newyorker--2020-10-26--Our Plexiglass-Panelled Dining Future

Our Plexiglass-Panelled Dining Future

The first time the architect and designer David Rockwell and the restaurateur Melba Wilson worked together was in 1996 .
Wilson , along with the restaurateur Drew Nieporent and Robert De Niro , was hoping to reopen Minton ’ s Playhouse , a jazz club in the former Cecil Hotel , on West 118th Street .
Minton ’ s was the birthplace of bebop ; a fire closed it in 1974 .
They asked Rockwell , who is known for his work on restaurants , hotels , and theatre productions , to bring the space back to life .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , at which such musicians as Etta James , Lionel Hampton , and Roy Ayers performed .
“ David blew it out of the park , ” Wilson said the other day .
She and Rockwell were seated in a plywood booth—painted a tropical-melon hue , under a canopy supported by ivy-covered poles—that had been installed in a parking spot outside Wilson ’ s soul-food restaurant , Melba ’ s , on West 114th Street .
Rockwell had designed the booth , too : it was a prototype for a pro-bono project , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ DineOut NYC , to equip restaurants with safe outdoor dining areas .
The project started at Melba ’ s , in part because Wilson is the president of the NYC Hospitality Alliance , a partner in DineOut NYC , which has been funded largely by private donors and corporate sponsors .
The “ outdoor dining system , ” which is modular , and incorporates plexiglass panels and telescopically extending planters , has been installed downtown , on Mott Street , and in Jackson Heights and the South Bronx .
Anyone can download the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the DineOut NYC Web site .
Rockwell said , “ When we opened this up , we had a woman come over who was so— ” “ She was in tears !
” Wilson interjected .
“ This woman walks up with her daughter , and her daughter is looking around like ‘ Oh , my God , Mom , this is so beautiful.
’ And the woman comes over to the table—it was me , David , and someone from the Mayor ’ s office—and she starts crying .
She goes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , we never see anything like this up in Harlem .
This only happens downtown.
’ ” Rockwell , whose long wavy hair gives him a zip that belies his sixty-four years , wore a dark T-shirt and a surgical mask .
He had returned to Melba ’ s with a team—including a mechanical engineer , whose mask was connected by tube to a portable HEPA filter hanging around his neck .
Bent over blueprints , they were gearing up for the next phase of DineOut NYC : indoor dining , which , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ permitted to offer if they limit capacity to twenty-five per cent and follow a set of guidelines .
At Melba ’ s , Rockwell planned to go above and beyond them .
Plexiglass partitions , built by an out-of-work scenic shop , would separate indoor tables .
“ That protects you from horizontal air movement , which is in some ways the most problematic , ” he said .
The H.V.A.C .
system would be fine-tuned , and portable HEPA filters would be installed on the floor .
Melba ’ s floor-to-ceiling windows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A host stand , with a plexiglass shield , an umbrella , and an L.E.D .
lamp , would sit on the sidewalk , so that no one eating outdoors would have to enter the premises .
Rockwell talked about other aspects of restaurant design that will forever be altered by the pandemic .
“ Sanitary stations can no longer be hidden , ” he said .
“ The fact that there are not enough bathrooms in a restaurant—it ’ s going to be interesting seeing sanitation becoming part of what people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Another thing that ’ s going to change in the restaurant world is rent structures , so that restaurants aren ’ t squeezing out four to five per cent and taking all the risk.
” Wilson nodded vigorously .
Outdoor dining had brought in a little more than fifty per cent of the revenue of a normal summer for her .
At twenty-five per cent capacity , indoor dining won ’ t make up the difference .
Before she opened Melba ’ s , in 2005 , Wilson—who says that she was “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Harlem—worked in restaurants such as Sylvia ’ s ( its founder , Sylvia Woods , was her aunt ) and Windows on the World .
For years , she saved money by stuffing stray bills under her mattress , as her mother had done .
One day , she was shocked to realize that she ’ d amassed more than three hundred thousand dollars .
“ I was , like , Oh , my God , suppose somebody robs me ?
But that ’ s how I opened up , ” she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me , being born and raised in this community , to provide the change that I wanted to see .
This was one of the most notorious drug blocks in Harlem.
” It was time for fried chicken .
Rockwell demurred—he had dinner plans—but , after a final walk-through of the dining room , he emerged holding a sweet-potato pie .
♦

David Rockwell Illustration by João Fazenda
The first time the architect and designer David Rockwell and the restaurateur Melba Wilson worked together was in 1996. Wilson, along with the restaurateur Drew Nieporent and Robert De Niro, was hoping to reopen Minton’s Playhouse, a jazz club in the former Cecil Hotel, on West 118th Street. Minton’s was the birthplace of bebop; a fire closed it in 1974. They asked Rockwell, who is known for his work on restaurants, hotels, and theatre productions, to bring the space back to life. He designed the set for a splashy fund-raiser, at which such musicians as Etta James, Lionel Hampton, and Roy Ayers performed. “David blew it out of the park,” Wilson said the other day. She and Rockwell were seated in a plywood booth—painted a tropical-melon hue, under a canopy supported by ivy-covered poles—that had been installed in a parking spot outside Wilson’s soul-food restaurant, Melba’s, on West 114th Street.
Rockwell had designed the booth, too: it was a prototype for a pro-bono project, which was launched in April, called DineOut NYC, to equip restaurants with safe outdoor dining areas. The project started at Melba’s, in part because Wilson is the president of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, a partner in DineOut NYC, which has been funded largely by private donors and corporate sponsors. The “outdoor dining system,” which is modular, and incorporates plexiglass panels and telescopically extending planters, has been installed downtown, on Mott Street, and in Jackson Heights and the South Bronx. Anyone can download the construction plans, for free, from the DineOut NYC Web site. Rockwell said, “When we opened this up, we had a woman come over who was so—”
“She was in tears!” Wilson interjected. “This woman walks up with her daughter, and her daughter is looking around like ‘Oh, my God, Mom, this is so beautiful.’ And the woman comes over to the table—it was me, David, and someone from the Mayor’s office—and she starts crying. She goes, ‘Oh, my God, Melba, we never see anything like this up in Harlem. This only happens downtown.’ ”
Rockwell, whose long wavy hair gives him a zip that belies his sixty-four years, wore a dark T-shirt and a surgical mask. He had returned to Melba’s with a team—including a mechanical engineer, whose mask was connected by tube to a portable HEPA filter hanging around his neck. Bent over blueprints, they were gearing up for the next phase of DineOut NYC: indoor dining, which, as of October 1st, restaurants are permitted to offer if they limit capacity to twenty-five per cent and follow a set of guidelines. At Melba’s, Rockwell planned to go above and beyond them. Plexiglass partitions, built by an out-of-work scenic shop, would separate indoor tables. “That protects you from horizontal air movement, which is in some ways the most problematic,” he said. The H.V.A.C. system would be fine-tuned, and portable HEPA filters would be installed on the floor. Melba’s floor-to-ceiling windows would be left open at all times. A host stand, with a plexiglass shield, an umbrella, and an L.E.D. lamp, would sit on the sidewalk, so that no one eating outdoors would have to enter the premises.
Rockwell talked about other aspects of restaurant design that will forever be altered by the pandemic. “Sanitary stations can no longer be hidden,” he said. “The fact that there are not enough bathrooms in a restaurant—it’s going to be interesting seeing sanitation becoming part of what people lead with.” He continued, “Another thing that’s going to change in the restaurant world is rent structures, so that restaurants aren’t squeezing out four to five per cent and taking all the risk.” Wilson nodded vigorously. Outdoor dining had brought in a little more than fifty per cent of the revenue of a normal summer for her. At twenty-five per cent capacity, indoor dining won’t make up the difference.
Before she opened Melba’s, in 2005, Wilson—who says that she was “born, bred, and buttered” in Harlem—worked in restaurants such as Sylvia’s (its founder, Sylvia Woods, was her aunt) and Windows on the World. For years, she saved money by stuffing stray bills under her mattress, as her mother had done. One day, she was shocked to realize that she’d amassed more than three hundred thousand dollars. “I was, like, Oh, my God, suppose somebody robs me? But that’s how I opened up,” she said. “It was important for me, being born and raised in this community, to provide the change that I wanted to see. This was one of the most notorious drug blocks in Harlem.”
It was time for fried chicken. Rockwell demurred—he had dinner plans—but, after a final walk-through of the dining room, he emerged holding a sweet-potato pie. ♦


