newyorker--2020-06-29--What Happens When David Mitchell Writes a Rock Novel?

There ’ s a side of rock and roll—defiant , anarchic , Dionysian , subversive , doomed , Romantic—that has always appealed to literary novelists , but that ’ s not its only side .
Plenty of its practitioners make decent music , and decent livings , without feeling the need to subvert or defy anything at all .
Nor does everyone feel oppressed by celebrity ; all that star-maker machinery has to get stoked with something , and for every Dylanesque refusenik in the world there are ten thousand volunteers for fame .
Why shouldn ’ t they get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ David Mitchell ’ s novel “ Utopia Avenue ” ( Random House ) , four such figures—young , reasonably talented , eager to succeed—come together to form a band of that name .
They are introduced to one another by a wise and benevolent manager ( maybe the first one in the history of the rock novel ) named Levon Frankland , who spots them playing in other , subpar bands and has a hunch , their disparate musical influences notwithstanding , that they would sound great together .
All this is set @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was possible to believe uncynically that new music could change the world .
The likable quartet—Griff , Dean , Elf , and Jasper—are not really out to change anything , though , except their fortunes .
They aren ’ t sellouts , by any stretch ; they ’ re just not pretentious about their goals .
They want to find an audience , and to win over that audience .
They refuse to compromise with management on any artistic decision , but they ’ re never really asked to , because there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ music to make anyone try to get them to compromise it .
Though they are , fictionally speaking , near-contemporaries of Bucky Wunderlick , the Garbo-like rock god at the heart of Don DeLillo ’ s “ Great Jones Street , ” it ’ s hard to imagine any of Utopia Avenue ’ s members sharing Bucky ’ s credo : “ That ’ s why we ’ re so great .
We make noise .
We make it louder than anybody else and also better .
Any curly-haired boy can write windswept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s heads .
That ’ s the only way to make those fuckers listen.
” Instead , the band goes through the usual succession of rough gigs in lousy halls ( a brawl breaks out in one when Griff , the drummer , gets beaned by a beer bottle ) ; they travel between engagements in a broken-down van , fondly named the Beast .
They get excited the first time they hear a song of theirs on the radio .
They listen in awe to “ Sgt .
Pepper ” when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , one of them is the victim of a trumped-up drug charge .
They ’ re more pleased than disillusioned to be following this classic path .
And for quite a while , until late in the book , when it more or less sheds its skin , the genre comforts of the rock novel seem all that “ Utopia Avenue ” is interested in providing .
The rock novel , broadly speaking , is less concerned with the making of music ( an experience hard to translate into prose ) than with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to iconoclasm and a proud aversion to bullshit .
A strong line extends from DeLillo to Jonathan Lethem to Jennifer Egan to Eleanor Henderson to Steve Erickson , with many excellent stops in between ; somewhere along the way , though , the purer-than-thou asceticism of that “ authenticity ” became a wearisome trope of its own .
Looked at one way , Mitchell ’ s lack of interest in rebellion ( despite setting his novel at the virtual ground zero of music-as-rebellion ) constitutes a fresh take .
Unfortunately , while the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ subversive , other aspects of Mitchell ’ s scene-setting don ’ t fare as well , particularly when it comes to the music itself .
Guitar solos are “ pyrotechnic ” ; Elf , the keyboardist , is twice described as playing “ slabs of Hammond chords.
” Mitchell ’ s song titles don ’ t sound like song titles , and his poundingly metrical lyrics don ’ t really sound like lyrics : But the most troubling play for that elusive authenticity comes in the numerous cameo appearances , within the narrative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they don ’ t just get spotted from across the room , either ; they say things .
David Bowie , Brian Jones , John Lennon , Steve Winwood , Keith Moon , Sandy Denny , Syd Barrett , Jimi Hendrix , or , in this instance , Leonard Cohen : I find passages like this mortifying , though I recognize that many readers will not .
The technique of incorporating real people into fictional narratives is an established literary convention , one that , like all techniques , can be employed well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one thing to stick into the mouth of a character of your own invention a clichéd line of dialogue such as “ Problem is , if fame is a drug , it ’ s hard to kick , ” but quite another , especially if you care about music at all , when Gene Clark , of the Byrds—Gene Clark , who wrote “ I ’ ll Feel a Whole Lot Better ” !
—is made to say it .
Or when Bowie says to a member of Utopia Avenue , “ We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too .
.
.
I was on my way up , then .
Now I ’ m going down .
Is that a metaphor ?
” Or when Allen Ginsberg says , “ Don ’ t believe everything you read about me .
.
.
.
Just most of it.
” Or when Brian Jones says , “ I come up with tons of ideas for Mick and Keith but all I get from them is sarcasm .
I ought to write songs , you know .
Even Wyman ’ s got one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I begin .
Tomorrow .
Got any drugs ?
”

There’s a side of rock and roll—defiant, anarchic, Dionysian, subversive, doomed, Romantic—that has always appealed to literary novelists, but that’s not its only side. Plenty of its practitioners make decent music, and decent livings, without feeling the need to subvert or defy anything at all. Nor does everyone feel oppressed by celebrity; all that star-maker machinery has to get stoked with something, and for every Dylanesque refusenik in the world there are ten thousand volunteers for fame. Why shouldn’t they get the literary treatment, too?
In David Mitchell’s novel “Utopia Avenue” (Random House), four such figures—young, reasonably talented, eager to succeed—come together to form a band of that name. They are introduced to one another by a wise and benevolent manager (maybe the first one in the history of the rock novel) named Levon Frankland, who spots them playing in other, subpar bands and has a hunch, their disparate musical influences notwithstanding, that they would sound great together. All this is set in mid-sixties London, when and where it was possible to believe uncynically that new music could change the world.
The likable quartet—Griff, Dean, Elf, and Jasper—are not really out to change anything, though, except their fortunes. They aren’t sellouts, by any stretch; they’re just not pretentious about their goals. They want to find an audience, and to win over that audience. They refuse to compromise with management on any artistic decision, but they’re never really asked to, because there’s nothing disturbing enough about their music to make anyone try to get them to compromise it. Though they are, fictionally speaking, near-contemporaries of Bucky Wunderlick, the Garbo-like rock god at the heart of Don DeLillo’s “Great Jones Street,” it’s hard to imagine any of Utopia Avenue’s members sharing Bucky’s credo: “That’s why we’re so great. We make noise. We make it louder than anybody else and also better. Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people’s heads. That’s the only way to make those fuckers listen.”
Instead, the band goes through the usual succession of rough gigs in lousy halls (a brawl breaks out in one when Griff, the drummer, gets beaned by a beer bottle); they travel between engagements in a broken-down van, fondly named the Beast. They get excited the first time they hear a song of theirs on the radio. They listen in awe to “Sgt. Pepper” when it comes out. While on tour, one of them is the victim of a trumped-up drug charge. They’re more pleased than disillusioned to be following this classic path. And for quite a while, until late in the book, when it more or less sheds its skin, the genre comforts of the rock novel seem all that “Utopia Avenue” is interested in providing.
The rock novel, broadly speaking, is less concerned with the making of music (an experience hard to translate into prose) than with authenticity of attitude: an aggressive commitment to iconoclasm and a proud aversion to bullshit. A strong line extends from DeLillo to Jonathan Lethem to Jennifer Egan to Eleanor Henderson to Steve Erickson, with many excellent stops in between; somewhere along the way, though, the purer-than-thou asceticism of that “authenticity” became a wearisome trope of its own. Looked at one way, Mitchell’s lack of interest in rebellion (despite setting his novel at the virtual ground zero of music-as-rebellion) constitutes a fresh take. Unfortunately, while the characters’ happy-to-be-here vibe ironically plays as subversive, other aspects of Mitchell’s scene-setting don’t fare as well, particularly when it comes to the music itself. Guitar solos are “pyrotechnic”; Elf, the keyboardist, is twice described as playing “slabs of Hammond chords.” Mitchell’s song titles don’t sound like song titles, and his poundingly metrical lyrics don’t really sound like lyrics:
What is plotted will unravel.
What is built slip out of joint.
Good intentions get forgotten.
Makes you wonder, what’s the point?
But the most troubling play for that elusive authenticity comes in the numerous cameo appearances, within the narrative, by real-life rock stars. And they don’t just get spotted from across the room, either; they say things. David Bowie, Brian Jones, John Lennon, Steve Winwood, Keith Moon, Sandy Denny, Syd Barrett, Jimi Hendrix, or, in this instance, Leonard Cohen:
“I’m not one of life’s settlers. I came here [to New York] to write The—or just A—Great American Novel. I wince at the cliché. I fancied myself a big fish in a small pond, but I wasn’t even a fish. I was susceptible to distraction. Greenwich Village. Beatnik readings. Folk sessions. I went on long walks, posing as a flâneur, but only the French can get away with that. I watched the boats on the East River. Once, I took the elevator up there.” Leonard nods at the Empire State Building. “I looked over Manhattan and was seized by an absurd desire to take it. To own it. Do we write songs as a substitute for possession?”
I find passages like this mortifying, though I recognize that many readers will not. The technique of incorporating real people into fictional narratives is an established literary convention, one that, like all techniques, can be employed well or badly. Still, it is one thing to stick into the mouth of a character of your own invention a clichéd line of dialogue such as “Problem is, if fame is a drug, it’s hard to kick,” but quite another, especially if you care about music at all, when Gene Clark, of the Byrds—Gene Clark, who wrote “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better”!—is made to say it. Or when Bowie says to a member of Utopia Avenue, “We met on the stairs last time, too . . . I was on my way up, then. Now I’m going down. Is that a metaphor?” Or when Allen Ginsberg says, “Don’t believe everything you read about me. . . . Just most of it.” Or when Brian Jones says, “I come up with tons of ideas for Mick and Keith but all I get from them is sarcasm. I ought to write songs, you know. Even Wyman’s got one on Satanic Travesties. That settles it. I begin. Tomorrow. Got any drugs?”
The aura of reality that these speeches are meant to enhance is undermined in most cases by the fact that the speaker devoted a lifetime to not talking like that. One can argue that Bowie’s fame is now at such a level that anything goes, that he has ascended, Nixon-like, into the realm of imagination’s raw material. But what did poor Gene Clark ever do to get dragooned into this pantomime? He led a brilliant, tragically short life, and, if you want to write a novelization of that life, have at it; but this is just opportunism. He should have been more famous than he was; one of the compensations of that should be that he is spared this deepfake afterlife as a poorly scripted spokesman for the real.
The swerve comes late in the novel’s feel-good, rise-to-modest-fame narrative, though the groundwork, in retrospect, is visible throughout. Jasper, the band’s gifted, eccentric lead guitarist, appears—to judge from the chapters narrated from his perspective—to be mentally ill, to a much greater degree than his bandmates and his manager suspect. As his delusions intensify, Jasper begins to hear an ominous knocking sound. Since no one else can hear it, its source would seem to be in his head. Yet he has heard it before, as a boy at an English boarding school; with the aid of a sympathetic schoolmate gloriously named Heinz Formaggio, he once traced the sound to a mirror, wherein he encountered not his own image but that of “a man, older, shorter than Jasper, with East Asian eyes, in ceremonial robes.” A psychiatrist named Dr. Galavazi helped Jasper to quiet the knocking then. But now it is back.
“I go by Michael now.” Cartoon by Matilda Borgström Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Mitchell, whose novels range through different modes and genres with extraordinary facility, has a lucid, kinetic style at all times, but he is never more impressive than when writing in close third person about characters in altered mental states—captivity, physical pain, madness. Here is Jasper, in an unsuspecting girlfriend’s bed:
01:11 A.M., says her clock. A classical LP is on her Dansette. Jasper clicks the PLAY toggle. An oboe has lost its way. Upon hearing a violin in the thorns, the oboe picks a path toward it, metamorphosing into what it seeks. It’s beautiful and perilous. Sleep pulls Jasper down, hypnogogic fathoms down. Nothing of her that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Far above, the hull of the steamer darkens the lilac sea. Look. A coffin sinks, trailing bubbles. Inside is Jasper’s mother, Milly Wallace. From inside the coffin, Jasper hears a knock . . . knock . . . knock . . . Soft, yes, drowned, yes, persistent, yes, real? Yes.
Notwithstanding the pressures of growing fame—or the sudden availability of drugs, or the fact that three of the band members are straight men and the fourth is a woman—Utopia Avenue’s interpersonal chemistry remains intact. As their sales and their reputation ascend, they weather individual, very un-rock-star-like personal crises: a death in the family, father issues, struggles to acknowledge sexuality. Jasper suffers mostly in silence, more and more tortured and unreliable, until finally, during a show in New York that seems like the leading edge of Utopia Avenue’s conquest of America, he collapses onstage, apparently catatonic; and his interior world, for a time at least, supplants the reality outside it.
At which point, questions about the novel’s genre bona fides, about its passing or failing any authenticity tests, are rendered moot; Mitchell had a different destination all along. Not unlike Jasper himself, “Utopia Avenue” turns out to have been a sort of host for something else entirely.
To go further would be to give too much away—not to everyone, perhaps, but certainly to readers of Mitchell’s earlier work. Jasper’s last name, de Zoet, will have tipped off such readers; in 2010, Mitchell published a historical novel called “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” about a Dutch trader in eighteenth-century Japan. He turns out to be Jasper’s distant ancestor, a fact that casts the strange details of that hallucinatory mirror image in another light entirely. Indeed, for Mitchell devotees, alarms will have sounded throughout the novel (as throughout this review) at the mention of certain other names as well. Levon Frankland, the manager with the unerring instincts: wasn’t that also the name of a character in Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks” (2014)? Heinz Formaggio—wasn’t there a Heinz Formaggio in “Ghostwritten” (1999)?
On the Internet there are wikis devoted to the universe of fictional characters in Mitchell’s eight available novels (another, which is currently reposing in a time capsule, is slated to be published in 2114) and to tracking their appearances, whether major or minor, across multiple works. Only in a loose, nonrealistic sense are characters with the same name always the same characters; sometimes they’re better understood as different incarnations, living different lives with the same soul. Six years ago, Mitchell was asked in an interview about these recursions across his œuvre—whether he saw his books as “one contiguous whole” or as discrete entities laden with reader-friendly Easter eggs—and this was his answer:


