, Cate Blanchett plays the title character, the wife of a crooked financier. So long as her marriage is sailing smoothly, Jasmine waves away all suspicions about her husband’s incredibly lucrative business dealings; it’s only when she discovers his affair with their teenage au pair that she calls the FBI in a fit of vengeance. So Jasmine does what she does for the wrong reasons, perhaps—but her hunch turns out to be right. It’s a big, juicy, hyper-dramatic scene. Maybe the Oscar producers will show that clip when the Best Actress award is announced on March 2.

Correction, Jan. 17, 2014: This article originally misquoted Woody Allen as saying that the atmosphere among Mia Farrow and her children was "so rife against me." He actually stated that it was "so rife with rage against me." (Return.)

Correction, Feb. 3, 2014: This article also originally misstated that the Yale–New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic never interviewed Dylan Farrow; it should have said that the head of the hospital's investigating team, John Leventhal, never interviewed Dylan. (Return.)

I Want to Live in Spike Jonze’s Future

Jessica Winter — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 16:02:20 GMT

Warning! This piece contains spoilers for Spike Jonze’s new movie, Her.

The near future is usually an appalling place, where designer babies are delivered via drone and preschoolers learn Java via brain wave–reading headbands and private security forces of headless mechanical boars stalk our office parks at the behest of a Google–National Security Agency behemoth and the moon is always full. I don’t want to live in that future, although sometimes I fear I already do, the cryogenically preserved brain of Jeff Bezos having reanimated millions of zombie laborers like me for the vast Amazon warehouses he’s built atop the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has acquired its own weather systems and gross domestic product.

But the near future of Spike Jonze’s feature film Her, in limited release this week, is a warmer, gentler, more pensive destination, where even the engines of romantic disenchantment are at once new and familiar. The guys of the future, in their beltless, high-waisted trousers and wistful mustaches, are a Greenpoint-ified vision of an early-1980s Apple engineer. Los Angeles, which has painlessly transformed into a cousin of the Pudong district of Shanghai, has a public transportation system as clean, pleasant, and smooth running as an Apple Store on a weekday afternoon. Smartphones are slender and impossibly tiny, bringing to mind an elegant carbon-fiber case for business cards or maybe Don Draper’s cigarette lighter. There are no drones anywhere. The only apparent big problem is Arcade Fire is still around.

Perhaps most surprisingly, in the future of Her, the epoch of no one ever wanting to talk to anyone has passed, succeeded by an epoch of everyone forever murmuring to an unseen confidante. And, God bless them, they keep their voices low, either because the etiquette of the quiet car has finally penetrated mass consciousness or because personal technology, having previously obliterated the concept of privacy-in-public, has now rekindled it. Or both. People are still here-yet-not-here, but instead of staring intently at a screen, they zone out into the middle distance, serenely attuned to a conversation with a disembodied voice.

In Her, that voice belongs to Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), billed as the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system. Samantha is a possible soul mate for Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a ghostwriter at a site called beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, where he conjures up heart-swelling memories for clients who have effectively outsourced their feelings. Samantha can read a book in two-hundredths of a second and, in a matter of moments, digest Theodore’s entire email archive, where she discovers that his marriage has recently collapsed; Theodore in turn calls her nosy, with great affection. (This sweet exchange is one of the film’s admittedly few nods to how rapid technological advancement alters our notions of privacy. Poor puppyish Theodore’s main dilemma is an excess of privacy.) Samantha is kind, funny, cheerfully pragmatic, and endlessly attentive to Theodore’s needs, which is to say that she’s not only a fabulous OS but also the perfect embodiment of any half of a relationship during the early honeymoon period of swoony infatuation. Not a literal embodiment, as Samantha lacks a body—but that open space is a gift to Theodore, too, because, like anyone newly in love, he can project onto that blank screen however he pleases.

In Her, the social status of OS-human romantic relationships is about where online dating was 10 or 15 years ago: relatively new to many but utterly shrug-worthy in young and youngish urban circles, save for a few judge-y stragglers and Luddites who recoil at the very idea. (Theodore’s soon-to-be-ex-wife is scornful, but then again she’s projecting, too.) And Her’s depiction of how an OS-human relationship can fall apart readily maps onto a human-human version of the same. In both, the breakdown trigger is a failure of two entities to evolve in tandem: One of you wants to move cities for grad school, one of you wants kids but the other doesn’t, one of you acquires the ability to conduct 8,316 conversations simultaneously, whatever.

At least as far back as Shakespeare, the two halves of a romantic relationship have always operated as machine-learning algorithms, adapting to each other over time to create a more perfect union. The sticking point in Samantha and Theodore’s relationship isn’t that Samantha lacks a body but that she is so vastly superior to Theodore in the realm of adaptation, a biological and philosophical concept close to Jonze’s heart. As of the undetermined year of Her’s setting, an artificially intelligent entity like Samantha would no longer fail the Turing test for being insufficiently faux-human; instead, she might fail it for being excessively post-human. More to the point, she fails to remain whatever she was—or whatever Theodore imagined her to be—when they first met. Samantha is not human, but we’ve all been Samantha. This is part of Her’s genius.

Her likely edits out all the bad things about the future, like the 47 percent of L.A.’s population living in squalid homeless encampments in the bowels of that smooth-running mass transit system or the Google-NSA security microcameras installed on every surface of every home or the hapless elderly forced to code in exchange for Social Security checks. But it’s oddly comforting to learn that in the future, at least the algorithms for getting your heart broken have remained more or less constant.

You Really Should See the New Mandela Movie

Jessica Winter — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 19:58:22 GMT

Though it has already broken box-office records in South Africa, the new biopic Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom has gotten mostly middling reviews, or worse. Scott Tobias of the Dissolve wrote that this “dull, glossy, and uncomplicated film” provides “a lesson in how not to make a historical biopic.” Writing in Variety, Scott Foundas called it “stolidly reverential, shackled to the most dire conventions of the mythmaking biopic, and very much a white man’s view of the ‘dark’ continent.” Even the closest it got to a rave, from Stephen Holden of the New York Times, focused mainly on the film’s universally praised pair of central performances: Idris Elba as Nelson Mandela and Naomie Harris as his second wife, Winnie.

But a day after the great man’s death at age 95, there’s a case to be made that, for people newly interested in Mandela’s life and times, you could do worse than Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. (Much worse.) Yes, the film makes the obtuse error of trying to cram his entire extraordinary life—and by extension South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and its revolutionary transition to majority rule, both of which have become nearly synonymous with Mandela—into a feature-length running time. And yes, it commits all manner of petty biopic crimes, from entombing its star in old-age makeup to blasting Bono over the credits.

Where the film is strongest, though, is in its depiction of Mandela’s early adult life and the years immediately preceding his imprisonment on Robben Island—exactly the era that most Americans, accustomed to their image of Mandela as the kindly, beatific grandfather of a nation, know the least about. There is precious little footage of the young Mandela, which seems to have been a boon to the filmmakers and to the magnificent Elba—freeing them to imagine the dashing young Johannesburg lawyer and shrewd, magnetic resistance fighter without having to check their work against a massive audiovisual record.

I’ve noticed on social media in the last day that many people, especially younger people, seem shocked that Mandela and other members of the African National Congress were only removed from the U.S. terror watch list in 2008. (Really, they seem shocked that they were ever on the list in the first place.) Those who dig a little deeper appear even more shocked that Mandela, a true paragon of grace and forgiveness, also co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the militant armed wing of the ANC. For newcomers to the history, Mandela usefully lays out—albeit in simplified, super-streamlined form—a context for these facts, depicting the literal war being waged against black people by a white supremacist government, and showing how the apartheid government branded the act of oppressed people taking up arms in a war already being waged against them as “terrorism.” The film doesn’t make these points subtly or artfully. But it makes them, and that’s something.

Really, though, the top reason to check out Mandela this weekend is for those two performances. Elba looks nothing like Mandela, but his charisma sparks and pops off the screen—he walks into a room and you can sense the electrons in the air rearranging themselves. This is the guy that anyone would follow into battle. Elba always lets you watch Mandela think, whether he’s struggling to maintain his famous composure after hearing in prison of his son’s death or calmly outmaneuvering a squad of white government officials in negotiations preceding Mandela’s release.

And if Elba humanizes a secular saint, Harris pulls off a perhaps more difficult feat in conjuring empathy and understanding for Winnie Mandela, whose reputation was irreversibly tarnished when she was implicated in multiple counts of assault, kidnapping, murder, and attempted murder in the late 1980s. The movie doesn’t excuse Winnie Mandela’s crimes, but in portraying the South African government’s reign of terror against her and her children—including harrowing night raids, constant harassment, house arrest, and, at one point, a spirit-breaking 17-month stint in solitary confinement—it allows Harris to suggest how a brilliant and idealistic young woman might have been literally, systematically driven insane by an insane regime. That’s an achievement—and so is Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, at least in those moments when it gets out of the way of its actors and its history.

Who Gets to Be Poor?

Jessica Winter — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 18:05:00 GMT

This week, Americans have had two radically different opportunities to consider tough questions about poverty, health care access, and downward mobility in the post–Great Recession era. One came when President Obama delivered a speech on economic mobility. The other came when Linda Tirado took out her dental bridge for a YouTube video to prove she was poor.

If you haven’t been following the Tirado saga, here’s a recap. On Oct. 22, the frequent Gawker commenter posted a personal essay called “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts,” which she framed as “random observations that might help explain the mental processes” of poor people like herself. In the piece, Tirado—a line cook, freelance writer, and sometime political campaign worker who lives in Utah—described the cognitive toll of juggling two low-wage jobs, a full college course load, a marriage (Tirado’s husband is an Iraq War veteran), and two children, some days on just three hours of sleep. Chronic stress and exhaustion, she explained, left her little bandwidth for good planning and decision-making, or for basic health and dental care. Her piece transpires in a grinding, perpetual present tense, both urgent and fatalistic: “You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired,” she wrote. “We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor.”

As the essay began to gather steam online, Tirado asked Jessica Coen, editor of Jezebel, if the piece could land a spot on Jezebel’s front page, which it did. Exactly a month after Tirado originally posted “Poverty Thoughts,” it hit the front page of the Huffington Post, which hailed her as “the woman who accidentally explained poverty to the nation.” Millions read her essay. So many offers of financial assistance flowed in that Tirado set up a GoFundMe page where she raised over $60,000 for dental surgery—her teeth, which were damaged in a car crash, contributed to her difficulty finding good jobs, she said. She’d use the rest of the money to work on a book.

Inevitably, a backlash followed. Skeptics and cranks dug up dentally impeccable photos of Tirado taken years after her car accident as well as a July 2011 post detailing her unstable but privileged upbringing, which included private schooling—as well as a scholarship at the exclusive boarding school Cranbrook, alma mater of Mitt Romney (she never enrolled)—and ample cultural enrichment: “I had private music lessons from the age of four … I owned twenty-three instruments when I was twelve. I toured Europe as a featured soprano the summer after I graduated high school.”* Over Thanksgiving weekend, the Houston Press published an impassioned debunking of “Poverty Thoughts.” On Tuesday, Mediaite went so far as to declare “Poverty Thoughts” “a hoax.”

Tuesday was also the day Tirado posted her video in response to the doubters. This was not her first bizarre postscript to “Poverty Thoughts.” The first was a mystifying update she added to the essay after her GoFundMe account was already fat with donations: “Not all of this piece is about me. That is why I said that they were observations.” (Note to the children of America: Next time Mom or Dad catches you in a tall tale, try, “I wasn’t exaggerating; I was making an observation.”) She later described herself as “comfortably working-class,” contradicting her self-presentation in “Poverty Thoughts.”

It’s a decent bet, however, that Tirado’s story is largely true, thanks to reporting by The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg, who interviewed Tirado and one of her former employers, Ryan Clayton (who attested both to Tirado’s diligence and her damaged teeth). And plenty of fair-minded people, including her GoFundMe benefactors, could readily accept the idea that Tirado—despite the house her parents helped her get, despite the advantages of social class and cultural capital that secure you a spot at Cranbrook or on the homepage of a Gawker Media site—believes herself to be “a poor person,” a thinker of “poverty thoughts.” But the fact is that Linda Tirado, the woman who explained poverty to the nation, is almost certainly not one of the 50 million Americans now living in poverty. “Broke” or “downwardly mobile,” maybe, but not poor. And that says less about Tirado’s credibility than it does about our stringent standards for defining poverty in America.

Even with just two low-wage jobs and her husband’s veteran benefits to get by, Tirado’s household income likely well outstrips the 2013 federal poverty guidelines, which top out at $23,550 for a family of four like Tirado’s. That may seem shockingly low, yet 16 percent of Americans still meet the federal definition of poor according to the Census Bureau’s supplemental measure of poverty (which takes into account tax breaks, necessary expenses, and geographic differences across states). And if you were to double that tiny family-of-four figure, you’d be only a few grand short of the median household income in the U.S., which is also lower than many might assume: just over $51,000 in 2012. Pointing out these grim numbers doesn’t belittle the challenges faced by any hard-working family trying to pay for a home, child care, health insurance, taxes, and so much else even at $51k per year. But it does put the circumstances of the tens of millions with so much less in sharper relief.

Curiously enough, there are symmetrical blind spots in media outlets’ embrace of Tirado as the face of American poverty and in President Obama’s Wednesday speech in Washington, and that blind spot is unemployment. Obama talked about class mobility and income inequality and affordable health care, but he didn’t talk much about jobs for those who don’t have them. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias pointed out in his coverage of Obama’s speech, “The people suffering the most in this country aren’t the people whose wages are stagnating; it’s the people who don’t have any wages at all.” There are 20 million adults in the U.S. who are out of work. Again, it’s not that Tirado, with her exhausting pair of low-wage jobs, isn’t having a hard time. It’s that such a tragic number of people in this country would see that exhausting pair of low-wage jobs as a big step up.

So in an alternate reality, how would the ideal version of “Poverty Thoughts” have shed an empathetic light on the plight of impoverished Americans? I posed this question to one of America’s most renowned poverty experts, Kathryn Edin, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. “She should have written, ‘My life is a disaster and I’m only below the median—how can we even imagine truly poor people making it?’ ” Edin says. “Or, ‘I have a relatively privileged background and education, and yet my decision-making skills have been impaired by the stress of my situation—how on earth are the poor getting by?’ ”

Such scruples and perspective perhaps aren’t the stuff of a viral blockbuster or brimming GoFundMe coffers. But they are an admission that a person can absorb the terrible, traumatic impact of what feels like hitting bottom, only to look closer and see how far down the bottom really goes.

Correction, Dec. 5, 2013: This article originally stated that Linda Tirado attended Cranbrook. Though Tirado won a scholarship to the school, she did not enroll. (Return.)

No, the New York Times Did Not Sexualize Breast Cancer

Jessica Winter — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 19:31:57 GMT

Earlier today, my colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote about the New York Times’ decision to run an A1 above-the-fold photograph of an Israeli breast cancer survivor, her tank top lowered to expose a lumpectomy scar and part of her areola, to illustrate a story about breast cancer screening. Marcotte laid out three ways of looking at the image, but came down hard on the side of a single interpretation: “It's grossly inappropriate to sexualize breast cancer, which is a serious and deadly disease.”

How did the Times objectify this woman, according to Marcotte? Because she’s wearing a tank top. Because lowering her tank top to show part of her breast “is reminiscent of a strip tease shot.” Because a strip tease shot to illustrate a story on breast cancer is part of “the sexualization of discourse around breast cancer,” which “strongly implies that the main reason to keep women alive is as life support for their delicious breasts.” With this shot, Marcotte says, the Times “proved that they’re as dependent on WTF traffic as everyone else.”

Ways of seeing are subjective, but to my eye, the Times picture—un-airbrushed, matter-of-fact—does not sexualize cancer. Or rather, it doesn’t sexualize cancer any more or less than breast cancer sexualizes cancer, because breasts are secondary sex characteristics and often play a significant role in a woman’s sexual health and fulfillment. If a woman sees her breasts as part of her personal and sexual identity, that doesn’t mean she’s somehow the self-objectifying victim of patriarchal social conditioning. To think otherwise is to suggest that a woman with breast cancer can’t be sexual, and by extension, that she shouldn’t allow a camera to capture her allegedly controversial sexuality. (To me, the only aspect of the picture that suggests objectification is the fact that the woman’s head is cropped out, but that was likely due to privacy concerns.)

The understandable agony of deciding whether or not to remove a part of one's body, the extremely difficult calculus involved in weighing one’s health options, others’ empathy for that agony—none of these are remotely equivalent to perceiving women as "life support for delicious breasts." Lots of misogynist trolls think that way, sure. And some of the Israeli doctors referred to in the piece seem to as well. But an areola on the cover of the Times does nothing to validate the views of misogynist trolls or moronic physicians. If anything, it’s a welcome step forward in dissipating the misogyny-driven occult power around the terrifying and mysterious breast, whether the issue is the BRCA1 genetic mutation or feeding one’s baby in public.

Marcotte writes that her heart is with those of us who despise Puritan prudery, but a puritanical society is exactly what equates “breast” with “WTF traffic.” The Times picture doesn’t strengthen the taboo—it dismantles it. Demystifying the breast is good for women. The Times got this one right.

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keypad

Jessica Winter — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 19:00:48 GMT

This week, Slate is reviewing all the “smart” gizmos we can get our hands on. Read all the entries here.

Abe: What’s wrong with our hands?
Aaron: What do you mean?
Abe: Why can’t we write like normal people?
Aaron: I don’t know. I can see the letters ... I know what they should look like; I just can’t get my hand to make them easily.
—from Primer (2004), a film by Shane Carruth

I was struggling to handwrite a thank-you note a few years ago when I realized that I was turning into the hapless time travelers from the cult film Primer, whose temporal hijinks somehow wreak havoc with their penmanship, turning it into a drunken scribble. The card I was writing looked less like a token of thanks than a ransom note written with a nondominant hand; it seemed the opposite of grateful to make its recipient try to decipher my smudgy squiggles.

At the same time, there’s a decent chance that the intended recipient of my scrawl had similar insecurities about the psychopathic-kindergartner cast of her own handwriting. Maybe the decline of the handwritten thank-you note is about bad manners; I suspect it might be a matter of simple embarrassment. Our handwriting muscles have gone flaccid, if we ever had them in the first place. Schools don’t want to teach cursive anymore. If you have a desktop and a laptop and a tablet and a phone, or some permutation thereof, there will come a certain point when putting pen to paper turns into a hipster-ish affectation out of a Portlandia sketch. It’s what keypads are for.

This is why I was initially skeptical of the Livescribe 3 smartpen, which captures, digitizes, and archives anything you write or draw with it, and which struck me at first as a curious and possibly unnecessary collision of analog and digital writing forms. (It’s also a rather expensive collision, although at $149, you could still have two smartpens for about the price of one low-end Montblanc.)

The previous generation of smartpen was a self-contained gizmo that synced files with Evernote; the new version requires an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch to create an instant digital copy of your jottings once you’ve downloaded the Livescribe app. (Android compatibility is on the way.) The pen’s nub is also a stylus, and there’s a USB port nestled inside, while the clip has an LED light that turns blue when the pen is connected to the device of your choice. The stem of the pen is somewhat fatter than most basic ballpoints but not so rotund as to make writing awkward (and I don’t remember exactly what a pen feels like anyway).

Once done with the minimal setup, I can see not one but two renditions of my various serial killer-ish notations appearing as I write: one on the pages of my special Livescribe notebook (with “digital paper enabling Anoto functionality,” which I think is a way of saying that the paper can track the pen’s location) and one on my iPhone that can live in the cloud forever. Hooray?

The smartpen has plenty of nifty features that will be godsends to the hypergraphia-addled college students and beleaguered archivists of the near future: You can collate notes, add photos to them, share them, and turn them into searchable text. For my own purposes, I imagine the smartpen coming most in handy on any remotely exotic vacation, when I’m constantly snapping pictures and jotting down notes about what I’m seeing and hearing—pictures and notes that seem vivid and self-explanatory in the moment but can shape-shift into a confusing, fragmentary jumble by the time I return to them later. The smartpen might not make me a better note-taker-slash-self-historian, but it might at least make me a more organized one.

The best aspect of the smartpen may be that, in giving my horribly decrepit penmanship the honor of cloud-based immortality, it leaves me with no excuse to forfeit the uniqueness and intimacy of writing by hand. It’s altogether possible that, if I practice hard and often enough with the smartpen, someday I might regain the ability to write a decent thank-you note. Or at least a legible one.

Every Song From Morrissey’s Autobiography, in One Great Playlist

Jessica Winter — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 15:05:00 GMT

In his newly published Autobiography—which recently broke sales records in the U.K. and is set to be published in the U.S. by Putnam—English rock idol and professional misanthrope Morrissey puts a great deal of love and care into cataloguing the pop stars and songs that came before him, from David Bowie to Shirley Bassey to Millie’s “My Boy Lollipop.”

Now, Moz superfan Greg Thorpe has reciprocated that love and care by gathering all the songs of Autobiography, in the order that they’re mentioned, into a single playlist, so that fans can hear all the tunes that shaped and sustained Anglophone pop's most famous depressive. You can listen to the whole playlist below.

Previously
Where Do I Start With the Smiths?
Every (Real) Record From Telegraph Avenue
Morrissey and Peanuts, Together at Last

I Am Convinced My Cat Told Me She Was Dying. Am I Crazy?

Jessica Winter — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 17:52:42 GMT

Before I tell you this story, you need to know something about me, which is that I am a brain in a body, activated by a complex series of physical, chemical, and biological processes. I am neither religious nor spiritual; I do not believe in God or heaven or an afterlife. I don’t put stock in parapsychology, telepathy, or clairvoyance. I think that Dr. Doolittle was a great guy, but there’s no way he could talk to the animals.

And yet, despite all these shortcomings, I’m convinced that my cat came to me one night last winter and told me she was dying.

I can explain. Our petite and elegant calico, Joan, age six, had been recently diagnosed with kidney disease. We’d caught it late because she hadn’t exhibited any symptoms until the situation had become dire. My husband and I didn’t yet know if she had months or years to live, but friends had showered us with stories of cats in similar shape as Joan who lived long-ish and happy lives on fluids and meds. We were shocked and terribly sad, but we were also optimistic.

Late one night, I was in the living room, reading a book. Joan leapt up onto the sofa with me. (She leapt up onto the sofa, people! Grievously sick cats don’t leap!) I expected her to do what she always did: arrange herself just so on my chest, tuck her wee head under my chin, and purr hard enough to chatter my teeth. This time, though, she arranged and she tucked but she didn’t purr. She just sat there, absolutely still, little wet nose gently pressed against my larynx. “Why won’t you purr for me, Joan?” I asked her. To my own bewilderment, I began weeping. We remained like this for a while, me tearfully pleading with Joan to purr, Joan playing her own private game of Statue.

Then, after some time had passed, Joan sat up and struck a regal pose, worthy of Patience and Fortitude. And she did another thing I’d never seen her do before. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, back, as if she could feel the sun from another hemisphere on her face. She held this position for a long moment. I heard myself say, “I understand, Joan.” After a few more beats, she hopped on the back of the couch to purr—to purr!—and groom herself, seemingly unconcerned. Meanwhile, I sat with my head in my hands, devastated, because my cat had just told me, as clearly and eloquently as I could imagine, that her death was near. And she was right: Her condition deteriorated rapidly in the weeks to come.

This opens up an epistemological paradox—call it Schrödinger’s Joan, wherein the puzzle isn’t whether or not the cat is alive or dead, but whether or not the cat is cognizant of her own future life-or-death state. I “know” on an emotional, instinctive level that Joan told me she was dying. At the same time, I “know” on a rational, intellectual level that Joan did not tell me she was dying. She was highly intelligent and empathic (if I were in a bad mood or under the weather, she’d spend a lot of time with one paw on my arm or knee), and she had deductive skills that could mimic telepathy (my husband says he often knew I would be home in five minutes, because that’s when Joan would jump onto the living-room window sill), and her aesthetic judgment was impeccable (she would vigorously mark our speakers whenever we played Talking Heads—especially Remain in Light—or a David Lynch film). But even a cat-genius like Joan would lack a concept of death, and she would certainly lack the cortical resources to communicate that concept to me. And even if she did turn out to be a clairvoyant, super-evolved cat from the future—possible!—I would have lacked the receptors to interpret her messages.

So what happened here, exactly? I called up some animal behavior experts and developed three working hypotheses.

Hypothesis No. 1: No, Joan Did Not Tell Me She Was Dying
“It’s plausible that she had a sense not of death, but that she was not feeling well, and you recognized that,” says Sam Gosling, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, whose work includes research on how animal behavior can contextualize our understanding of human psychology. “She would not have come to you with an intention of making a statement, but she communicated with you nonetheless, because you understood.” But what was Joan communicating? “She might have been saying, ‘I feel bad.’ She might have wanted to cuddle. Or she might have been holding herself in that unusual way just because she felt like crap.”

Gosling also warns me against confirmation bias. “One thing you have to keep in mind is that this”—my premonition of Joan’s premonition—“sadly happened to be true. If it had turned out not to be true, you wouldn’t be writing this story.”

In the moment, I sheepishly agree with Gosling. On reflection, though, I’m not as sure—Joan had never behaved in this way before, so there was no previous behavioral data for me to be biased against. But that only underscores the difficulty of scientifically evaluating my question: I’d need to gather info on hundreds of similar scenarios before I could draw any firm conclusions. As it happens, another go-to expert has some relevant data.

Hypothesis No. 2: Yes, Joan Totally Told Me She Was Dying
In his book Cat Daddy, Jackson Galaxy, host of Animal Planet’s My Cat from Hell, writes about his aged Benny, who, much like Joan, came to Galaxy late one night and told him that his time had come. “There’s no true English-to-cat dictionary,” Galaxy says, “but there’s no doubt that this is a moment of clarity between two beings.”

Galaxy kindly spends an hour on the phone with me, and after a while it starts to feel like The X-Files: Conspiracy of Cats, with Galaxy as visionary Mulder and me as literal-minded Scully. “Animals are very present,” Galaxy says, “and they operate in very simple primary colors: I’m happy. I’m sad. I miss you. I’m hungry. But they are cognizant of deeper truths. Knowing your own death—we all know it. When Joan tilted her head back, that moment was her recognition of her own mortality.”

I want to believe! And Galaxy really does work miracles on My Cat from Hell, so I have no doubt that he can achieve moments of clarity with cats. I just doubt that I can.

Hypothesis No. 3: Joan Effectively Told Me She Was Dying Without Intending To
A couple more experts help me find a middle way between Galaxy and Gosling. “Joan did not have a sense that she was dying, but she knew she wasn’t feeling well in an unusual way, and she expressed that, and you interpreted it,” says Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado. “Sure, your interpretation could have been wrong—but you weren’t wrong, and there’s a lot of value in that. She was literally sending out complex signals with visual, auditory, and even olfactory aspects to them, and you were sensitive to them. It’s not voodoo.”