newyorker--2020-10-26--Misremembering the British Empire

Misremembering the British Empire

The Black Lives Matter movement has accelerated a reckoning across Europe about the legacies of slavery and imperialism , nowhere more urgently than in Britain , which presided over the largest empire in world history .
The Colston statue stood on Colston Avenue , in the shadow of Colston Tower , on Colston Street , around the corner from Colston Hall .
Scratch almost any institution with roots in Britain ’ s era of global dominance and you ’ ll draw imperial blood—from the Rhodes Trust , established by the fervent expansionist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes , to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ funded by profits from Jamaican plantations worked by slaves , and the Booker Prize , launched by a food company once notorious for its exploitative practices in the cane fields of British Guiana .
Every year , the Queen honors hundreds of citizens with the Order of the British Empire .
( A 2004 parliamentary committee recommended changing the name to the Order of British Excellence , to no avail . )
Public discussion in Britain about the imperial past has pivoted on a reductive question : Was the empire good or bad @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ ensure the historical injustices of colonialism , and the role of the British Empire ” are “ properly integrated into the National Curriculum , ” while Boris Johnson , the Prime Minister , decries a “ cringing embarrassment about our history.
” A March , 2020 , poll found that a third of Britons believed that their empire had done more good than harm for colonies—a higher percentage than in other former imperial powers , including France and Japan .
More than a quarter of Britons want the empire back .
Asking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or bad is , as a historical matter , about as useful as asking whether the Atlantic Ocean is good or bad .
When , what , where , for whom ?
Britons have been left ill-equipped to say .
Unlike most other European countries , Britain stops requiring students to study history when they reach the age of fourteen , which leaves little room for nuance in a national curriculum designed to showcase “ our island story.
” The public narrative about Britain ’ s imperial past matters because it is keenly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Our collective amnesia about the legacy of our colonial past is not getting any better , ” the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch observes in her podcast “ We Need to Talk About the British Empire.
” “ We ’ re engulfed in a sense of denial.
” Satia , whose earlier books described British surveillance of the interwar Middle East and the eighteenth-century origins of a British military-industrial complex , is well attuned to the echoes of historical scripts .
Mill ’ s basic premise that imperialism brings progress reverberated in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ act abolishing the transatlantic slave trade , in 1807 , was held up as proof of the British Empire ’ s commitment to freedom , effacing its shameful past as the largest slave trader in the eighteenth-century world .
Colonial independence , in the twentieth century , was depicted as the culmination of a selfless mission to spread democracy , something “ given ” or “ granted ” to colonies , rather than something long denied by force .
The Second World War became the British Empire ’ s triumphant last stand as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ face of fascism , eliding Britain ’ s violent suppression of anticolonial resistance .
“ In the end , the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans , Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs , ” Niall Ferguson wrote in 2002 .
“ Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire ’ s other sins ?
” “ Time ’ s Monster ” joins a dense body of scholarship analyzing liberal justifications for empire .
By the early twentieth century , critics were growing skeptical of British claims about progress .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Bengal in 1910 as a Methodist missionary and befriended the anticolonial poets Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal .
The Great War , in which Thompson served as an Army chaplain in Mesopotamia , soured him on the much touted promises of British civilization .
He started writing history to expose the unsavory truths that propagandists had left out .
In “ The Other Side of the Medal ” ( 1925 ) , a revisionist history of the Indian rebellion of 1857 , Thompson described British atrocities passed over in earlier accounts .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to “ face the things that happened , and change our way of writing about them.
” In an incisive recent study of anticolonial dissent , “ Insurgent Empire ” ( Verso ) , Priyamvada Gopal , a professor of English at Cambridge , places Thompson in a long line of critics of imperialism .
She and Satia agree that public outcries against injustice—such as the brutal suppression of the 1865 uprising at Morant Bay , Jamaica , and the 1919 Amritsar Massacre , in which soldiers under British command fired into a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a scapegoating of individuals and the laundering of the nation ’ s conscience .
Yet , through a process of what Gopal calls “ reverse tutelage , ” colonial subjects consistently pressed their British interlocutors to adopt more radical stances against empire .
One might see Thompson as a sort of real-life Fielding , the British teacher at the center of E. M. Forster ’ s “ A Passage to India , ” who learns from the Indian doctor Aziz that , in Gopal ’ s words , they “ would have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the English out of India before they could be friends.
” “ Insurgent Empire ” demonstrates how often critics have hacked at the pedestals of imperial pieties , and how consistently voices outside Britain have inspired them .
Nine decades ago , the Scottsboro case prompted anticolonial activists to confront racism ; five years before Colston tumbled down , Rhodes Must Fall , a student movement at the University of Cape Town , inspired an affiliated campaign at Oxford to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes and “ decolonize ” the curriculum .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Making of the English Working Class ” ( 1963 ) is one of the most influential works of modern history .
Its method , “ history from below , ” has had an incalculable international impact , not least in recuperating the histories of colonized people .
Yet , in Satia ’ s view , Thompson himself personified an insular turn taken by historians of his generation , who , as Britain ’ s global power waned , focussed intently on the local .
Histories that ignored British imperialism , she suggests , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ histories that defended it did .
Insularity , though , hardly describes postwar Britain ’ s other preëminent historian , Eric Hobsbawm .
A secular Jew born in Alexandria and raised in Vienna and Berlin , Hobsbawm , a lifelong Communist , wrote panoramic histories that unfurled the international ramifications of British industrialization .
And empire was an ever-present frame for the cultural theorist Stuart Hall , another co-founder of The New Left Review , who came to England from Jamaica as a Rhodes Scholar , and argued that “ the very notion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ is bound up with empire.
” In the nineteen-nineties , practitioners of a “ new imperial history ” ( including Hall ’ s wife , Catherine , a distinguished feminist historian ) picked up this thread and stitched the stories of the British Empire and the British Isles together again .