newyorker--2020-06-29--The True Cost of Dollar Stores

The True Cost of Dollar Stores

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica .
When Jolanda Woods was growing up in North St. Louis , in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties , she and her friends would take the bus to the stores downtown , on Fourteenth Street , or on Cherokee Street , on the south side , or out to the River Roads Mall , in the inner suburb of Jennings .
“ This was a very merchant city , ” Woods , who is fifty-four , told me .
There were plenty of places to shop in her neighborhood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Louis , a mostly black and working-class part of town , fell into economic decline .
There was Perlmutter ’ s department store , where women bought pantyhose in bulk , Payless shoes , True Value hardware , and Schnucks grocery store .
Almost all these stores have disappeared .
As St. Louis ’ s population has dropped from eight hundred and fifty thousand , in the nineteen-fifties , to a little more than three hundred thousand , owing to suburban flight and deindustrialization , its downtown has withered .
The River Roads @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Louis is a devastated expanse of vacant lots and crumbling late-nineteenth-century brick buildings , their disrepair all the more dramatic for the opulence of their design .
“ This neighborhood has gone down , ” Woods said .
“ Oh , my God , these houses.
” A new form of retail has moved into the void .
The discount chains Family Dollar and Dollar General now have nearly forty stores in St. Louis and its immediate suburbs , about fifteen of them in North St. Louis .
This is where the people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ detergent and toys and pet food and underwear and motor oil and flashlights and strollers and mops and drain cleaner and glassware and wind chimes and rakes and shoes and balloons and bath towels and condoms and winter coats .
The stores have some nonperishable and frozen foods , too , for people who can ’ t travel to the few discount grocery stores left in the area .
Rudimentary provisions like these allowed the stores to remain open as “ essential ” businesses during the coronavirus shutdowns .
“ These stores are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Darryl Gray , a local minister and civil-rights activist , told me .
“ It ’ s the stuff you won ’ t get at a grocery store , that you get at a Walmart—but we don ’ t have one.
” Three years ago , Jolanda Woods ’ s husband , Robert Woods , who was forty-two , began working at a Dollar General on Grand Boulevard , across from an abandoned grocery store .
He and Jolanda had separated , but they stayed in touch over the years as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a job at the Salvation Army , was ordained as a minister , and became an informal counsellor to other men battling addiction .
Dollar General paid a bit more than the Salvation Army , but he expressed anxiety about security problems at the store .
Shoplifting was common , and occasionally there were even armed robberies .
The store lacked a security guard , and it typically had only a couple of clerks on hand .
On November 1 , 2018 , Woods went to work on his day off , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Footage from a security camera shows a man entering the store just after 1 P.M. , wearing a blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over a red cap , and holding a silver gun .
He fired down the center aisle , hitting Woods in the back of the head .
Then he pointed the gun at the cash register , before seeming to panic .
He ran out of the store empty-handed .
An ambulance arrived , but Woods was no longer breathing .
After his body was removed , Dollar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before closing amid protests from local residents .
Woods ’ s murder was one of three homicides in six months at the two discount chains in the St. Louis area .
On June 13th , a man and a woman started arguing in a car in the parking lot of a Family Dollar on West Florissant Avenue , just outside the city line ; he shot her once in the head , killing her .
Less than a month after Woods ’ s death , a sixty-five-year-old woman was shopping at the Family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a seemingly mentally ill thirty-four-year-old woman grabbed steak knives from a shelf in the store and stabbed her to death .
The Gun Violence Archive , a Web site that uses local news reports and law-enforcement sources to tally crimes involving firearms , lists more than two hundred violent incidents involving guns at Family Dollar or Dollar General stores since the start of 2017 , nearly fifty of which resulted in deaths .
The incidents include carjackings in the parking lot , drug deals gone bad , and altercations inside stores .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which workers or customers have been shot .
Since the beginning of 2017 , employees have been wounded in shootings or pistol-whippings in at least thirty-one robberies ; in at least seven other incidents , employees have been killed .
The violence has not let up in recent months , when requirements for customers to wear masks have made it harder for clerks to detect shoppers who are bent on robbery .
In early May , a worker at a Family Dollar in Flint , Michigan , was fatally shot after refusing entry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The number of incidents can be explained in part by the stores ’ ubiquity : there are now more than sixteen thousand Dollar Generals and nearly eight thousand Family Dollars in the United States , a fifty-per-cent increase in the past decade .
( By comparison , Walmart has about forty-seven hundred stores in the U.S. ) The stores are often in high-crime neighborhoods , where there simply aren ’ t many other businesses for criminals to target .
Routine gun violence has fallen sharply in prosperous cities around the country , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the cities and towns where these stores predominate .
The glowing signs of the discount chains have become indicators of neglect , markers of a geography of the places that the country has written off .
But these factors are not sufficient to explain the trend .
The chains ’ owners have done little to maintain order in the stores , which tend to be thinly staffed and exist in a state of physical disarray .
In the nineteen-seventies , criminologists such as Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson argued that rising crime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the social environment which lowered the risk of getting caught .
That theory gained increasing acceptance in the decades that followed .
“ The likelihood of a crime occurring depends on three elements : a motivated offender , a vulnerable victim , and the absence of a capable guardian , ” the sociologist Patrick Sharkey wrote , in “ Uneasy Peace , ” from 2018 .
Another way of putting this is that crime is not inevitable .
Robberies and killings that have taken place at dollar-store chains would not have necessarily happened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is sort of a Whack-a-Mole game , that if you just press here it ’ ll move over here ” is wrong , Richard Rosenfeld , a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis , told me .
Making it harder to commit a crime doesn ’ t just push crime elsewhere ; it reduces it .
“ Crime is opportunistic , ” he said .
“ If there ’ s no opportunity , there ’ s no crime.
” James Luther Turner left school in 1902 , when he was eleven .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ accident , and Turner had to run his family ’ s farm , in Macon County , Tennessee .
He was successful and entrepreneurial , and when he was twenty-four other farmers asked him to manage the local co-op ; he started a bridle shop behind the store .
Eventually , he took a job working for a Nashville drygoods wholesaler , hawking samples across southern Kentucky and middle Tennessee .
In 1929 , at the onset of the Depression , he opened a store in Scottsville , a small town in Kentucky @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stock , which he either liquidated , sold to other store owners , or took back to his own shop , Turner ’ s Bargain Store .
“ He also knew that where there was failure , there was opportunity , ” his grandson Cal Turner , Jr. , wrote in a memoir , called “ My Father ’ s Business , ” published in 2018 .