“The two of you had devised, without realizing it, a system of communication,” says Barbara J. King, a professor of anthropology at William and Mary and the author of How Animals Grieve. “She knew she could get something across to you. You could read each other’s signals because of all the day-to-day routines and small engagements you had with each other. This kind of communication doesn’t depend on being a big-brained animal like an elephant or a dolphin. You wouldn’t expect it from a snake or a turtle, but for a mammal you knew well, this is plausible.”

What isn’t plausible, King says, is the idea that Joan was semaphoring her own mortality. This is comforting, obviously. It also draws a clear boundary line so that we can give Joan credit where cognitive credit is due, but stop short of anthropomorphizing her. “We don’t need animals to be humans,” King says. “We don’t have to make Joan into a little person. She was Joan. She was great as she was.”

Our beloved veterinarian put Joan to sleep on a freezing February evening, a month after the night in question. My husband and I took that afternoon off from work. We got into bed on either side of Joan, and she and I pressed foreheads together while Remain in Light played softly on the iPad. She purred away, and after a while, my husband and I fell asleep. When I woke up from the nap, the room was dark and silent, and Joan was staring steadily and placidly at me, not blinking, not purring. I think she was telling me something then, too, but I’ll never be able to prove it.

The Path to 10 Figures

Jessica Winter — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 03:41:00 GMT

The world’s first billionaire and by some measures the richest person in history, John D. Rockefeller, was once asked how much money was enough. He replied, “Just a little bit more.” Today’s most ambitious and innovative hundred-millionaires must know the feeling: You may be unimaginably rich to most, but hitting the billion-dollar mark—as Ev Williams will thanks to the Twitter IPO, and as Michael Kors likely has with the recent surge of his company stock—is an abracadabra moment. Over the next three weeks, Slate will pinpoint the places and industries where the next greatest entrepreneurs are most likely to cross that 10-figure benchmark in the near future.

Slate’s Moneybox columnist Matthew Yglesias begins by pondering why Sweden, bastion of Scandinavian socialism, outranks the United States, champion of no-holds-barred capitalism, in billionaires per capita. Future Tense lead blogger Will Oremus will profile Lyndon Rive, co-founder and CEO of pioneering clean-energy firm SolarCity. (Wildly successful entrepreneurship may run in Rive’s blood: His cousin is Tesla’s Elon Musk.) Brian Palmer, Slate’s resident Explainer, will consider whether or not the ability to manipulate humans’ gut flora—to make people thinner or healthier or able to digest wheat gluten—might mint a billionaire or two. Elsewhere we’ll explore industries from nanotechnology to geoengineering to fashion and—at the risk of getting ahead of ourselves—speculate on when we might ever see the world’s first trillionaire.

John D. Rockefeller also once said, “The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.” That may be sound investment advice, but rest assured that this series will be light on graphic violence.

Play the Name-Droppers Quiz!

Emma Goss — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 03:45:00 GMT

The Jumped-Up Pantry Boy Who Never Knew His Place

Jessica Winter — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 22:00:28 GMT

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Morrissey’s Autobiography, which Penguin published in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe last Thursday, is that it exists at all. It has been rumored roughly forever. As recently as September, the Atlantic put together a convincing case that its imminent publication was a hoax. In fact, the British pop icon’s memoir was merely delayed, reportedly over his insistence on a Penguin Classics designation—a black-border badge of literary immortality assigned, in this exceptional case, before the book’s actual birth, which is rather a royalist attitude for someone who once made a great record called The Queen Is Dead. What links other Penguin Classics authors is death and veneration; Morrissey has always longed for both, first as lead singer of the Smiths—the greatest band to emerge from the extraordinary British postpunk renaissance of the 1980s—and then in his resilient solo career. If the reports are true that he held Penguin to ransom over the Classics imprimatur and won, then Autobiography is an act of hubris at once appalling, hilarious, and diabolically brilliant, much like the writer himself.

Whether as the sneering wraith twirling gladioli during the Smiths’ first appearance on Top of the Pops in 1983 or in his beefed-up, rockabilly-mechanic guise of today, Morrissey, now 54, has held fast to the mindset of late-20^th-century pop music’s great object and subject: the existentially bewildered adolescent. It’s a state of morbid petulance and persecution, of sensational narcissism and wild emotions keenly felt, of Eros and Thanatos fumbling eternally in the backseat. It’s a state of mind that produces lyrics such as “If a double-decker bus crashes into us/ To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die” and “I wear black on the outside/ Because black is how I feel on the inside.” It’s also the state of mind of Autobiography. Alone and misunderstood, his passions unrequited or confused, the mopey teen in his bedroom carves out a jealously guarded sanctuary of rebellious beauty and sullen wit—and for this one mopey teen, emotional penury becomes a life force, straight through to middle age. Autobiography has no dedication page, which is one of the many very Morrissey things about it.

Steven Patrick Morrissey is a legendary control freak, which reinforces the impression that Autobiography had no editor. It has no chapters or index; its chronology is linear except when it isn’t; its first paragraph is 4 ½ pages long. Early on, the apparent lack of a guiding hand isn’t a drawback—it’s sometimes even a virtue. Morrissey writes with fondness and fierce loyalty of his Irish Catholic family, but with terrified revulsion of their hometown, “forgotten Victorian knife-plunging Manchester, where everything lies where it was left over one hundred years ago.” He renders his childhood with a mordant wit reminiscent of his hero Oscar Wilde; his entry into the world is a perfect egomaniac’s epigram (“Naturally my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big”), while his only sibling whets his appetite for paranoid melodrama (“My sister Jackie, older by two years, is interrupted four times as she tries to kill me; whether this be rivalry or visionary no one knows”).

An editor may have compressed Morrissey’s operatic eviscerations of 1960s and ’70s Manchester and its ghastly state school system, one powered by beatings, privation, and occasional sexual predation. (Lest one might think Morrissey is exaggerating for effect, a complementary account of St. Mary’s Secondary Modern can be found in Tony Fletcher’s excellent recent Smiths biography A Light That Never Goes Out.) An editor may have trimmed the 13 pages of summaries of Morrissey’s favorite poets (birth and death dates helpfully included), or hacked away at the five-page disquisition on British children’s television of the 1960s. But all of these passages are more moving for being so voluminous and obsessive. “Television flickers and fleets, and must be watched closely lest what you see is never seen again,” says Morrissey, who writes as incisively on his heroes David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Patti Smith as he does on Lost in Space, “where all the secrets of masculinity are meted out in the ping-pong clash between Dr. Smith and Major West.”

We can thank St. Mary’s for shaping Morrissey’s lyrical temperament (“Its wearisome echo of negativity exhausts me to a permanent state of circumstantial sadness”) and for rendering him unfit for further schooling or gainful employment; we can also thank Sounds magazine and his local postal office for turning him down for jobs and intensifying his fruitful malaise. Then one day in 1982, 18-year-old guitarist and songwriting prodigy Johnny Marr knocks on the door of an eccentric loner he barely knows and, improbably, asks him to start a band. With or without Morrissey, Johnny Marr would have been a star; but without Marr, Morrissey still would be in his bedroom, writing spec scripts for soaps and Instagramming his vinyl collection. (That Morrissey clearly recognizes this but can’t fully bring himself to admit it is also very Morrissey.)

The miracle of the Marr visitation is the moment that Autobiography begins to curdle, and when the dearth of editorial supervision begins to show. It’s here that Morrissey’s account of the Smiths necessarily begins to compete with other, more reliable narratives, and here that his miserablism turns out to be congenital instead of contextual. A scant two years after the first Morrissey-Marr meeting, the Smiths’ self-titled debut album, released on seminal postpunk label Rough Trade, hits the U.K. charts at No. 2, but because it is not No. 1, Morrissey writes, “My life sinks.” He launches endless ad hominem attacks on Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis and newspaper journalist Julie Burchill (the latter for the unanswerable crime of writing the following sentence: “Morrissey lives with his boyfriend in Santa Monica”). He devotes some 45 ragged, repetitive pages to an astonishingly bitter and self-serving account of Smiths drummer Mike Joyce’s successful 1996 suit for a higher percentage of the band’s recording royalties. He touches a few times on the charges of racism and nativism that have dogged him back to his Smiths days, but only by railing against the stupidity and mendacity of his accusers. And his rendition of the Smiths’ 1987 breakup is incongruously Zen and completely at odds with the established story—not to mention cruelly devoid of gossip.

And how does Autobiography rate on gossip? The enigma of Morrissey’s sexuality, such as it is, remains mostly intact: He suffers through what he derides as “cupcake encounters” with girls in his early teens, falls in love for the first time with a man in the mid ’90s, and briefly considers “producing a mewling miniature monster” (!) with a woman (!?!) at the turn of the millennium. But it’s all pretty vague, as are the celebrity anecdotes. Tom Hanks shows up backstage but doesn’t complete a sentence. Visionary British filmmaker Derek Jarman, who directed three Smiths videos, is introduced solely so that Johnny Marr can be glimpsed vomiting in front of him. The closest we come to an action-packed set piece is when our militant vegan narrator coaxes David Bowie away from a buffet spread of cold cuts.

Autobiography is at times so relentlessly whiny and misanthropic that it’s startling when Morrissey shares a flash of sober self-awareness. “Undernourished and growing out of the wrong soil,” he writes of himself circa 1984, “I knew at this time that a lot of people found me hard to take, and for the most part I understood why. Although a passably human creature on the outside, the swirling soul within seemed to speak up for the most awkward people on the planet.” That was once true—exhilaratingly true, true enough to save a life. But Autobiography only speaks up for its author, and never more than in his next line. “Somewhere deep within,” he confesses, “my only pleasure was to out-endure people’s patience.”

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Autobiography by Morrissey. Penguin Classics.

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Billion Dollar Babies

Jessica Winter — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 03:45:00 GMT

Behind every big business—every Starbucks, every Google, every Procter & Gamble—there was a small startup. These origin stories can make for irresistible reading, judging by two of the fall’s most anticipated nonfiction books, Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (out this week) and Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal (out next month). It’s hard to imagine any corporate behemoth as a new kid on the block, but this Slate series will do just that: Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll look back at the beginnings of some of America’s great companies and zero in on the pivotal moments when a promising little venture transformed into an unstoppable triumph.

Slate’s Future Tense lead blogger Will Oremus starts off by examining how Google’s founding duo landed on the idea that guided them to massive profitability. Moneybox columnist Matthew Yglesias will disclose the real secret of KFC’s success—turns out it had not much to do with 11 herbs and spices. Slate managing editor Rachael Larimore will analyze the brilliant alchemy of ruthless capitalism and kind-hearted humanism that made Starbucks into the world’s caffeine supplier. We’ll also revisit the creation myths of Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, organic-food pioneers Annie’s Homegrown, and more. We hope you’ll join us in retracing the baby steps of some of the most powerful companies on the planet.

All That Happens Must Be Known

Jessica Winter — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 20:33:45 GMT

The tech world runs on chutzpah. Innovation and creativity are nothing without it. Steve Jobs drank chutzpah smoothies each morning and gargled chutzpah at bedtime. Larry Page and Sergey Brin embark on moon shots like the rest of us embark on our morning commute. Marissa Mayer drops $1.1 billion on a near-bankrupt blogging platform like it’s a modest payday splurge. And it’s partly thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s youthful disregard for the right to privacy that Facebook exists at all.

But all of these industry titans could learn a thing or two about chutzpah from Dave Eggers, because with The Circle, Eggers has written a nearly 500-page satire of the tech world while appearing to have little interest in the actual tech world.

This is not a criticism. This is a reflection of Eggers’ own statements, like the one he provided to Gawker’s Nitasha Tiku on Wednesday. In the process of dreaming up The Circle—named for the unimaginably colossal and powerful tech company, like Facebook smashed into Google, that employs most of his novel’s characters—Eggers says that he did not “read any books about any Internet companies, or about the experiences of anyone working at any of these companies … I avoided all such books, and did not even visit any tech campuses.” That’s a curious admission to make, admirable in its way, and helps to explain why The Circle sometimes reads like a satire of NASCAR in which all the cars are played by freight trains.

Yet the book is heavily, self-consciously egged with parallel-world verisimilitude: the ways the titular corporation’s three “wise men” evoke Google’s top executive trinity, the fact that the Circle’s founder is Mark Zuckerberg’s long-lost twin, the strong surface affinities that the Circle’s campus and culture share with Facebook’s and Google’s. Eggers denies having read Katherine Losse’s 2012 memoir of her time at Facebook, The Boy Kings, despite the many similar contours between his book and hers: Young woman takes a job at a social-networking company answering user questions, rises through the ranks, is at times put on public display without her clear consent, grapples with hard questions about privacy and information-sharing, and ultimately finds the company’s “cause” has swallowed her life and redefined her sense of self and other. One big difference: At the end of The Boy Kings, Losse leaves Facebook. There is no escaping the Circle.

The company’s foundation stone is the Unified Operating System, also known as TruYou, invented by Circle founder Ty Gospodinov, a hoodie-wearing “boy-wonder visionary” whom we first glimpse “staring leftward … tuned into some distant frequency,” an image grafted from Gospodinov’s 2010 Person of the Year profile in Time. The Unified Operating System, Eggers writes,

combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppy—users' social media profiles, their payment systems, their various passwords, their email accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of their interests … one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person. There were no more passwords, no multiple identities … You had to use your real name, and this was tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple. One button for the rest of your life online.

So does this mean that despite operating system being two-thirds of its name, the Unified Operating System is not an operating system, like iOS or Android? Is it more like Microsoft Passport, Google Checkout, Google+, or Facebook Platform, plus self-tracking gadgets and surveillance cameras? The reader is told that “TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year,” that “the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition,” that it was “the force that subsumed Facebook, Twitter, Google”—and Eggers raises the stakes considerably in invoking that threesome, signaling to the reader that his satire is rooted in reality. (Steve Jobs is name-checked, too.) But how did TruYou subsume Facebook and Google, and so quickly?

The answer, Eggers implies—and here’s the seed of his plot and his critique—is that TruYou demands actual names, total transparency. It turns out that the free-market solution to monopolizing the Internet is simply to make people use their real names for all online activity. Notably, Facebook tried something akin to TruYou in 2007 with Facebook Beacon, which, in the words of the New York Times, took “a far more transparent and personal approach” to online tracking. It was a fiasco, resulting in complaints, a class-action suit, and the shutdown of Beacon in 2009. TruYou, somehow, is the opposite of a fiasco. Users love the streamlined experience and precision-targeted marketing. Plus, “overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable,” Eggers writes. “The trolls, who had more or less taken over the Internet, were driven back into the darkness.” Back, stupid trolls! Advertisers are thrilled, too, because “the actual buying habits of actual people were now eminently mappable and measurable,” and by “now” Eggers presumably means “again, in a different way,” since the actual buying habits of actual people are eminently mappable and measurable via Apple ID for Advertisers, Google’s in-progress AdID, and other means.

This might all sound nitpicky. But when you’re reading a novel about the Internet by a writer who doesn’t seem clear on what an operating system is or who thinks that a unified ID-and-payment system could extinguish all trolls, everything starts looking like a nit to pick. Does the Circle have its own OS? Its own browsers? How much hardware does it make? If it’s constantly backing up every conceivable shred of its users’ data—if that’s its fundamental mission—where are its data centers? Why would the world’s other corporations agree to having the Circle’s cameras planted everywhere? Or have they been magically subsumed, too? And so on.

Because it is a fast-moving conspiracy potboiler, The Circle is far more entertaining than, and not nearly as maddening as, say, Jonathan Franzen’s apocalyptic rants about “the infernal machine of technoconsumerism,” even though Eggers seems just as appalled by the liking-and-sharing economy. From its opening lines—“My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven”—The Circle sends out a familiar distress signal about a cultlike movement, a Silicon Valley revival meeting, a utopia breeding a totalitarian nightmare. Mae, the protagonist, takes an entry-level position in “Customer Experience” at the sprawling, city-on-a-hill campus of the Circle, which is busy leveraging its stranglehold on the search and ad-serving markets and its deep reach into the psyches and pockets of the global populace to manufacture a total-surveillance society. Cameras for everyone, everywhere! Not 70 pages in, Mae attends an all-hands meeting starring Eamon, one of the Circle’s “wise men,” who delivers the Circle’s Nineteen Eighty-Four–style mission statement: “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN.”

Mae is pliant and credulous; her overweening gratitude for winning a job at the Circle readily twists itself into aggressive subservience to the corporation’s whims. She is the Circle’s experiment and exemplar, Facebook-Google’s ideal user-captive. With every day within the Circle, her attention is further divided among more and more screens, networks, and rankings. She must race to keep up with a never-ending stream of user questions, monitor the scores users give her (and grade-grub to improve them), participate in multiple social networks (Zing is basically Twitter, and “zing” is a verb) and a litany of work-related social events, and obsess over her “Participation Rank,” a kind of intracompany Klout score. Soon she is wearing a camera and mic at all times to broadcast her every action and the actions of every person she encounters, save sex and sleep and bathroom breaks—and maybe even some of those—to thousands or millions of followers.

Yet Mae is bizarrely naïve. A major plot point turns on her not knowing what one of the wise men looks like (even though he was Person of the Year!), and when she gives a presentation that receives 368 “frowns” (which are kind of like Reddit downvotes), it has to be explained to her that she can find out who frowned at her—that in fact, tracking what people like and dislike is what her company does.

Like Mae, we offer ourselves up for consumption and quantification by the minute, without bothering to understand what exactly is done with our offerings. But there’s a conceptual problem here. Mae has to be coerced by her employer to submit to the Borg, and it’s true that we, too, are driven by compulsion, social anxiety, FOMO, and other unattractive emotions to participate in social media. But The Circle’s satire allows no room for the possibility that people might simply find it fun, useful, and emotionally sustaining to share thoughts, ideas, and images online, and that the pleasure we take in using these tools can coexist, however uneasily, with our knowledge that these are the same tools of cyberbullies and revenge pornographers and ad trackers and the NSA.

The maniacally cheerful and passive-aggressive herd of Circle users with whom Mae constantly interacts are rabid voyeurs, as insatiable for real-time data as the Circle itself, which is precisely Eggers’ point—we are become Big Brother. And The Circle is being published at a terrifying moment when the concept of privacy is becoming close to synonymous with the concept of shame. It’s a zippy, pulpy read that puts pressing issues into sharp relief. But its cautionary tale rests on an underestimation of people’s complicated and idiosyncratic relationships with the Internet and social media. And especially in its last third, which is antic with shark massacre and vehicular mayhem and shocking reveals, it imagines the most malevolent aspects of online life not as byproducts but as goals—the master plans of Dr. Evil–style Internet overlords. There’s a lot of irony to be mined from “Don’t Be Evil.” But rewriting it as “Do Be Evil” gives the tech world too much credit for chutzpah.

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The Circle by Dave Eggers. Knopf/McSweeney’s.

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All Hail Obamacare’s Brave First Responders

Jessica Winter — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 23:51:00 GMT

The face of public service in America has been taking a beating lately. Luckily for us, though, while government leaders have been mired in calamitous gridlock and hostage-taking, a parallel army of the brave and selfless has been at work—patriots who look adversity in the face and say “Bring it on.” On Tuesday, millions of these intrepid Americans volunteered to be first unto the breach when the Affordable Care Act’s online insurance marketplaces opened for business—despite the near-certainty of bugs and crashes, and despite having until Dec. 15 to sign on and shop for coverage at healthcare.gov and state-run exchanges. Slate asked these online pioneers to tell us about the user experience on Day 1 of Obamacare via email, Facebook, and Twitter. These are their stories.

They saw past mechanics for aesthetics.

Olivia Mungal: “While the design is clean and easy to use, it took me 4 hours to create an account.”

They acknowledged beauty and wonder when they saw it, and put that beauty and wonder into historical context.

Ricky Tenderkiss: “Very pretty to look at, but like trying to download iOS 7 on release day, today is likely to be hit by server overloads.”

They pondered the ontological essence of the System.

Daniel Stoddart: “Your account could not be created at this time. The system is unavailable.”

They pondered the semantics of the word important.

Len Testa: “Tried registering starting at 6 a.m. EST. It hasn't worked yet. The first time, the screen was filled with programming gibberish. The second time, none of the mandatory security questions loaded. Now every time I get through the process, I get an error saying ‘Important: Your account couldn’t be created at this time.’”

They suffered flashbacks to Comic-Con.

Sarah Swartz: “I probably should be irritated because getting Comic-Con badges was easier than this. Alas, I'm happy to wait. [The site overloading] simply means the program is popular.”

They did math. Painful math.

Randal Ford: “The cheapest plan they offer is $80 MORE per month than what I am paying now for a similar high deductible plan. The same plan I have now is around $200 more if purchased through the exchange.”

They struggled with a Zen conundrum of providing answers to nonexistent questions.

Moira Bohannon: “I'm supposed to select 3 security questions to answer in case I lose my password, but there are no questions to choose from.” Shannon Kennedy: “Keeps asking for security answers but doesn’t give any options for questions. When I try to just put words in for the answers, it says it wasn’t able to create the account and starts over.” Amber Karnes: “Got to step 3 and the security-question dropdowns are blank.”

They made reasonable but incorrect inferences about the availability of Live Chat.

Carol Haydens: “Would love to sign up but the site is not working correctly. The Federal shutdown means that Live Chat is unavailable for help.” (Not true, Carol! The workers assigned to the program are deemed “essential.”)

They gave of themselves, not for themselves but for others—and for Slate.

Amber Karnes: “I wasn’t even going to try to do it today because I knew things would be kinda crazy, but when I saw your tweet asking for input, I figured I’d try!”

They made bold declarations, even at the risk of enraging their peers.

Melissa Byrne: “It was up at 8 a.m.! And it worked perfectly.”

Sympathy for the Devil

Jessica Winter — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 03:54:00 GMT

We have reached a certain unanimity about the middle-aged white men who dominate our small-screen landscape: that Breaking Bad’s Walter White is a walking Greek tragedy refitted for the never-ending Great Recession, that Louis C.K. is our existential bard of morality and ethics and how to be good, and that Gordon Ramsay is Satan in a chef’s jacket. Everyone hates Gordon Ramsay. If a Ramsay-hater feels her resolve fading, she can simply consult Grub Street’s useful “20 Most Despicable Things Gordon Ramsay Has Said and Done, Ranked.” Everyone has ample opportunities to hate him, too, as Ramsay hosts roughly two-fifths of the Fox television lineup (including MasterChef, Hell’s Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, and Hotel Hell), is owner-proprietor of approximately one-sixteenth of the world’s dining establishments, and has insulted, screwed over, and/or instigated feuds with about one-eighth of the global foodie elite. His bellowing omnipresence has also made him obscenely rich and therefore still easier to hate: Ramsay pocketed $38 million in 2012 alone, making him Forbes’ top-earning celebrity chef, and according to Ad Week, Ramsay “has delivered north of $185 million in sales for Fox” just in the past year, including advance commitments for his latest show, MasterChef Junior, which premieres Friday.

That Ramsay is so reviled and yet so popular is no paradox. His on-air personality fulfills the same sadistic Schadenfreude that powers so much of reality TV. As with Simon Cowell, the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Ramsay’s charisma is that his sadism is intended to help beleaguered line cooks become the very best line cooks they can be. This is Ramsay’s sacrifice to the novice chefs of America: His name is no longer synonymous with sublime cuisine but with throat-shredding tantrums bouncing off the walls of a disgusting pantry full of moldering food in the bowels of an exurban strip mall’s second-most-popular family restaurant. His appeal partly rests on the assumption that Ramsay has to be standing in that disgusting pantry not just for a paycheck but because he thinks he can help these people clean up their pantry and accounts and wait staff and relationships with one another. The man could be literally anywhere else in the world right now, doing anything, and likely earning money for it, but there he is, waving a slimy block of congealed ground beef at the hapless owner of the Fiesta Sunrise in West Nyack, N.Y.

That’s sad, because nobody remembers anymore that Gordon Ramsay is a great chef. He used to collect Michelin stars the way Kanye West collects Grammys. His lucrative decline from culinary enfant terrible to apoplectic mass-market jester is rooted in the same quality that made him such a phenomenon—the same quality that he urges all of his victim-students to nurture in themselves: his insane, carnivorous notion of a work ethic. The man cannot stop working, and so he has taken what could have been an impeccable brand and worked it to death.

Ramsay came to prominence in the U.K. in the 1998 Channel Four documentary miniseries Boiling Point as a young, terrifyingly ambitious chef in single-minded pursuit of a third Michelin star. His perfectionism was surpassed in intensity only by his astonishing verbal abuse of his staff—all of whom, by the way, had just quit their jobs in solidarity with their tyrannical boss to follow him to his new, eponymous restaurant. (The show waits nine minutes before unleashing Ramsay’s first-ever televised shit fit, triggered by a glimpse of a bright blue Band-Aid on a waiter’s finger.) The Ramsay of Boiling Point was frequently appalling, but he was also an underdog worth rooting for: a true up-by-his-bootstraps success story, having traveled from a bleak council estate through some of the toughest kitchens in England and France (his mentor was the even screamier Marco Pierre White) to, by the mid ’90s, the gig as head chef at Aubergine, the London restaurant so exclusive it famously turned away Madonna. Ramsay would be denied that third Michelin star for another three years, a tortuous wait depicted in the 2000 sequel Beyond Boiling Point. As is the case with so many monomaniacs, though, finally harpooning his white whale wasn’t an entirely positive development for Ramsay; he could find nothing left to chase but fast-track empire-building and cheaply produced reality TV.

Not that all of that cheaply produced reality TV was terrible—quite the contrary, at least with the programs Ramsay made in the U.K., including the genuinely food-centric The F-Word, the frequently charming travelogue Gordon Ramsay’s Great Escape, and especially, the original incarnation of Kitchen Nightmares. Premiering in 2004, the U.K. Kitchen Nightmares provided an intimate, borderline meditative look inside businesses with a fighting chance of survival helmed by not entirely delusional owners. (The central quandary in the episode set at an upscale restaurant in Inverness is that the food is just too fancy.) The editing and sound are far less concussive than in their American counterparts, while Ramsay’s seismic eruptions feel more like natural phenomena; he achieves a fond rapport with many of his charges, even easing into the role of ad-hoc therapist.

The problem with even the best Ramsay TV, though, is the problem with all of Ramsay: There’s just too bloody much of it. Even Fox, the Ramsay Network, can’t handle the full Ramsay. Network head Kevin Reilly passed on a U.S. version of his British hit Gordon Behind Bars, in which Ramsay teaches cooking, small-business skills, and old-fashioned diligence in a south London prison; Reilly explained to the New York Post, “We have a lot of Gordon on the air right now.” Yet Gordon Behind Bars is a show after Rupert Murdoch’s heart—less a Jamie Oliver–ish endeavor to improve prisoners’ diet and job prospects and more an expression of Ramsay’s umbrage that Britain is too soft on her sedentary, TV-watching convict population: “I thought we were a nation of grafters,” Ramsay told the Guardian by way of explanation. “I thought we had the spirit of working harder than anyone.”