Historians , whether mythmaking or record-righting , draw on sources that are themselves shaped by historical pressures—and these , too , played a role in distorting the picture of the imperial past .
For while Thompson and his contemporaries were performing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imperial officers of the British government were doing their best to leave little for posterity to find .
At the empire ’ s late-Victorian apogee , Rudyard Kipling had enjoined his compatriots to contemplate the ruins of fallen powers with humility : “ Judge of the Nations , spare us yet , / Lest we forget—lest we forget !
” In the event , an apter motto for Britain ’ s imperial retreat was “ Best we forget.
” In one colony after another , as the former Guardian journalist Ian Cobain details @ @ @ @ @ @ @ History Thieves , ” the British went down in a blaze of documents .
A reporter in Cairo during the Suez Crisis recalled standing on the lawn of the British Embassy “ ankle deep in the ashes of burning files.
” Twelve days before Malaya ’ s independence , in 1957 , British soldiers in Kuala Lumpur loaded trucks with boxes of records to be driven down to Singapore and , a colonial official reported , “ destroyed in the Navy ’ s splendid incinerator.
” In 1961 , recognizing that “ it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ celebrate Independence Day with smoke , ” the Colonial Office advised the governor of Trinidad and Tobago to get an early start , and told him that he could also pack files into weighted crates and drop them into the sea .
In British Guiana , in 1965 , two women hovered over a forty-four-gallon drum on the Government House grounds carrying out what their boss described as “ the hot and wearing work ” of cremating files .
What colonial officials didn ’ t destroy , they hid .
In Nairobi , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four packing crates of sensitive papers were hustled into a plane and flown to London Gatwick , where a government official supervised their transfer into storage .
These , along with thousands of other colonial files , ended up stashed behind the razor wire of Hanslope Park , in Buckinghamshire , an intelligence facility dedicated to communications security—that is , to keeping secrets .
“ Erasing history ” is a charge invariably lobbed at those who want to remove the statues of contentious figures .
But taking down a statue isn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cultural priorities .
Those who pulled down the Colston statue were , in a way , making history—by insisting that public space reflect the values of postcolonial Britain , just as citizens of former colonies have renamed , removed , and reframed imperial symbols .
( In the nineteen-fifties , a British diplomat in India discouraged the idea of sending dismantled monuments to England , wondering “ what use a series of somewhat weather-beaten and not uniformly first-class statues could be put to in the United Kingdom .
I thought we had too @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : now , that ’ s erasing history .
By eliminating written evidence of their actions from the archival record , British officials sought to manipulate the kinds of histories that future generations would be able to produce .
E. P. Thompson , who struggled for years with the “ secret state ” to get details about his brother ’ s death during a covert wartime operation , would not have been surprised by the extent of government duplicity .
“ Reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , rifling through their files to figure out what to destroy , came up with a name for the process of erasure .
They called it Operation Legacy .
The secret stash at Hanslope Park was revealed only in 2011 , during a lawsuit brought against the British government by victims of torture in colonial Kenya .
( The case was based in part on oral testimony gathered by my Harvard colleague Caroline Elkins . )
What came pouring out from the so-called “ migrated archives ” were records of systematic , wide-ranging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the face of the popular British myth that—as a Home Office guide for the U.K. citizenship test currently assures us— “ there was , for the most part , an orderly transition from Empire to Commonwealth , with countries being granted their independence.
” “ The problem with weighing pros and cons is that it presumes there is a point at which the story is over , the accounts are closed , and we can actually tot up the balance , ” Satia writes .
But the reckoning continues .
In 2018 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the “ Windrush generation ” ( named for a ship , the Empire Windrush , which brought Caribbean migrants to the U.K. in 1948 ) , who had legally settled in Britain between 1948 and 1973 , had recently been deported by the Home Office because they couldn ’ t prove their status .
Their landing cards—often the only record of their legal arrival—had been destroyed in a procedural culling of the archives in 2010 .
Satia joins Gopal , Hirsch , and a growing number of historians—many of them scholars of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A fuller history of empire and its legacies requires , in part , what Gopal calls “ a sustained unlearning.
” This approach is gaining momentum , at least symbolically .
Two days after Colston fell , a crane in London ’ s Docklands hoisted the effigy of another slave trader off its plinth , as Mayor Sadiq Khan launched a review of all public landmarks .
The University of Liverpool announced the renaming of a dormitory commemorating Prime Minister William Gladstone , who was the son of a slaveowner and , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1833 , had argued in favor of compensating slaveowners for emancipated slaves .
The governing body of Oriel College , Oxford , voted to remove the controversial statue of Rhodes that , four years earlier , it had affirmed keeping in place , while Imperial College London , endowed by Rhodes ’ s South African mining cronies , removed its motto , Scientia imperii decus et tutamen : “ Scientific knowledge , the crowning glory and safeguard of the empire.
” What shall be learned instead ?
Satia , taking inspiration from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ historians to step away from narratives of moral progress and seek fresh ways to connect the present and the past .
A good example of what that might look like in practice is University College London ’ s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership .
The center ( which Catherine Hall chairs ) has compiled a database of every slaveowner in the British colonies at the time of emancipation , in 1833 , and has wrinkled the sanctimonious tale of British abolitionism .
Its researchers have shown that government @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inherited by generations of prominent bankers , writers , engineers , and politicians—sustaining slaveowners ’ privilege right down to the present .
Last year , the University of Glasgow , scrutinizing its own imperial gains , announced a twenty-million-pound project to explore the history of slavery and its consequences , in partnership with the University of the West Indies , whose vice-chancellor , Sir Hilary Beckles , has been at the forefront of the Caribbean reparations movement .
A myth countered , a history deepened , and a gesture of recompense .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but such beginnings might help historians imagine broader forms of recovery and repair .
That , too , could be a kind of progress .
♦