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.
When Jolanda Woods was growing up in North St. Louis, in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, she and her friends would take the bus to the stores downtown, on Fourteenth Street, or on Cherokee Street, on the south side, or out to the River Roads Mall, in the inner suburb of Jennings. “This was a very merchant city,” Woods, who is fifty-four, told me. There were plenty of places to shop in her neighborhood, too, even as North St. Louis, a mostly black and working-class part of town, fell into economic decline. There was Perlmutter’s department store, where women bought pantyhose in bulk, Payless shoes, True Value hardware, and Schnucks grocery store. Almost all these stores have disappeared. As St. Louis’s population has dropped from eight hundred and fifty thousand, in the nineteen-fifties, to a little more than three hundred thousand, owing to suburban flight and deindustrialization, its downtown has withered. The River Roads Mall closed in 1995. North St. Louis is a devastated expanse of vacant lots and crumbling late-nineteenth-century brick buildings, their disrepair all the more dramatic for the opulence of their design. “This neighborhood has gone down,” Woods said. “Oh, my God, these houses.” A new form of retail has moved into the void. The discount chains Family Dollar and Dollar General now have nearly forty stores in St. Louis and its immediate suburbs, about fifteen of them in North St. Louis. This is where the people who remain in the neighborhood can buy detergent and toys and pet food and underwear and motor oil and flashlights and strollers and mops and drain cleaner and glassware and wind chimes and rakes and shoes and balloons and bath towels and condoms and winter coats. The stores have some nonperishable and frozen foods, too, for people who can’t travel to the few discount grocery stores left in the area. Rudimentary provisions like these allowed the stores to remain open as “essential” businesses during the coronavirus shutdowns. “These stores are our little Walmarts, our little Targets,” Darryl Gray, a local minister and civil-rights activist, told me. “It’s the stuff you won’t get at a grocery store, that you get at a Walmart—but we don’t have one.” Three years ago, Jolanda Woods’s husband, Robert Woods, who was forty-two, began working at a Dollar General on Grand Boulevard, across from an abandoned grocery store. He and Jolanda had separated, but they stayed in touch over the years as Robert overcame a crack-cocaine addiction, got a job at the Salvation Army, was ordained as a minister, and became an informal counsellor to other men battling addiction. Dollar General paid a bit more than the Salvation Army, but he expressed anxiety about security problems at the store. Shoplifting was common, and occasionally there were even armed robberies. The store lacked a security guard, and it typically had only a couple of clerks on hand. Jimmy Donald, on the west side of Dayton, near the store where he was robbed. Photograph by Andres Gonzalez for The New Yorker On November 1, 2018, Woods went to work on his day off, to fill in for an absent co-worker. Footage from a security camera shows a man entering the store just after 1 P.M., wearing a blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over a red cap, and holding a silver gun. He fired down the center aisle, hitting Woods in the back of the head. Then he pointed the gun at the cash register, before seeming to panic. He ran out of the store empty-handed. An ambulance arrived, but Woods was no longer breathing. After his body was removed, Dollar General remained open for several hours, before closing amid protests from local residents. Woods’s murder was one of three homicides in six months at the two discount chains in the St. Louis area. On June 13th, a man and a woman started arguing in a car in the parking lot of a Family Dollar on West Florissant Avenue, just outside the city line; he shot her once in the head, killing her. Less than a month after Woods’s death, a sixty-five-year-old woman was shopping at the Family Dollar on St. Charles Rock Road when a seemingly mentally ill thirty-four-year-old woman grabbed steak knives from a shelf in the store and stabbed her to death. The Gun Violence Archive, a Web site that uses local news reports and law-enforcement sources to tally crimes involving firearms, lists more than two hundred violent incidents involving guns at Family Dollar or Dollar General stores since the start of 2017, nearly fifty of which resulted in deaths. The incidents include carjackings in the parking lot, drug deals gone bad, and altercations inside stores. But a large number involve armed robberies in which workers or customers have been shot. Since the beginning of 2017, employees have been wounded in shootings or pistol-whippings in at least thirty-one robberies; in at least seven other incidents, employees have been killed. The violence has not let up in recent months, when requirements for customers to wear masks have made it harder for clerks to detect shoppers who are bent on robbery. In early May, a worker at a Family Dollar in Flint, Michigan, was fatally shot after refusing entry to a customer without a mask. The number of incidents can be explained in part by the stores’ ubiquity: there are now more than sixteen thousand Dollar Generals and nearly eight thousand Family Dollars in the United States, a fifty-per-cent increase in the past decade. (By comparison, Walmart has about forty-seven hundred stores in the U.S.) The stores are often in high-crime neighborhoods, where there simply aren’t many other businesses for criminals to target. Routine gun violence has fallen sharply in prosperous cities around the country, but it has remained stubbornly high in many of the cities and towns where these stores predominate. The glowing signs of the discount chains have become indicators of neglect, markers of a geography of the places that the country has written off. But these factors are not sufficient to explain the trend. The chains’ owners have done little to maintain order in the stores, which tend to be thinly staffed and exist in a state of physical disarray. In the nineteen-seventies, criminologists such as Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson argued that rising crime could be partly explained by changes in the social environment which lowered the risk of getting caught. That theory gained increasing acceptance in the decades that followed. “The likelihood of a crime occurring depends on three elements: a motivated offender, a vulnerable victim, and the absence of a capable guardian,” the sociologist Patrick Sharkey wrote, in “Uneasy Peace,” from 2018. Another way of putting this is that crime is not inevitable. Robberies and killings that have taken place at dollar-store chains would not have necessarily happened elsewhere. “The idea that crime is sort of a Whack-a-Mole game, that if you just press here it’ll move over here” is wrong, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told me. Making it harder to commit a crime doesn’t just push crime elsewhere; it reduces it. “Crime is opportunistic,” he said. “If there’s no opportunity, there’s no crime.”
James Luther Turner left school in 1902, when he was eleven. His father had died in a wrestling accident, and Turner had to run his family’s farm, in Macon County, Tennessee. He was successful and entrepreneurial, and when he was twenty-four other farmers asked him to manage the local co-op; he started a bridle shop behind the store. Eventually, he took a job working for a Nashville drygoods wholesaler, hawking samples across southern Kentucky and middle Tennessee. In 1929, at the onset of the Depression, he opened a store in Scottsville, a small town in Kentucky. He bought up failed retailers’ stock, which he either liquidated, sold to other store owners, or took back to his own shop, Turner’s Bargain Store. “He also knew that where there was failure, there was opportunity,” his grandson Cal Turner, Jr., wrote in a memoir, called “My Father’s Business,” published in 2018. In 1939, James Luther Turner’s only child, Hurley Calister Turner, known as Cal, Sr., bought a building in Scottsville to serve as the warehouse for a new wholesale business, J. L. Turner and Son. Soon, he was buying so much discount merchandise that he had trouble finding stores to take it, so he and his father started a chain of stores in partnership with local managers. At first, Cal, Sr., later said, the plan was “selling the good stuff to the rich folks, but we were late getting into retailing.” He concluded, “We had to sell the cheap stuff to the poor folks.” Cal, Sr., had high standards: he called all his store managers on Saturday nights, and made frequent rounds in person. “He wanted a store to be clean and well displayed,” Cal, Jr., wrote. He started working for the company when he was about thirteen, sweeping the warehouse for twenty-five cents an hour. “I thought we agreed—no dressing up for video chats.” Cartoon by Elisabeth McNair By 1955, the Turners had three dozen stores across Kentucky and Tennessee. Cal, Sr., noticed that crowds of shoppers came to department stores in larger cities when they held “dollar days,” selling off excess merchandise cheaply. On June 1st of that year, the company converted a store in Springfield, Kentucky, into one called Dollar General. The store was a sensation, as was a second one, in Memphis, which in ten months did more than a million dollars in sales. Soon, all J. L. Turner and Son stores were renamed Dollar General, with a new slogan above the window: “Every Day Is Dollar Day.” Signs outside read “Nothing Over $1.” At first, the Turners didn’t have to radically change their business model. They bought inventory, including irregular items and closeouts, very cheap, and sold it for a little more. When a friend’s textile company had an excess of pink corduroy, Cal, Sr., had the friend make men’s pants, which he sold for a dollar a pair. He bought a truckload of wet socks in Nashville and had workers sort and hang them around the Scottsville warehouse. When bell-bottoms went out of fashion, he turned them into cutoff shorts. Once, at the end of the Christmas season, he bought thirty-five thousand fruitcakes; he sold them all a year later. Cal, Sr., sought out cheap real estate. “We don’t have to have great locations,” he said. “With our merchandise and our prices, we just need some kind of building around us.” And he paid poorly: wages were to be kept at a maximum of five per cent of a store’s gross sales, which, Cal, Jr., acknowledged, “placed us at the bottom of a low-paying industry.” A store typically had only two employees—and, if business was slow, it got by with just one at a time. When a bookkeeper invited two colleagues to lunch with a union organizer, Cal, Sr., had her fired. After the Teamsters tried to organize the company’s truck drivers, the company outsourced its transportation to a contractor and hired a slew of armed guards to escort the new drivers past picketers. Sales nearly doubled between 1963 and 1968, and