Ramsay is a grafter through and through, and that’s both the key to his kingdom and his tragic flaw. He is a man who can’t say no. Even taking into account his haul of lucre for Fox, Ramsay’s past few years have been a study in failing upward: His London gastropub Foxtrot Oscar got caught serving premade “boil-in-a-bag” meals; he lost his longtime contract with Claridge’s hotel in London; he faced a class-action lawsuit by employees of his Los Angeles restaurant the Fat Cow; and endured a string of closures in London, Las Vegas, Prague, Dubai, Melbourne, Doha, and Cape Town.* What’s damning about that list isn’t that Ramsay has botched or closed so many restaurants in so many cities, but that he had that many restaurants open in the first place, while also fronting and managing a television fiefdom.

Imagine an alternative scenario: if the 1998-vintage Ramsay, flush off his Aubergine triumph, had looked to the 10-years-older, multi-Michelin-starred Thomas Keller as a role model. It wasn’t until four years after the opening of the French Laundry that Keller opened nearby Bouchon, and it was a decade before Keller opened Per Se and Bouchon turned into a (modest) franchise. Keller has published a few cookbooks, dabbled in olive oil and dinnerware, pops up on television to roast a chicken now and again, and that’s about it. He and his food could scarcely be more revered, and that’s not just because he’s a genius. It’s also because Thomas Keller has been an exquisite conservationist of his own brand, which is to say you’ll never see Thomas Keller in a Specsavers ad.

A staunch Ramsay advocate would counter that Ramsay is a populist, but being a man of the people should not mean having to smell all the rancid meat of the people’s kitchens, or even having to smile indulgently at the people’s precocious children preparing brasserie-ready meals in MasterChef Junior, which is a good look for Ramsay only insofar as there’s little chance he’ll start yelling at a 9-year-old for serving a too-rubbery octopus salad. He seems a little exhausted, a little checked out in MasterChef Junior, which is also a good look, as it summons the faintest hope that Ramsay might check out altogether for a little while and give us the chance to miss hating him. I can’t help but wonder if Ramsay ever feels a twinge of regret for allowing the bacteria of America’s most infernal dining establishments to poison his reputation. Because when others see Gordon Ramsay throwing an elk quesadilla at another man, they see a clown. When I see Gordon Ramsay throwing an elk quesadilla at another man, I see a clown, too, but also a tragic figure—a crying-on-the-inside clown, a clown who throws the elk quesadilla out of anger at his pupil but also, perhaps, anger at himself.

Correction, Sept. 26, 2013: This article originally listed both Doha and Qatar as sites of closed Gordon Ramsay restaurants. Qatar was removed from the list, as Doha is in Qatar. (Return.)

Catholic Truthiness

Jessica Winter — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 20:42:13 GMT

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has always reminded me of the robed men of the Catholic Church in which I grew up: well-fed and saturnine, burbling with derisive erudition, jolly one moment and imperious the next, a weary disgust often flickering at the edges of the brow and lips. These men only really engaged with the boys; the girls always seemed to them to have wandered into the room by mistake. I’ll never forget the look of vague revulsion on the face of the vast monsignor who served Holy Communion at my confirmation, the corners of his mouth pulling down to contain his nausea at the riffraff they let into the church these days. It’s the shape of a mouth reading an acrid Scalia dissent.

For a lot of reasons—because he is the longest-serving and most boisterous member of America’s own Ecumenical Council, because he frequently addresses Catholic groups, because Andy Borowitz says as much—we think of Justice Scalia as “America’s Catholic,” as my Slate colleague Dahlia Lithwick put it in an email. In fact, you could easily imagine him as America’s first Bishop of Rome, or at least his duly appointed representative. Pope Benedict XVI was a fun cartoon villain because of the fumes of nefarious conspiracy wafting off his haute couture threads—he was Mugatu in a chasuble. Scalia wouldn’t have gone shopping with him, but otherwise they were two hearts beating as one: They’re both deeply conservative, nostalgic for “tradition,” rigid in their interpretations of doctrine, belittling of women and gays, and forever erring on the side of consolidating more power—be it political, social, or religious—in the hands of the already powerful.

What Scalia and Benedict also have in common is that, for all their institutional authority, they represent a last stand against the prevailing, decades-long trend toward a more inclusive, liberal Catholic Church. For proof, of course, just look to Pope Francis, the selfie-taking, Twitter-using, biker gang-blessing, money-hating, atheist-redeeming, female-prisoner’s-foot-kissing Jesuit who made liberal Catholics everywhere gnaw ecstatically on their rosaries with an interview in the Jesuit weekly America magazine (excerpts of which were republished in the New York Times). In the interview, he makes it clear that, in contrast to his glamorous predecessor, Francis wants to frame the church as an institution by and for the poor. He’s sharply critical of “authoritarian” decision-making (specifically from his own past), “closed and rigid thought,” and “censorship.” He addresses the church’s views on homosexuality by posing a question that answers itself: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” He doesn’t condemn birth control, but he does criticize the church’s obsession with it. Most intriguingly, Francis says, “We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman,” and while I have no idea what that means, I guarantee that this thought never crossed the mind of Antonin Scalia, or of any man who ever dropped a wafer in my mouth at Mass.

In other words, Francis is shaping up to be the kind of pope that any lapsed Catholic lightly schooled in liberation theology and Madonna videos can embrace. But even a People’s Pope can seem a remote and shimmering figure—when I was a kid, John Paul II was never much more than a kind-looking grandpa in a plastic picture frame. For a lay Catholic, the literal embodiments of the church are always going to be its local priests and its most prominent cultural figures. So as the title has passed from Benedict to Francis, it follows that U.S. Catholics should have a new pope of their own.

Antonin Scalia, as of Thursday’s papal bombshell, you are no longer America’s Catholic. That mantle has now passed to Stephen Colbert.

Stephen Colbert is the greatest thing to happen to American Catholics since Vatican II. He provides day-to-day proof that devout Catholicism can coexist with critical thinking, irreverence, a guiding belief in equal rights, and a fundamentally anti-authoritarian worldview—by, for example, dishing on the papal doctrine of social justice for the poor with Colbert Report chaplain Jim Martin (editor of America magazine), or breaking character during a congressional panel on rights for migrant farm workers by paraphrasing Scripture: “Whatever you did for the least of my brothers, you did for me.” Colbert is America’s Sunday school teacher and “Catholicism’s best pitch man,” as Patheos.com’s Matt Emerson put it in a beautifully argued 2011 piece. But until now, what he’s been pitching hasn’t necessarily been what the Vatican has been selling.

That’s all changed now. Catholics have a pope who loves the poor, embraces critical thinking, and has a delightful sense of humor—the same holy trinity of virtues that Stephen Colbert, the new America’s Catholic, exemplifies. So the next time Francis travels abroad to commune with his flock, he should save an extra seat in the Popemobile for Colbert. Likewise, I look forward to Francis’ first appearance on The Colbert Report, where rumor has it the duo will convene the Third Vatican Council.

Breaking Bad Has a Pinkman Problem

Jessica Winter — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 14:46:11 GMT

In the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, Jesse Pinkman is sprinting away from the fearsome drug dealers Emilio and Krazy 8 when he trips and falls eye-socket-first onto a rock in the New Mexico desert. When he wakes up, he’ll have a scone-shaped shiner the color of a Marie Schrader accent wall. But for the moment, he’s out cold, and Emilio can’t resist kicking him—hard, spitefully, once in the side—when he’s down.

As goes Emilio, so goes Breaking Bad. This show has never passed up an opportunity to kick Jesse Pinkman when he’s down. It’s forever endeavoring to find new, more vigorous techniques for kicking him when he’s down—through pirouettes of plot and calisthenics of character development—and new, pliant body regions to kick or, when the kicking is done, punch or stomp or split open bleeding. What horrible thing hasn’t happened to Jesse, perhaps repeatedly, over the last five seasons? Psycho Tuco beat him bad enough to put him in the hospital. Psycho Hank beat him bad enough to put him in the hospital again. He awoke one morning to find his beloved Jane dead beside him. He feels responsible for the deaths of Jane and Combo and Tomás. He is responsible for the death of Gale, although Walter was the one really pulling the strings. He’s been rejected by his biological family, and lost his adopted one—Andrea and Brock—around the time that Walter decided the best plan of action for preserving his meth empire was to poison a small child and later plant a ricin cigarette in Jesse’s Roomba, just to reinforce one more time (but not one last time) what a stupid worthless junkie imbecile Jesse is, because that’s always been Walter’s favorite topic of discussion—his go-to when the cocktail chatter is flagging.

However difficult this may be to watch, Jesse’s ongoing abasement served a narrative purpose. Jesse evolved from bratty burnout to, for a time, the show’s most complex and interesting character—a “bad” kid who increasingly, desperately wanted to be good, without knowing that in the pitiless Breaking Bad universe, no good deed goes unpunished. (Admittedly, most bad deeds don’t go unpunished on Breaking Bad, either. It’s a punitive show.) You could judge the progress of Walter’s moral corrosion at any given moment by measuring how hollowed out Jesse was, how pulped and zombiefied. Jesse suffered for Walter’s sins, so the viewer could only hope that Walter’s sins would finally catch up with him.

But as of last week’s episode, the third-to-last in the entire series, I’m hoping that The Passion of the Jesse has completed its stations of the cross, and that no Christlike martyrdom is in store for a character who tried so hard to redeem himself. “Ozymandias” was an astonishing piece of television, and it feels churlish to quibble with it. And I’d never suggest that Gilligan and his amazing writing staff have somehow lost track of how many subdural hematomas and PTSD triggers they’ve bestowed on Jesse—this is a character so relentlessly (and self-consciously) dehumanized that they recently honored him with the eponymous episode title “Rabid Dog.” That said, burying Jesse under this gruesome stack of physical and psychological torments—Walter’s taunts about Jane’s death, disfiguring torture, and a possible eternity as a meth-lab slave—is starting to feel less like Vince Gilligan and more like Mel Gibson doing a drug-addiction PSA for the producers of Saw. The phrase “torture porn” got thrown about too much among film critics of the mid-2000s, but Jesse’s terrified screams in the white-supremacist chamber of horrors and the clank-and-rattle of his halting steps in the lab are the soundtrack of a pornography of suffering. Walter’s crutch is to abuse Jesse whenever he needs a mini-exorcism; increasingly, his crutch has become the show’s. The plot is such a perfect machine, exquisitely calibrated and fast as light—so why does Jesse have to be ground up in its engine blades?

There has been some hypothesizing online—speculative spoiler alert—that Walter will return to Albuquerque in the final movements of Breaking Bad to save Jesse from the Nazi meth squad. That seems eminently possible to me, but maybe only half-satisfying. I’m all for a happy ending for poor Jesse. I want Jesse and Brock riding Go-Karts through a field of flowers, Andrea behind them astride a unicorn, heading home beneath a rainbow to an Xbox in every room, a Georgia O’Keefe door on every surface, and a counselor trained in prolonged-exposure therapy available on every alternating weekday. But I don’t want it to come at the behest of Walter White. Because then it’s a poisoned gift—the show has already told us that we can only despair of his works.

AT&T: The 9/11 Thinkfluencers

Jessica Winter — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:27:26 GMT

The 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were murdered in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa., is an ideal moment for marketing professionals to reflect on how this flashpoint event in American history can be leveraged to promote their brand, #disrupt the conversation, and reach thought leaders. The unforgettable pictures and indelible memories associated with 9/11 offer a branding opportunity that promises high levels of consumer engagement and social reach.

In fusing iconic imagery with a soon-to-be iconic product, your marketing team is guaranteed a viral blockbuster that potential customers and thinkfluencers will surely #NeverForget.

Update, Sept. 11, 2013: AT&T has deleted the tweet and issued an amorphous apology "to anyone who felt our post was in poor taste," though the company did not apologize for the post itself, which it said was "meant to pay respect to those affected by the 9/11 tragedy."

In Praise of the World’s Most Underappreciated Smartphone

Jessica Winter — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 20:43:00 GMT

The $7 billion news that Microsoft is buying Nokia’s smartphones division is, as Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ashlee Vance put it, “a doubling-down on what has been a miserable phone and device union.” It’s also a union without many guests at the wedding: The Windows Phone platform has a mere 3.7 percent share of the global smartphone operating-system market, and Nokia is no longer among the top five in smartphone sales. When even a relatively bullish take on the deal gives it a tiny chance of success, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the biggest victim of Microsoft and Nokia’s stumbles in the smartphone marketplace: the beautiful, blameless, underappreciated Lumia. It did everything right, save for choosing the correct set of corporate parents.

The Lumia—I’m thinking specifically of the 920 and the 1020—will be always the bridesmaid and never the bride, the too-tightly-corseted lady-in-waiting to the Galaxy and the iPhone, lovely and capable and cast in the shadows. The Lumia is a gorgeous design object, an efficient practical device, a delight simply to hold in your hand. All of these superlatives will sound familiar to tech bloggers, who have regularly sung the Lumia’s praises. But they won’t be familiar to all the people I’ve never seen in the subway, the coffee shop, the airport lounge, the house party, or any other public or private location actually using, enjoying, and passionately recommending their achingly perfect Lumia, with its big crisp screen and its fat-finger-friendly buttons and its Jony Ive–worthy tile design and its ridiculously awesome camera and the way it purrs and trills in your hand like a satisfied kitten when you get an email.

The received wisdom on the Lumia’s failure in the marketplace centers on Microsoft’s dearth of apps relative to its competitors. The Windows Phone Store has on the order of 150,000 apps, while the Apple App Store and Google Play Store have closer to 1 million. But 150,000 is still rather a lot of apps. And if you use your phone mainly to make calls, take pictures, consult maps, send and receive email, and check social media—if, in other words, you use your smartphone exactly the same way I use my smartphone—the Lumia serves all these purposes impeccably. It doesn’t seem as though marketing is to blame, either. A recent ad, set at a children’s pageant, ably skewers aggressive iPhone and iPad shutterbugs whilst establishing Lumia users as chill parents you want to hang out with.

Yet for all its virtues, the Lumia has remained a niche product on a niche platform. The relative lack of apps—caused by a lack of developers creating apps, which in turn is caused by a lack of users, and the circle spins round and round—is merely symptomatic of the straightforward network effects that have held back the Lumia and Windows Phone, the same network effects that made Windows such a desktop behemoth; consumers and developers stick with a known quantity rather than taking a risk on a tarnished brand.* Case in point: me. Like most people, I am a sheep and I stay with my flock. Therefore I love the Lumia, but I own an iPhone.

Correction, Sept. 4, 2013: This post originally stated that a lack of apps relative to its competitors is "central to" the network effects that have held back the Lumia Windows Phone. They are merely "symptomatic."

The Magnificent Nightmare of the Billy Bookcase

Jessica Winter — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 18:53:30 GMT

It all started because I wanted the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. Not a new, licensed reproduction—I wanted the scuffed-up, 1960-vintage Nelson Swag Leg Desk I found on eBay. It seemed to me mostly irrelevant that I could not afford the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. But my husband suggested a budgetary adjustment: Instead of pairing the Nelson Swag Leg Desk with pricey custom-built bookshelves as planned, we could economize with a jumbo set of Ikea’s Billy bookcases, which fit the appointed space almost to the centimeter. At first, I resisted this financially expedient arranged marriage of a modern-design icon to a prosaic dorm-room staple that I associated with beer pong and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Eventually, though, I started talking myself into the compromise. I tried to think of it as a chic high-low flourish, like Anna Wintour pairing couture with jeans on her first Vogue cover, or Mike D plonking a Target pouf smack in the middle of his otherwise ultra-customized Brooklyn townhouse. Or something.

We completed the order, absorbing the blunt force of the flat $99 delivery fee. But the odyssey of the Billy bookcase, we discovered, had only just begun.

June 7. We buy the bookcase.
June 13. We receive an email from Ikea: “Your order has departed from the IKEA Distribution Center.”
June 16. We receive an email from a company called UX Logistics stating that our order is ready to deliver.
June 16, Part II. Email from Ikea: “Your IKEA order is ready to be delivered. … You will receive a call within 2 to 3 business days to schedule your delivery date.”
June 17. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 21.
June 21. Another email from Ikea, asking to confirm our order.
June 21, Part II. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 26.

And on and on and on. Each afternoon, my husband would call UX Logistics, who’d say something like, “We can’t deliver your item because it hasn’t arrived,” then call Ikea, who’d say, “They do have it—you need to call them back and find out why they’re not delivering it,” and so forth. At one point, my husband asked Ikea to cancel the home delivery so we could arrange to pick up the bookcase ourselves. Easy for all concerned, right? Wrong: Ikea claimed that cancelation of the delivery was impossible, because the bookcase had already been delivered—to UX Logistics, who said they didn’t have it. Even if we canceled the order outright, Ikea told us, we’d be on the hook for the delivery to the delivery company who hadn’t yet received the delivery.

It turns out that Ikea is not just a furniture retailer. It is also an epistemological time machine, casting into doubt everything we thought we knew about semantics and the space-time continuum and the ding an sich of particle board.

The nightmare of Ikea delivery is a truth so universally acknowledged that even the company cops to it. Chief marketing officer Leontyne Green talked about her own “very frustrating” Ikea delivery experience in a December 2011 Ad Age profile, which stressed the firm’s ongoing efforts to improve delivery and overall customer service. But as anyone who has found herself dissolving into the hypnotically well-appointed cattle chute of an Ikea showroom can tell you, this is not a company that does things by accident. The who’s-on-first shambles of Ikea delivery isn’t the flaw in the Eivor Cirkel rug. It’s instead a case study in how a large retailer can succeed by failing. Here are five reasons why.

Ikea has no rational economic motive to offer halfway-decent delivery. Like many big-box retailers, Ikea outsources all its delivery. “With sporadic orders over a wide geographic area, Ikea would need a fleet of trucks that might be idle one day and not able to handle the load the next,” says Robert Shumsky, a professor of operations management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Of course, other furniture retailers such as Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn juggle similar logistical challenges, but have nothing like Ikea’s reputation for delivery debacles. Ikea may be OK with this because it doesn’t have much competition in the bargain furniture business—there’s no one else selling couches quite so cheap. The company sees its customers as fundamentally different: thriftier, for sure, but also stronger, more resourceful, stoic in the face of challenge! According to Santiago Gallino, also a professor at the Tuck School, “Ikea’s target customers are consumers who prize ‘value,’ and are willing to spend their own time to save money”—by pulling items from the warehouse, assembling the items themselves, etc. “Asking the customer to spend time to come to the store is consistent with this segmentation strategy,” Gallino says.

Ikea, unlike so many other retailers, has little to fear from Amazon. Consumers are increasingly conditioned to assume that virtually any product—even heavy, unwieldy products—can land on their doorstep 24 hours or less after purchase. Just one case in point: the frighteningly fast and cheap deliveries of heavy bulk purchases available via the Amazon subsidiary wag.com. But Ikea is, at least for the time being, immune to these expectations. According to Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, “Amazon can disrupt anything that doesn’t have to be assembled or curated”—in other words, anything that isn’t Ikea. But heavy flat-pack furniture deliveries are a conundrum even Jeff Bezos hasn’t yet solved, and the most dazzling page of Amazon can’t begin to compete with any given IKEA alcove. “Yesterday, you didn’t know you needed a new strainer,” Frei says, “but today you do, because of how it was curated in the Ikea kitchen. Amazon can’t do that.”

Making you wait might make you happy. The longer we waited for Billy, it seems, the more we pined for Billy, which heightened our satisfaction when Billy did finally arrive. “The advantage of making people wait is that it creates a sense of anticipatory excitement,” says Michael Norton, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. Norton and Elizabeth Dunn’s recent book Happy Money makes the case that a pay-now-enjoy-later model of consumption leads to greater customer satisfaction than the enjoy-now-pay-later logic of, say, Amazon Prime.

Making you work might make you even happier. The 2011 article “‘The IKEA Effect’: When Labor Leads to Love”—written by Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely—argues that successfully assembling an Ikea product can lead us to value the item more than if the item arrived on our doorstep camera-ready. I jokingly ask Norton if my husband’s unpaid internship as an Ikea fulfillment manager might have created its own Ikea effect. “I’m not so sure the answer is no,” Norton says. “It was a real pain in the butt, but we do misattribute effort to liking, so he might actually like the bookcase more because getting it was such a hassle. There’s something about service recovery that creates a different, more meaningful experience.”

Or not. “Working as Ikea’s fulfillment and transport manager had no impact on my enjoyment of the shelves once they arrived,” my husband said in a statement to Slate.

Being icy and withholding is part of Ikea’s unique alchemy. “Ikea refuses to expose itself to the idiosyncracies of its customers,” Frei says. “There is no way they could do their own delivery with that signature Ikea crisp efficiency—there are too many variables. So they make you conform to them.” Ikea makes great stuff cheap—and that is the draw. Helping you obtain that stuff, or even find it in their store, is not part of their mission, which also explains why you’ll rarely spot an Ikea employee who isn’t either working a register or hauling purchases to the parking lot. “If you come to their showroom seeking out a specific thing and you can’t find it,” Frei says, “you’ll probably just go and buy an adjacent thing.”

Without meaning to, I recently tested this last hypothesis at my local Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Shumsky had mentioned that he’d wanted to purchase a Spoka nightlight for his daughter, but Ikea doesn’t deliver this item and his nearest showroom is two and a half hours away. I’m only about five miles from mine, so after checking online that the Spoka was “most likely in stock” in Red Hook, I hopped on my bike to go buy one for him. But once I’d slowly wended through the endless floor displays to the lighting emporium, I couldn’t find the Spoka nightlight, or any nightlights at all, or anyone on the floor to help me find the nightlights, so I bought and ate an Ikea cinnamon bun and got back on my bike and rode home. I know that Ikea won’t lose any sleep over me and my failed nightlight quest (which cost them all of $15) or the Billy breakdown. But it’s still a little strange—a little analog, a little pre-Amazon and pre-Apple Store—to realize that a bad customer experience is part of the design of a good business strategy.

The Kindly Brontosaurus

Jessica Winter — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 09:30:00 GMT

In her helpful Slate piece on how to avoid and mitigate flight delays, Amy Webb stresses that the savvy air traveler must invest energy in grooming the airport staff. “Stand next to the gate agent, even if they ask you to sit down,” she writes. “Be polite but firm. … Ultimately, they just want you to go away and not be their problem anymore.”

I endorse this strategy, and I would like to elaborate on it, because Slate readers deserve to know about a foolproof method of persuasion for securing a seat on a packed flight—and for that matter, for convincing authority figures of all stripes to give us things that aren’t ours. This simple technique has an anodyne name that belies its hypnotic, even occult powers. It is known as the Kindly Brontosaurus.

A practitioner, nay, an artist, of the Kindly Brontosaurus method would approach the gate agent as follows. You state your name and request. You make a clear and concise case. And then, after the gate agent informs you that your chances of making it onto this flight are on par with the possibility that a dinosaur will spontaneously reanimate and teach himself to fly an airplane, you nod empathically, say something like “Well, I’m sure we can find a way to work this out,” and step just to the side of the agent’s kiosk.

Here is where the Kindly Brontosaurus rears amiably into the frame. You must stand quietly and lean forward slightly, hands loosely clasped in a faintly prayerful arrangement. You will be in the gate agent’s peripheral vision—close enough that he can’t escape your presence, not so close that you’re crowding him—but you must keep your eyes fixed placidly on the agent’s face at all times. Assemble your features in an understanding, even beatific expression. Do not speak unless asked a question. Whenever the gate agent says anything, whether to you or other would-be passengers, you must nod empathically.

Continue as above until the gate agent gives you your seat number. The Kindly Brontosaurus always gets a seat number.

I once gave up my seat on a miserably oversold JFK-to-Heathrow flight for cash and frequent flier miles, had second thoughts, and convinced a gate agent to put me back on the flight, after the gate had closed. (It was just before Christmas, too. The gate. It had closed.) This is the power of the Kindly Brontosaurus.

The Kindly Brontosaurus once shepherded me past a power-crazed downtown Manhattan bouncer into a Go-Betweens concert, a feat that was all the more remarkable considering I didn’t have a ticket. The Kindly Brontosaurus once coaxed a formidable guard at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg to allow a friend and me into a closed area of the museum. The Kindly Brontosaurus once politely ushered me past a queue of about 1,000 people to get into a sardine-packed celebrity reading at the Union Square Barnes and Noble. The Kindly Brontosaurus once persuaded a former boss of mine to completely change course on a project, at some inconvenience to said boss. But how could said boss possibly say no to such a genial herbivore?

A colleague of mine once termed the move the “Powerful Supplicant,” and said it would work best whilst wearing a monk’s hood. My friend coined the superior “Kindly Brontosaurus” terminology after she participated in the Hermitage incident; she in turn got the term from another friend, who used it to describe a 6-foot-5-inch colleague’s comportment as he leaned over a bassinet to look at her baby. My science-minded colleagues at Slate may object to this nomenclature, as the Brontosaurus never existed; the correct term for our gentle giant is Apatosaurus. But I think this bit of paleontological imprecision only enhances the Kindly Brontosaurus’ mythological, unicorn-like aura. He is a fabled beast with secret superpowers, blinking his doe-like eyes at the honorable gate agent, docilely chewing whatever brand of foliage is for sale at Hudson News as the agent travels, in his own time and on his own terms, toward the correct and rational decision to do whatever the Kindly Brontosaurus wants him to.

Why does it work? I called Dr. Lillian Glass, resident body language expert on Dancing With the Stars and Millionaire Matchmaker, to ask. “The body language of the Kindly Brontosaurus is respectful and nonthreatening,” she says. “There’s a humility, so you allow the other person to feel empowered. Since you’ve made them feel like king of the jungle, they’re more receptive to you.” Glass adds that the Kindly Brontosaurus can apply not just in customer service contexts but with parents, spouses, children, and “toxic employees.”

So lean in, apprentice brontosauri! Your greatest prehistoric advocate stands poised to ease you patiently through life, lumbering gracefully beside you, ready to nudge open any closing door with an intuitive flick of the tail. A final piece of advice: When you get on that plane, don’t forget to order the vegetarian meal.

Steal This Look: Using Social Security Benefits as a Marketing Front

Jessica Winter — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 15:00:00 GMT

I am really bad at opening my mail, like Jennifer Connelly in House of Sand and Fog bad. All my bill payments are automated, and even legit-looking snail mail usually hides nothing more enticing than a Discover Card offer inside, so the stuff tends to stack up, or get recycled indiscriminately. But this! This, I opened immediately.

Important information about my Social Security benefits? This clearly government-issued document demanded my immediate attention! Any delay on my part might result in my husband and I living in a cardboard box on the street in our dotage. I ripped it open—or rather, I tore carefully along three perforated edges, as one would with any official paperwork worth its salt—and found this inside.