On a cloud-spackled Sunday last June, protesters in Bristol, England, gathered at a statue of Edward Colston, a seventeenth-century slave trader on whose watch more than eighty thousand Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic. “Pull it down!” the crowd chanted, as people yanked on a rope around the statue’s neck. A few tugs, and the figure clanged off its pedestal. A panel of its coat skirt cracked off to expose a hollow buttock as the demonstrators rolled the statue toward the harbor, a few hundred yards away, and then tipped it headlong into the water.
The Black Lives Matter movement has accelerated a reckoning across Europe about the legacies of slavery and imperialism, nowhere more urgently than in Britain, which presided over the largest empire in world history. The Colston statue stood on Colston Avenue, in the shadow of Colston Tower, on Colston Street, around the corner from Colston Hall. Scratch almost any institution with roots in Britain’s era of global dominance and you’ll draw imperial blood—from the Rhodes Trust, established by the fervent expansionist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes, to the British Museum, whose founding collection was funded by profits from Jamaican plantations worked by slaves, and the Booker Prize, launched by a food company once notorious for its exploitative practices in the cane fields of British Guiana. Every year, the Queen honors hundreds of citizens with the Order of the British Empire. (A 2004 parliamentary committee recommended changing the name to the Order of British Excellence, to no avail.)
Public discussion in Britain about the imperial past has pivoted on a reductive question: Was the empire good or bad? The Labour Party has pledged to “ensure the historical injustices of colonialism, and the role of the British Empire” are “properly integrated into the National Curriculum,” while Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, decries a “cringing embarrassment about our history.” A March, 2020, poll found that a third of Britons believed that their empire had done more good than harm for colonies—a higher percentage than in other former imperial powers, including France and Japan. More than a quarter of Britons want the empire back.
Asking, today, whether empire was good or bad is, as a historical matter, about as useful as asking whether the Atlantic Ocean is good or bad. When, what, where, for whom? Britons have been left ill-equipped to say. Unlike most other European countries, Britain stops requiring students to study history when they reach the age of fourteen, which leaves little room for nuance in a national curriculum designed to showcase “our island story.” The public narrative about Britain’s imperial past matters because it is keenly felt to license present injustice. “Our collective amnesia about the legacy of our colonial past is not getting any better,” the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch observes in her podcast “We Need to Talk About the British Empire.” “We’re engulfed in a sense of denial.”
How did the British get to be so blinkered about their own history? In “Time’s Monster: How History Makes History” (Harvard), a probing new book, the Stanford professor Priya Satia argues that British views of empire remain “hostage to myth” partly because historians made them so. In 1817, the utilitarian philosopher James Mill provided a template when he published his three-volume “History of British India,” which became a textbook for colonial administrators. Civilization evolves in stages, the logic ran; Britain had reached a higher stage than its colonies; therefore Britain had a moral duty to lift them up. Mill soon got a job drafting dispatches in the East India Company’s London headquarters. (Mill’s eldest son, John Stuart, who at the age of eleven had helped correct the book’s page proofs, joined him at India House as a junior clerk in 1823 and stayed until the East India Company was dismantled, in 1858.)
Satia, whose earlier books described British surveillance of the interwar Middle East and the eighteenth-century origins of a British military-industrial complex, is well attuned to the echoes of historical scripts. Mill’s basic premise that imperialism brings progress reverberated in a series of moral claims. The parliamentary act abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, in 1807, was held up as proof of the British Empire’s commitment to freedom, effacing its shameful past as the largest slave trader in the eighteenth-century world. Colonial independence, in the twentieth century, was depicted as the culmination of a selfless mission to spread democracy, something “given” or “granted” to colonies, rather than something long denied by force. The Second World War became the British Empire’s triumphant last stand as the bulwark of global liberty in the face of fascism, eliding Britain’s violent suppression of anticolonial resistance. “In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs,” Niall Ferguson wrote in 2002. “Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?”
“Time’s Monster” joins a dense body of scholarship analyzing liberal justifications for empire. By the early twentieth century, critics were growing skeptical of British claims about progress. Consider Edward John Thompson, who travelled to Bengal in 1910 as a Methodist missionary and befriended the anticolonial poets Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal. The Great War, in which Thompson served as an Army chaplain in Mesopotamia, soured him on the much touted promises of British civilization. He started writing history to expose the unsavory truths that propagandists had left out. In “The Other Side of the Medal” (1925), a revisionist history of the Indian rebellion of 1857, Thompson described British atrocities passed over in earlier accounts. It was time, he said, to “face the things that happened, and change our way of writing about them.”
In an incisive recent study of anticolonial dissent, “Insurgent Empire” (Verso), Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of English at Cambridge, places Thompson in a long line of critics of imperialism. She and Satia agree that public outcries against injustice—such as the brutal suppression of the 1865 uprising at Morant Bay, Jamaica, and the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, in which soldiers under British command fired into a crowd of nonviolent Indian protesters—often amounted to a scapegoating of individuals and the laundering of the nation’s conscience. Yet, through a process of what Gopal calls “reverse tutelage,” colonial subjects consistently pressed their British interlocutors to adopt more radical stances against empire. One might see Thompson as a sort of real-life Fielding, the British teacher at the center of E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” who learns from the Indian doctor Aziz that, in Gopal’s words, they “would have to be allies in the project of driving the English out of India before they could be friends.” “Insurgent Empire” demonstrates how often critics have hacked at the pedestals of imperial pieties, and how consistently voices outside Britain have inspired them. Nine decades ago, the Scottsboro case prompted anticolonial activists to confront racism; five years before Colston tumbled down, Rhodes Must Fall, a student movement at the University of Cape Town, inspired an affiliated campaign at Oxford to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes and “decolonize” the curriculum.
What happened to this critical strand in the history of the British Empire? Satia finds an unexpected answer in Thompson’s son, Edward Palmer Thompson. As a boy, he saw the stream of writers and activists who passed through the family’s home, outside Oxford—Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, T. E. Lawrence—as a source of exotic stamps for his collection. When he was a young man, returning from service in the Second World War to complete a degree in history, he rebelled against his father’s Byronic ideals and engagement with Indian affairs. He joined the Communist Party, took a teaching job in Leeds, resigned from the Communist Party, co-founded The New Left Review, and wrote about the lives of working-class radicals—to rescue them, he said, from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