the Turners took the chain public. By 1972, they had five hundred stores, and, a few years later, around the time that Cal, Sr., passed the reins to Cal, Jr., they started buying up other chains, also in small towns, extending the company far from its upland-South base. A competing chain, Family Dollar, started by Leon Levine in Charlotte in 1959, focussed mostly on low-income urban areas. By 1974, Levine had two hundred stores; he took his company public five years later. As the two chains have grown, expanding to offer many goods for more than a dollar, the urban-rural distinction between them has diminished. Today, it is not uncommon to find both stores on the same small-town main street, or a few blocks apart in a distressed urban neighborhood. (Dollar Tree, which bought Family Dollar in 2015 and has maintained both brands, keeps prices closer to a dollar with a more limited selection—wrapping paper, party supplies—sold to a more middle-class clientele. Unlike Dollar General and Family Dollar, Dollar Tree’s stores tend to be in suburban locations.) As Amazon and its e-commerce rivals have devastated brick-and-mortar shopping, the two chains represent just about the only branch of physical retail that is still growing in America. Even Walmart, often viewed as the bane of small-town retailers, has been consolidating. Last year, it closed about twenty stores, leaving some communities even more dependent on the two chains. In 2019, discount chains accounted for about half of all new retail-store openings. Dollar General alone opened nearly a thousand stores. The chains’ executives are candid about what is driving their growth: widening income inequality and the decline of many city neighborhoods and entire swaths of the country. Todd Vasos, the C.E.O. of Dollar General, told the Wall Street Journal in 2017, “The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer.”
Because dollar stores are heavily concentrated in poor towns and neighborhoods, many middle- and upper-middle-class consumers are unaware of their ubiquity—or of the frequency of armed robberies and shootings. In 2017, the manager of a Dollar General in Baltimore, where I live, was shot and killed as he was closing up. But I discovered the pervasiveness of the problem while reporting elsewhere. In Dayton, Ohio, I got to know Jimmy Donald, who was working for a heating and air-conditioning contractor while trying to start an organization to help ex-felons and others with troubled backgrounds, a category that included himself. Donald, who is thirty-eight, served in the Marines in Iraq. He then spent four years in prison, after being involved in the beating death of a man outside a Michigan bar, in 2004. He lived on the west side of Dayton, which is predominantly black; as the area has lost several grocery stores, the dollar-store chains have proliferated. This correlation is not a coincidence, according to a 2018 research brief by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for small businesses. The stores undercut traditional grocery stores by having few employees, often only three per store, and paying them little. “While dollar stores sometimes fill a need in cash-strapped communities, growing evidence suggests these stores are not merely a byproduct of economic distress,” the brief reported. “They’re a cause of it.” The dollar store in Dayton where Dave Dukes shot and killed an armed robber. Photograph by Andres Gonzalez for The New Yorker There are now more than a dozen Family Dollars and Dollar Generals on Dayton’s west side. “In a lot of these areas, they’re the only stores around,” B. J. Bethel, who has reported on the chains for WDTN, the local NBC affiliate, told me. For robbers, he added, “it’s the only place to get cash.” Donald did much of his shopping at the stores, and each week he drove his mother to them to do her shopping as well. One day in Dayton, needing a winter hat, I stopped by a Dollar General at West Third Street and James H. McGee Boulevard, where Donald and his mother were making their way down an aisle. Goods spilled off the shelves, and carts were piled high with boxes waiting to be opened and stacked, giving the store an air of neglect. Shortly before Donald and I first met, he had been the victim of an armed robbery at another west-side Dollar General. It was homecoming weekend at Central State University, the historically black college near Dayton, and his mother needed some barbecue sauce. Donald was standing in line to pay when two young men, probably in their late teens, came in and pointed a gun at the cashier. Donald concluded that they were amateurs—they weren’t wearing masks, and when the one with the gun pulled the slide back, not realizing that a round was already chambered, the bullet popped out. They ordered Donald and two women in line to get on the floor, then took the money that he had just cashed from his paycheck: seven hundred dollars. Donald described this event in an undramatic and routine manner. And for good reason: armed robberies are a regular occurrence at the Dayton stores. In 2017, the year he was held up, there were thirty-two armed robberies at eighteen Dollar Generals and Family Dollars in Dayton. (This count didn’t include the store where he was robbed, which sits just beyond the city line.) Last year, there were two dozen. The violence has included more than robberies, too. Last July, a man and a woman were killed outside a west-side Family Dollar in a murder-suicide; in September, a man was shot during a drug deal outside the Dollar General where I had run into Donald and his mother. All told, the Dayton police receive an average of nearly a thousand calls for service to the stores each year. There have been more calls to just nine of the city’s Family Dollars than there have been to one of Dayton’s two major hospitals, Grandview Medical Center, where police are often summoned for interviews with victims of violent crimes, drug overdoses, and other problems. The Dayton Police Department prides itself on being a modern, data-driven force, embracing such initiatives as “harm reduction” measures to combat the opioid epidemic. Several years ago, noticing the rise in calls to the dollar stores, the department provided training sessions for Family Dollar managers in how to practice what police call “crime prevention through environmental design.” Officers showed them how less trash outside and less clutter inside and fewer big ads in the windows, which block the view of responding police officers, would make their stores safer. The store managers were told to instruct cashiers to make frequent transfers of cash from the register to the safe. (Until 2004, Dollar General did not accept credit cards, and the stores still deal heavily in cash.) But Jason Hall, the commander of the city’s Violent Crime Bureau, told me that the effect of the training had dissipated, partly because the stores, which pay a starting wage of about nine or ten dollars an hour in states without higher minimum-wage thresholds, have such high turnover. “It was supposed to be passed down to the rest of the employees, but it didn’t trickle down,” he said. “The rank and file did not reap the benefit of that training.” Store managers have resisted pleas to reduce trash or loitering outside their stores, saying that their responsibility is limited to the stores themselves. And they are often slow about getting police the feed from store cameras after robberies, Hall said. The cameras are typically of such low quality and so poorly placed that their records are of limited use anyway. Nan Whaley, the mayor of Dayton, told me that managers sometimes discourage employees from testifying in court against robbers, because they’re needed to staff the stores. (A spokesperson for Dollar General said that she was unaware of this practice.) “What is that? They’re not even respecting the justice system,” Whaley said. “They don’t even care if they’re being held up at gunpoint.” Recently, Dayton has cited the crime and violence that the stores attract as a reason to challenge their requests to sell alcohol. Several years ago, Dollar General obtained alcohol licenses for many of its Dayton-area stores. In 2017, the city’s law department began seeking to block requests by Family Dollar to obtain licenses for seven of its stores, including three on the west side. The city had an easier time enlisting community testimony against alcohol-license applications for stores on the north and east sides of town, which are less heavily African-American. City officials attributed this imbalance in part to a general sense of resignation and powerlessness on the west side. When the state’s Division of Liquor Control approved all but one Family Dollar request, Martin Gehres, the assistant city attorney, drove a fifteen-passenger van full of north- and east-side residents to appeals hearings in Columbus. The residents, who included the owner of a bakery across from a Family Dollar and the manager of an adjacent library branch, won reversals of the approval for that store and for another on the north side. But the alcohol sales went ahead on the west side, where crime is worse. “The stores they got them at were the ones I was most concerned about,” Gehres said. “Did you shake it first to see if it’s any good?” Cartoon by Sam Gross When I met with Gehres and Hall, they told me they were aware that the stores filled a retail void for many residents of Dayton, which has lost nearly half its residents since 1960. But they also cited research suggesting that, in some places, the dollar stores have exacerbated the problem. “They are filling a food desert,” Gehres said. “And they are helping cause a food desert.”