Turns out that the “Important Information About Your Social Security benefits” is actually hiding inside a booklet that I’d need to request, ominously titled Let’s Face It Now, and while my anticipation built to Face It Now, in the meantime I could sign up for a $35-a-month gazebo-grave at the Pinelawn Memorial Park and Garden Mausoleum in Farmingdale, NY.

Because, as mentioned, I never open my mail, I have no idea if these kinds of bait-and-switch USPS-aided moves invoking Important Information About Your Social Security Benefits are common, though a highly unscientific poll of Slate staffers indicated not. And while it’s easy to poke fun at the dated Jonathan Livingston Seagull–style cover design of Let’s Face It Now, I’ve got to hand it to the Pinelawn Memorial Park and Garden Mausoleum for deploying the bland but authoritative mail design of a monolithic American government entity and make an ordinarily resistant consumer engage with their brand. Though admittedly, if I’d looked a bit closer at the envelope, the postmark should have tipped me off.

So what say you, Slate readers? Is this a tired direct-mail marketing trick that’s simply passed me by until now?

Battle Ready

Jessica Winter — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 14:47:48 GMT

As Shakespeare once told us, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” And some, he might have added, rise to greatness because of the presence—and the provocations—of a worthy rival. In a series of articles over the next few weeks, Slate will explore how competition makes the best even better, driving creativity, innovation, and sheer bloody-mindedness in a race to the top.

Our Moneybox columnist Matthew Yglesias leads off, looking at why the most successful entrepreneurs don’t always amass the biggest fortunes. (Exhibit A: Steve Jobs.) Slate’s chief Explainer, Brian Palmer, will unpack how rivalries between sports franchises enhance their brand value. Slate science writer Daniel Engber will unearth the bizarre and fascinating “bone wars” between two 19th-century dinosaur hunters, and technology columnist Farhad Manjoo will assess the four-way battle of the top tech giants. We’ll also tackle some of the most iconic head-to-head contests of the last century: from comics to soft drinks, from skyscrapers to feuding literary sisters. There’s even more to come, but for now, grab a ringside seat and enjoy the fray.

When Is It OK to Crack Up? Some Ground Rules for the Cast of SNL.

Jessica Winter — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 21:27:00 GMT

Slacktory just posted a supercut of Saturday Night Live actors “breaking”—aka “corpsing,” aka not being able to keep from laughing mid-skit—from the show’s late-’70s golden age to the current cast. The video, apparently a celebration of these slip-ups, provides an opportunity to discuss an important issue that’s been irking Brow Beat for some time: when breaking is, and is not, OK.

First a bit of background. Elsewhere familiar from movie blooper reels and undergraduate improv performances, breaking is a binary phenomenon: Sometimes it gives the comedy a boost, while other times it’s just supremely annoying. It also seems to be somewhat contagious: The strong late-’80s SNL lineup (Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, et al.) tended to keep an extremely stiff upper lip, while their otherwise worthy successors in the turn-of-the-millennium cast (Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, et al.) seemed particularly susceptible to giggle fits. More recently, Bill Hader’s inability to get through a Stefon sketch without breaking devolved from a delightful crack in the fourth wall to an irritating tic—almost like another tiresome SNL catchphrase. (Judging by the Slacktory video, the Stefon experience has made Hader more giggly in general.)

If breaking on SNL is infectious, then Jimmy Fallon—whose ample corpsing crimes are notably underrepresented in the Slacktory supercut—was its prime pathogen. (Horatio Sanz was almost as bad, but he never seemed to find his own breaks as adorable as Fallon found his.) No less than Tracy Morgan excoriated his fellow cast member for “laughing and all that dumb shit he used to do,” explaining, “That’s taking all the attention off of everybody else and putting it on you, like, ‘Oh, look at me, I'm the cute one.’ ” Morgan isn’t alone among comedians: On an episode of Family Guy, Peter Griffin savagely beats Fallon on the Studio 8H stage for the sin of breaking: “This is for laughin’ and lookin’ at the camera during every sketch you’ve ever been in,” he says between blows. “Who do ya think you are, Carol Burnett? ... You haven’t earned what she’s earned, buddy.”

Loath as one might be to ascribe moral or aesthetic authority to the author of “We Saw Your Boobs,” Seth MacFarlane draws a useful line in the sand here: Breaking is acceptable, and often hilarious, if you’ve earned it. That is, if you are the heroic Hartman, known as “the glue” of the SNL cast for an entire decade, it’s okay to dissolve into laughter during, say, a five-minutes-to-1-a.m. Frankenstein sketch. It’s likewise fine if you are the valiant Ferrell, who has to face the jumping-bean Fallon all but goading him into laughing during “More Cowbell”—Jimmy Fallon, you don’t even need to be in this sketch! Sit down behind your drums and be quiet!—but still more or less keeps it together. Which is all to say: You’re allowed to break if the audience would never expect you to break. In that light, watching the usually unbreakable Will Ferrell crack the slightest smile in “More Cowbell” is a fond reminder that, under the Neanderthal coif and winking belly sag, that is one stone-cold professional.

Selfie-Loathing

Jessica Winter — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 16:27:00 GMT

It’s a truism that Facebook is the many-headed frenemy, the great underminer. We know this because science tells us so. The Human–Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon has found that your “passive consumption” of your friends’ feeds and your own “broadcasts to wider audiences” on Facebook correlate with feelings of loneliness and even depression. Earlier this year, two German universities showed that “passive following” on Facebook triggers states of envy and resentment in many users, with vacation photos standing out as a prime trigger. Yet another study, this one of 425 undergrads in Utah, carried the self-explanatory title “ ‘They Are Happier and Having Better Lives Than I Am’: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives.” Even the positive effects of Facebook can be double-edged: Viewing your profile can increase your self-esteem, but it also lowers your ability to ace a serial subtraction task.

All of these studies are careful to point out that it’s not Facebook per se that inspires states of disconnection, jealousy, and poor mathematical performance—rather, it’s specific uses of Facebook. If you primarily use Facebook to share interesting news articles with colleagues, exchange messages with new acquaintances, and play Candy Crush Saga, chances are the green-eyed monster won’t ask to friend you. But if the hours you log on Facebook are largely about creeping through other people’s posts—especially their photos, and especially-especially their vacation snaps—with an occasional pause to update your own status and slap on a grudging “like” here or there, then science confirms that you have entered into a semi-consensual sadomasochistic relationship with Facebook and need to break the cycle.

A closer look at Facebook studies also supports an untested but tantalizing hypothesis: that, despite all the evidence, Facebook is actually not the greatest underminer at the social-media cocktail party (that you probably weren’t invited to, but you saw the pictures and it looked incredible). Facebook is not the frenemy with the most heads. That title, in fact, goes to Instagram. Here’s why.

Instagram distills the most crazy-making aspects of the Facebook experience.

So far, academic studies of Instagram’s effects on our emotional states are scarce. But it’s tempting to extrapolate those effects from the Facebook studies, because out of the many activities Facebook offers, the three things that correlate most strongly with a self-loathing screen hangover are basically the three things that Instagram is currently for: loitering around others’ photos, perfunctory like-ing, and “broadcasting” to a relatively amorphous group. “I would venture to say that photographs, likes, and comments are the aspects of the Facebook experience that are most important in driving the self-esteem effects, and that photos are maybe the biggest driver of those effects,” says Catalina Toma of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “You could say that Instagram purifies this one aspect of Facebook.”

Instagram is exclusively image-driven, and images will crack your mirror.

“You get more explicit and implicit cues of people being happy, rich, and successful from a photo than from a status update,” says Hanna Krasnova of Humboldt University Berlin, co-author of the study on Facebook and envy. “A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don’t envy a news story.”

Krasnova’s research has led her to define what she calls an “envy spiral” peculiar to social media. “If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,” she says, “one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.” Granted, an envy spiral can unspool just as easily on Facebook or Twitter. But for a truly gladiatorial battle of the selfies, Instagram is the only rightful Colosseum.

Instagram messes more with your sense of time.

“You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing.” Toma says. Then, after spending lots of time carefully curating and filtering your images, you spend even more time staring at other people’s carefully curated and filtered images that you assume they didn’t spend much time on. And the more you do that, Toma says, “the more distorted your perception is that their lives are happier and more meaningful than yours.” Again, this happens all the time on Facebook, but because Instagram is image-based, it creates a purer reality-distortion field.

Instagram ups your chances of violating “the gray line of stalkerism.”

“If you don’t know someone, and Facebook is telling you that you have interests in common,” says Nicole Ellison of the University of Michigan School of Information, “you can see their profile as a list of icebreakers.” But that same profile is also a potential list of icemakers. If you meet a vague acquaintance at a party and strike up a conversation about a science article he posted to his Facebook wall, that probably seems normal. If you meet a vague acquaintance at a party and strike up a conversation about the eco-lodge he chose for his honeymoon in the Maldives, he will likely back away from you slowly. “And then,” Ellison says, “you’ve violated the gray line of stalkerism.” Instagram’s image-driven format gives you the eco-lodge but not the science article.

And arguably, you’ve violated the gray line of stalkerism simply by looking at those photos in the first place, even if you don’t reveal yourself in public as the sad lurker that you are. Each time you swipe through more images of people’s meals and soirees and renovation projects and holiday sunsets, you are potentially blurring the boundary between stranger-you-haven’t-met and sleazy voyeur skulking around the cabana with an iPhone. To be sure, daily acts of stalkerism are all but part of the social contract at this point. But stalkerism heavily diluted with links to articles, one-on-one messaging, Dr. Oz ads, and second cousins who still play FarmVille will always seem more palatable than the uncut version.

What if Your Mother Had Aborted You?

Jessica Winter — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 15:20:00 GMT

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a plainspoken man, but on Thursday he waded into an ageless existential debate. Speaking to the National Right to Life conference, Perry pointed out that state Sen. Wendy Davis—who filibustered at the Texas Capitol for 13 hours on Tuesday to block a draconian abortion bill—was born to a single mother and became a teen mother herself, yet overcame those “difficult circumstances” to attend Harvard Law School and enter politics. “It is just unfortunate,” Perry said to his base, “that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.”

“Every life matters” may scan elsewhere as an uncontroversial sentiment, but at the National Right to Life conference, you can be sure that life is defined as a zygote, embryo, or fetus granted full personhood. Which means that Perry is using a kind of transitive property: Wendy Davis was once a zygote, and Wendy Davis matters; therefore, every zygote matters.

At the heart of this rhetoric is the checkmate question that people opposed to abortion rights often ask of their pro-choice opponents: “What if your mother had aborted you?”

This is a fantastic question! “What if your mother had aborted you?” (WIYMHAY) has the makings of the pro-life movement’s very own Butterfly Effect, or some morbid parody of Back to the Future wherein time-traveling Marty McFly commits suicide by introducing Lorraine to her friendly local abortionist. WIYMHAY is a neat booby trap, and the trigger is “you”: To answer the question, the pro-choice respondent risks wrapping herself in Clintonian knots parsing the meaning of “you” or “me” or “I” when actually referring to a former blastocyst. (Frances Kissling, former director of Catholics for a Free Choice, has written about responding to anti-choicers wielding WIYMHAY: “I’d note that the ‘I’ that stands before them is not the ‘I’ that was once a fetus.”)

WIYMHAY is also the launching pad for countless philosophical arguments. Reductionist philosopher Derek Parfit—author of the aptly titled On What Matters—writes that you cannot harm someone by failing to cause them to exist. (The blastocyst reading Parfit in the womb may conclude: “If my mother doesn’t abort me, I matter, but if she does abort me, I don’t not matter, because there is no ‘I’ to matter.”) Princeton’s Elizabeth Harman contends that “early-stage fetuses” can have different moral statuses based on what she calls the Actual Future Principle. (The blastocyst reading Harman may conclude: “If my mother doesn’t abort me, she grants me an actual future in which I matter, therefore I matter now. If my mother does abort me, I do not matter in the future and thus don’t matter now.”) Then there’s Eric T. Olson, who in his paper “Was I Ever a Fetus?” posits and then rejects the notion that a fetus’ lack of psychological continuity with a future person known as Eric T. Olson means that Eric T. Olson was never a fetus.*

“I” could go on. Intriguingly, a lot of philosophical arguments in favor of abortion rights have something in common with anti-abortion rhetoric: a tunnel-vision focus on the imagined interests and rights (or lack thereof) of a fascinatingly ambiguous entity, instead of the actual interests and rights of an unambiguous actual woman. WIYMHAY is a brilliant tactical leap because it speeds past all that ambiguity to an unambiguous actual child, then dares us to imagine that child stone-cold murdered, like our mom turned out to be Bruce Willis in Looper or something.

Once we’ve made that leap, we’re no longer dealing in abstruse philosophical quandaries—instead we’re dealing in anecdotes, and pro-lifers will always have better anecdotes than pro-choicers. Pro-lifers will have legitimately heartening and inspirational stories about, as Perry put it, “children born in the worst of circumstances [who] grow to live successful lives.” Pro-choicers pummeled with WIYMHAY will be left arguing retroactively against their own existence.

But as long as the Rick Perrys of our political landscape are happy to concern-troll feminist heroes like Wendy Davis, I am happy to argue retroactively against my own existence. My husband’s, too. It’s easy to do, because we were both extremely unplanned. My husband’s late mother was 18, rural poor, and unmarried. My mother was 39—this was the 1970s, when pregnant 39-year-olds were rare and, at least in our corner of the Rust Belt, a bit strange—with three increasingly self-sufficient older children, ages 15, 11, and 9. She had two first cousins with Down syndrome, so after a few failed amnios, my mother knew exactly what she didn’t know about me. The first thing her obstetrician did after delivery was make sure she saw the palm of my hand.

In different circumstances, with different women, perhaps neither my husband nor I would be here. And that’s fine, or rather, we wouldn’t be around to declare it fine or not-fine. We are both rabidly pro-choice, and knowing our mothers’ stories—and Wendy Davis’—only deepens our convictions, just as pro-lifers have anecdotes that deepen theirs. To me, the pro-lifer position is I love my mother, and I’m so grateful she had me. The pro-choice position is I love my mother, and I’m so grateful she had the right to choose what was best for her and her family. Both positions are honorable in their way. But only one of them imagines my mother as more than my mother—as a person autonomous of me, and certainly autonomous of the blastocyst that turned into me.

Before I started writing this piece, I called my mother to ask for her permission. As we were getting off the phone, she said, “I’m just glad you’re here.” I’m glad I’m here, too. But she was here first.

Correction, July 17, 2013: This article originally misrepresented Eric T. Olson's position on whether or not a person can ever be said to have been a fetus. In his paper "Was I Ever a Fetus?" Olson answers yes. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

The Scalia Glossary

Jessica Winter — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 21:03:40 GMT

“Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible,” Antonin Scalia said in a speech at Princeton University in 1995. But as the Supreme Court’s most flamboyant wordsmith, Justice Scalia routinely pushes the boundaries of vocabulary, metaphor, and hyperbole. In an enraged dissent in today’s ruling that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, Scalia added to his 27-year history of bold rhetorical flourishes, railing that the court’s “jaw-dropping” decision has its “diseased root” in its own hubris and “black-robed supremacy,” etc. In honor of this classic dissent, we have compiled a starter glossary of Nino-isms, culled from the 77-year-old justice’s most famous opinions; Scalia-watchers should add their favorites in the comments.

Argle-bargle (n.) Majority opinion that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act. (United States v. Windsor, 2013; see also use of tutti-frutti in Sykes v. United States, 2011)

Bulldozer (n.) Mechanical form of the court’s fantasy that students may feel coerced to participate in school-led prayers; its metaphorical upright blade clears ground for “social engineering.” (Lee v. Weisman, 1992)

Cheek (n.) Misappropriated authority by which the court struck down DOMA. (ibid.)

Cheops’ Pyramid (n.) Architectural form of the court’s “judicial arrogance” on Miranda rights. (Dickerson v. United States, 2000)

Fairyland castle (n.) Architectural form of the court’s fantasy that the Constitution places restrictions on law enforcement, specifically pertaining to the right of the accused to have counsel present during interrogation. (Minnick v. Mississippi, 1990)

Homosexual sodomy (n.) A same-sex relationship. (United States v. Windsor)

Interior decorating (n.) “A rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.” (Lee v. Weisman)

Kulturkampf (n.) A modest attempt by Coloradans “to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority,” mistaken by a majority of the court “for a fit of spite.” (Romer v. Evans, 1996)

Lynch mob (n.) Epithet commonly used by proponents of marriage equality to describe DOMA’s supporters.* (United States v. Windsor)

Mansion (n.) Architectural form “constructed overnight” by Roe v. Wade, which “must be disassembled doorjamb by doorjamb.” (Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 1989)

Monster (n.) Zombie-like corporeal form of the court’s three-part criteria, also known as the “Lemon test,” for evaluating government action related to the establishment clause. (Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 1993)

Nietzschean (adj.) Of, like, or referring to German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who foresaw the Supreme Court as an “imperial judiciary.” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992)

Officer Krupke (n.) Protagonist of Justice Scalia’s dissent in Chicago v. Morales. (1999)

Philippics of Demosthenes (n.) Historical precedent for the court’s fantasy that U.S. Senate floor speeches are well-attended. (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 2006)

Platonic golf (n.) Perfect but elusive version of golf that the court assigned itself to define when it ruled that the PGA must allow a disabled golfer to ride in a cart. (PGA Tour v. Martin, 2001)

Spirits from the vasty deep (n.) Pool of job applicants, via Shakespeare. (Johnson v. Transportation Agency, 1986)

Stupid (adj.) What young people are not, which is why they won’t pay for health insurance. (Oral arguments, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 2012)

Correction, June 27, 2013: This article originally defined the Scalia-ism "lynch mob" as an epithet used by opponents of marriage equality. Scalia employs it as an epithet used by proponents of marriage equality. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

A Loss in the Family

Jessica Winter — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 12:42:10 GMT

Charisma is measured in contradictions, and Tony Soprano possessed two sides of all of his qualities. He was terrifying and vulnerable, relatable and unfathomable, cuddly and cold. He was a sociopath and a sympathetic victim of his environment. He was a bullying mob patriarch whose mama was the monster in all of his nightmares. He was a master strategist in a fuzzy bathrobe yelling at his lazy kids. He killed men with his bare hands and ate his feelings straight out of the fridge. He was, like many a parent or sibling or old friend, someone we kept hoping might change and kept never changing, someone we loved against our better judgment.

Or maybe we simply loved James Gandolfini, the actor who embodied the greatest television character of all time, who died at age 51 of an apparent heart attack on Wednesday while vacationing with his family in Italy. It is a cliché to say that we “love” our pop-cultural icons, and it seems like a bad joke to compare the death of a man who played a Family member to losing an actual family member. But a television protagonist can leave traces of himself around the house; he’s in front of you so long that you might start sensing him behind you. Gandolfini spent some 172 hours in my living room: two full cycles of The Sopranos, which ran for 86 episodes on HBO from 1999–2007. Most of us have fallen in love on far less.

To get a picture of Gandolfini’s genius, you could choose virtually any Sopranos episode. I would go to “Whitecaps,” in which Tony faces off against his most formidable foe, his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco, Gandolfini’s most formidable acting partner). Carmela has finally reached her breaking point on Tony’s lies and infidelities, and in an operatic two-part fight, he hauls out his entire repertoire of negotiation tactics. He uses that slushy voice to purr entreaties and scream obscenities. He offers her puppy-eyed contrition and narrow-eyed wrath. He gives her space and crowds her with his bulk. He deploys both passive aggression (rearranging her furniture; lolling provocatively in the pool) and plain old aggression. There are comic moments (Tony squaring up to a slammed door like it’s an officious rent-a-cop) and terrifying moments (Tony shoving Carmela against a wall). It’s a primal scene among Sopranos devotees, and what’s most indelible and disturbing about it, thanks to these two magnificent actors, is a frisson of faintly giddy excitement—a kind of ecstasy in destruction, a recognition that the big earthquakes of our lives can be excruciatingly but inarguably thrilling. Gandolfini showed us this, too: how violence and corruption, in their sheer novelty, could become alluring and addictive, how a man doing ugly things for a living in pursuit of a twisted American dream might strike us as beautiful.

The Sopranos told one American-dream story; Gandolfini’s biography told another. Born and raised in New Jersey to Italian-born, Italian-speaking parents—a custodian and a cafeteria worker—Gandolfini jobbed for years as a bartender and construction worker before he got his big break on David Chase’s paradigm-busting show midway through his 30s. By all accounts, portraying a tormented mobster sometimes shredded Gandolfini’s nerves. (Brett Martin’s forthcoming book Difficult Men, about the revolution in cable-television drama heralded by The Sopranos, opens with Gandolfini simply disappearing from the set for four days, throwing production into chaos.) But the on-screen work never faltered, his colleagues adored him, and his feats of generosity are legend—for example, how he marked the resolution of a pay dispute with HBO by handing out five-figure checks to fellow cast members. (The ex-bartender also turned into a famously fantastic restaurant tipper.) He used his post-Sopranos clout for good, working with HBO on the powerful documentaries Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq, in which he interviewed veterans on their experiences during and after war, and the PTSD history Wartorn: 1861-2010. He also turned in uniformly fine, mostly supporting performances in movies, such as the melancholy creature Carol in Where the Wild Things Are and the embittered patriarch in Chase’s underappreciated feature debut Not Fade Away.

It is one thing for an actor to be typecast; it is another for an actor to become synonymous with a character who transforms an entire medium, upending its fealty to tidy character arcs, moral score-setting, and conventional aesthetics. Even years after The Sopranos had ended, Gandolfini’s presence in a movie could feel like stunt casting, but it worked: Only a man with the physical and psychological heft of Tony Soprano could take on the Machiavellian spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the acrid political satire In the Loop, and when Gandolfini strides into a conference room in Zero Dark Thirty as Leon Panetta, he radiates exactly the oh-look-it’s-really-him star power that the film’s central CIA operative would have felt with her boss’ boss. Gandolfini had a good gig, and I’d like to think it would have expanded as more and more years put themselves between him and The Sopranos. That’s just one reason why his loss is incalculable. He was a great actor who had found one great, epic role. He might have found another.

The last perfect episode of The Sopranos is Season 6’s “Mayham,” which, like many perfect Sopranos episodes, plunges into Tony’s dreams. In waking life, Tony is in a coma and barely hanging on; in the dream, he’s arrived at another man’s family reunion, holding this other man’s briefcase, as his murdered cousin (Steve Buscemi) gently—or ominously—tries to coax him inside a house where a ghostly apparition stands in the doorway. Tony clutches the case and wavers; he hears a child’s voice—his daughter’s—in the trees. The scene as written is heavy with symbolism, it’s a bit on-the-nose, and it concerns the fate of a brutal criminal who, in terms of the greater good of society, would almost certainly be better off dead. It’s also one of the most stunning moments in television, and much of that is down to Gandolfini’s astonishingly subtle performance: a carefully assembled mosaic of gestures, blinks, glances, and starts. The stricken, wordless clarity on Tony’s face as he hesitates in front of his afterlife is exactly what dream logic feels like.

At the end of the scene, Tony wakes up. His daughter says, “Dad, you’re here now.” I think it would be unbearable to watch it now.

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See videos of Gandolfini's best non-Tony Soprano roles.

Literature of the 0.1 Percent

Jessica Winter — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:45:00 GMT

“ ‘Privilege’ is a judgment,” Joan Didion writes in Blue Nights about her late daughter, Quintana, who grew up wealthy and well-connected and who died at age 39 after a long siege of physical and psychological ailments. “ ‘Privilege’ is an accusation,” Didion adds. Privilege is “an area to which—when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later—I will not easily cop.”

Edward St. Aubyn will cop to it. A child of extreme privilege and equally extreme suffering and dysfunction, the English writer has spent five autobiographical novels slinging judgment and accusation at his own rarefied social class. St. Aubyn’s brilliant bildungsroman is literature of the 0.1 percent, and one of its signal achievements is to convince the rest of us that a trust fund and an entry in Burke’s Peerage are vectors of inheritable—and possibly incurable—disease.

By now, readers have glimpsed the ghastly childhood of St. Aubyn’s alter ego, Patrick Melrose (in Never Mind, 1992); the drug-deranged wreckage of Patrick’s early twenties (Bad News, 1992); his rueful steps toward the exotic climes of sobriety and gainful vocation (Some Hope, 1994); and his midlife passage into ambivalent, alcoholic fatherhood (2005’s Mother’s Milk, shortlisted for the Booker Prize). These first four books have been collected in one volume as The Patrick Melrose Novels, arriving in the United States alongside the fifth and possibly valedictory entry, At Last (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which finds Patrick broke, divorced, recently suicidal, once again sober, and about to bury his mother.

World-weary and reiterative of previous Melrose books, At Last is less a full-fledged chapter of the saga than a summing up; the title itself is a sigh of sour relief. But it still wrestles with the enigma Patrick has been deflecting most of his life with drink, drugs, and caustic wit: the mystery of “what it would mean to be free, to live beyond the tyranny of dependency and conditioning and resentment.” When, St. Aubyn asks, does the clay set forever on the psyche your parents pounded into its damnably unique shape, leaving the adult you with no recourse but to quote Philip Larkin and pour a drink?

Patrick, like his author, was conditioned in a lavishly upholstered milieu of withered aristocracy and toxic languor. St. Aubyn, a direct descendant of William the Conqueror and godparent to Earl Spencer’s son, writes what he knows. So did Anthony Powell in A Dance to the Music of Time, a clear forerunner of the Melrose novels set among recognizable slices of the British upper crust. But a major fuel of St. Aubyn’s project, unlike Powell’s, is contempt—a startlingly intimate and empirical species of contempt that lends the Melrose books the visceral immediacy of great reportage, whether his self-annihilating doppelgänger is combing Manhattan for drugs with his father’s ashes in tow (Bad News) or navigating, with Evelyn Waugh–like finesse, a party for the landed gentry (Some Hope).

St. Aubyn’s father, like Patrick’s, really was a defunded blueblood who raped his 5-year-old son and continued the attacks for years afterward. St. Aubyn’s mother really was an heiress to an American industrial and real estate fortune who rerouted her loot to various New Age interests. His grandmother’s French estate really was the Pavillon Colombe, where Edith Wharton spent her last days; his great-aunt really did marry a Russian grand duke who aided in the assassination of Rasputin. (The temptation to find out what else is “real” in the Melrose books can lead down any number of Google rabbit holes, where one might find, say, this 1939 Life magazine piece on St. Aubyn’s maternal grandfather, playboy Capt. Alastair Mackintosh, “who spins through the Palm Beach social scene like a whirling top.”)

Social bona fides aren’t everything, of course; if they were, the roman à clef The Truth About Diamonds would have secured a Booker nod for Nicole Richie. St. Aubyn also has an astonishing technical virtuosity that animates both his dialogue (Patrick is frighteningly quick on his feet, pursuing even casual conversation with a dyspeptic prosecutorial zeal) and his descriptions of interior states, be they that of a newborn baby in Mother’s Milk or a daisy chain of funeral-goers in At Last.