E. P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class” (1963) is one of the most influential works of modern history. Its method, “history from below,” has had an incalculable international impact, not least in recuperating the histories of colonized people. Yet, in Satia’s view, Thompson himself personified an insular turn taken by historians of his generation, who, as Britain’s global power waned, focussed intently on the local. Histories that ignored British imperialism, she suggests, contributed to historical illiteracy as much as histories that defended it did.
Insularity, though, hardly describes postwar Britain’s other preëminent historian, Eric Hobsbawm. A secular Jew born in Alexandria and raised in Vienna and Berlin, Hobsbawm, a lifelong Communist, wrote panoramic histories that unfurled the international ramifications of British industrialization. And empire was an ever-present frame for the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, another co-founder of The New Left Review, who came to England from Jamaica as a Rhodes Scholar, and argued that “the very notion of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’ is bound up with empire.” In the nineteen-nineties, practitioners of a “new imperial history” (including Hall’s wife, Catherine, a distinguished feminist historian) picked up this thread and stitched the stories of the British Empire and the British Isles together again.
Historians, whether mythmaking or record-righting, draw on sources that are themselves shaped by historical pressures—and these, too, played a role in distorting the picture of the imperial past. For while Thompson and his contemporaries were performing their acts of archival recovery, the imperial officers of the British government were doing their best to leave little for posterity to find.
On a showery Friday in August, 1947, citizens of the new nation of India crammed into the ceremonial avenues of New Delhi to celebrate their first day of independence. “Jai Hind! Jai Hind! ” they cheered as the new tricolor was run up the flagpole, and a rainbow broke over the clearing sky. But for days beforehand, it was said, a haze of smoke had blanketed the city: the British were burning government documents en masse, lest anything that might compromise His Majesty’s government get into the wrong hands.
At the empire’s late-Victorian apogee, Rudyard Kipling had enjoined his compatriots to contemplate the ruins of fallen powers with humility: “Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, / Lest we forget—lest we forget!” In the event, an apter motto for Britain’s imperial retreat was “Best we forget.” In one colony after another, as the former Guardian journalist Ian Cobain details in his 2016 book, “The History Thieves,” the British went down in a blaze of documents. A reporter in Cairo during the Suez Crisis recalled standing on the lawn of the British Embassy “ankle deep in the ashes of burning files.” Twelve days before Malaya’s independence, in 1957, British soldiers in Kuala Lumpur loaded trucks with boxes of records to be driven down to Singapore and, a colonial official reported, “destroyed in the Navy’s splendid incinerator.” In 1961, recognizing that “it would perhaps be a little unfortunate to celebrate Independence Day with smoke,” the Colonial Office advised the governor of Trinidad and Tobago to get an early start, and told him that he could also pack files into weighted crates and drop them into the sea. In British Guiana, in 1965, two women hovered over a forty-four-gallon drum on the Government House grounds carrying out what their boss described as “the hot and wearing work” of cremating files. What colonial officials didn’t destroy, they hid. In Nairobi, nine days before Kenya became independent, four packing crates of sensitive papers were hustled into a plane and flown to London Gatwick, where a government official supervised their transfer into storage. These, along with thousands of other colonial files, ended up stashed behind the razor wire of Hanslope Park, in Buckinghamshire, an intelligence facility dedicated to communications security—that is, to keeping secrets.
“Erasing history” is a charge invariably lobbed at those who want to remove the statues of contentious figures. But taking down a statue isn’t erasing history; it’s revising cultural priorities. Those who pulled down the Colston statue were, in a way, making history—by insisting that public space reflect the values of postcolonial Britain, just as citizens of former colonies have renamed, removed, and reframed imperial symbols. (In the nineteen-fifties, a British diplomat in India discouraged the idea of sending dismantled monuments to England, wondering “what use a series of somewhat weather-beaten and not uniformly first-class statues could be put to in the United Kingdom. I thought we had too many already!”)
Burning documents: now, that’s erasing history. By eliminating written evidence of their actions from the archival record, British officials sought to manipulate the kinds of histories that future generations would be able to produce. E. P. Thompson, who struggled for years with the “secret state” to get details about his brother’s death during a covert wartime operation, would not have been surprised by the extent of government duplicity. “Reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge,” he said. Colonial officials in Uganda, rifling through their files to figure out what to destroy, came up with a name for the process of erasure. They called it Operation Legacy.
The secret stash at Hanslope Park was revealed only in 2011, during a lawsuit brought against the British government by victims of torture in colonial Kenya. (The case was based in part on oral testimony gathered by my Harvard colleague Caroline Elkins.) What came pouring out from the so-called “migrated archives” were records of systematic, wide-ranging, stomach-churning abuse. These accounts flew in the face of the popular British myth that—as a Home Office guide for the U.K. citizenship test currently assures us—“there was, for the most part, an orderly transition from Empire to Commonwealth, with countries being granted their independence.”
“The problem with weighing pros and cons is that it presumes there is a point at which the story is over, the accounts are closed, and we can actually tot up the balance,” Satia writes. But the reckoning continues. In 2018, it emerged that dozens of immigrants of the “Windrush generation” (named for a ship, the Empire Windrush, which brought Caribbean migrants to the U.K. in 1948), who had legally settled in Britain between 1948 and 1973, had recently been deported by the Home Office because they couldn’t prove their status. Their landing cards—often the only record of their legal arrival—had been destroyed in a procedural culling of the archives in 2010.
In 2002, the privately funded British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which aimed to present the imperial age from multiple perspectives, opened in Bristol after more than a decade of planning. In a slant rhyme to the end of empire, it closed its doors six years later and went into liquidation amid sordid reports about the unauthorized sale of loaned objects. The chairman of the museum’s board of trustees said, “I think the time has not yet arrived for the proper story of Empire and Commonwealth to be told.”
Satia joins Gopal, Hirsch, and a growing number of historians—many of them scholars of color—in trying to change that storyline. A fuller history of empire and its legacies requires, in part, what Gopal calls “a sustained unlearning.” This approach is gaining momentum, at least symbolically. Two days after Colston fell, a crane in London’s Docklands hoisted the effigy of another slave trader off its plinth, as Mayor Sadiq Khan launched a review of all public landmarks. The University of Liverpool announced the renaming of a dormitory commemorating Prime Minister William Gladstone, who was the son of a slaveowner and, in his maiden speech in Parliament, in 1833, had argued in favor of compensating slaveowners for emancipated slaves. The governing body of Oriel College, Oxford, voted to remove the controversial statue of Rhodes that, four years earlier, it had affirmed keeping in place, while Imperial College London, endowed by Rhodes’s South African mining cronies, removed its motto, Scientia imperii decus et tutamen: “Scientific knowledge, the crowning glory and safeguard of the empire.”