Even the most image-conscious public corporations tend to acknowledge, in their required disclosures to investors and in their quarterly calls with market analysts, the challenges facing them. So it was startling to find no mention of the prevalence of crime and violence in recent filings for either Dollar General or Family Dollar and Dollar Tree. Company executives make occasional reference to “shrink,” the industry euphemism for stock lost mainly to shoplifting or employee theft. But the steady stream of violence at the stores, much of it directed against employees, was omitted. Dollar General emphasized its efforts to keep costs down. In its disclosures for the third quarter of 2019, Dollar General lamented the rise in nationwide hourly wages, and said that it was aiming to shift to self-checkout in many stores. The company hopes not to have to increase security at stores, since its “financial condition could be affected adversely” by doing so. “Our ability to pass along labor costs to our customers is constrained by our everyday low price model,” Dollar General concluded, “and we may not be able to offset such increased costs elsewhere in our business.” Similarly, Dollar Tree executives told analysts in a quarterly call in March that they were pushing “productivity initiatives” in stores, which would help get more from fewer workers. “We are well positioned in the most attractive sector of retail to deliver continued growth and increase value for our shareholders,” Gary Philbin, the company’s C.E.O., said. In the past five years, the share price of Dollar General has nearly tripled, outpacing the broader stock market by some eighty per cent and vastly outperforming traditional grocery stores and retailers such as Kroger and Macy’s. In 2018, Vasos, Dollar General’s C.E.O., received more than ten million dollars in total compensation, nearly eight hundred times the median pay for workers at the company. Philbin, at Dollar Tree, was paid about the same amount. Asked about the hundreds of incidents of violent crime at their stores, the companies said that they took security concerns seriously, but they did not elaborate on preventive measures at the stores. Both companies declined to say how many had armed security. Randy Guiler, a Family Dollar spokesman, said, in written responses to questions, “To ensure the integrity of our security systems and procedures, we do not publicly share specific details.” None of the ten dollar stores that I visited in Dayton had a security guard present. In liquor-board testimony, the Family Dollar manager for the region stretching across Interstate 70 from Dayton to St. Louis said that the company deployed security guards at only a couple of stores in his region, in St. Louis and Cincinnati. Guiler said that the stores coöperated fully with local police departments, and had in some places opened tip lines with rewards for information leading to arrests. He told me that the company recently hired the security firm ADT to upgrade the stores’ camera systems. Asked about the stores’ low staffing levels, Guiler said, “We are a small-box retailer. Staffing levels can, and do, vary by day, by hour and based on store sales volumes.” A spokesperson for Dollar General said, “In keeping with our mission of Serving Others, we are proud to provide a convenient, affordable retail option to customers and communities that other retailers choose not to serve.”
When Jolanda Woods heard about Robert’s murder, she returned to St. Louis from Philadelphia, where she had been working at a nonprofit, to organize his funeral. In an interview with KMOV, the local CBS affiliate, she faulted Dollar General for leaving stores understaffed and for allowing stock to pile up near the door, making it harder for workers and customers to escape robberies. “That’s not enough staff to secure your store with no security,” she said. “You can’t expect them to watch the aisles, work the cash registers, watch the thieves and stop the thieves.” Community activists helped overturn the granting of a liquor license to this dollar store in Dayton. Photograph by Andres Gonzalez for The New Yorker In February, I went to St. Louis and visited the Dollar General where Robert was killed. Inside the entrance was just the sort of barrier that Jolanda had described: a double-wide column of several dozen “totes,” or large plastic crates, holding a jumble of goods on clearance. There were cable protectors and scented oils and chicken-jerky curls and baby pacifiers and “Frozen”-themed Ziploc bags and party napkins and elastic wrist supports and charcoal foot scrub and romance novels. In the shampoo aisle, a manager was telling an employee to mark down certain goods with a price gun. “I want to sell this because this is what creates totes in the back room, and I hate totes in the back room,” he said. “So get your gun.” The next morning, I went to see Jolanda at her new house, in an inner suburb just north of the city. She called up her friend Winter and put her on speakerphone. Winter knew a lot about crime that had occurred at that Dollar General in the years when Jolanda had been living in Philadelphia. There was the time some men loaded up a large trash can with stolen goods at the store’s back door and then just hauled it out. There was the time a manager she knew became so frustrated by the crime that he asked a friend from East St. Louis to serve as de-facto security. After the friend got in an altercation with a suspected thief, the company reprimanded them, which led both to quit. “When they quit, it was all on again,” Winter said. The police say that Robert Woods’s killing remains unsolved. Jolanda had received a workers’-compensation payment on Robert’s behalf, but she was contemplating organizing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of family members of other victims of violence at Dollar Generals. “You have a service and a product that’s needed in a community,” she said. “Well, you have to be part of the community to make that work. And being part of it means ‘I’m going to secure you while you’re here. I’m going to have somebody on my lot to make sure you get to your cars. I’m going to secure it.’ These stores are throughout our community, but they have no interest in the community. They’re not giving nothing back. They give nothing back.”
Last October, Jimmy Donald was in line with a friend at a Dollar General on the west side of Dayton, at 2228 North Gettysburg, a short drive from the one where he took his mother to shop and the one where he had been robbed. He was startled to see that the cashier was carrying a pistol on his hip. The cashier, Dave Dukes, said that he had been held up recently and wanted to be ready in case it happened again. Frustration was rising at City Hall, too. When Mayor Whaley entered city government, in 2005, she viewed the dollar chains as serving a useful purpose, but over time she saw how the chains’ stores in urban neighborhoods contrasted with the ones in rural areas. Residents often sent her photos of dangerously cluttered aisles, and she asked fire marshals to issue warnings. “The more and more ubiquitous they’ve gotten, they’ve gotten less and less caring,” she said. “I came to see them as glorified check-cashing and payday lenders, for the way they prey off the poor but don’t really care about the poor.” In January, 2019, John Cranley, the mayor of Cincinnati, wrote a letter about his city’s struggles with the stores to the C.E.O. of Dollar Tree, which led to a meeting at Cincinnati’s City Hall with Cranley, Whaley, the cities’ police chiefs, and some company executives. The executives started giving a PowerPoint presentation about Dollar Tree, but the mayors cut them off, and threatened to file lawsuits against the company. The executives promised to work on “good neighbor” agreements with the cities instead, laying out terms for better coöperation. (Asked for an update this spring, Gehres, Dayton’s assistant city attorney, wrote in an e-mail, “Family Dollar and the City are ironing out the terms. Some language concerns a litter abatement program and environmental improvements to mitigate some of our concerns.”) Some cities have started to take more dramatic measures. In 2018 and 2019, Tulsa, New Orleans, and Birmingham, believing that the stores’ concentration dissuaded traditional grocers from moving in, were among the cities that passed legislation requiring new chain dollar stores to be at least a mile apart, unless they held a minimum square footage of fresh food. Whaley and Gehres told me that Dayton had considered taking this step but decided that it would be of little more than symbolic value, since the city’s immediate challenge was contending with problems at the stores it already had.
Eventually, I made it to the Dollar General on North Gettysburg, where Jimmy Donald had seen Dave Dukes, the cashier with the gun on his hip. But he was no longer there. “We have to record this, or no one’s going to believe us.” Cartoon by Ellis Rosen On October 9, 2019, Roosevelt Rappley, a twenty-three-year-old man who police said had been involved in several dollar-store robberies, came into the store carrying a gun. Dukes, who is twenty-eight, had been employed at the store for a year and a half, after years of working in construction. He had been promoted to assistant manager and, he said, had repeatedly asked his supervisors for a security guard at the store, to no avail. He had a concealed-carry permit for the gun, and, in any case, Ohio allowed open carry without a permit. The store manager knew about the gun and had not prevented him from carrying it. When Rappley drew his gun and threatened him, Dukes shot him dead. Dukes then called 911. “I just had somebody try to attempt and rob me over here at Dollar General on Gettysburg,” he said. “Came in with a firearm, threatened to take money out the drawer, pointed a gun at me and my staff members. . . . He pointed a gun at me. I had a firearm on me. I pulled my firearm, and I shot him in self-defense.” (Dukes was not charged.) The next day, Dollar General told Dukes not to return to work, according to Dukes’s lawyer, Erik Blaine. “This is a company that decided to place their stores in certain areas and absolutely fought requests for security, and then, when someone does defend themselves and their co-workers, they’re thrown out the next day,” Blaine told me. “For a company that puts profits so far over people to put their store employees at risk of life and death, it’s just unconscionable.” Dollar General declined to answer questions about the case. “When employee actions are part of police investigations, we thoroughly review matters and take appropriate action, as necessary,” the company said. In November, just a few weeks after Rappley’s death, someone robbed the Dollar General on nearby Salem Avenue, where Jimmy Donald had been robbed in 2017. The robber wore a surgical mask and fired a gun before leaving. Soon afterward, Edwin Goldsmith, who is thirty-two, took a job there. The only security training he received was a twelve-minute video. Cashiers were instructed to give up the cash in the drawer if threatened, to include a dye pack to make it easier to trace the money, and to use a red phone behind the register to call a security company that Dollar General uses. Goldsmith’s supervisors ignored his request for security guards. On St. Patrick’s Day, as Ohio started to shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, a man walked into the store while pulling on a mask, and took out a gun. There was only eighty dollars in the register; the cashiers had just transferred cash to the drop box. There was no dye pack in the register to add to the money—it still hadn’t been replaced after the November robbery. Goldsmith had only recently removed a part of the counter that the gunman had damaged with a bullet. Goldsmith, the most senior of the three employees on shift, worried that the robber would come back for more money. So Goldsmith got his own gun from his car and slipped it under his waistband. The police arrived, as did the Dollar General district manager. When they played back the camera footage to see the robbery, they also saw Goldsmith getting his gun. The following day, the store manager told Goldsmith that the company had told her to fire him for having violated the company handbook’s rule against bringing a gun to work. Dollar General declined to comment on the firing. Goldsmith had never seen the handbook. “It’s not right for me to lose my job all because I didn’t want to die in the store,” he told me the next day.