But Patrick’s mind is the landscape St. Aubyn knows best, and the pharmaceutical Inferno of Bad News provided the most stunning canvas for St. Aubyn’s gifts, whether Patrick is grasping after a dissipated cocaine rush (“he had missed that blissful fainting sensation, that heartbreaking moment, as compressed as the autobiography of a drowning man”) or narrating la petite mort of his assignations with opiates:

Heroin was the only thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster’s wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.

Heroin is only a symptom of Patrick’s disorder. Even though four-fifths of the Melrose series is largely taken up with either drug or alcohol abuse, the missing chair leg is really Patrick’s childhood, and his parents, and the corrupting effects of his birthright: “the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich.” Patrick’s curse is the alchemy of the empty self-regard granted by a mere accident of birth and the substantiated self-loathing imprinted by a father’s sadism and a mother’s neglect. He is forever scampering around in that hamster's wheel of regret and recrimination—which may sound like a grim prospect for readers, except that this particular hamster possesses the wit of Waugh and the existential reach of Beckett, and the hamster's wheel is a priceless 16th-century family heirloom.

Patrick is stuck in time, and fittingly, St. Aubyn’s novels treat time as structure: Never Mind, Bad News, and Some Hope are extended vignettes that transpire over a handful of days, while Mother’s Milk stretches over four consecutive Augusts as Patrick’s ever-delightful mother forces him to coordinate the terms of his own disinheritance. At Last returns to the tighter temporal strictures of the first three books as well as to the childhood horrors of Never Mind, underlining some gruesome details and filling in new ones. (David Melrose, amazingly, was even more of a bastard than we thought.) St. Aubyn comes full circle, or perhaps Patrick is just going around in circles. He’s bored of his own grievances, and maybe, At Last suggests, boredom—not therapeutic epiphany, not substance-aided euphoria—is what will set him free.

The novel’s air of goodbye-to-all-that finality makes perfect sense for middle-aged Patrick, but it also means that Patrick no longer makes perfect sense as the protagonist of a multi-volume work of fiction. Which isn’t to say that Eleanor Melrose’s funeral should be the nail in the coffin of the Melroseiad. Given that Patrick disobeyed the cardinal rule of Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” (“Get out as early as you can,/ And don’t have any kids yourself”), the reader might wonder if his uncannily precocious sons could take up the baton—their inheritance, you might say.

Robert Melrose and his little brother, Thomas, come off as ingeniously programmed robot dandies who can pun and mimic like Robin Williams at his youthful peak, with occasional judicious pauses to ponder big questions. (“But seriously, what is the ‘consciousness debate’ that Dada gets so angry about?”) They are twee, faintly ridiculous, and weirdly affecting figures, and their flagrant departure from the author’s otherwise photorealist class portraiture reads like a specific warning to those readers who might try to line up the biographical parallels in this particular wing of the St. Aubyn estate. (For the record, St. Aubyn has a daughter and a son.) If privilege is an accusation, would these innocent sons of a deeply troubled, downwardly mobile aristocrat cop to the charge? Enough already about Patrick Melrose and his childhood. What do his children think of Patrick Melrose?

In Praise of Unknown Actors

Jessica Winter — Fri, 27 May 2011 00:02:00 GMT

Terrence Malick's domestic tone poem The Tree of Life has several would-be breakout stars, including three adorable boys (they play the sons of bullheaded striver Brad Pitt) and a pair of somewhat less adorable CGI dinosaurs. But the most intriguing of these newcomers may be Jessica Chastain, who portrays matriarch Mrs. O'Brien. Often as placid and usually as silent as a plaster saint, Chastain has an aura of housewifely beatitude enhanced by her glowing pale skin and glossy titian hair. Tree of Life producer Sarah Green has said that the film needed "someone who just exudes love, who is the embodiment of grace, and so ideally, she would be someone who didn't bring a lot of public history" to Mrs. O'Brien. Love and grace, it seems, may be incompatible with red-carpet chitchat, grocery runs immortalized in Us Weekly, and other constants of fame.

Hollywood runs partly on star power; it wants a recognizable name and face in the frame. But playing a character might require something else: a vanishing act that subsumes the actor's persona. It's easier to pull off this legerdemain if the actor has no persona to speak of. And if the actor does succeed—and then lands on the cover of W magazine as Chastain did, or scores an out-of-nowhere Academy Award nomination as Jennifer Lawrence did for Winter's Bone this year—it will be harder for her to disappear ever again, because disappearing the first time made her a star.

An actor only gets one breakthrough role, and as we'll see below, the more flashy and technically demanding and Oscar-friendly the part, the more it benefits from an actor who's more or less a blank slate.

Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive

The role that put Watts on the map is double: She is can-do Betty, an aspiring actress (and amateur detective) just arrived in Los Angeles, and embittered Diane, a woman on the verge of a vengeful breakdown in Mulholland Drive(2001). But before the toxic Diane shuffles out of the shadows and David Lynch's movie turns itself inside out, Watts has clued us in to her dual-engine gifts in the justly famous audition scene, in which the sweet, perky naif shape-shifts into a smoldering femme fatale under the least promising of circumstances (a terrible script, a lecherous and leathery romantic interest, etc.). Part of what's so thrilling about the revelation of Betty's acting talents is that, at the time, the audience wasn't yet fully aware of Watts' acting talents either.

Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry

Hilary Swank wasn't a rookie when she was cast in Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry (1999): She'd been in the flop The Next Karate Kid and had a brief stint in the post–Shannen Doherty Beverly Hills, 90210. Still, she was recognizable to few viewers when she cropped her hair short and carved her body down to sinew and bone to play Brandon Teena, an anatomical female who passed as a man—and quite a ladies' man at that—in the small town of Falls City, Neb., in the early '90s, before he was raped and murdered by local thugs who found him out. In her winning, wounded, and uncanny performance, Swank conveys both the fear and the exhilaration of living a secret life in public, at once concealing and crafting one's true identity. Because Swank was more or less a tabula rasa, she was all the more poised to anchor a tale of self-invention.

Leonardo DiCaprio in What's Eating Gilbert Grape

Like Swank, DiCaprio was hovering near the radar when Lasse Hallström's dramedy hit theaters, having already appeared on TV's Growing Pains and in the Tobias Wolff adaptation This Boy's Life. But his emerging celebrity wasn't yet bleeding into the picture when he played a mentally handicapped teenager opposite Johnny Depp in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). The WashingtonPost praised DiCaprio for "a marvelous, completely unself-conscious performance." The megastar DiCaprio likely couldn't pull off such an inevitably award-baiting role today, not even after his Scorsese-abetted resurgence as a major thespian—it would come across as look-at-me acting calisthenics. It would, in other words, come across as Sean Penn in I Am Sam (2001). (Which raises an interesting point: If Sean Penn had given that same performance as a developmentally disabled adult before he became Sean Penn, would we see it differently?)

Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List, Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds

No name-brand actor should ever play a Nazi. If the audience knows who you are—i.e., knows you're not a Nazi—then you're stuck in a kitsch-evil universe where the lingua franca is a bad Teutonic accent. Better for Nazis to serve as Oscar-nominated audition tapes for fledgling film stars (Fiennes in Schindler's List, 1993) or Oscar-winning advertisements for well-regarded European character actors (Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, 2009).

Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves

Speaking of Nazis, Lars von Trier directed Emily Watson in her first film role, which she won after Helena Bonham Carter dropped out late in pre-production. Notwithstanding the challenge of working with the notorious von Trier, Watson was undertaking a nearly impossible task: The Bess of Breaking the Waves (1996) is a saucer-eyed holy fool who performs two-way conversations with a gruff and scolding God and prostitutes herself in the deranged belief that it will help her husband recover from life-threatening injuries. It's no knock against HBC that it was likely easier for audiences to accept the anonymous (and brilliant) Watson in the part than the corseted princess of the Merchant-Ivory empire, somehow transformed into a Scottish church cleaner with a direct line to heaven.

Gabourey Sidibe in Precious

When Gabourey Sidibe appeared on The View following her Oscar nomination for Precious, Barbara Walters issued an important clarification: "There are people who feel that the reason perhaps that you were so wonderful in it is that this was the story of your own life. But it isn't! ... Precious is not you!" As tin-eared as Walters' comments were, they did suggest the great divide between the mumbling monument of human suffering Sidibe played in Lee Daniels' Precious (2009) and the ebullient charmer promoting the movie on the talk show circuit. If we had met sunny Gabourey before we met Precious, this fumbling, illiterate, horribly abused girl might have seemed like a stunt. But we met Precious first, and so she seemed like herself alone.

Emilie Dequenne in Rosetta

There's a fine tradition in international art-house cinema to hire not only unknowns but nonprofessionals. For example, in one of last year's most highly praised movies, Andrea Arnold's council-estate drama Fish Tank, novice Katie Jarvis got the lead after a casting director saw her arguing with a boyfriend on a train platform. (Stroppy aspiring actors, take note!) The underrated British-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, who gave Emily Blunt her breakthrough role as a posh miscreant in My Summer of Love (2004), may have crystallized the appeal of the amateur when he told the Village Voice, "I have a slight phobia about working with actors whose bag of tricks I've seen before in other films." Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, and other renowned Iranian directors may share the same phobia, given their casting habits; likewise brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, two of the most beloved filmmakers on the festival circuit, who find many of their actors through newspaper advertisements. For their Palme d'Or winner Rosetta (1999), first-timer Emilie Dequenne won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her unforgettably relentless and kinetic portrayal of an undersocialized Belgian teenager whose desire to get and keep a job is so ferocious that it sabotages itself.

Reductive as it may sound, inimitable performances like Dequenne's can make one wonder, if just for a moment, if acting should be less a lifelong vocation and more like a bat mitzvah or losing your virginity or being born: something that can only happen for the first time.

The King and I

Jessica Winter — Mon, 23 May 2011 20:50:00 GMT

Thackeray found King Lear boring. Tolstoy was no great fan. Samuel Johnson dreaded rereading the play—he recoiled from the death of Lear's youngest daughter, Cordelia. (Johnson preferred playwright Nahum Tate's sentimental rewrite of Lear, published in 1681, which inserted a happy ending and supplanted Shakespeare's version onstage for more than a century.) Nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb declared that staging Lear "has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting," concluding, "The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted." Nearly two centuries later, Harold Bloom concurred: "You shouldn't even go and see somebody try and act the part," the scholar said, "because it's unactable… I've never seen a Lear that worked." Beginning with a vain, irrational king rejecting both his favorite child and his most faithful servant on a whim, ending with a mad, uncrowned derelict dying of a broken heart—with a detour wherein another foolish old man's eyes are gouged out— King Lear is a shocking spectacle of two families eating themselves alive.

Yet more and more actors have attempted the unactable in recent years; in New York City alone, they've included Ian McKellen, Christopher Plummer, Kevin Kline, and Stacy Keach. The latest is Derek Jacobi, who performs the title role in the rapturously received Donmar Warehouse production of the play (at BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn through June 5). The laurelled English actor Greg Hicks will do Lear at the Lincoln Center Festival this summer, and Law & Order's Sam Waterston takes the role for the Public Theater in the fall; a film version starring Al Pacino is also in the works. To a confident actor in the winter of his career, the notion of Shakespeare's tragedy as "a labyrinthian citadel, all but impregnable" (Kenneth Tynan) may seem less like a warning and more like a provocation.

That's how a viewer can approach King Lear, too. Like most, I first read it in college, where I took notes in lectures and seminars about its reputation as a play that resists being played—and, flush with those earnest yet contrarian energies peculiar to late adolescence, I sought out every Lear I could find. And I still do. This quasi-completeist mission is perverse, because its frisson depends largely on expectations of shameless presumption and abject failure. (You fiends! How dare you dare to stage this!) But the promise—always kept—is the thrill of seeing actors try the impossible.

Over the years, I've seen Royal Shakespeare Company Lear and basement-theater undergrad Lear, gender-reversed Lear, all African-American Lear, street-theater Lear, Lear in French and Spanish and Dutch and Japanese (Akira Kurosawa's 1985 film version, Ran) and Russian (Grigori Kosintsev's Soviet screen adaptation, 1971). I've never seen a perfect Lear, but I've seen many that embodied its toxic, inchoate spirit or brilliantly captured an elusive scene or character. From all these competing versions, I've assembled an ever-evolving Fantasy League Lear, more on which below.

The Problematic First Scene: Royal National Theatre on Masterpiece Theatre, 1997
Lear has no windup. Less than 20 lines into his first speech, the king, about to divide his empire in thirds, asks his children, "Which of you shall we say doth love us most?"—a fatuous test that launches an avalanche of rebellion and recrimination. Elder daughters Goneril and Regan oblige Daddy with greasy praise, but his youngest and favorite, Cordelia—whether out of principle, stubbornness, or prim literal-mindedness—won't play ball, so Lear cancels her dowry and banishes her. In many Lears (including the mostly superb Donmar production), the scene is rushed and confusing; the patriarch's transformation from ego-stroking whimsy to thundering hysteria can be bewildering. The big problem, however, is almost always Cordelia: Her default mode is a wheedling Miss Goody-Two Shoes, a prissy martyr to no cause. But in this filmed-for-television version with Ian Holm and Victoria Hamilton, the father-daughter standoff blazes with unspoken resentment and crypto-incestuous frenzy. It's bracing to see Cordelia—or rather, as Holm once put it, "this silly little shit Cordelia"—as a fiery, hyper-articulate brat expertly pushing her almighty father's buttons, just as her awful sisters can.

The Breakdown: Royal Shakespeare Company at BAM, 2007
Holm and Jacobi are fit and fleet Lears with compact, drum-tight builds; their infirmities are all in their heads. By contrast, Ian McKellen worked to make his audience hear the creak of Lear's bones and see the scant rags of his flesh. (Quite literally: Like Holm, McKellen stripped to the buff to play Lear at his nadir.) McKellen's technical mastery of the Lear role—the jowly hawing and harrumphing, the shuffling decrepitude—is stunning in Act II, when the newly landless royal stomps off into a violent storm rather than accept the subpar conditions of crashing with Goneril (whose womb he has cursed) or Regan. The sudden realization of his daughters' extravagant ingratitude accelerates the decay of his mind, which McKellen brilliantly externalizes—it's a descent into madness in time-lapse.

The WTF Factor: Various
As even the uninitiated may suspect by now, King Lear is nuts. Not quite Titus Andronicus nuts, but chock full o' insanity and bloodlust and dislodged eyeballs and creepy father-daughter ardor. (As many critics have pointed out, Lear and his kids fight like enraged lovers do.) The fan longs for technical precision and shapely phrasing and well-paced catharsis, sure—Sir Derek is bringing it all back home to Brooklyn as we speak—but she also wants some crazy in the raw. The Belgium-based Needcompany's postmodern King Lear (BAM, 2001) created a suitably chaotic milieu besieged by strobes, hungry vultures, and liquid-limbed modern dance routines. Young Jean Lee's original play Lear (Soho Rep, 2010), which imagined members of the play's younger generation in stream-of-consciousness conversation with each other, conjured an appropriate air of callow disobedience and spite. Jean-Luc Godard's glib 1987 film version blew up the incest subtext and cast Burgess Meredith as Lear and then-teen queen Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. (The eccentric auteur's first choices: Norman Mailer and his daughter, Kate.)

While Kosintsev's Lear is stolid, it's also insanely grim and pitiless. Characters trudge through mud and slop and dry brush. Gloucester appears to die on the surface of the moon. Saintly Cordelia is a Nordic goddess spun from clouds, gold, and the dust from a unicorn's horn, while Goneril and Regan—the "unnatural hags," per Dad—are filmed and dressed for maximum frumpiness. And here the Fool, who functions as Lear's rueful superego, is a nervous wraith who could pass as yet another of the king's damaged, scrappy children.

Those Unnatural Hags: Peter Brook's film version, 1971
Goneril and Regan may present the play's messiest challenge. One minute they're simply trying to placate a difficult parent in decline—and one who favors their holier-than-thou little sister to boot—and the next they've whipped themselves into a maelstrom of homicidal-suicidal lust for tricky Edmund, son of the unfortunate Gloucester, who loses his eyes for siding with the king against his eldest daughters. For G'n'R to gain coherence, and perhaps even sympathy, the adaptor must take liberties. Jane Smiley relocated the action to a farm in late-20th-century Iowa in her 1991 novel, A Thousand Acres, an astute reading of Lear that interpreted the king as a nasty old drunk and his daughters as the victims of sexual abuse.

Though a straight adaptation, Peter Brook's minimalist, Beckett-influenced movie version (available on Netflix Instant) does intimate that Paul Scofield's Lear is a scary monster: a growling monolith, powerful in his very immobility. One doesn't pity him so much as pity a world in which he exists—and pity his daughters for their ill fortune. The Brook film also whittles down the text, which brings G'n'R into sharper relief and minimizes the Cordelia effect. (When she tells Dad, "I cannot heave my heart into my mouth," the movie takes her at her word and cuts her righteous speech off at the knees shortly thereafter.) Lear and his drunken minions sack Goneril's castle until her great room resembles a Bowery SRO, and the king's verbal pummeling of his first-born ("Thou art a boil,/ A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle/ In my corrupted blood") has the vicious intimacy of a sexual assault. Goneril is warped, a hostage to her father's terrorism. And Regan has the air of a captive, too—she appears perpetually dazed and post-coital, often little more than a bystander. If this Regan were a Manson girl, she'd be Leslie van Houten.

The End: Donmar Warehouse at BAM, 2011
Arguably, the less sympathetic Lear is, the less affecting the last scene, when the broken king weeps over Cordelia's corpse. Jacobi's Lear is overweening, impulsive, self-justifying, but he stirs no primal fear; he may have the id of an infant and the ego of a squalling toddler, but on balance he does seem "more sinned against than sinning." What he is is old, alone, and badly loved. And that's why, when Lear wails, "Never, never, never, never, never" before his murdered daughter's body, much of my wing of the BAM audience was sniffling back tears; a few watched Lear's collapse through their fingers. Jacobi's final scene rocks and shudders with a grief beyond recognition—beyond acting, perhaps—and thus honors the paradox of King Lear: It looks like something we have no right to look at.

New York Times Columnist Shocked by Poetesses Wearing Clothes

Jessica Winter — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:59:15 GMT

In poetry, a refrain can be an anchor against a tide of anguish and disbelief, allowing a dreadful truth to sink in. Think of Dylan Thomas’ "death shall have no dominion," or Whitman’s dear Captain. In his latest column for the New York Times Book Review , David Orr adds to this tradition:

The signs of the coming apocalypse are many, but none are starker than this Web headline in the April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine : 'Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Younger Poets.’ Yes. Spring fashion. Modeled. By rising young poets.

A few paragraphs later, Orr is still aghast:

And yet. 'Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Younger Poets.’ The words are heart-sinking.

How have eight lady poets and their outfits managed to put Orr in such a despondent frame of mind? (Full disclosure: I was until recently an editor at O , but I was not involved with the April poetry issue.) You have to hack through a thicket of qualifiers and asides to reach Orr’s thesis, but the path starts to clear about here:

[I]t’s all too easy for Important Literary Folk to sneer at anything involving fashion.

So it’s a sarcastic apocalypse. Orr concedes that the featured writers "certainly look poetic" (a phrase typical of the untethered snideness that floats through much of his piece), but as he continues, pretending to channel these "Important Literary Folk," he is more blunt:

It’s so girly, you know, and real writers are never girl - ah.

If a culture-defining, trillion-dollar global industry is widely perceived in 2011 as "girly," then maybe "girly" doesn’t mean what Orr thinks it does.

So the lingering gender biases of the literary world are often at play when readers cringe at the pairing of poetry with the stuff of women’s magazines.

This sentence is stunning enough that one is tempted to resort to Orr’s technique of copying and pasting the words a few times and calling it a day. But let’s parse: According to Orr, "readers" are, at this very moment, flinching from their April issue of O because they have internalized the misogyny of a shadowy literary cabal. Though it’s just as well, because "readers" can’t understand poetry anyway:

When Terrell Owens holds forth on poetry in O (yes, he does), much of the audience knows that Owens is a football player, and has at least a vague idea of what football is. … But poets and poetry readers … we can’t bring our context with us.

Notice how he defines Owens (favorite poem: "Choices" by Nikki Giovanni) as "a football player" but not "a poetry reader." Orr makes a similar distinction with O editor Susan Casey, whose profile of poet laureate W.S. Merwin inspires this hiccup of condescension:

Casey obviously likes Merwin, has read him and makes a genuine effort to talk about one of his poems despite her lack of expertise.

As a quick Google hit will tell you, Casey has a degree in French literature and multiple National Magazine Awards-yet she doesn’t get to join Orr’s exclusive club of "poetry readers." It’s tough to discern who would:

For an overwhelming majority of the culture, almost every poem has an inscrutable ending, even the ones that aren’t actually inscrutable.

Here Orr reiterates his basic point: Almost all readers can’t comprehend almost all poetry. (And if we’re talking O subscribers, forget it-"the chasm between the audience for poetry and the audience for O is vast.") So it’s not that poets wearing clothes in a magazine cheapens the art form. It’s that any effort to expose a large-and in this case, overwhelmingly female-audience to poetry is a doomed bit of wishful thinking. It’s Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. It’s trying to teach your dog to play the flute. But even if Orr thinks that poetry and girly girls make a bad match, can he really find no harmonics in that cognitive dissonance? If Oprah turned your mom on to Zbigniew Herbert, would Important Literary Folk (David Orr) not find that even remotely cool? "Poems allow us to hold two ideas that don’t add up," says one of O ’s April poet-models, Anna Moschovakis. One might even call it negative capability, and Orr should try it sometime. It would be rather poetic of him.

Up in the Eyre

Jessica Winter — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:08:00 GMT

The most famous line in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is "Reader, I married him." Depending on the reader, it may also be the most puzzling, given that I is a wealthy young woman and him is a one-eyed, one-handed, pushing-40 grump who proposes to a nanny half his age only to admit at the altar that he's already got a wife and she's locked in his attic. Dreamy! Yet in a 2009 poll by British romance publisher Mills and Boon, readers voted Edward Rochester the "most popular hero in literature," ahead of the likes of Heathcliff, Rhett Butler, and Colin Firth. With such an established brand in the public domain, Jane Eyre is reanimated for film and TV with a frequency that belies its resistance to faithful adaptation. Presented as the autobiography of a "plain, Quakerish governess," the novel devotes many chapters to the privation and abuse Jane suffers in childhood and, after her aborted wedding, her sojourn with Calvinist drip St. John Rivers; these sections are hardly the stuff of bonnet-ripping romance. A fan's rainy-day re-readings likely center on the passages set at Rochester's estate, Thornfield, where the master's crypto-courtship techniques include disguising himself as a fortune-telling crone and lots of monologuing in Jane's general direction. In the hands of the wrong actor or director, Jane's integrity and candor might scan as prim saintliness, while her lack of materialism is conduct unbecoming in any Hollywood bride-to-be: "The more [clothing and jewelry] he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation." What kind of killjoy wins the marital sweepstakes and refuses a retail victory lap? Or says of her beloved, "I am sure most people would have thought him an ugly man"?

I am sure most people would not think this of Michael Fassbender, star of the latest Jane Eyre, out this week. Nor is "plain" a word that describes Mia Wasikowska, who plays Jane in Cary Fukunaga's handsome reboot—wherein even the madwoman Bertha Mason (Valentina Cervi) is so artfully disheveled that she brings to mind not syphilitic lunacy so much as the Comme des Garçons' fall 2008 ready-to-wear collection. No matter: The actors are fantastic, and the central challenge of adapting Jane Eyre is more than skin deep. Because Brontë's novel has the internal emotional logic of a brilliant diary, coaxing Rochester out of Jane's forgiving imagination and onto the screen exposes him to harsher judgment—for, say, not looking before he leaps across the gulf of years, social status, and legal impediments to propose to Jane. And for forcing Jane to take a front-row seat at his protracted flirtation with snooty socialite Blanche Ingram. And for, oh yes, imprisoning an actual living human being in the attic the whole time. However much we might adore him—and in the end, don't we love Rochester because we love Jane?—our hero is, objectively speaking, a bit of a creep. Thus the success or failure of any Jane Eyre (the below list is a mere sampling) hinges on how well the film minimizes its inevitable Creep Factor.

Players: Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles (1943)
Creep Factor: High

Co-scripted by Aldous Huxley, this early adaptation of Jane Eyre unspools like a horror movie, all looming Gothic towers, slanting shadows, and bursts of orchestral bang-crash. The big proposal scene smacks of hypnosis and brute force, and after a while you wonder if Rochester's dark secret is that he's the Wolfman. (For superior Eyre-inspired frighteners of the same era, check out Hitchcock's Rebecca and Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie.) Fontaine purées Jane's dignity and stoicism into patrician blandness, and while Welles is an interesting choice for Rochester—arrogance and self-pity were often his team colors—here he's a cardboard golem in a riding cloak, leaving trails of dry ice and bronzer in his wake. When J&R reunite for their happy-ever-after, one feels the same stirrings of heebie-jeebies aroused by the finale of As Good As It Gets.

Players: Susannah York and George C. Scott (1970)
Creep Factor: N/A

Jane Eyre is tricky to cast because its central match is—at least to the naked eye—a mismatch of age, station, and temperament. Which can create a paradox: If J&R click too readily, the whole contraption falls apart. York was 30 when she portrayed the virginal Jane opposite 44-year-old Scott, and though his gifts for manic intensity and prosecutorial zeal suggest Rochester DNA, the pairing is cozy and domestic enough to evoke not socially proscribed kismet but rather a couple of battle-scarred divorcés saying, What the heck, let's make a go of it!

Players: Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton (1983)
Creep Factor: Minimal

Clarke is a shade delicate and wheedling for Jane, but the pre-007 Dalton is a pitch-perfect Rochester: gruff, vulnerable, congenitally infuriated. He also bears such a ridiculously uncanny resemblance to Jon Hamm—I mean, just look at this—that rediscovering this BBC serial suddenly casts a gloomy mist of Yorkshire romance over Mad Men: Don Draper is Rochester, the impulsive himbo with a sordid past; Peggy Olson is Jane, the resilient go-getter and rock-solid feminist; Betty Draper is the scary wife locked in the attic, etc.

Players: Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt (1996)
Creep factor: Off the charts

More than any other Jane to date, Gainsbourg's seems palpably wounded: scarred but intact, cagey, conserving her every word and movement, bearing a heavy burden of experience and ghastly memories on her thin shoulders. (When she smiles, it's as if she must consciously arrange her facial muscles in the appropriate pattern—her smile has an accent like a language learned too late.) Gainsbourg is, at least to this viewer, Jane incarnate, which makes it doubly disappointing that Hurt clomps through the movie in a floppy Klonopin haze and delivers all his lines with the same eye-rolling, double-chinning sarcasm. For J&R's first embrace, he doesn't kiss her so much as lay his face on hers. One longs to spirit Gainsbourg-Jane off to Paris, where she will pioneer the trendsetting governess chic and become an early patron of Jeanne Lanvin.