newyorker--2020-10-26--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons November 2, 2020

“ And the award for scariest costume goes to .
.
.
the one guy not wearing a mask .
@

“And the award for scariest costume goes to . . . the one guy not wearing a mask.”
Cartoon by Daryl Seitchik


newyorker--2020-10-26--Experiments in Audio Theatre, Radical and Retro

“ Look with thine ears , ” Lear tells poor blind Gloucester , and that is exactly what the rest of us should do now we know that the majority of New York theatres will not open their doors until , at the most optimistic guesstimate , the middle of next year .
Zoom fatigue set in months ago , but audio is stepping into the breach to take us places that glazed screen-gazing can ’ t .
The eyes tend toward the literal , while what we only hear can bloom , the way a novel does , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is the case with two new productions—one radical , one retro—that use audio to light a path forward for performance in the COVID era and beyond .
“ A Thousand Ways ” ( produced by the Brooklyn-based ArKtype ) was created by the duo Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone , who go by the moniker 600 Highwaymen and are known for devising inventive , sincere theatre of a kind that makes urbane audiences fatted on cynicism feel wonder afresh .
In “ This Great Country , ” from 2012 , seventeen performers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out scenes from “ Death of a Salesman , ” transforming that classic into something rich and strange ; “ Employee of the Year , ” staged in 2014 , had five girls under the age of eleven tell the story of one woman ’ s adulthood .
Browde and Silverstone , who are partners in life as well as in theatre , insist that they hate audience participation , which is a little like Elmer Fudd saying that he hates hunting wabbits .
“ The Fever , ” which premièred in New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by its creators , as “ a public convergence , ” and involves much communal writhing and laying on of hands ; people who attended the show describe it as if they had gone to an ordinary church service and left speaking in tongues .
The term “ experimental ” tends to signal an ambition to flaunt difficulty and occlude meaning , but 600 Highwaymen ’ s experiments with theatrical form are distinctly generous .
That is the case with “ A Thousand Ways , ” which takes a simple premise and turns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ designed to be staged , ultimately , in three parts , the latter of which will involve physical encounters , safety permitting .
Part 1 is being rolled out virtually , by fourteen theatres around the globe , from Toronto to Dublin to Singapore .
It consists of an hour-long phone call between two strangers , mediated by a friendly female-sounding robot .
I participated in a performance “ at ” Williams College , where my ticket confirmation came with instructions reminiscent of those you ’ d receive when pledging a secret society @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stroke of eight , I was to call a number and be introduced to my partner ; I should be in “ a quiet , interruption-free indoor space , ” with a fully charged phone .
( In fact , I used a landline .
Have you heard of them ?
They ’ re fantastic—no news alerts , and you can ’ t lose hours of your life to Instagram . )
And there my partner was—a male voice , nameless , as I was to him .
We were asked , by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and then to decide which of us would be Person A and which Person B .
This accomplished , we were prompted to describe , in simple , specific terms , aspects of the rooms we were in , and to put our hands on our cheeks , grounding ourselves in the physical .
It ’ s amazing what a voice conveys , and what it doesn ’ t .
Person A , I decided right away , was a retiree who ’ d figured he might as well try something new .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ my partner revealed that he was born in 1988 .
I , meanwhile , was asked merely to say if I was alive then ; he would never know that I was only a year older than he was .
The deliberately asymmetrical titration of information is integral to the mystery and pleasure of “ A Thousand Ways.
” It eliminates the polite “ and you ?
” reflex .
How novel , and relaxing , to give up conversational control—to feel interest without needing to perform it for the sake of social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ convince or entertain .
I learned that my partner was gay and proud of it ( “ I do , in a very positive way , have limp wrists , ” he said , when asked to describe a physical mannerism ) , and that he was a painter .
He learned that my ancestors , whom I was asked to describe in three words , were poor Ashkenazi Jews .
He found out that I have never shot a gun , and that I know how to train a dog .
( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ robot asked A to tell me if he had inherited money ; she asked me to describe a quality from childhood that I wished I could recover .
What we were doing was dancing , using only our voices , learning each other ’ s rhythms as the steps were called , the random and the banal grapevining with the profound .
There was a story , of a sort , woven through all this choreographed talk .
The robot asked us to imagine that we were in a car that had broken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end , we were camping together by a fire under the stars , disaster averted .
Something here touched on the twee .
Nonetheless , when the Person A in my own life walked through the door and accidentally destroyed my desert by turning on the lights , I waved him wildly out .
I wanted to stay on that frequency , with that stranger , until we were severed by the robot ’ s brusque “ goodbye , ” leaving me with that best and rarest of feelings—wanting more .
What works @ @ @ @ @ @ @ itself , which was written in the year it is set , and has the quality of a time capsule opened too soon .
It could be revived in twenty years , if audiences want to remember what a certain subset of comfortable liberals sounded like as they tried to make sense of the first moments of the Trump Presidency , but otherwise it might be best left in the ground .
It is spring .
James Comey has just testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee .
A group of New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gathered at the upstate farmhouse recently bought by Jools and Richard ( Sue Jean Kim and Richard Topol ) .
Trump is the non-stop subject .
Allie ( Brooke Bloom ) is furious that her friends seem to have accepted the scuttling of Merrick Garland ’ s Supreme Court nomination ; Luis ( Raúl Esparza ) , a lawyer who emigrated from El Salvador as a child , is attracted to the chaos surrounding Trump in a Faustian sort of way , but the significance of his origins in Trump ’ s America @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a good ear for ripped-from-the-op-ed-page outrage .
The play hints at the impotence of a politics that is rooted in norms rather than in ideas , and enacts , with minimal critique , the liberals ’ wheel-spinning obsession with the minutiae of a bankrupt political reality that is rotting the country but not directly affecting their own lives .
What Washburn doesn ’ t do is make any of this matter much .
The characters are generic , interchangeable city types , saying the familiar MSNBC things ; the personal , which should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , then dropped .
In an aside that fascinates before it fizzles , a white farmer ( Bruce McKenzie ) tells us about adopting a boy from Kenya , though the son has been cut from this production .
There are two ineffective fantasias , one a dull imagining of the notorious private dinner between Trump ( Bill Camp , sounding like Frasier Crane ) and Comey ( Joe Morton ) , the other a baffling confrontation over the Iraq War between a weirdly statesmanlike Trump and a clownish George W. Bush ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be a subject long after he is—Inshallah—out of power .
What is said about him onstage will matter only if it can tell us something about ourselves .
♦