newyorker--2020-06-29--What to Do About a Room with a “Vues”?

What to Do About a Room with a “Vues”?

When Jacqueline Kennedy arrived at the White House , in 1961 , she hired a French decorator , who helped her fill the place with European antiques and fine art .
Many Americans were perturbed .
( Clement Conger , the famous White House curator , reportedly thought that it looked “ too Frenchified.
” ) There was one addition that seemed patriotic ; Kennedy installed , in the Diplomatic Reception Room , a nineteenth-century panoramic wallpaper that depicted scenes from American history : ships unloading at Boston Harbor , a stagecoach driving under the Natural Bridge , military cadets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But even the wallpaper was French—it was called “ Les Vues d ’ Amérique du Nord ” and was designed for Zuber et Cie , by an artist named Jean-Julien Deltil , who had likely never visited America .
“ Vues ” still hangs in the White House , although it now shares a room with a rug , designed by the current First Lady , Melania Trump , that displays the official flower of each state .
It can also be found at upscale places such as the Acorn Club , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in West Virginia .
Since 1929 , “ Vues ” has also covered some of the walls on the seventh floor of the Spence School , an all-girls K-12 institution on the Upper East Side .
Many students ( including Gwyneth Paltrow , Kerry Washington , and Jackie Kennedy ’ s cousin Edith Beale ) and faculty ( including Soon-Yi Previn , who was once a student teacher there ) have passed the painted scenes on their way to class .
Spence takes great pride in “ Vues , ” which is printed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ declared monuments historiques in France .
“ When students would give tours to prospective parents , they were always told to highlight the fact that we had this wallpaper , ” a recent alumna recalled .
But , about two weeks ago , an Instagram account called @ blackspencespeaks highlighted the wallpaper in a different way , citing it as an example of systemic racism at the school .
The wallpaper ’ s Boston Harbor scene includes a multiracial crowd hanging out on the docks ; its depiction of the Natural Bridge shows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ black and white men and women who are dressed in finery .
The paper is historic , but not historically accurate .
The alumnae who run the @ blackspencespeaks account believe that it also “ glorifies the trans-Atlantic slave trade and abuse of Indigenous peoples.
” “ Vues ” has long been a subject of internal discussion at Spence .
The @ blackspencespeaks account has made this conversation public .
( It has also publicized other racist incidents at the school , such as black and brown students being mistaken for one another @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nannies . )
In an early post , a current student recalled a heated classroom debate over the wallpaper .
“ The only other black girl in the class and myself had to single handedly fend off everyone telling us how to feel , ” she wrote , adding , “ The abuse of my people is nothing I would ever want to see on the walls of my school.
” In another post , a former school employee referred to the wallpaper as “ the Confederate statue of Spence.
” Robert Emlen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which has a version of “ Vues ” hanging in a building on its own campus , described the wallpaper ’ s depictions of black wealth and interracial mingling as a “ rose-colored view of life in Jacksonian America , ” and a product of a time when the French tended to romanticize the country .
( It was the era of Alexis de Tocqueville ’ s “ Democracy in America.
” ) According to Emlen , Deltil ’ s portrayal of African-Americans might be wrong , but “ gives no suggestion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ black woman who graduated from Spence in 2019 said that the work is a dangerous revision of history—one that reinforces the bad habits of her white peers .
“ Having that false history portrayed perpetuates what they want to believe , ” she said the other day .
“ They want to believe that , because we ’ re here with them , racism has disappeared , and that we don ’ t struggle as much .
But we do.
” Students at Brown recently called for the removal of “ Vues ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ responded by installing plastic screens over the panels depicting black and brown figures ; passersby are invited to leave notes commenting on the images .
When Spence convened a committee , in 2018 , to discuss what to do with its “ Vues , ” it landed on a similar solution , and , for a period , the wallpaper was covered by faculty- and staff-made art projects .
Several months later , those projects were taken down .
On June 13th , the @ blackspencespeaks account published a list of demands for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ order to address racism at the institution .
The group members did not ask for the removal of the wallpaper , because they assumed that the idea would be a non-starter .
( A 2019 alumna who served on the earlier committee recalled that the discussion was always “ framed in a way where the wallpaper wasn ’ t going to be taken down , so we had to find a different way to solve the issue.
” ) Instead , they asked that the school install another art exhibition over the paper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response .
Spence announced that the wallpaper would be removed entirely .
“ Infused by the many stories of how this wallpaper continues to isolate , separate and deny belonging at Spence for our Black and Brown community members , The Board of Trustees has decided to remove the wallpaper permanently , ” the school wrote in a statement .
The alumna who served on the earlier committee was shocked .
“ The pressure finally got to them , ” she said .
Another alumna , who graduated in 2016 , said , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This is motivating me to push for those things .
Because it ’ s attainable .
All things can happen with time.
” ♦

When Jacqueline Kennedy arrived at the White House, in 1961, she hired a French decorator, who helped her fill the place with European antiques and fine art. Many Americans were perturbed. (Clement Conger, the famous White House curator, reportedly thought that it looked “too Frenchified.”) There was one addition that seemed patriotic; Kennedy installed, in the Diplomatic Reception Room, a nineteenth-century panoramic wallpaper that depicted scenes from American history: ships unloading at Boston Harbor, a stagecoach driving under the Natural Bridge, military cadets forming a procession at West Point. But even the wallpaper was French—it was called “Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord” and was designed for Zuber et Cie, by an artist named Jean-Julien Deltil, who had likely never visited America. “Vues” still hangs in the White House, although it now shares a room with a rug, designed by the current First Lady, Melania Trump, that displays the official flower of each state. It can also be found at upscale places such as the Acorn Club, in Philadelphia, and the Greenbrier resort, in West Virginia.
Since 1929, “Vues” has also covered some of the walls on the seventh floor of the Spence School, an all-girls K-12 institution on the Upper East Side. Many students (including Gwyneth Paltrow, Kerry Washington, and Jackie Kennedy’s cousin Edith Beale) and faculty (including Soon-Yi Previn, who was once a student teacher there) have passed the painted scenes on their way to class. Spence takes great pride in “Vues,” which is printed with centuries-old hand-carved blocks that have been declared monuments historiques in France. “When students would give tours to prospective parents, they were always told to highlight the fact that we had this wallpaper,” a recent alumna recalled. But, about two weeks ago, an Instagram account called @blackspencespeaks highlighted the wallpaper in a different way, citing it as an example of systemic racism at the school.
The wallpaper’s Boston Harbor scene includes a multiracial crowd hanging out on the docks; its depiction of the Natural Bridge shows indigenous people dancing for an audience of black and white men and women who are dressed in finery. The paper is historic, but not historically accurate. The alumnae who run the @blackspencespeaks account believe that it also “glorifies the trans-Atlantic slave trade and abuse of Indigenous peoples.”
“Vues” has long been a subject of internal discussion at Spence. The @blackspencespeaks account has made this conversation public. (It has also publicized other racist incidents at the school, such as black and brown students being mistaken for one another, and their parents being mistaken for nannies.) In an early post, a current student recalled a heated classroom debate over the wallpaper. “The only other black girl in the class and myself had to single handedly fend off everyone telling us how to feel,” she wrote, adding, “The abuse of my people is nothing I would ever want to see on the walls of my school.” In another post, a former school employee referred to the wallpaper as “the Confederate statue of Spence.”
Robert Emlen, a former curator for Brown University, which has a version of “Vues” hanging in a building on its own campus, described the wallpaper’s depictions of black wealth and interracial mingling as a “rose-colored view of life in Jacksonian America,” and a product of a time when the French tended to romanticize the country. (It was the era of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”) According to Emlen, Deltil’s portrayal of African-Americans might be wrong, but “gives no suggestion of malice.” However, a young black woman who graduated from Spence in 2019 said that the work is a dangerous revision of history—one that reinforces the bad habits of her white peers. “Having that false history portrayed perpetuates what they want to believe,” she said the other day. “They want to believe that, because we’re here with them, racism has disappeared, and that we don’t struggle as much. But we do.”
Students at Brown recently called for the removal of “Vues” from their campus, and some faculty responded by installing plastic screens over the panels depicting black and brown figures; passersby are invited to leave notes commenting on the images. When Spence convened a committee, in 2018, to discuss what to do with its “Vues,” it landed on a similar solution, and, for a period, the wallpaper was covered by faculty- and staff-made art projects. Several months later, those projects were taken down.
On June 13th, the @blackspencespeaks account published a list of demands for the school’s leadership, in order to address racism at the institution. The group members did not ask for the removal of the wallpaper, because they assumed that the idea would be a non-starter. (A 2019 alumna who served on the earlier committee recalled that the discussion was always “framed in a way where the wallpaper wasn’t going to be taken down, so we had to find a different way to solve the issue.”) Instead, they asked that the school install another art exhibition over the paper.
Last week, they got a response. Spence announced that the wallpaper would be removed entirely. “Infused by the many stories of how this wallpaper continues to isolate, separate and deny belonging at Spence for our Black and Brown community members, The Board of Trustees has decided to remove the wallpaper permanently,” the school wrote in a statement. The alumna who served on the earlier committee was shocked. “The pressure finally got to them,” she said.
Another alumna, who graduated in 2016, said, “We have other things we want. This is motivating me to push for those things. Because it’s attainable. All things can happen with time.” ♦


newyorker--2020-06-29--How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands

It is a place to retreat to in a time of plague .
Outside the town are miles and miles of empty land , and few roads .
Nothing anywhere but whitegrass , dark , scrubby bushes growing close to the ground , and rocks .
Only low mountains and no trees , so there ’ s little to block the incessant wind that blows in from the sea .
It ’ s very quiet , at least when the wind dies down , and some people find the silence and the emptiness hard to take .
Before the war @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bigger farms employed dozens of men , and there were settlements with forty or fifty people living in them , but most of those people are gone now , either moved or emigrated .
These days , there is one person for every twelve square miles .
Some of the old houses are vacant and derelict ; others were hauled out of the settlements , leaving not so much as a gravel track behind , because the people who lived there rode horses .
At the edges of the two big islands , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than seven hundred smaller islands , some empty , others inhabited by only one or two families : a couple of houses , some generators , a landing strip .
There is plumbing and Internet .
With a big enough freezer , you could stay here without contact for months .
Longer , if you know how to live as people did here until very recently : killing and butchering their own mutton , milking cows , collecting seabird eggs and diddle-dee berries , digging peat for fuel .
During the war @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the town and turning up at farmhouses , there was not much worry about feeding them , or the British soldiers who took shelter in henhouses and shearing sheds .
The farmers had vegetable gardens , and countless sheep , and flour and sugar in fifty-kilo sacks .
For a hundred and fifty years , when the Falkland Islands were a distant outpost of the British Empire , many men came from the Scottish Highlands to work as shepherds , and the islands are oddly similar to the Shetlands or the Isle of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blustery rain ; the nearness of the sea—as though a piece of Scotland had broken off into the Atlantic and drifted eight thousand miles south , past Ireland , then Portugal , past Morocco and Mauritania and Senegal , down past the coasts of Brazil and Uruguay , and come to rest just a few hundred miles north of Antarctica .
But here , on days when the air is very sharp and clear , people know that a floating iceberg must be close .
And here there are penguins at the water @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with egg-yolk bibs ; squat rockhopper penguins with spiky black head feathers like gelled hair ; whimsy-hatted gentoos .
In March , as the plague was circling , the penguins had nothing to do .
They were molting , so they couldn ’ t swim or eat .
Molting , people said , was tiring and uncomfortable .
The penguins stood about in crowds near the surf , backs to the wind , waiting for their feathers to fall out .
Then again , when the plague does come there may be no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ islands each week : one to Punta Arenas , in southern Chile , on Saturdays , and one on Wednesdays , to São Paulo .
Even in normal times these flights are often cancelled owing to strong winds at the airport , and now both have been halted .
There are military flights to Britain , but these rely on a stopover to refuel , and so many countries have closed their borders that for several weeks there were no flights at all and the islands were completely cut off .
There used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and dry goods and mail once a month from Montevideo and made the rounds of the settlements , but that was a long time ago .
People who live on the more remote farms have been warned that if they get sick no one will be able to come and get them , so those most at risk are departing for the only town—Stanley , on East Falkland—if they can .
Until recently , the Falkland Islands were a quasi-feudal colony , in which an arcadian Britain of the past was preserved in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a little larger than Jamaica .
The islanders , almost all of whom claimed British ancestry , ate British food and planted British gardens , with crowded flower beds and gnomes .
They flew Union Jacks from their cars and greenhouses .
They were given to displays of patriotism that were rare in the mother country : they celebrated the Queen ’ s birthday , and sang the national anthem every Sunday in the cathedral .
When older islanders talked about Britain—even if they had never been there , and their families had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called it “ home.
” John Fowler arrived on the mail boat in 1971 .
After several awful days at sea , he woke up at four or five in the morning to find that the ship was still .
He went up on deck in his pajamas and saw that they were moored on the jetty at Stanley—the town just a few streets on the steep slope above the harbor , little white houses with colored roofs , the air smelling of peat smoke—and saw what looked like three-quarters of the population @ @ @ @ @ @ @ To him , just woken up , and disoriented by appearing in public in his pajamas , it was a dreamlike sight , in 1971—like England twenty-five years before , the men in ties and mackintoshes , the ladies in the sort of dresses he remembered his mother wearing when he was a boy .
At the time , the Falklands were poor and embattled , losing so many people to emigration that it seemed the society was in danger of becoming extinct , the islands abandoned .
Nobody knew that it was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ astonishing change : that , a generation later , it would be unrecognizable , its politics transformed , its population doubled and commingled , its identity mutating .
It is the fruit fly of societies—a tiny social organism that has metamorphosed through centuries of history in twenty years .
Everything changed for the Falklands because of a chain of events set in motion by the decision of General Leopoldo Galtieri , then President of Argentina , to invade , in April , 1982 .
Argentina had long claimed the islands , which lie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and although it was defeated in the war , it claims them still .
It maintains that the Falklands are an illegal colony , populated by implants sent by London , and that the British forces on the islands are there to prevent islanders from escaping to Argentina .
In a referendum in 2013 , all but three voters elected to remain a self-governing British territory , but the Falklands are no longer now as British as they were .
They have become a place where people fetch up from all over the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wanderers , transient workers , people fleeing politics at home .
In February , a small delegation arrived representing a group of Hong Kong Chinese who were nervous about Beijing .
Several white South Africans have turned up ; in early March , a divorced contractor from Cape Town who had recently emerged from ten years in prison , in Kuwait , visited offices in Stanley with a stack of business cards .
But the constant pressure of the Argentine claim compels the islanders to make the case to the world that they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of settlers , sharing nothing but the ground they live on .

It is a place to retreat to in a time of plague. Outside the town are miles and miles of empty land, and few roads. Nothing anywhere but whitegrass, dark, scrubby bushes growing close to the ground, and rocks. Only low mountains and no trees, so there’s little to block the incessant wind that blows in from the sea. It’s very quiet, at least when the wind dies down, and some people find the silence and the emptiness hard to take. Before the war, in 1982, some of the bigger farms employed dozens of men, and there were settlements with forty or fifty people living in them, but most of those people are gone now, either moved or emigrated. These days, there is one person for every twelve square miles. Some of the old houses are vacant and derelict; others were hauled out of the settlements, leaving not so much as a gravel track behind, because the people who lived there rode horses.
At the edges of the two big islands, East Falkland and West Falkland, are more than seven hundred smaller islands, some empty, others inhabited by only one or two families: a couple of houses, some generators, a landing strip. There is plumbing and Internet. With a big enough freezer, you could stay here without contact for months. Longer, if you know how to live as people did here until very recently: killing and butchering their own mutton, milking cows, collecting seabird eggs and diddle-dee berries, digging peat for fuel. During the war with Argentina, when people were fleeing the town and turning up at farmhouses, there was not much worry about feeding them, or the British soldiers who took shelter in henhouses and shearing sheds. The farmers had vegetable gardens, and countless sheep, and flour and sugar in fifty-kilo sacks.
For a hundred and fifty years, when the Falkland Islands were a distant outpost of the British Empire, many men came from the Scottish Highlands to work as shepherds, and the islands are oddly similar to the Shetlands or the Isle of Skye—the bleak, rocky landscape; the blustery rain; the nearness of the sea—as though a piece of Scotland had broken off into the Atlantic and drifted eight thousand miles south, past Ireland, then Portugal, past Morocco and Mauritania and Senegal, down past the coasts of Brazil and Uruguay, and come to rest just a few hundred miles north of Antarctica. But here, on days when the air is very sharp and clear, people know that a floating iceberg must be close. And here there are penguins at the water’s edge: three-foot king penguins with egg-yolk bibs; squat rockhopper penguins with spiky black head feathers like gelled hair; whimsy-hatted gentoos. In March, as the plague was circling, the penguins had nothing to do. They were molting, so they couldn’t swim or eat. Molting, people said, was tiring and uncomfortable. The penguins stood about in crowds near the surf, backs to the wind, waiting for their feathers to fall out.
Then again, when the plague does come there may be no escape. Two commercial flights leave the islands each week: one to Punta Arenas, in southern Chile, on Saturdays, and one on Wednesdays, to São Paulo. Even in normal times these flights are often cancelled owing to strong winds at the airport, and now both have been halted. There are military flights to Britain, but these rely on a stopover to refuel, and so many countries have closed their borders that for several weeks there were no flights at all and the islands were completely cut off. There used to be a boat that brought fruit and dry goods and mail once a month from Montevideo and made the rounds of the settlements, but that was a long time ago. People who live on the more remote farms have been warned that if they get sick no one will be able to come and get them, so those most at risk are departing for the only town—Stanley, on East Falkland—if they can.
“Honey, I’m home!” Cartoon by Bishakh Som Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Until recently, the Falkland Islands were a quasi-feudal colony, in which an arcadian Britain of the past was preserved in microcosm—a population of eighteen hundred, territory a little larger than Jamaica. The islanders, almost all of whom claimed British ancestry, ate British food and planted British gardens, with crowded flower beds and gnomes. They flew Union Jacks from their cars and greenhouses. They were given to displays of patriotism that were rare in the mother country: they celebrated the Queen’s birthday, and sang the national anthem every Sunday in the cathedral. When older islanders talked about Britain—even if they had never been there, and their families had been in the Falklands for five generations—they called it “home.”
John Fowler arrived on the mail boat in 1971. After several awful days at sea, he woke up at four or five in the morning to find that the ship was still. He went up on deck in his pajamas and saw that they were moored on the jetty at Stanley—the town just a few streets on the steep slope above the harbor, little white houses with colored roofs, the air smelling of peat smoke—and saw what looked like three-quarters of the population assembled onshore to greet the ship. To him, just woken up, and disoriented by appearing in public in his pajamas, it was a dreamlike sight, in 1971—like England twenty-five years before, the men in ties and mackintoshes, the ladies in the sort of dresses he remembered his mother wearing when he was a boy.
At the time, the Falklands were poor and embattled, losing so many people to emigration that it seemed the society was in danger of becoming extinct, the islands abandoned. Nobody knew that it was in fact on the verge of an astonishing change: that, a generation later, it would be unrecognizable, its politics transformed, its population doubled and commingled, its identity mutating. It is the fruit fly of societies—a tiny social organism that has metamorphosed through centuries of history in twenty years.
Everything changed for the Falklands because of a chain of events set in motion by the decision of General Leopoldo Galtieri, then President of Argentina, to invade, in April, 1982. Argentina had long claimed the islands, which lie three hundred miles off its coast, and although it was defeated in the war, it claims them still. It maintains that the Falklands are an illegal colony, populated by implants sent by London, and that the British forces on the islands are there to prevent islanders from escaping to Argentina.
In a referendum in 2013, all but three voters elected to remain a self-governing British territory, but the Falklands are no longer now as British as they were. They have become a place where people fetch up from all over the world, for all sorts of reasons—rootless wanderers, transient workers, people fleeing politics at home. In February, a small delegation arrived representing a group of Hong Kong Chinese who were nervous about Beijing. Several white South Africans have turned up; in early March, a divorced contractor from Cape Town who had recently emerged from ten years in prison, in Kuwait, visited offices in Stanley with a stack of business cards. But the constant pressure of the Argentine claim compels the islanders to make the case to the world that they are something more than a haphazard group of settlers, sharing nothing but the ground they live on.
Until three hundred years ago, the Falklands were uninhabited, except by wolves, seals, and island birds—penguins, cormorants, skuas, dark-faced ground tyrants. In 1690, a British captain, John Strong, made the first recorded landing, but he didn’t stay long. A French settlement was established in the seventeen-sixties, and quickly handed to the Spanish. For a few years in the same period, the British maintained an outpost on Saunders Island, near West Falkland, but after clashes with the Spanish they decided that it wasn’t worth the money and went home, leaving a lead plaque asserting British sovereignty. The Spanish kept a garrison on East Falkland for forty years at the end of the eighteenth century, and in the eighteen-twenties, under license from Buenos Aires, a Huguenot cattle-ranching merchant from Hamburg hired gauchos from the mainland and started a settlement that lasted for a few years until it was destroyed by an American gunboat. The British reclaimed the islands in 1833, but it was not until the eighteen-forties that a town was established at Stanley.
After that, people came from all over on boats—sheep farmers from England, fishermen from Scandinavia, seal hunters from Connecticut, whalers, pirates. For the better part of a century, Stanley’s harbor was crowded with abandoned ships wrecked on the terrible journey around Cape Horn—the route taken by European prospectors heading for the California gold rush. Many sailors deserted—traumatized by their brush with death, or just from being horribly seasick on the rough passage from Montevideo. They hid out in Camp (an Anglicization of campo, or “countryside”—in the Falklands it meant everywhere that wasn’t town) until their ship had left. Later, people arrived on yachts—they sailed into Stanley Harbor on their way somewhere else and decided to settle—a couple from Australia, a family from France.
The Lady Elizabeth, a ship grounded at the east end of Stanley Harbor. Photograph by Maroesjka Lavigne for The New Yorker
A man who lived on one of the outer islands for many years used to say that there were two kinds of people in the Falklands: those in Camp, who were mostly descended from farmers who had been kicked out of the Highlands during the clearances, and were hardworking and honest, and those in Stanley, who were descended from people thrown off ships for bad behavior, and were not to be trusted. But there were all sorts in Camp. When Lionel Blake—known as Tim—was the manager of Hill Cove Farm, on West Falkland, in the nineteen-sixties, there were juvenile delinquents working there, one of whom had come to the Falklands straight out of Borstal. It wasn’t easy to get people to move eight thousand miles for low-paid contract work, so you couldn’t be choosy. Tim advertised for shepherds in Farmers Weekly and got a steelworker, a gardener, and a cinema projectionist.
That was how many people came: they answered an ad. The Falklands weren’t a place that most people thought to go to, or had even heard of, so you had to catch their attention. In the early days, farm managers would place notices in newspapers all over Britain. Later, people would post their résumés on hospitality job sites like Catererglobal, or type “overseas jobs” into Google. You didn’t get people who were leaving a lot behind. Even Tim himself was there because he was a third son and there was no room for him on his father’s farm in Somerset.