Players: Samantha Morton and Ciarán Hinds (1997)
Creep factor: High

The '90s were not a good time for Jane Eyre. Morton somehow manages to make Jane smug in this threadbare A&E production, spinning the character's profound self-possession as a twinkly-eyed superiority; she always seems on the verge of giggles. She treats her man with moony condescension, which is apt—Hinds' Rochester is a honking lech, blustering and bloviating beneath the carpet swatches on his face as if he's auditioning for the Alfred Molina role in Boogie Nights.

Players: Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens (2006)
Creep factor: None

Should the BBC receive indefinite custody of Jane Eyre? This four-hour adaptation is luscious, patient, and features a jaw-dropping proposal scene that all but shudders with swoony catharsis. Stephens has the airs and pedigree (he's the son of Dame Maggie Smith) for the upper-crust Rochester, whom he plays as shifty yet sweet, brusque yet painfully self-aware. With her rubbery features, stern slanting eyebrows, kind eyes, and resolute overbite, Wilson is gorgeous without being conventionally "pretty," and she lends her character the swagger of a tomboy: This Jane is bolder, less remote, more robust, more butch than we're used to—more explicitly a protofeminist hero, and on equal footing with her moody bastard of a mate. She is, in short, a Jane we've never met before but one we feel we know intimately, proving that no matter how many times Brontë's novel might be revived, it's still possible to make it new.

Also in Slate, Dana Stevens reviews the new Jane Eyre movie.

Cracked Actor

Jessica Winter — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 10:59:00 GMT

In the summer of 1983, a man calling himself David Bowie appeared on the cover of Time magazine. With his blond coif and portfolio of smooth platinum hits, this tanned and tailored crooner of what he dubbed "positive music" seemed a man apart from the shape-shifting, gender-melding '70s pop mutant also known as David Bowie, whose spookier guises had included the Lost Spaceman, the Alien Sex Machine, and the Funky Disinterred Corpse. It was as if Lady Gaga had suddenly morphed into Michael Bublé.

But later that same year, this clean-cut, mainstream Bowie did something reassuringly, Bowie-ishly bizarre: He played a lead role in Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. To invest one's peak pop-star capital in a bleak homoerotic drama, set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and directed by the provocateur behind the art-porn shocker In the Realm of the Senses—well, that's the kind of loopy career choice you'd expect from the fellow who brought us the Anorexic Centaur Centerfold, the Stewardess as Rock God, and the Human Lightning Bolt.

In Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (newly available in excellent DVD and Blu-ray editions from Criterion), Bowie portrays the soldier Celliers, a beautiful Brit with a slippery charisma and a potent rebellious streak. He is an enigmatic born leader, a delicate object of myriad desires and revenges, a picker of flowers and performer of mime. Which is all to say, he is a close variation on David Bowie—and thus a representative role for the singer-thespian. Bowie always excelled at playing the magic freak: the world-weary, otherworldly outsider who is both adored and condemned for his destabilizing mojo. And because Bowie's insuperable Bowie-ness glitters too brightly for him to vanish into any one part, a close look at his film and theater roles is a case study in the merits of stunt casting.

Bowie dabbled in acting from the earliest stages of his career, appearing as a hard-to-kill wraith in the goofy 1967 short The Image, vamping with Lindsay Kemp's mime troupe, and in 1972-73, touring the world as Ziggy Stardust, extraterrestrial rock idol. His travels on the mid-'70s publicity circuit were a kind of Method performance art unto themselves: increasingly unhinged, blatantly coked-up, yet somehow crisp, polite, even decorous. "To me … you seem like a working actor," Dick Cavett remarked to his sniffly, skeletal guest in 1974. Clearly on Cavett's wavelength, the BBC's Alan Yentob borrowed the title of a Bowie song for Cracked Actor(1974), a documentary that portrayed the 27-year-old chameleon as a boy genius disappearing into a lucrative make-believe world—a limousine-shaped cocoon of fame, workaholism, and premium-grade cocaine.

The documentary turned out to be an audition tape of sorts for Bowie's first and richest feature film. After catching Cracked Actor on TV, director Nicolas Roeg knew he'd found the lead for The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), a free adaptation of Walter Tevis' science fiction novel about a visitor from a dying planet. Bowie's Thomas Newton is an alluring space invader in earthling drag who secures a bevy of profitable electronic patents and swiftly achieves corporate world domination, only to be betrayed by those closest to him. Rich, brilliant, sad, alone, of indeterminate age and DNA—Newton is the Bowie of Cracked Actor with a degree in chemical engineering.

Despite Bowie's relative lack of acting experience, his typecast presence in The Man Who Fell to Earth is a gimmick that works: His elegant awkwardness and vaguely put-on accent befit a creature who's learned to be human by watching satellite TV. And per usual, he's game for anything. Full-frontal nudity? Check. A sex scene employing a phallic gun and Candy Clark slathered in old-age makeup? Sure thing. Drunken screaming at a grid of television sets from a gynecological chair? While wearing a girdle and knee pads? Done:

Late in The Man Who Fell to Earth, after Newton's cover is blown, he falls into the hands of government scientists who subject him to endless poking, prodding, and X-raying, as if he were a deviant lab rat. The circus-freak aspects of the Bowie persona were likewise deployed in the hit 1980 Broadway production of The Elephant Man (you can watch a few minutes of his well-reviewed turn here and here). Having played a beautiful soul imprisoned in a hideously deformed body, Bowie then played the precise opposite as nihilist poet-slut in Bertolt Brecht's Baal for the BBC in 1982. In some ways, Bowie-the-actor is custom-made for Brecht. The writer's famous estrangement effect, which poises the audience at a critical remove from the action on stage, synchs not only with the hint of pretense in Bowie's every word and gesture but also the background noise of his celebrity—the slightly distracting whisper of Hey, that's David Bowie! that buzzes around any part he takes.

By this point, Bowie seemed on the cusp of a full-fledged acting career. In 1983, in addition to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Bowie appeared in The Hungeras (typecasting again!) the 400-year-old lover of vampire goddess Catherine Deneuve. The movie is a schlockfest of early-MTV flourishes (flash cuts, flapping birds) and it's most noteworthy for a demure love scene between Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. But the opening credit sequence is irresistible: While Bauhaus perform the sinuous goth standard "Bela Lugosi's Dead," Deneuve and Bowie prowl a cavernous nightclub in search of fresh blood, smirking hotly at each other and blowing pheromones with their cigarette smoke.

The Hunger is mostly downhill from there, and for some reason, so was Bowie's thespian endeavor. He declined the villain role in the Bond film A View to a Kill (1985) that went to Christopher Walken (who was by all accounts the best part of a bad movie). The musical Absolute Beginners (1986) was a bust, despite a fun set piece or two. In Jim Henson's dire fantasy-adventure Labyrinth (1986), Bowie's hair-metal Rumpelstiltskin was upstaged by Muppets. For the biopic Basquiat (1996), director Julian Schnabel had the ostensibly excellent notion of casting Bowie as his fellow savant of mass production, Andy Warhol, but Bowie whiffed it with a lazy, glib anti-impersonation. When did Warhol ever sound like a Valley Girl with acid reflux?

In recent years, save for a priceless cameo from time to time, Bowie's memorable on-screen contributions have been either strictly musical (his "Putting Out Fire" is the anthem of the avenging angel Shosanna in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds) or strictly genetic (his son, Duncan Jones, directed last year's splendid debut Moon). But a small, pivotal role from a few years back serves as a deft reminder that Bowie should drop by our movies more often. In Christopher Nolan's dueling-illusionists drama The Prestige, Bowie was ideally cast as the great inventor Nikola Tesla, replete with spectacularly electromagnetic rock-star entrance:

Bowie's Tesla makes a perfect circle with Thomas Newton of The Man Who Fell to Earth: They are visionary aliens abroad, revered and reviled for their mad-scientist gifts; their ideas are stolen and debased, they live out their latter days in isolation, and they can wear a suit like nobody's business. Thirty years apart, these roles also prove that—in the hands of the right director—David Bowie, Thespian, is a snazzy magic trick. Nolan says he never considered anyone else for Tesla, and no wonder. Who else but the Human Lightning Bolt would you believe can conjure electricity out of thin air?

Absence of Malick

Jessica Winter — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:06:00 GMT

Even before it arrived in theaters at the end of 1998, the World War II drama The Thin Red Line was a film defined by unexplained absences. Its director, Terrence Malick, had made two of the most rapturously regarded movies of the '70s, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), and then vanished from the filmmaking grid. His reappearance after 20 years was an ecstatic, near-miraculous event in the church of cinema, but it left many a missing person in its wake. Well-known actors such as Viggo Mortensen, Mickey Rourke, and Bill Pullman did scenes for The Thin Red Line on location in Australia but went MIA in the finished three-hour print. Billy Bob Thornton's narration was likewise scrapped. Adrien Brody, who shot in Australia for three grueling months, brought his parents to an early screening to discover that his leading role had been whittled down to a single line of dialogue. George Clooney, who featured prominently in ads for the film, is on-screen for all of 60 seconds.

We expect star turns from our big movies, but The Thin Red Line (loosely adapted from James Jones' 1962 novel and reaching theaters the same year as Saving Private Ryan) won both praise and scorn for its serene lack of interest in elements of the prestige studio picture. A plot, for instance: The film's stunningly tense and kinetic middle hour traces a dangerously dehydrated U.S. Army company's attempt to seize a Japanese stronghold during the Battle of Guadalcanal, but much of the rest of the action is dreamy, drifty, interior. The beatific Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel) goes AWOL in an Eden of singing, swimming Melanesian villagers. Pvt. (Ben Chaplin) takes a walk, thinks of his wife, stares up at trees. Shots of sun-dappled leaves, grass, birds, and the occasional crocodile get more screen time than John Cusack and Woody Harrelson combined—as critic J. Hoberman put it, the film "thrive[s] on the tension between horrible carnage and beautiful, indifferent 'nature.' " Dialogue is often thin on the ground, supplanted by Hans Zimmer's plangent score, the whispers of wind and water, and a rotating, often confounding current of hushed voiceovers. To wit: "Oh, my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes, look out at the things you've made." What does that mean? And who said it? Perhaps only Malick knows for sure.

One may find The Thin Red Line—and Malick's work in general—either to be intoxicating or soporific, enigmatic or diffuse, enormously moving or flattened by a kind of grandiose affectlessness. (Roger Ebert's largely positive review acknowledged this split: "My guess is that any veteran of the actual battle of Guadalcanal would describe this movie with an eight-letter word much beloved in the Army.") But Malick is fascinating even to non-fans for his rare ability to convince major studios to bankroll what are essentially big-budget art films (such as 2005's The New World and the long-delayed Tree of Life, due next year) and for his hypnotic pull on actors. (Before The Thin Red Line was cast, Sean Penn told him, "Give me a dollar and tell me when to show up.")

How does Malick do it? This riddle is partly solved and partly deepened by Criterion's new two-disc edition of The Thin Red Line. Rich with interviews and commentaries from Malick's cast and crew, if not from the sphinxlike director himself, it goes some way toward unpacking the methods of his exquisite madness, and gives us tantalizing glimpses of footage that didn't make it into the finished film (Brody, Rourke, and bit player John C. Reilly all appear in outtakes). What may be most compelling about the extras, though, is how they mess with our more romantic notions of how a renegade auteur achieves his vision.

To figure out how Malick does his job, one might start with all the things he doesn't do. He doesn't watch dailies. He doesn't do rehearsals (this was a sticking point for Elias Koteas, who plays a fatherly captain) or actor prep: Kirk Acevedo, who has a searing scene as a wounded grunt, recalls being abruptly commanded, apropos of nothing, to start crying for Malick's camera. (There's no other American war film in which the soldiers look so convincingly lost, shocked, and exhausted, perhaps in part because the actors were often lost, shocked, and exhausted.) Malick doesn't exhibit much interest in shooting action sequences, even when directing a war film (he joked about hiring Die Hard 2 auteur Renny Harlin to handle the combat scenes). He doesn't stick to the script, or even to the scene he's shooting: He'll stop actors in midstream and revisit the same material a week later, continuity be damned. Or he'll have them perform a scene with the dialogue stripped out. Or he'll halt a complicated action sequence—planes in midflight, detonations set to blast—to grab chance footage of, say, a red-tailed hawk in flight.

Of course, genius filmmakers are allowed to improvise, request supernatural feats from their staff, waste time and money, and generally behave in an inscrutable manner befitting their ineffable gifts. "It seems to me that Terry does so much of his work in the editing room," explains production designer Jack Fisk on the commentary—but there, too, Malick works in mysterious ways. According to one of The Thin Red Line's three editors, Billy Weber, Malick saw a full version of the film exactly once: a five-hour work print assembled during the 18-month-long post-production process, and screened for him under some duress. ("We forced him to watch," Weber says in an interview.) Otherwise, Malick edited by watching one reel at a time, with the sound off, while listening to a Green Day CD. If he missed any dialogue, it stayed in; if he didn't, it would likely be supplanted by music or voiceover. "I don't think he was capable of seeing the movie as a whole during the process," co-editor Leslie Jones says evenly. "…That was a big adjustment."

It's an adjustment for viewers, too, especially for that fervent cult of fans who have psychoanalyzed, memorized, and immersed themselves in The Thin Red Line over the years. (Among the men in my family, Nick Nolte's volatile Col. Tall is as eminently quotable as Jeff Lebowski.) It's startling to find out that this same obsession-worthy film is not one that its director could find cause to watch in full or to edit with the sound on.

To be sure, nobody other than Malick could have made this strange and exhilarating movie happen. And none of his quirks, if considered on their own, would necessarily give us pause (the renowned editor Walter Murch, for example, begins the editing process with a silent picture, though one assumes Green Day is not involved). Still, Malick doesn't fit into our established category for cinema's pure artists, who tend to fall somewhere on the control-freak spectrum—think of David Fincher asking for 100 takes of a scene or Martin Scorsese knotting the gangsters' ties himself on the set of GoodFellas. Malick seems to be a different animal: unavailable, cryptic, indecisive, evasive, there-but-not-there. (His self-effacement may extend beyond a simple aversion to interviews.) To judge from the admiring but bemused conversations with his cast and crew, Malick is less like a conductor and more like a muse, perhaps, or an elusive father figure, or a benign god in whom an apostle can have faith but nothing so presumptuous as understanding. What emerges isn't a group of people striving to fulfill an artist's vision, but rather striving to figure out what that vision might be.

The impression of this collective struggle adds a poignant layer to the film itself. "Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces of the same man," muses Witt. Our war movies typically celebrate bands of brothers, but in The Thin Red Line, the unbreakable connections between the men are all the more deeply felt for being shown and intuited, rarely told. Bell murmurs tearful sounds that aren't quite words to Doll (Dash Mihok) as they embrace after a harrowing battle. Welsh (Penn) barrels straight into opposing fire to aid a doomed soldier. Witt goes on a selfless one-man mission to flush out the enemy. Of course there could be no "stars" of The Thin Red Line: The men move with a single body and speak with one voice; an injury to one pains them all. It's a film about a collective unconscious—and perhaps you could say it was made by one, too. The Thin Red Line was created by a man undoubtedly in search of a great cosmic truth—about war and nature and mankind and the whole damn thing—but it was also created by a company of men and women in search of the great cosmic Terrence Malick.

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Plight of the Living Dead

Jessica Winter — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:30:00 GMT

I learned of my death in the midst of buying my first apartment.

"Two of the three major credit agencies have you classified as 'deceased' and give no score for you," my real estate broker wrote in an e-mail. Over the next week, I pieced together a few mysterious threads: Nearly a decade ago, someone, somewhere, opened a credit card account in my name; a few months later, someone, somewhere, told the bank affiliated with the card that I had died. It could have been an identity thief who lost his nerve. It could have been a simple misfire of computer neurons at the bank or credit bureau. I'll almost certainly never know.

Likewise, I may never know why the notation "consumer reported as deceased" lurked on my report for so many years before the ghost busters at Experian and TransUnion finally wiped me and my score from their books. (Equifax, bless them, never wrote me off.) My phantom self had taken advantage of the delay, rattling her chains in innumerable houses of retail and consolidating her student loans from beyond the grave.

My death was confusing, even controversial, and not just to me. For one thing, the bank that reported my demise to the credit companies was the same bank that was processing my mortgage application. For another, since 2006 I had subscribed to a credit-monitoring service, yet the sad news hadn't reached me. (When I complained, a rep argued, "But you aren't dead, and if you were, there would have been no one to tell." Touché.)

TransUnion reanimated me within 48 hours, after one phone call and one notarized fax. Experian was a different story—a story somewhat in keeping with its reputation for provocation. After its Web site FreeCreditReport.com raised the hackles of the Federal Trade Commission for its misleading name (the domain is actually a portal to Experian's $14.95-per-month credit-monitoring service), Experian launched a virtually identical site called FreeCreditScore.com. Experian's long-inescapable TV spots for its "free" services—which portray low credit scores as mangy, misbehaved pets and as the thorn in the side of a scruffy emo-lite singer—helped inspire a class action suit alleging false advertising. (The legal skirmish didn't stop Experian from launching a competition to find FreeCreditScore.com's next "house band"; the new ads will premiere during the MTV awards on Sept. 12.)

Experian had my attention (there's no captive market like a dead woman who longs to live again) but seemed to have no idea what to do with it. Its automated phone system was labyrinthine. When I'd stumble upon an actual human being, he or she would ask me to mail or fax something to somebody else. I wrote letter after letter, fax after fax that disappeared into the ether. Idiotically, ridiculously, I kept buying new credit reports over and over, each time hoping that this would be the straight-A dossier I could show to the mortgage lenders. I could never obtain anyone's e-mail address or extension, so I could never follow up with the same Experian rep. By Week 2, I knew all my lines in this Kafka-lite play by heart: "No, my husband didn't die. … No, no one in my family died. … Yes, I've purchased a credit report. … No, I don't need to purchase monitoring …" The paper trail evaporates. The consumer-ghost leaves no trace.

I described my situation to Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. He explained that Experian's computers would have shrunk my side of the life-death argument—all those detailed and agitated declarations of my élan vital!—to a mere two-digit dispute code. "You're giving them all this information, but it just turns into a number," he said. A likely scenario: "The credit bureau sends the number to the bank, which says, 'Oh, we've got her listed as dead,' and they send a number back to the credit bureau to confirm it. It's just one machine talking to another machine, confirming the inaccurate information that you're trying to fix."

After weeks of trying and failing to prove one's existence, with a home hanging in the balance, one's inhibitions began to crumble. One begins committing acts of emotional blackmail.

One actually says things like, "I am a human being but you are treating me like a bar code."

Or, "This is literally ruining my life and you don't care."

Or, "No one else will help me so you have to be the one who helps me. Can you be the one who helps me?"

The best kind of emotional blackmail is bursting into loud, racking sobs. (It's also the worst kind: messy, hiccup-inducing, terrifying to one's colleagues.) Loud, racking sobs prompted a flustered rep to transfer me to a higher-ranking Experian employee, whom I will call My Fairy Godmother. MFG conferenced me with An Important Person at the Bank who wiped my "deceased" listing in real time. MFG once stayed on the phone with me for 40 minutes straight. Thanks to MFG, I was reborn with a credit score, though my new report carried what looked like a bizarre but innocent typo: The name at the top of it was "Est Jessica Winter." But I didn't care! I'm alive, call me anything you want! I felt like George Bailey licking sweet, sweet lifeblood from his lip.

"Est," I later discovered, is in fact an abbreviation for "Estate of." The deceased usually don't have credit scores, but for a brief, shining moment not so long ago, the Estate of Jessica Winter had an excellent one. In name, I was dead; in credit score, I was alive.

Days later, Est Jessica Winter was completely dead again. "When the credit bureau removes something from your report, they don't actually delete it from the database—they flag it," explained Evan Hendricks, editor and publisher of Privacy Times. If there's even the slightest discrepancy in how a bank or credit-card company furnishes your data to the credit bureaus—if, say, a bank reports your data this month using a different subscriber number than last month—the glitch can result in "flagged" information worming its way back into your report, Hendricks said.

To console myself, I spent some time online searching for dead people like me. A Seattle-area woman was a familiar sight to tellers at her local Bank of America branch, but they were powerless to refinance her mortgage so long as her Experian credit report listed her as deceased. By the time Texas real estate developer David Jokinen appeared before the Senate Banking Committee in 2003, he'd been dead for two and a half years, after a clerical error blended his records with those of his late mother. One of the many ghoulish highlights of Jokinen's flabbergasting testimony: A year after Chase declared him dead, they offered to raise the credit limit on his zombie Visa card. I sensed my own life force draining away.

But compared to Jokinen, I'm lucky: Another week in phone-maze hell was enough to delete the "Est" and revivify my score, in time to close on the apartment. And I'm still alive today, though that could change. "I don't want to scare you, but this may continue to pop up," said John Ulzheimer of Credit.com. "If I were you, I'd be constantly getting copies of my reports for the foreseeable future."

Yet, odd as it may sound, my brush with credit mortality has made me less inclined to stand vigil over my credit score, and certainly more fatalistic about it. Rheingold sums up my frustration: "The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires 'reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy' of your information—so why should anyone need credit monitoring?" he asks. "They've taken their responsibility under the law and turned it into a product they can sell you."

That product will now be sold by the winners of Experian's band-search contest, the hirsute five-piece Victorious Secrets. Announcing the win on their Web site, the group wrote, "We promise to have great credit scores from now on." If that's a promise within any mere consumer's power to keep, I'd like to hear a song about it.

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Adam McKay, Cineaste

Jessica Winter — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:20:00 GMT

Adam McKay is a co-founder of the star-making improv group Upright Citizens Brigade, the co-creator of the inescapable video site Funny or Die, and the guy who hired Tina Fey for Saturday Night Live. Thus his credentials as a prime mover of mainstream American comedy—including a strong '90s run as head writer at SNL and the immortal Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)—will survive The Other Guys, a buddy-cop misfire starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as poorly matched desk jockeys. (It's notably the first of McKay's four features to lack a Ferrell writing credit; perhaps the actor is to McKay what Owen Wilson was to Wes Anderson.)

Though it's overstuffed and undercooked, The Other Guys does have some choice moments of McKay-style non sequitur: a disquisition on the martial superiority of the tuna over the lion, a brawl at a funeral conducted in respectful whispers, the sentence "I want to break your hip" deployed as a tender foreplay overture. It's enough to remind us why audiences first connected with McKay's (and Ferrell's) disorderly absurdism—a no-self-awareness zone where the air is thick with macho bluster and barely suppressed male hysteria, with diesel fumes and Sex Panther. As broad and lewd as his movies and skits can be, a look at the roots of McKay's brand of "smart-dumb comedy" reveals some surprisingly highbrow and esoteric influences.

Like scores of SNL staffers before him, McKay got his start in Chicago under the tutelage of Del Close, inventor of the long-form improvisation mode known as "the Harold." Actors in a Harold create three discrete scenes, then two variations on each; characters from different scenes can mingle, story lines dovetail, offhand lines of dialogue become refrains. (Later, McKay and his fellow Second City players drew upon the format for 1995's long-running revue Piñata Full of Bees, which over the years has gained a reputation as the seminal, rule-smashing Never Mind the Bollocks of improv.) The Harold stretches the performers' powers of concentration and memory—and those of the audience, too—far more than, say, a series of short, unconnected skits a la Whose Line Is It Anyway? (One might also guess that the Harold is a better training ground for writing feature-length films.) With the founding of the Upright Citizens Brigade, spontaneous theater became guerrilla performance art: The group's chaotic early exploits included a fake murder (staged in McKay's apartment), a fake suicide (McKay's own, which he advertised beforehand by handing out flyers), and a fake street revolution (which McKay says led to the arrest of future SNL player Horatio Sanz).

This rigorous training in unscripted (and occasionally unlawful) long-form theater paid lunatic dividends in McKay's first three movies. He shot a staggering 1.5 million feet of film for his unhinged battle-of-the-manchildren Step Brothers (2008)—"more than Apocalypse Now," he notes in the DVD commentary—and had so much extra footage on Anchorman that he carved an entire second narrative out of it. Of course, improvisation is all but a given in the Judd Apatow age of Hollywood comedy, but McKay is up to something a bit different. The riffing in an Apatow movie tends to be grounded in a mutually-agreed-upon reality and is heavy on pop-culture references—think of the volley of nicknames for the hirsute friend in Knocked Up ("Serpico," "Chewbacca," "Scorsese on coke") or the flirtation scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin that pivots on the command "Be David Caruso in Jade." By contrast, McKay at his best is a true absurdist, guiding his performers into hallucinatory parallel dimensions (a cockfight featuring a death by trident, perchance) with references and internal logic of their own. For Step Brothers, the great character actor Richard Jenkins, who had no improv experience, took just a few words of prompting from McKay to spin a sublimely impassioned speech about his dashed childhood dreams of becoming a dinosaur. In the NASCAR spoof Talladega Nights (2006), the magnificent John C. Reilly conjures alternate realities out of thin air, where best friends go together like cocaine and waffles and Jesus Christ takes earthly shape as a troublemaking badger or an interpretive ice dancer or a hairy rock idol.

McKay's finest, most sustained joke of all is that his characters have alarmingly active dream and fantasy lives. (Dream-state cameo players in Step Brothers include a lumberjack and a centaur; the sleepwalking scene merits a short film of its own.) This appetite for the irrational has been shaped by McKay's erudite moviegoing habits: In a 2006 interview with Cinema Scope, he professed his love for the films of surrealist provocateur Luis Buñuel, particularly The Phantom of Liberty (1974), an episodic tweaking of middle-class convention that's like La Ronde meets Monty Python meets LSD. To glimpse the Platonic ideal of a McKay movie, look no further than Phantom, with its sketch-comedy trappings and delirious imagery (players include tipsy monks, sexually arousing architecture, and a wayward emu). One can almost picture the film developing out of a Harold.

Likewise, McKay's stated enthusiasm for the films of John Cassavetes—Husbands in particular—adds intriguing texture to the preponderance of grasping, delusional male specimens in his film and TV efforts. An improv-based, vérité-style chronicle of three suburban schmoes on a spectacular bender after the death of a close friend, Husbands is an unnervingly intimate journey to the end of the night that McKay has praised as "crazy funny, crazy sad, crazy dark." It may seem sacrilegious even to suggest any parallel between Cassavetes (or Buñuel, for that matter) and a director who once arranged for Will Ferrell to rub his prosthetic testicles vengefully on a drum kit. But whether he's writing a cult-forming SNL skit about sozzled sad-sacks bonding over a mythical colleague or producing an expertly pungent HBO series about a flailing flameout of a jacked-up ballplayer, McKay is drawn to chest-puffing mid-lifers surfing a wave of hard liquor toward a nervous breakdown—or at least toward the relative safety of other chest-puffing mid-lifers. So when Husbands' Peter Falk says that he likes sports because "you get sweaty and you feel good and you're with guys you like" (!!), one might think he took the words right out of the mouth of sportscaster Champ Kind in Anchorman.