“Look with thine ears,” Lear tells poor blind Gloucester, and that is exactly what the rest of us should do now we know that the majority of New York theatres will not open their doors until, at the most optimistic guesstimate, the middle of next year. Zoom fatigue set in months ago, but audio is stepping into the breach to take us places that glazed screen-gazing can’t. The eyes tend toward the literal, while what we only hear can bloom, the way a novel does, in the privacy of the mind, as is the case with two new productions—one radical, one retro—that use audio to light a path forward for performance in the COVID era and beyond.
“A Thousand Ways” (produced by the Brooklyn-based ArKtype) was created by the duo Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, who go by the moniker 600 Highwaymen and are known for devising inventive, sincere theatre of a kind that makes urbane audiences fatted on cynicism feel wonder afresh. In “This Great Country,” from 2012, seventeen performers, some experienced, some green, acted out scenes from “Death of a Salesman,” transforming that classic into something rich and strange; “Employee of the Year,” staged in 2014, had five girls under the age of eleven tell the story of one woman’s adulthood. Browde and Silverstone, who are partners in life as well as in theatre, insist that they hate audience participation, which is a little like Elmer Fudd saying that he hates hunting wabbits. “The Fever,” which premièred in New York in 2017, is described, by its creators, as “a public convergence,” and involves much communal writhing and laying on of hands; people who attended the show describe it as if they had gone to an ordinary church service and left speaking in tongues.
The term “experimental” tends to signal an ambition to flaunt difficulty and occlude meaning, but 600 Highwaymen’s experiments with theatrical form are distinctly generous. That is the case with “A Thousand Ways,” which takes a simple premise and turns it into magic. The piece is designed to be staged, ultimately, in three parts, the latter of which will involve physical encounters, safety permitting. Part 1 is being rolled out virtually, by fourteen theatres around the globe, from Toronto to Dublin to Singapore. It consists of an hour-long phone call between two strangers, mediated by a friendly female-sounding robot. I participated in a performance “at” Williams College, where my ticket confirmation came with instructions reminiscent of those you’d receive when pledging a secret society or delivering a ransom. At the stroke of eight, I was to call a number and be introduced to my partner; I should be in “a quiet, interruption-free indoor space,” with a fully charged phone. (In fact, I used a landline. Have you heard of them? They’re fantastic—no news alerts, and you can’t lose hours of your life to Instagram.) And there my partner was—a male voice, nameless, as I was to him. We were asked, by the robot, to say hello, and then to decide which of us would be Person A and which Person B. This accomplished, we were prompted to describe, in simple, specific terms, aspects of the rooms we were in, and to put our hands on our cheeks, grounding ourselves in the physical.
It’s amazing what a voice conveys, and what it doesn’t. Person A, I decided right away, was a retiree who’d figured he might as well try something new. Wrong! Prompted by the robot, my partner revealed that he was born in 1988. I, meanwhile, was asked merely to say if I was alive then; he would never know that I was only a year older than he was. The deliberately asymmetrical titration of information is integral to the mystery and pleasure of “A Thousand Ways.” It eliminates the polite “and you?” reflex. How novel, and relaxing, to give up conversational control—to feel interest without needing to perform it for the sake of social lubrication, to abandon the instinct to convince or entertain. I learned that my partner was gay and proud of it (“I do, in a very positive way, have limp wrists,” he said, when asked to describe a physical mannerism), and that he was a painter. He learned that my ancestors, whom I was asked to describe in three words, were poor Ashkenazi Jews. He found out that I have never shot a gun, and that I know how to train a dog. (Well, sort of.) The robot asked A to tell me if he had inherited money; she asked me to describe a quality from childhood that I wished I could recover. What we were doing was dancing, using only our voices, learning each other’s rhythms as the steps were called, the random and the banal grapevining with the profound.
There was a story, of a sort, woven through all this choreographed talk. The robot asked us to imagine that we were in a car that had broken down in a desert; by the end, we were camping together by a fire under the stars, disaster averted. Something here touched on the twee. Nonetheless, when the Person A in my own life walked through the door and accidentally destroyed my desert by turning on the lights, I waved him wildly out. I wanted to stay on that frequency, with that stranger, until we were severed by the robot’s brusque “goodbye,” leaving me with that best and rarest of feelings—wanting more.
This fall, the Public planned to mount Anne Washburn’s “Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017.” Since that became impossible, the theatre, along with Washington, D.C.,’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, has now produced it as a radio play. Adapted and directed by Saheem Ali, who also directed the Public’s successful audio production of “Richard II” over the summer, it is available for download on podcast platforms. The format works beautifully, and suggests a vast realm of possibility available to playwrights making new work. What could you do if you didn’t have to worry about the cost and the complication of a physical production, if simply reading out stage directions, with the help of some minimal, evocative sound design, could put your audience wherever you wanted it to be?
What works less well is Washburn’s play itself, which was written in the year it is set, and has the quality of a time capsule opened too soon. It could be revived in twenty years, if audiences want to remember what a certain subset of comfortable liberals sounded like as they tried to make sense of the first moments of the Trump Presidency, but otherwise it might be best left in the ground.
It is spring. James Comey has just testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A group of New York City friends in middle age have gathered at the upstate farmhouse recently bought by Jools and Richard (Sue Jean Kim and Richard Topol). Trump is the non-stop subject. Allie (Brooke Bloom) is furious that her friends seem to have accepted the scuttling of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination; Luis (Raúl Esparza), a lawyer who emigrated from El Salvador as a child, is attracted to the chaos surrounding Trump in a Faustian sort of way, but the significance of his origins in Trump’s America is left oddly unexplored.
Washburn has a good ear for ripped-from-the-op-ed-page outrage. The play hints at the impotence of a politics that is rooted in norms rather than in ideas, and enacts, with minimal critique, the liberals’ wheel-spinning obsession with the minutiae of a bankrupt political reality that is rotting the country but not directly affecting their own lives. What Washburn doesn’t do is make any of this matter much. The characters are generic, interchangeable city types, saying the familiar MSNBC things; the personal, which should ground the political, is alluded to, then dropped. In an aside that fascinates before it fizzles, a white farmer (Bruce McKenzie) tells us about adopting a boy from Kenya, though the son has been cut from this production. There are two ineffective fantasias, one a dull imagining of the notorious private dinner between Trump (Bill Camp, sounding like Frasier Crane) and Comey (Joe Morton), the other a baffling confrontation over the Iraq War between a weirdly statesmanlike Trump and a clownish George W. Bush (Philip James Brannon). Trump will be a subject long after he is—Inshallah—out of power. What is said about him onstage will matter only if it can tell us something about ourselves. ♦