newyorker--2020-06-29--Studio Notes on Your Rom-Com, for the Coronavirus Era

Thanks for turning in the new draft of your script .
We ’ re thrilled !
It has blossomed into a charming rom-com for the ages !
Sorry for our delay in giving you notes .
( The timing was tough , with the quarantine and all . )
The good news : our whole development team feels that the script is one rewrite away from a green light !
We have only a few small notes : IN GENERAL : We want to make sure that our leads , Shaun and Rosie , are still coming across as likable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reality .
PAGE 5 : You describe Shaun and Rosie ’ s first encounter as a “ meet-cute , ” but this now feels glib .
Please revise to a “ meet-sombre ” or a “ meet-crying.
” ( Perhaps one or both have a critically ill loved one ?
And clarify that they remain six feet apart at all times . )
PAGE 7 : Shaun notices Rosie ’ s “ million-dollar smile ” —but how would he be able to see it under the face mask that she should now be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Maybe Shaun instead admires Rosie ’ s “ million-dollar upper-nose area and/or forehead ” ? )
PAGE 8 : Shaun describes Rosie ’ s laughter as “ contagious.
” Please change to literally any other adjective .
PAGE 10 : We love the “ opposites attract ” angle ( and the subversion of stereotype ) that she ’ s a slob and he ’ s a neat freak , but instead can they both be neat freaks ?
PAGE 16 : Please change “ Shaun and Rosie ’ s First Date ” to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Zoom Date.
” PAGE 24 : Please change “ Shaun and Rosie ’ s Second Date ” to “ Shaun and Rosie ’ s Second Zoom Date.
” PAGE 35 : Please change “ The Bris of Shaun and Rosie ’ s Mutual Friend ’ s Baby ” to “ The Zoom Bris of Shaun and Rosie ’ s Mutual Friend ’ s Baby.
” PAGE 47 : Shaun calls Rosie ’ s smile “ infectious.
” Please change to literally any other adjective .
PAGE 54 : We love that Rosie has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s always making trouble for her love life !
PAGE 68 : We love the plot complication of Rosie ’ s big , successful architecture firm taking over Shaun ’ s tiny , about-to-go-bankrupt firm , but instead can both firms be about to go bankrupt ?
PAGE 75 : The scene in which Rosie , who ’ s now Shaun ’ s boss , is supposed to fire Shaun but chickens out and gives him a raise instead—can you try another angle here ?
ALSO , don ’ t forget to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tugboat also has a love interest , a cute lady dog across the hall , and they have a Zoom date ?
!
( Um , TRAILER-MOMENT ALERT ! )
PAGE 81 : We love this fifteen-page set piece at the World Series ( and how do you not love a girl who loves the Mets this much , haha ! )
, but since there ’ s no baseball anymore , or public events of any kind , can this instead be an online heart-smart-recipe exchange ?
Finally , although we love @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sider with family ties to British royalty , whereas Rosie is a gritty neighborhood girl from Queens , the movie ’ s title , “ Rosie : The Queen of Corona ” —yeah , that ’ s got ta go .
( But we have a new title idea ! )
Again , all of us here at Zoom Studios are psyched .
We plan to fast-track this film in our next production slate , once things return to normal .
Assuming the rewrite goes well , we ’ ll green-light “ Zoom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the late summer/early fall of 2025 .
Zoom !
♦

Thanks for turning in the new draft of your script. We’re thrilled! It has blossomed into a charming rom-com for the ages! Sorry for our delay in giving you notes. (The timing was tough, with the quarantine and all.) The good news: our whole development team feels that the script is one rewrite away from a green light! We have only a few small notes:
IN GENERAL: We want to make sure that our leads, Shaun and Rosie, are still coming across as likable and responsible, given our new post-COVID-19/social-distancing reality.
PAGE 5: You describe Shaun and Rosie’s first encounter as a “meet-cute,” but this now feels glib. Please revise to a “meet-sombre” or a “meet-crying.” (Perhaps one or both have a critically ill loved one? And clarify that they remain six feet apart at all times.)
PAGE 7: Shaun notices Rosie’s “million-dollar smile”—but how would he be able to see it under the face mask that she should now be wearing throughout the entire film? (Maybe Shaun instead admires Rosie’s “million-dollar upper-nose area and/or forehead”?)
PAGE 8: Shaun describes Rosie’s laughter as “contagious.” Please change to literally any other adjective.
PAGE 10: We love the “opposites attract” angle (and the subversion of stereotype) that she’s a slob and he’s a neat freak, but instead can they both be neat freaks?
PAGE 16: Please change “Shaun and Rosie’s First Date” to “Shaun and Rosie’s First Zoom Date.”
PAGE 24: Please change “Shaun and Rosie’s Second Date” to “Shaun and Rosie’s Second Zoom Date.”
PAGE 35: Please change “The Bris of Shaun and Rosie’s Mutual Friend’s Baby” to “The Zoom Bris of Shaun and Rosie’s Mutual Friend’s Baby.”
(Great news: Zoom has boarded this project as a producer!)
PAGE 47: Shaun calls Rosie’s smile “infectious.” Please change to literally any other adjective.
PAGE 54: We love that Rosie has a mischievous dog, Tugboat, who’s always making trouble for her love life!
(Note: Maybe the entire film can instead be an animated family movie about Tugboat’s hilarious high jinks? Might be easier to physically produce at this point.)
PAGE 68: We love the plot complication of Rosie’s big, successful architecture firm taking over Shaun’s tiny, about-to-go-bankrupt firm, but instead can both firms be about to go bankrupt?
PAGE 75: The scene in which Rosie, who’s now Shaun’s boss, is supposed to fire Shaun but chickens out and gives him a raise instead—can you try another angle here?
(This note isn’t COVID-related; we just thought this scene was almost unforgivably hacky.)
ALSO, don’t forget to squeeze more TUGBOAT in here! Maybe Tugboat also has a love interest, a cute lady dog across the hall, and they have a Zoom date?! (Um, TRAILER-MOMENT ALERT!)
(Great news: Zoom has purchased our studio. And now we have a slogan—“Zoom: Keeping you securely connected wherever you are!” Please have a character say this verbatim, but in a way that feels natural and unforced.)
PAGE 81: We love this fifteen-page set piece at the World Series (and how do you not love a girl who loves the Mets this much, haha!), but since there’s no baseball anymore, or public events of any kind, can this instead be an online heart-smart-recipe exchange?
Finally, although we love that Shaun is a fancy-pants Upper East Sider with family ties to British royalty, whereas Rosie is a gritty neighborhood girl from Queens, the movie’s title, “Rosie: The Queen of Corona”—yeah, that’s gotta go. (But we have a new title idea!)
Again, all of us here at Zoom Studios are psyched. We plan to fast-track this film in our next production slate, once things return to normal. Assuming the rewrite goes well, we’ll green-light “Zoom Into My Heart” to start shooting in the late summer/early fall of 2025. Zoom! ♦