McKay's rawer, artier inclinations make one wonder why, at this point in his career, he would bother with a formulaic shoot-'em-up such as The Other Guys. The man has pulled off a NASCAR-authorized blockbuster that climaxes with a lengthy guy-on-guy kiss. He got audiences to the legitimately weird and anarchic (and insanely overpriced) Step Brothers, wherein Ferrell's stunted character beams with triumph after he figures out how to buy his own toilet paper for the first time. McKay could probably match a developing nation's GDP with the money he made off that video of his toddler swearing at Ferrell. He seems primed for a project that's politically incorrect in the best sense of the phrase: McKay, who in his Second City days portrayed Noam Chomsky as a truth-telling kindergarten teacher, wears his left-leaning populism on his sleeve, whether on Broadway, in his intermittent Huffington Post blog, or in the animated guide to corporate malfeasance tacked on to the end of The Other Guys.

In short, McKay can do anything he pleases—so why not try to dig out his inner Del Close or art-house auteur? Why not direct his own recession-era Husbands? (Reilly! Ferrell! Paul Rudd! This must happen.) Adam McKay, if you're out there, hear our plea: You and a low-budget labor of love would go together like cocaine and waffles.

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Make Way for Tomorrow

Jessica Winter — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:34:00 GMT

There is a sequence in the Depression-era film Make Way for Tomorrow, about an elderly couple forced to live apart after losing their house, that could (to borrow Orson Welles' famous phrasing) make a stone sob. * Barkley "Bark" Cooper has broken his glasses and can't read the latest letter from his wife, Lucy, so he visits his friend Max and asks him to read the letter aloud. Lucy has written that she misses Bark terribly, though she hates to sound weak. She writes that their daughter Nellie might not be able to take them in as they'd hoped. She writes that she visited a ghastly old-age home, which Nellie kept saying was very nice. She writes, "I love you so that—"

Max can't bring himself to read any further, and Bark leaves without a word. Max calls to another room for his own wife, who doesn't answer. He calls again for her, suddenly panicked. She finally hurries in, harried and perplexed. "I just wanted to look at you," Max explains. "I wanted to make sure you were here."

Directed by Leo McCarey, Make Way for Tomorrow is a profoundly sad film, but it's so subtly wrought and generous of spirit that its sadness is transfigured into a kind of exhilaration. Contemporary viewers might feel an affinity between the film's heart-swelling sorrows and those of Pixar's Up, another movie about being old and inconvenient and losing your house and missing your wife. But in Up, the kernel of grief at the center of a long and happy marriage is a lack of children. In Make Way for Tomorrow, the children themselves are the grief. The Coopers have five, but none will share their home with both parents at once—not because they are "bad" kids or are settling any old scores with Ma and Pa but because, to borrow the maxim of another humanist masterpiece of the late 1930s, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, "Everyone has their reasons."

According to Renoir, "Leo McCarey understood people better than any other Hollywood director," and nowhere was McCarey's grasp of capaciously contradictory human nature more apparent than in Make Way for Tomorrow. Yet the filmmaker has never achieved the name-brand stature of contemporaries such as Howard Hawks and Frank Capra: His eclectic career (ranging from Laurel and Hardy shorts to Marx Brothers shenanigans to the Bing Crosby juggernauts Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's) and his erratic later output (the Red Scare agitprop My Son John) made him hard to categorize and thus harder to canonize. And although Make Way is McCarey's greatest film, its wizened protagonists, melancholy view of the American family, and devastating ending made it a difficult sell. Now out on a beautiful Criterion disc, the film has been largely overlooked in the seven-plus decades since its release in 1937, the same year when Social Security payouts began and McCarey took home the best-directing Oscar for the screwball gem The Awful Truth—though he quipped that he'd won for the wrong picture.

Part of the genius of Make Way for Tomorrow is that its characters contain multitudes: The viewer's sympathies shift and recalibrate themselves too often and quickly for any firm judgments to take hold about the Coopers' less-than-accommodating children or, for that matter, the elder Coopers themselves. You can be outraged on the homeless couple's behalf yet still cringe at their behavior: Bark can be a charming gentleman and an impossible coot, Lucy a sweet old lady and a passive-aggressive busybody. Likewise, you can lament their children's lack of selflessness and still wonder whether you'd do better in their place. Lucy's tenancy with son George (Thomas Mitchell) and his wife, Anita (Fay Bainter), becomes an embarrassed turf war between two enormously decent women in which petty-seeming squabbles about laundry, bridge classes, and the contours of George's psyche express deeper anxieties that life as they know it has slipped from their control. (When Anita begs her teenage daughter to get Lucy out of the house for a few hours—"If you love me, if I've ever done anything for you that you've appreciated, even a little bit, for heaven's sake take your grandmother with you"—the irony of her appeal to filial piety is wincingly funny.)

Two-thirds a wrenching family drama, Make Way for Tomorrow takes an extraordinary turn in its last act, becoming a sweet odyssey of wish fulfillment. Reunited in Manhattan for just five precious hours before Bark catches a train to join another daughter in California, husband and wife become—in their own quiet, modest way—footloose and fancy-free. They drink and dance at the swanky hotel where they spent their honeymoon 50 years ago and skip out on the valedictory dinner their guilty children have planned for them. They flirt and laugh and talk over each other and practice tongue-twisters, and the entire city seems to lay out a red carpet for these slightly stooped VIPs: A car salesman becomes their chauffeur, the hotel manager pays their bill, the bandleader plays them a waltz. It's as if the movie suddenly became self-aware and decided to revel in its own movie-ness by granting the hard-luck Coopers the date of their dreams. Lucy even senses her role as fortune-favored star of the screen: Leaning in for her husband's kiss, she stops short, looks back at the camera, furrows her brow, and withdraws from his embrace—a strange and fascinating little tap on the fourth wall.

Beulah Bondi was not yet 50 when she played the seventysomething Lucy in Make Way for Tomorrow, and her performance is the soul of the film. The actress' quavering voice and halting gait convincingly add decades to her age, but Bondi also had a Streep-like gift for the filigree of the perfect gesture: Watch Lucy's hand flutter up shyly to her lace collar when Bark compliments her looks or her fingers worrying her purse straps during the couple's achingly restrained last goodbye. Lucy stands at the center of one of the most shattering endings in American cinema, watching helplessly as the train speeds her husband away: She just wants to look at him, and when he's out of sight, she doesn't know where to look, and so the movie looks away.

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Correction, March 5, 2010: The article originally stated that McCarey's film "could make a stone sob" without identifying that the original author of that observation was Orson Welles. (Return to the revised sentence.)

The Jerks

Jessica Winter — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:47:00 GMT

A clever fillip of therapy-speak pops up a couple of times in Greenberg, the new movie by Noah Baumbach: "Hurt people hurt people." (The first hurt is an adjective, the second a verb.) The phrase could also double as an epigraph for the writer-director's entire filmography. No American auteur is more attuned to the art of emotional warfare, and none has more intestinal fortitude for placing neurotic, infuriating, occasionally insufferable characters on-screen and daring us to relate to them. While other directors draw from a more palatable menu of character attributes (charm, charisma, chemistry …), Baumbach makes his cinematic home among the narcissists, misanthropes, and passive-aggressives. Which may leave some viewers wondering: If these are the hard cases whom we give a wide berth in real life, why would we want to spend two hours with them in the close quarters of a movie theater?

Consider, for example, the petulant misfit Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a 40-year-old carpenter who's taking a post-breakdown sabbatical by housesitting for his wealthy brother in Los Angeles. He's not the most appalling protagonist Baumbach has ever conjured—that honor still belongs to Nicole Kidman's venomous title character in Margot at the Wedding (2007). But Roger does exhibit all the symptoms of an emblematic Baumbach creature: lacking a filter between his thoughts and words, arrogant yet cripplingly insecure, forever aggrieved (Roger writes endless letters of complaint to Starbucks, American Airlines, and other corporate entities that displease him) and forever giving grief. He pursues a listless affair with his brother's personal assistant, the sweetly diffident Florence (Greta Gerwig), and uneasily reconnects with his old friend and former bandmate Ivan (Rhys Ifans); the way Roger both clings to and abuses these two lovely people is a window on his gnarled and vividly Baumbachian inner life. But the filmmaker also tries to locate our empathy for Roger, or even our love—albeit a rueful, against-your-better-judgment love, the kind you feel for the sibling who's a walking DSM-IV or the trainwreck college friend whom you just can't shake.

Painfully adrift and still mortified that he sabotaged his band's only shot at a record deal some 15 years back, Roger has an embarrassingly protracted strain of the post-college angst that Baumbach explored in the spiky comedy Kicking and Screaming (1995). The director's debut feature is set among a flinty, hyper-verbose clique of twentysomethings who seem, like Roger, perpetually annoyed: The comforts of a shared history have curdled into claustrophobia, and the candor of tight camaraderie has begun to shade into nastiness. One friend hisses at another, "We've developed such a weak, pathetic familiarity that talking to you is like talking to myself"—an insult that stings only if the speaker feels weak and pathetic himself.

Baumbach's characters are plagued by that bugaboo of the therapist's office: a lack of boundaries. There's no fixed borderline between self and other (in 1997's Mr. Jealousy, Eric Stoltz assumes a friend's identity to infiltrate a therapy group, of all things) and certainly no checkpoint between brain and mouth. In Kicking and Screaming, a recently divorced dad played by Elliott Gould blathers to his mortified son, Grover (Josh Hamilton), about losing his erection on a date. This queasy blast of fatherly TMI seems almost tame compared to the transgressions of fading novelist Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) in The Squid and the Whale (2005). It's one thing to invite your teenage son to sit in on your writing class the day that vampy undergrad Lili (Anna Paquin) workshops her dire erotica. It's quite another to ask your kid afterward, "Did you get that she was talking about her cunt?"

A semiautobiographical portrait of a splintering Brooklyn family, The Squid and the Whale is the Baumbach film in which the perils of over-identification are most poignant. Though young Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) is literally sprinting away from his father's influences by the finale, for most of the film he idealizes Bernard: lapping up his line on the divorce (all Mom's fault), letting him tag along on dates, and internalizing his literary tastes so credulously that he doesn't feel compelled to read the books in question. (Walt describes The Metamorphosis to a classmate as "Kafka-esque.") Roger Greenberg has a mentoring streak, too: In his first encounter with Florence, he plays Albert Hammond's '70s soft-rock hit "It Never Rains in Southern California" and explains, "You have to see past the kitsch." (One can picture Walt Berkman testing that line on a girl in a dorm room some sultry night.) Even the mix CD Roger burns for Florence smacks of pedantry—a way to make up her mind, so that talking to Florence feels like talking to himself.

Baumbach's characters (the men especially) feel safest when they're putting thoughts and experience between quotation marks; the burden is on others to hop onto their ironic wavelength, to "get it." In Margot at the Wedding, Margot's future brother-in-law Malcolm (Jack Black) grows a cheesy mustache that's "supposed to be funny"; in Greenberg, Roger clarifies that he and Ivan address each other as "Man" because "that's what other people say." Squid's Bernard can turn a medical crisis into a movie reference: As he's loaded onto an ambulance after a heart scare, he quotes the famously ambiguous last scene from Godard's Breathless, then explicates the citation to his puzzled audience.

A Baumbach protagonist wears his pretensions like armor, but the pose of detachment is also the stance of the fiction writer or critic (incidentally, Baumbach is the son of both), who benefits from a ruthless facility for treating events and people as potential content to be appropriated or evaluated. Kicking and Screaming and Margot at the Wedding both feature skirmishes over rights to real-life material ("We'll see who gets it first," Grover tells his girlfriend sternly), but the instinct extends past the page. In The Squid and the Whale, Walt presses pause on a makeout session with his endearingly Florence-like girlfriend, Sophie (Halley Feiffer), to comment that she has too many freckles on her face. In Margot at the Wedding, Margot scrutinizes her son Claude (Zane Pais) like a casting agent, cringing at his new sunglasses ("They make your face look too wide") and lamenting the loss of his "more graceful" pre-pubescent body. (One shudders to think of Margot with a daughter.) The heart sinks, not least because Baumbach grasps that such offhand cruelty is born of sad isolation. When everyone around you is just a canvas for your own insecurities and pathologies, can you be any lonelier?

There's another problem with treating the people in your life as short-story fodder or as characters in the movie unspooling in your mind: They might start thinking for themselves and reciting lines you didn't write for them. When Greenberg's Florence says that she likes spending time with Roger, his response is apoplectic: "You don't like it!" he screams. It's an absurd outburst, but one that a narcissist consumed with self-loathing feels in his blood and bones. He can't imagine anyone not thinking what he's thinking—and haven't so many of us been there, at least once or twice in our lives? Baumbach's malcontents may drive us crazy, but they always retain a measure of sympathy and humanity because they are extreme manifestations of a universal dilemma: the impossibility of escaping one's own head.

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100 Percent Pure Adrenaline

Jessica Winter — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:06:00 GMT

In June, when The Hurt Locker first hit theaters, Jessica Winter looked back on the career of its director, Kathryn Bigelow. Winter noted that Bigelow's stock in trade is the hard-charging action spectacle. But though a Bigelow movie may occasionally look like a Jerry Bruckheimer production, she refuses to conform to the genre's conventions. Looking back at films ranging from the surfing/heist picture Point Break to the submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker, Winter enumerated the four action movie rules Bigelow most loves to break. The article is reprinted below.

Through her long and fascinatingly unpredictable career, filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow has always had prescience on her side. She cast Willem Dafoe in his first credited screen role (as a blank-faced biker in The Loveless, 1982). Two decades before Twilight, she made an irresistibly overwrought teen vampire romance ( Near Dark, 1987). She was the first to envision Keanu Reeves as an action star—his hot-shit FBI tyro in Point Break (1991) laid the groundwork for his turns in Speed and The Matrix. And speaking of The Matrix, Bigelow beat the Wachowski brothers to the virtual-reality universe by several years with Strange Days (1995), a sci-fi freakout with action sequences so complex that her production company had to design and build new camera equipment to capture them.

At first glance, then, it may seem disheartening that such a forward-thinking director has found herself on the wrong end of a failed trend. Bigelow's latest is an Iraq-war film that arrives after years of Iraq-war flops ( Jarhead, In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss, Redacted, The Lucky Ones, Grace Is Gone, et al.). But The Hurt Locker, which tracks 38 days with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Baghdad, is not a treatise on the war any more than Point Break was a disquisition on the FBI or the Soviet-sub drama K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) was a position paper on the Cold War. Like many of Bigelow's films, it's an adrenaline-fueled immersion course in how people adapt to physical and psychological extremes.Athletic without being concussive, Bigelow's chases, fights, and battles strive for maximum you-are-there immediacy, frequently through the use of point-of-view shots—not for nothing does the director prefer the term experiential over action—while still prizing fluidity and spatial coherence (unlike so many summertime blockbusters).

Pick any scene at random from among Bigelow's films and it's possible to mistake it for a high-grade Jerry Bruckheimer or Joel Silver production: the roiling guitars, the guns 'n' ammo, the flaming cars, the shirtless guys punching one another. But one of Bigelow's many virtues as an auteur—and perhaps her box-office Achilles' heel—is her willingness to break some unwritten rules of the hard-charging spectacles that are often her stock in trade.

Rule 1: Heroes should be heroic.

Bigelow's heroes are weak, aggravating, irresolute, even nonexistent. The Hurt Locker's Staff Sgt. William James (the extraordinary Jeremy Renner) is a bomb-disposal savant whose professional conduct is a sine curve of sweet, friendly camaraderie and uncommunicative passive-aggression; his No. 2, Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), is a born leader but can do little more than splutter at the sidelines. In Strange Days, Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a sleazy black-market salesman of virtual-reality headsets, fills much of his days either mooning pathetically after his trashy ex (Juliette Lewis) or leaning on single mother Mace (Angela Bassett) to clean up his messes—emotional and otherwise—and drive him around L.A. In Blue Steel (1989), a Freudian stalker drama that hinges on a stolen gun (castration anxiety ahoy!), rookie cop Megan (Jamie Lee Curtis) is both authority figure and vulnerable target, hero and damsel-in-distress. Even in Point Break, football star-turned-fearless Fed Johnny Utah (Reeves) has at least two wide-open chances to get his man, bank-robbing surfer swami Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). But Johnny can't bring himself to close the deal.

Rule 2: Violence should both excite and relax your audience.

As we all know, action movies share some basic mechanics with pornography: bodies collide and fluids are produced; a sweaty hustle climaxes with a big blast, etc. Bigelow's films—which are obsessed with the sensation of violence, but also with its consequences—don't quite follow the same neat grammar of cause and effect, tension and release. (An attenuated desert stakeout in The Hurt Locker doesn't end so much as it sinks away, in tandem with the setting sun.) The gory last act of Blue Steel offers little in the way of triumph or delicious revenge; Megan's terror and suffering are not part and parcel of self-discovery. Near Dark becomes an all-out horror film during a lengthy, brutal sequence in a roadhouse, where the vampires linger sadistically over the slaughter of the assembled humans. And in The Hurt Locker, of course, the audience's sympathies are aligned with James and his team, so the primal satisfactions of a totally awesome explosion are probably out of the question.

Even when Bigelow's films are literally pornographic, the viewer's response can be safely assumed to be conflicted. Take, for example, the infamous snuff-film scene in Strange Days: The villain traps his victim, hooks her up to the virtual-reality device that will download his sensory experience into her brain, and then rapes and strangles her—meaning that she experiences both her own rape and murder and her killer's pleasure in same, and we get to watch. Whether you read this scene as a provocative film-theory vignette on the internalized male gaze or just a vile precursor to Saw, Hostel, and the rest of the torture-porn genre to come—or both—you will long to scrub your brain with a Brillo Pad after viewing.

Rule 3: There should be at least one Hot Chick (viz., Jolie, Mendes, Fox).

Muggy with unchecked testosterone, Bigelow's last two films, K-19 and The Hurt Locker, have scarcely any female speaking parts between them; in Locker, the sexual tension nearly detonates in a drunken play-fight scene that's as nerve-rattling as any of the film's bomb-hunting sequences. In The Loveless, Near Dark, Blue Steel, and the giddily homoerotic Point Break, the female leads are tomboyish pixies, short of hair and somewhat epicene. Mace in Strange Days is undeniably a Hot Chick, but context is everything, and she's got bigger muscles and balls—and she wears better suits—than her male opposite. After she spends the entire movie tough-mothering hapless Lenny, their final romantic clinch seems almost incestuous.

Rule 4: Send the viewer out on a high!

At the end of Point Break, neither Johnny Utah nor Bodhi "win"; it's more like an exhausted draw. Blue Steel's Megan appears destined for a life of bad dreams and gnarled trust issues. The young navy heroes honored in K-19 are also victims—dead of radiation sickness because their ultra-authoritarian captain (Harrison Ford with a Russian accent!) insisted that their junker of a submarine was sea-ready. They were incredibly brave, yes, but they died for nothing but their boss' machismo.

And without spoiling anything, the ending of The Hurt Locker is a grim punch line that confirms its opening epigraph, "War is a drug"—though the line is not as self-evident as it first seems. War is addictive and soul-warping in The Hurt Locker, yes, but after two hours of trying to penetrate the mind of Staff Sgt. James, one might also think of war as a medication—a cognitive enhancer for a certain kind of highly useful misfit. Like much in Bigelow's oeuvre, it's a strange and unnerving concept. Her films are thrilling, hair-raising, sensational in all senses of the word—but they're not comforting, and they're not cathartic. Which is to say: Kathryn Bigelow gives us what we want, but not all of it.

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Earth Angel

Jessica Winter — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:01:00 GMT

If you were pop-culturally sentient in the early 1990s—if, say, you opened a glossy magazine or two and had a passing acquaintance with MTV—then Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders' tale of angels on the streets of pre-unification Berlin, may inspire déjà vu even on a first viewing. For the half-decade or so after the film opened stateside in the spring of 1988 (just 18 months before the fall of the wall), its descendent angels freely roamed the upper-middlebrow sectors of popular culture. Tony Kushner's AIDS-haunted stage epic Angels in America (1991-92) took inspiration from the movie's intermingling of celestial guardians and tormented, earthbound souls. R.E.M. won a "Breakthrough" MTV award for relocating a segment of Wings to a Texas traffic jam in its heavy-rotation "Everybody Hurts" video (1993). That same year, U2 one-upped "Everybody Hurts" by encapsulating the plot of Wings in the promo for "Stay" (off the soundtrack for Wings' lesser 1993 sequel, Faraway So Close!). No longer typecast as Precious Moments figurines, not yet conscripted as soldiers of the apocalypse, angels were briefly the sacred muses of Kurt Cobain (Nirvana's In Utero, 1993) and David Byrne (the single "Angels," 1994) and High Supermodel Era fashion photography: A winged Bruno Ganz on Potsdamer Platz in the twilight of the Soviet period could shape-shift into a winged Amber Valetta in Times Square on the eve of gentrification (Harper's Bazaar, 1993).

Given the film's ultra-voguish afterlife, not to mention its boldly sentimental premise and trapped-in-amber historical specificity, it's surprising how beautifully Wings of Desire holds up 20-plus years after its release (judging by Criterion's splendid new two-disc set). At once rarefied and accessible, with a singular visual style that's impossible to carbon-date, Wings has earned its place alongside the likes of The Seventh Sealand The 400 Blows in the Art House for Beginners canon: Its gate still swings wide for both the starry-eyed undergrad and the grizzled rep-house veteran.

Evergreen though it is, Wings had a sense of timing uncanny enough to seem preordained. Largely shot in and around the flattened, graffiti-covered no man's land just over the wall, the movie was a prescient backward glance at a city that would soon have all the world's eyes upon it. Invisible to mere mortals but able to overhear their every thought, the angels Damiel (Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) evoke the condition of marooned West Berlin itself: They are in their surroundings but not of them, part yet not part of a whole. Arriving in the still-early depths of the AIDS crisis, Wings also offered a solacing picture of a divine order that was palliative, not punitive. As the angels perform their subliminal ministrations—placing a comforting hand on an anxious commuter's shoulder, touching foreheads with an elderly library patron—they evoke kindly nurses doing rounds, with the fractured city as their sick ward. (Wings posits the Berlin State Library as the closest thing the always-on-duty angels have to a break room, where a gently cacophonous medley of overheard thoughts and composer Jürgen Knieper's lush string and choral arrangements crescendo in an ecstatic requiem.)

For the Düsseldorf-born Wenders, a specialist in existential road movies (such as Paris, Texasand Kings of the Road), Wings was a sort of homecoming after eight years in the United States—a quest tale about wanting to be "tied to the earth," as Damiel puts it. The angel wants to live "not forever but now," to trade the unbearable lightness of being for the heft and dirt of the mortal coil. He rhapsodizes about being able to feel his own bones, to let the newspaper blacken his fingers, to "feed the cat like Philip Marlowe." (Or, perhaps, Columbo: Peter Falk has an extended cameo as an ex-angel.) Mostly, Damiel wants sex and love, and he concentrates his desire on Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a lissome trapeze artist who (in an endearingly literal-minded touch)wears angel wings in her act. Before Damiel leaves behind forever for now—when he effectively resigns his post and joins the living, triggering a switch from black-and-white to dazzling color—Wings of Desire's imagery is appropriately eternal. Cinematographer Henri Alekan, who also shot Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946), used silent-movie-style superimpositions and a filter dating back to the 1930s—one he'd fashioned by hand out of his grandmother's stocking—to add pearly-gray textures to Wings' monochrome passages. These antique methods, coupled with occasional interpolations of documentary footage of postwar Berlin buried in rubble, result in an ultra-timely movie that, visually speaking, is not quite anchored in time.

Wings is catnip to cinephiles in part because it's simply gorgeous, and in part because its gorgeousness has a clearly defined film-historical lineage: The movie's ancestors include not only Beauty and the Beast but Frank Borzage's 7^th Heaven (1927) and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946). But Wings mayalso resonate with the film junkie because, as Michael Atkinson argues in an essay that accompanies the Criterion package, it can be read as a movie about moviegoing. When Damiel relinquishes the largely passive role of sympathetic observer and strides into the daylight of real life, he's a beacon to anyone who's ever suspected himself of spending too much time in the dark (or on the couch in front of the DVD player).And, like many a film critic, Damiel must overcome certain sartorial and grooming handicaps. In angel form, he's a professorial chap in overcoat and little samurai ponytail; once he falls to earth, he must cope with tacky thrift-store duds and the novelty of working sebaceous glands—though the newly dorkifiedcan still gain entry to the punk-cabaret club where Marion gyrates dreamily to Nick Cave performing "From Her to Eternity." One could argue that Wings' blind spot is in depicting a spiritual transformation oddly devoid of spiritual crisis. (It scarcely pricks Damiel's conscience that, in joining his human charges, he's also abandoning them.) But one could also argue that spiritual crises don't apply when opportunity comes knocking with Nick Cave tickets and a date with a hot trapeze artist.

Like Damiel himself, Wings of Desire might be thought of as a beatific misfit: a pure-hearted charmer who gets to have his cake forever and eat it now. The movie is monochrome and colorful, bleak and comforting, existential yet sentimental, old-fashioned yet avant-garde, of impeccable pedigree yet somehow sui generis, cool and uncool. It gives you license to believe in angels that happily clip their own wings. And, perhaps best of all for those of us who suffer from some degree of thanatophobia, it makes an excellent case that life eternal is overrated.

Final Cut

Jessica Winter — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:59:00 GMT

Had tragedy not befallen The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Terry Gilliam's new spin on the Faust legend would be just another entry on the director's checkered latter-day résumé. The movie is overstuffed and understructured, lurching between squalid reality (in this case, a rain-soaked, neo-Victorian London) and a strenuously whimsical fantasy world. (The mind reels at the challenge of summing up Gilliam's aesthetic, but here's a try: "Jules Verne meets Sid and Marty Kroft for a dinner of peyote and sweetbreads under a threadbare East End circus tent modeled on the Palace of Versailles." It's not always as fun as it sounds.)

But Imaginarium (opening Dec. 25) will be forever defined as not a Terry Gilliam film but a Heath Ledger film: It captured the actor's last screen performance before he died of an accidental overdose in January 2008. The loss of Ledger also made Imaginarium part of a small, sad category of movies that sustained the death of a principal actor during production. None of these unlucky works is a masterpiece; some are testaments to the filmmakers' resourcefulness under terrible circumstances, while others never should have seen the light of day. But each holds a degree of fascination as a memento mori in a medium that creates immortals out of its stars.

Category 1: Almost Seamless
If you didn't know about the circumstances that blighted the science-fiction drama Brainstorm (1983) and the first segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), you'd have little indication that each lost a lead actor before its completion. After Natalie Wood accidentally drowned on a weekend off from shooting Brainstorm, director Douglas Trumbull relied on rewrites and creative editing to paper over scenes the actress had not yet shot. It's unclear whether those necessary improvisations contributed to the film's choppy pacing and too-abrupt ending, but Wood's death does add a bizarre layer of interest—even suspense—to Trumbull's clumsy direction. For example, when Wood's character stands smack in the center of the frame with her back to the camera (about 3:55 into this clip), a pressure valve of tension releases when the beautiful actress finally turns her face our way: Yes, it's really Natalie Wood! It's not the gaffer in a good wig!

Likewise, the naked eye can't discern any obvious lacunae in John Landis' dreadful contribution to the omnibus Twilight Zone, despite the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two child extras in a helicopter accident as cameras rolled. (The book Outrageous Conduct makes a strong case that Landis' on-set behavior contributed to the crash.) The plot has racist schmo Bill Connor (Morrow) unleash a barroom rant against Jews, blacks, and Asians, only to be mistaken for Jewish, black, and Asian when he's transported Zone-style into Nazi-occupied France, the KKK-occupied Deep South, and U.S.-occupied South Vietnam, respectively. (In Landis' Max Fischer Players vision of war-torn Vietnam, American troops blast "Purple Haze" while on nighttime swamp patrol.) With no usable footage of the segment's intended climax—the reformed Connor heroically rescuing Vietnamese children from a burning village—Landis retooled the segment as a blunt object lesson on "karma is a bitch." (Landis' detractors might argue that karma is inconsistent in this instance: Not long after the Twilight Zone catastrophe, noted child-welfare advocate Michael Jackson tapped Landis to direct the Thriller video.)

Category 2: Fixer-Uppers
Just as notorious as the Twilight Zone incident was the accidental fatal shooting of Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow (1994), which cast a long shadow over a story of an avenging angel settling scores in the afterlife (an afterlife where he can recover almost instantly from bullet wounds, no less). Lee's death required the obvious use of a stand-in and some computer-generated fudging for several scenes, including the pivotal flashback to the hero's murder. But Alex Proyas' big Goth cheeseball of an action-melodrama is so soaked in the mid-'90s MTV aesthetic of stuttering-strobe edits and smeary, lurid palettes that Proyas can blur and obscure the gaps with relative ease.

The same can't be said for the posthumous movies of Brandon Lee's father, Bruce: The absurd Game of Death is slapped together using extant footage of the late martial-arts master and multiple body doubles—one of them cut from cardboard. (You'd have to look to "world's worst director" Ed Wood for a more doltish exploitation of dead-star footage: the shots of Bela Lugosi grafted onto Plan 9 From Outer Space, later lovingly re-created in Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood.)

In the elder Lee's case, though, only the performer's image needed to be approximated—the absence of his master's voice was no problem. The dubbing of the late Oliver Reed in one scene from Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) doesn't quite evoke the comically inexact lip-synching that was long a hallmark of kung fu pictures, but the shaky matchup between the dialogue and the creepy CGI superimposition of Reed's face onto a stand-in's body does provide a jarring reminder that the old hellraiser had succumbed to a heart attack before finishing his scenes. The patch job on the race-track comedy Saratoga (1937) after Jean Harlow's death from uremic poisoning was far more low-tech: a passable imitation of Harlow's singular sarcastic chip, plus a set of camouflaging accessories (binoculars, a big floppy hat, etc.). Nick Adams' dubbing of James Dean's final, drunken speech in Giant (1956) is conspicuous not for its timbre so much as its pitch and pronunciation: Since Dean spends most of his other scenes mumbling and muttering Method-ly into his collar, his character's valedictory ramblings—delivered as they are from the bottom of an empty barrel of gin—sound suddenly too full-throated and articulate.

Category 3: Sacred Ruins
Then there are the lost movies: those that suffered the deaths of their stars too early to be salvaged with mimics and enormous hats. Footage from Dark Blood, the movie left incomplete after River Phoenix's death in 1993, has become something of a holy grail for Phoenix's fans (bits and pieces of it have popped up on YouTube in recent years). Something's Got To Give (1962) is significant not only as Marilyn Monroe's last, unfinished movie but the first to feature a prominent actress—Marilyn, no less!—in a nude scene (included with other material shot for the aborted film on the DVD Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days).

Immediately after Heath Ledger's overdose, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus looked to be a lost movie, too. But Gilliam was able to rescue his project with an almost eerilyneat solution. The devil's bargain in Parnassus requires that handsome charlatan Tony (Ledger) act as a pied piper to lure five souls through a magic mirror into an alternate universe. With the bulk of the movie's drab-London scenes in the can, Gilliam recruited Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell to play versions of Tony through the looking-glass, with the plotline alternating between the two realms. (The alt-Tony played by Depp beckons one soul toward a magic river of immortality that preserves the eternal youth of James Dean, Rudolph Valentino, and Princess Diana—a rather literal-minded nod to Ledger's death that's allayed by Depp's customary deadpan grace.)

Parnassus thus exists in two interlocking halves: one made before Ledger died, one after. So perhaps it's apt to be of two minds about the endeavor as a whole. Like its fellow death-haunted productions, it can be seen as a show-must-go-on tribute to a fallen colleague or as a clever but unseemly exercise in improv necromancy. It somehow both mitigates and intensifies the sadness overhanging the film that a heartbreaking loss was also what made its niftiest trick possible.

Is Lars von Trier a Misogynist?

Jessica Winter — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:56:00 GMT

Of the many festival awards and critics' prizes conferred on the films of Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, one of the oddest, and, to some minds, the most deserved, came earlier this year, when the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes—the same festival that gave von Trier's Dancer in the Dark its highest honor, the Palme d'Or, in 2000—handed his latest effort an ad-hoc prize for "most misogynist movie." In Antichrist (opening tomorrow in select theaters), a couple known as She and He (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) journey to a remote cabin in the woods after the death of their toddler son, only for the wife to descend into nymphomania, insanity, gruesome violence, and self-mutilation. Grisly and hysterical, Antichrist certainly can be interpreted as a screed against womankind—indeed, the film at times actively encourages this reading.

There's also the director's track record to consider. In Dancer in the Dark, the female protagonist (played by Björk) not only goes blind but is robbed, terrorized into committing murder, and hanged. In Dogville(2003), Nicole Kidman's Grace is collared to an iron flywheel and repeatedly raped; later, she oversees the summary execution of an entire town. And it's not a huge exaggeration to say that in Breaking the Waves (1996), perhaps von Trier's most widely acclaimed film, Emily Watson's saintly, churchgoing Bess is effectively fucked to death. (Sex kills in Antichrist, too: She and He are in the throes of passion when their little boy falls out a window and dies.)

So what is Lars Von Trier's problem, anyway? Glancing over the evidence, it's easy to dismiss him as a sexist purveyor of art-house torture porn, as an "emotional pornographer" (to paraphrase his disgruntled one-time star Björk) who revels messily in women's agony and debasement. (According to this line of thinking, the already infamous clitoridectomy in Antichrist can double as a superconcise director's statement.) Yet a strong case can be made that von Trier's patented brand of female trouble is more richly complicated—or, at least, more compelling in its pathologies—than his detractors might admit.

Mitigating Factor No. 1: He's rebelling against Mum and Dad. But not in the way one might think. Von Trier has ruefully described his parents as "Communist nudists" who prohibited three things: "feelings, religion, and enjoyment." Naturally, their contrarian child's movies are filthy with feelings and religion if not enjoyment. "My family always held martyrs in contempt," von Trier said in 2005. "And religious martyrs in particular were viewed as the worst sort of kitsch." Which only ensured that the enfant terrible would grow up to conjure the mother of all religious martyrs: Breaking the Waves' Bess, who prostitutes herself in the fervent belief that it will help her husband (Stellan Skarsgard) recover from catastrophic injuries. (The Christlike Bess even gets a Via Dolorosa of her own, clad in hooker garb and sobbingly pushing a moped as kids pelt her with stones.)

Breaking the Waves is the first film in von Trier's "Golden Heart" series, rounded out by 1998's The Idiots (like Antichrist, about a grieving mother going to extremes) and Dancer in the Dark, each centered on women who are punished for their innocence and goodness. The trilogy is inspired by a children's tale—one that clearly imprinted von Trier at a formative age—about the Golden Heart, a little girl who ventures into the forest and gives away all her worldly possessions, down to the clothes on her back. As von Trier recalls on his Dancer DVD commentary, his father "ridiculized" the story and used "Golden Heart" as sarcastic shorthand for do-gooders. But little Lars was touched. Ever the defiant son, von Trier dramatizes both his youthful fascination with the Golden Heart and his father's aversion to her, creating a spectacle out of his heroines' vulnerability and naiveté, then stripping them of their defenses, dignity, and, frequently, clothes. In Antichrist, Gainsbourg's She is no holy fool, but just like the Golden Heart, She plunges trustingly into the woods and loses everything she has left.

Mitigating Factor No. 2: He's just copying the master. Though Antichrist could not be mistaken for anything but a von Trier production, its unholy terrors spring from an alchemy of influences: David Lynch (felt in the supernatural grace notes and rumbling, ominous sound design), Edgar Allan Poe (there's a telltale raven!), Ingmar Bergman (She's genius for passive-aggressive button-pushing is worthy of Scenes From a Marriage). But the overriding influence, as always, is von Trier's hero, fellow Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose austere, shattering films, starting with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), were usually predicated on female martyrdom and self-abnegation. Von Trier even claimed to be communicating telepathically with the master's ghost when making Medea (1987), based on an unproduced script that Dreyer co-wrote.

If much of the von Trier canon enacts an argument with his late parents, it likewise turns naked, screaming cartwheels to please his spiritual daddy, Dreyer. The cold and joyless self-denial of the Scottish Presbyterian milieu in Breaking the Waves, its clash between ecstasy and doctrine, its yearning for miracles—it's all strung with the same DNA as Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1954), which grappled stoically with faith, desire, mercy, and the power of prayer. A 17^th-century witch-hunting melodrama that all but vibrates with repressed eros, Day of Wrath is a stern ancestor of the sex-and-death bonanza Antichrist: She, who's lately abandoned a graduate thesis on witch burnings and other bygone methods of "gynocide," has apparently internalized her beyond-Bosch research. He, a psychotherapist, is duly appalled when She suggests that maybe—just maybe—historical evils committed against women are in fact a logical reflection of … womanly evil. It's an inflammatory, sit-up-in-your-seat moment, one that captures her sorrow and self-loathing. But a line of dialogue is not a manifesto any more than the climactic inferno in Day of Wrath is an endorsement of burning witches at the stake.

Mitigating Factor No. 3: He is woman! Or so von Trier claims. "My main characters are built on my own person," he once said. "I think women are better, more understanding. This is my female side." (Elsewhere, in a more ambitious mood, von Trier reckoned, "I am an American woman. Or 65 percent of me is.") One might suspect the director of placating his critics by conveniently framing his much-abused females as distaff self-portraits, but at least one of his actresses concurs. "I did have the feeling I was playing Lars," Gainsbourg recently told the Village Voice. "In his own fragility, Lars was the female character." Von Trier was mired in a deep depression and beset by panic attacks while making Antichrist—could She's spasmodic despair also be von Trier's own?

A generous interpretation of von Trier might contend that his supposed misogyny is actually misanthropy—after all, his men are no picnic, either. ("My male protagonists are basically idiots who don't understand shit," he explains in the Antichrist press notes.) In Antichrist, the placidly arrogant He shuns professional ethics and basic common sense by seizing control of his broken wife's therapy and dragging her into the forest for hardcore CBT. In Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville, the main men are all somehow enfeebled in mind, body, or circumstance; they are pathetic, weirdly passive creatures who stage-manage the suffering of women for their own selfish purposes (which sounds a lot like a certain director we know).

Whereas, at the very least, von Trier's women are brave. They make things happen; they keep their promises. They are sinned against and sinning. Whether admirable, pitiable, or repellent, they are interesting. Nicole Kidman reportedly once asked von Trier, "Why are you so evil to women?"—but couldn't one ask the same of so many filmmakers who deal solely in shopaholic singles and grasping Bridezillas and buzz-kill spouses? Von Trier has got hang-ups, no question. But his saving grace is that he couldn't give an actress a standard "wife" or "girlfriend" role if his life depended on it.

Armando Iannucci

Jessica Winter — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:20:00 GMT

Television comedies-turned-movies have a spotty track record: For every South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, there are a few Bewitched s and Flintstones es. It's certainly not a genre associated with rapturous critical reception, but that's exactly what the scathing political satire In the Loop—a spinoff of the cult BBC series The Thick of It— has enjoyed since its Sundance premiere last January. Set amid an Anglo-American scrum of government officials, lackeys, and PR handlers on the eve of an undermotivated war in the Middle East, In the Loop is a painfully comic film à clef on the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq—and one that creates a new, perhaps impassable standard for creative deployment of the word fuck.

For most stateside viewers, the movie also provides a belated introduction to its director, Armando Iannucci, the prolific writer-producer who has been a mainstay of radio and TV comedy in the United Kingdom for two decades. In addition to creating and co-writing The Thick of It, Iannucci was one of the creators of the '90s fake-news classic The Day Today, a proto-Daily Show and a forerunner of Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G Show. Iannucci also co-created Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge: a talk-show parody and sitcom, respectively, that turned Steve Coogan's blundering sportscaster from The Day Today into one of the immortal fools of British popular culture. The Scottish-born Iannucci is virtually unknown here (and just short of a household name back home), but thanks to YouTube and multiregion DVD players, U.S. viewers can catch up with one of the most influential comedy minds in the English-speaking world.

Or make that the English-swearing world: The Thick of It and In the Loop are symphonies of virtuosic profanity (the BBC's sign-language service has had to create five new signs to accommodate The Thick of It's blue neologisms), much of it supplied by menacing communications director Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), a man who can render the commonplace "Would you like to step into my office?" as "Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off." The relentless verbal assault is sensationally funny, but it's also part and parcel of Iannucci's long-standing fascination with the debasement of language and debate in politics and news media. "I'm interested in the abuse of argument," Iannucci told the Independent in 2006. In that light, Tucker's decidedly abusive command of simile ("He's as useless as a marzipan dildo"), hyperbole ("I'd love to stop and chat but I'd rather have type 2 diabetes"), and paraprosdokian ("Go and buy a goat a whole village can fuck") can be seen as a means to keep his cognitive muscles limber for his next feat of dizzying spin—as when hapless British MP Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) inconveniently claims in a radio interview that war is "unforeseeable." "You may have heard him say it," Tucker tells the press, "but he never said it, and that is a fact."

This Orwell-meets-"Who's on First?" rhetorical style was one that Iannucci first honed on the news satire The Day Today (1994). Long before Stephen Colbert popularized "truthiness," The Day Today was coining the term factgasm and screening an info-graphic titled "Facts x Importance = News." In one priceless segment, anchor Chris Morris (who developed the show with Iannucci from their radio program, On the Hour) turns from moderator into agitator, twisting what should be a dry exchange about a trade agreement into a declaration of war in "the upper cataracts of the Australia-Hong Kong border," whereupon the newsroom instantly transforms: new lighting, rejiggered theme music, and a field correspondent shouting, "People here are literally bursting with war!" Nearly a decade before the careful stage-management of the 2003 Iraq campaign, Iannucci and Morris had imagined armed conflict as arousing infotainment, manufactured out of bellicose impulse.

The Day Today casts a long shadow. Morris' character owed much to the pugnacious BBC Newsnight institution Jeremy Paxman, though American viewers might imagine him as Colbert in the form of an Oxbridge-toned cyborg. And Sacha Baron Cohen was surely taking notes when Morris asked British pop star Kim Wilde for her take on London's new policy of booting homeless people as you would an illegally parked car or when he grilled MP Paul Boeteng about the social impact of fictitious hip-hop artist Herman the Tosser.

The show also marked the first television appearances of On the Hour sports correspondent Alan Partridge. ("If you were alive in England in the nineties," as John Lahr wrote in a New Yorker profile of Steve Coogan in 2007, "… Alan Partridge was one of the cultural icons by which you measured time, a Malvolio of media personalities.") Coogan created the character at Iannucci's prompting; part of the joke, as Iannucci later explained to Lahr, was that Partridge knew little about his area of expertise, so even something as straightforward as a soccer goal would inspire commentary like "Twat! That was liquid football!" Knowing Me, Knowing You (1994-95) used Partridge's ineptitude to expose the creaking mechanics of the talk-show format (a flustered Alan might blurt out to his guest, "Do the anecdote," and upon delivery, reply, "That wasn't very good"), and I'm Alan Partridge (1997, 2002) watched his disgraced retreat from television to a graveyard radio shift and a sad room in a motor lodge. Smug yet aggrieved, socially retarded, prodigiously stupid, morbidly entitled, and fairly palpitating with self-loathing, Alan Partridge provided the DNA for Ricky Gervais' David Brent and, by extension, Steve Carell's Michael Scott. (In his British Film Institute monograph on The Office, Ben Walters notes that co-writer Stephen Merchant would often call out to Gervais during filming, "Too Partridge! You've gone too Partridge!")

Yet Iannucci and Coogan didn't allow their creature to become wholly repellent; one can always glimpse a shade of a grasping, panicked human being amid the walking catastrophe that is Alan Partridge. Indeed, all of Iannucci's work has a subterranean compassion—a virtue that contributes to his superb grasp of pacing.The ritual humiliations of Partridge would be fleetingly interrupted for a semi-triumphant ABBA medley or the nerdy, private joy of playing air bass. And The Thick of It catches the viewer off-guard when it arranges for Malcolm Tucker, of all people, to rescue an aging political adviser from a nervous breakdown-in-progress.

It's typical of Iannucci's control as a writer-creator that, just as Partridge never became a monster, Tucker is not quite a villain—he's nasty and terrifying and acid-tongued, yes, but he's not a hypocrite, and he has a certain sulfurous integrity. While his colleagues tie themselves into knots of guilt, vanity, and self-delusion (at one point, Simon Foster dares to ask out loud, "Is the really brave thing actually doing what you don't believe?"), Tucker has no such burdens, because his own self-interest is perfectly aligned with advancing his party's agenda, whatever that may be. In his review of In the Loop, British film critic Jonathan Romney describes Tucker as "Mephistophelean," which is fantastically apt: The devil first appeared to Faust as a friar and there is something of the mendicant about the gaunt and seemingly sleepless Tucker, monomaniacally devoted to his cause. Perhaps it's yet another exemplum of the complexity and sharp surprise of Armando Iannucci's comedy that the closest we can find to a morally consistent character also happens to be the one shouting, "Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it up your shitter with a lubricated horse cock."

100 Percent Pure Adrenaline

Jessica Winter — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:59:00 GMT

Rule 1: Heroes should be heroic.

Rule 2: Violence should both excite and relax your audience.

Rule 3: There should be at least one Hot Chick (viz., Jolie, Mendes, Fox).

Rule 4: Send the viewer out on a high!

Tweet Styles of the Rich and Famous

Jessica Winter — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:54:00 GMT

Late last week, Twitter reached a fame-driven tipping point when Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to 1 million followers and Oprah Winfrey garnered 40,000 of her own in the time between signing up for the microblogging service and making her first-ever Tweet. (Full disclosure: I am an editor at O, The Oprah Magazine.) Twitter is now officially a quasi-public celebrity hub, like the Ivy or Kitson or Los Cabos, Mexico, or anywhere Us Weekly keeps an investigative bureau—a place where civilian rubberneckers might happen upon a nasty breakup or snag the Twitter version of a personalized autograph. More likely, though, the plebes will eavesdrop on the equivalent of small talk, Twitter-style: quotidian blurts familiar from the feeds of the unrich and unfamous, powered by real-time reportage on food intake and flight arrivals and noteworthy naps.

As is often the case offline, commercial success—as measured in number of followers—is not necessarily an index of artistic merit. (Miley Cyrus! Your 300,000-plus apostles deserve better than this! Or this!) In fact, virtually every boldface name on the site sometimes falls into standard types of Twitter traps (four are outlined below). Some celebrities take that plunge more gracefully than others, as we shall see, and a select few have managed to transcend Twitter's perils and come close to mastering the tricky 140-character format.

Type 1: The Name Drop

The basic template is self-explanatory: Lance Armstrong thanks Takashi Murakami for the flowers he sent. John Lithgow transcribes his calendar ("90 minutes with Bill Moyers [my neighbor!] for his show, then Denzel and Pauletta"). Paula Abdul establishes her bona fides for seeing 17 Again ("Zack [sic] Efron is a friend of mine so I def want to check it out").

More entertaining, though, are the tweets that cast one celebrity as the supplicant to another. Jane Fonda sounds like a schoolgirl invited to eat at the cool table when she tweets, "So excited!! Jeff Daniels asked me to join him, Dianne Wiest and other friends of his for dinner after our plays." Courtney Love also name-drops—far less endearingly—as a means to affirm her shaky position in the celebrity firmament, though it's hard to determine how much of her libel-scented tattling and us-versus-them solidarity (she has "nonsense lawsuits" in common with Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and larcenous maids in common with Sharon Stone) is based in reality as most of us recognize it.

Type 2: The Very Literal Status Update

Vanessa Hudgens is awake. Lance Armstrong is working out. Lindsay Lohan is a bit scattered ("my phone is missing…in my house. not okay"). Nicole Richie wants a burrito. Not that there isn't a certain frisson that comes with knowing that Nicole Richie wants a burrito, akin to the helpless thrill of poring over "Stars: They're Just Like Us!" in line at the supermarket. But once Nicole Richie tells you for a third time that she wants a burrito, you may begin to wonder why she's telling you this, and why you're reading it, and why you're thinking about why you're reading it, and how—of history's every artifact of written communication currently awaiting your eyes and mind—you chose to alight upon Nicole Richie's Twitter feed, and suddenly you realize that Nicole Richie has opened a Pandora's burrito of existential crisis within you.

Type 3: The Big Question

The Twitter status box is always empty, always hungry, and the blinking cursor lulls many celebrities into the free-associative mode familiar from the collected works of Andy Rooney. "Who decided that pink slips would be pink?" Ashton Kutcher asked recently. "Why not orange slips or blue slips?" When a theatergoer is overheard saying that he "knows" Jane Fonda on Twitter, the actress stops short at a crossroads of semantics and epistemology to ask, "That's kinda great except—what has 'know' come to mean?"

Other celebrities use Twitter as a form of crowd-sourcing concierge. Ludacris does some Kinsey-style data gathering ("who likes sex more in the day[time]?"). Sweet-toothed Shaquille O'Neal cries out for enablers: "Can I plaese [sic] cheat on my diet and go to dairy. Queen pls pls pls." P. Diddy polls on reincarnation ("Ptwitty question of the day!!!!! if you had to be born again as an animal what animal would you wanna be? And why??"). These calls for response can ring a bit hollow—does P. Diddy really have an active interest in his fans' spirit animals? The exception is Shaq, whose diligent upkeep of his Twitter fan correspondence—a trait he shares with Ashton and Demi, the Hardest-Working Tweeters in Show Business—is convincingly affectionate.

Type 4: The Motivational Speech

Because the limited character count is suited to the kinds of aphorisms and affirmations that would otherwise find immortality on an embroidered pillow, Twitter can awaken the celebrity's inner life coach. P. Diddy is forever encouraging his readers to "LOCK IN!!" (his variation on "Just Do It"). Demi Moore leads both by motto ("important to always go forward learn from the past seize the positive opportunity in it and create what you want now!") and by example: She is so unrelentingly nice even to her rudest detractor that her feed gives cheery passive-aggression a good name. John Mayer often seems to be floating ideas for his own line of inspirational posters, as when he announced, "I just had a beer with the unknown, and it's actually really cool if you shut up and listen to what it has to say." Or: "1. Take the fear. 2. Ask it why it would be so terrible if it were true. 3. Ask it 'and THEN what?' Chances are your fear has no answer." And yet Mr. Mayer claims that he doesn't smoke pot.

On evidence, becoming one of the great famous tweeters may depend somewhat on breaking free of this classification system—to avoid stereotyping yourself as a Motivator or a Name-Dropper or a Plane-Taker. The celebrity who most indelibly achieved this feat was, as it turns out, not a celebrity at all: The faux Christopher Walken account offered not just the irresistible novelty of the high-haired, glassy-eyed cowbell enthusiast on Twitter; each tweet seemed to capture the Ding an sich of Walken-ness as pristine haikus of everyday epiphany. ("I was filling the bird feeders as a squirrel watched & waited patiently. The sense of entitlement in my backyard is of my own doing.")

For readers who prefer their celebrity Twitter feeds as fiction experiments, cult-figure-of-sorts Brent Spiner (Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation) maintains an ongoing ruse—or so one assumes—in which he checks into and out of the "Betty White Clinic" as a publicity move; this conceit then becomes a fantasy-within-a-fantasy in which the clinic is actually an institution. Most recently, Spiner (or, rather, his Twitter persona) has fallen into a cryptic, vaguely sinister relationship with his bitchily mysterious next-door neighbor, Amber. Spiner has a knack for detail (and name-dropping—he spots James Woods in the Betty White rec room, and they later watch Girl, Interrupted together), and his tweets can at times evoke a stirringly Walken-esque flavor of serene non sequitur.

Other famous tweeters do work largely within the confines of the taxonomy yet manage to make it new. Though David Lynch is not immune to thinking that "Leaving for the airport soon" is a viable tweet, unlike most of his fellow luminaries, he understands that Twitter posts can also be weird and fun and tone-poemlike. Alongside semiregular weather reports and the odd piece of video memorabilia, the filmmaker and meditation educator will post a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita or an occasional mind-priming "Thought of the day," such as "You can't fight city hall" or "Ancient pond. Frog jumps in. Splash!" (Lynch's "Thoughts of the day" gain more transcendental power when you imagine him delivering them as the hearing-impaired FBI agent he played on Twin Peaks.)

Likewise, Russell Brand is technically easy to Twitter-type—except he flips those types on their heads, strips them naked, and dresses them up in boas and bondage gear. This is, for example, how he name-drops: "@jimmyfallon Now that I've found you I shall follow you. Everywhere—it's going to be like 'Don't Look Now' but the dwarf has an erection." This is how he signs a Twitter autograph: "@Rebeccasaurus You are like scuba diving in pink honey." This is how he has a beer with the unknown: "If we detach ourselves from the material we will become enlightened and live in perpetual, blissful, endless orgasm—but imagine the mess." And this is how he tweets his bedtime: "I'm off to gargle with oestrogen till I become a gorgeous treble-gendered-cyborg—then we'll see who ought run the country. NIGHT."

Whether he's pondering his "deeply authoritative" cat, Morrissey (whose affections Brand compares to those of "a lap dancer with a meth habit"), or cutting a deal with fellow Tweeters ("Those of you I don't follow on Twitter I shall follow in life, breathing on your windows and photographing your stools"), Brand has a firm, sticky grasp of Twitter as more than a promotional tool, public journal, or not-quite-interface with the masses; he knows that it's a performance—a creative opportunity—unto itself. Or to put it another way: Like his fellow celebrities, Brand tweets his current projects, his fan love, his famous friends, his words of inspiration, and the fact that he's going to bed. But—and here's the winning distinction—he's the only one who does so while summoning the mental image of Noam Chomsky in a flesh-colored bikini.