newyorker--2020-10-26--Richard McGuire’s “American Tumult”

Richard McGuire’s “American Tumult”

This year ’ s Power Issue arrives on the eve of a Presidential election , and it features a cover that captures some of the force and tension of the moment .
The image is by the artist ( and author , and musician ) Richard McGuire , who made an early name for himself by pasting posters for his band , Liquid Liquid , around the streets of Manhattan in the eighties .
We recently talked to McGuire about poster art and the news .
The flag is usually a static symbol , yet here you ’ ve used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the election .
How did you land on that idea ?
The news has been crazy lately , with so many crises going on .
My first impulse was to create a very dense image to express how chaotic things feel .
I started looking at the murals of Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton for inspiration .
Those compositions are usually very complicated and have a lot of push and pull .
I made a few sketches in which I used a twisting flag as a center axis .
Then I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that one symbol .
So I took everything else out .
Your work often evokes the nineteen-thirties , which was a great era for posters .
Are there specific poster artists who inspire you ?
Work from the twenties and thirties has always struck a chord with me .
The Russian film posters by the Stenberg brothers , Georgii and Vladimir , are just amazing .
In the case of this cover , I can see a connection to the poster artist A. M. Cassandre .
Miguel Covarrubias would be on the list @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do you think makes a great poster ?
And why do posters matter today ?
A poster has to speak in a direct way , but it doesn ’ t have to shout ; a whisper can get attention when used in the right way .
I ’ m usually drawn to simplicity in design , whatever the era .
There ’ s so much I love in Japanese design , for example—reducing something to its essentials can be very powerful .
Effective communication always has an impact , even on the local @ @ @ @ @ @ @ You recently relocated to upstate New York .
Has the change of scenery affected your routine at all ?
During the shutdown , I was lucky that a friend offered me a place in Beacon , New York , about an hour and a half north of the city .
The town is on the Hudson River , so I ’ m close to nature trails and waterfalls .
Dia : Beacon is also here .
I had been to the museum many times , but am only just discovering the town , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I may not be able to run around the corner to get a pencil from an art-supply store , but I can listen to crickets at night .
See below for more political covers by McGuire :

This year’s Power Issue arrives on the eve of a Presidential election, and it features a cover that captures some of the force and tension of the moment. The image is by the artist (and author, and musician) Richard McGuire, who made an early name for himself by pasting posters for his band, Liquid Liquid, around the streets of Manhattan in the eighties. We recently talked to McGuire about poster art and the news.
The flag is usually a static symbol, yet here you’ve used it to depict the motion and chaos of the election. How did you land on that idea?
The news has been crazy lately, with so many crises going on. My first impulse was to create a very dense image to express how chaotic things feel. I started looking at the murals of Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton for inspiration. Those compositions are usually very complicated and have a lot of push and pull. I made a few sketches in which I used a twisting flag as a center axis. Then I realized everything was right there, in that one symbol. So I took everything else out.
Your work often evokes the nineteen-thirties, which was a great era for posters. Are there specific poster artists who inspire you?
Work from the twenties and thirties has always struck a chord with me. The Russian film posters by the Stenberg brothers, Georgii and Vladimir, are just amazing. In the case of this cover, I can see a connection to the poster artist A. M. Cassandre. Miguel Covarrubias would be on the list, as would Paolo Garretto.
McGuire’s sketches for the cover
What do you think makes a great poster? And why do posters matter today?
A poster has to speak in a direct way, but it doesn’t have to shout; a whisper can get attention when used in the right way. I’m usually drawn to simplicity in design, whatever the era. There’s so much I love in Japanese design, for example—reducing something to its essentials can be very powerful. Effective communication always has an impact, even on the local level of a handmade protest poster.
You recently relocated to upstate New York. Has the change of scenery affected your routine at all?
During the shutdown, I was lucky that a friend offered me a place in Beacon, New York, about an hour and a half north of the city. The town is on the Hudson River, so I’m close to nature trails and waterfalls. Dia:Beacon is also here. I had been to the museum many times, but am only just discovering the town, and it’s really wonderful. I may not be able to run around the corner to get a pencil from an art-supply store, but I can listen to crickets at night.
See below for more political covers by McGuire:


newyorker--2020-10-26--What Should Crisis Leadership Look Like?

There are many differences between that experience and the pandemic that we ’ re caught up in now .
The lockdown during the hunt for the bombers was short—less than twenty hours—and , considering the scale and surprise of the attack , the disruption was quite small .
Although we experienced a sense of vulnerability , the threat we faced was specific and visible , not microscopic and pervasive .
The whole event was over within days .
But the most striking difference , at least from today ’ s perspective , has to do with leadership .
Back then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officials spoke with one voice , and there was little squabbling , blame-gaming , or turf-grabbing .
It was a week of anxiety , punctuated by false reports and periods of chaos , but , in the realm of disaster response , the Boston Marathon bombing was a case study in professionalism .
A few months later , the United States Senate held a hearing to learn from the event ’ s emergency response .
A team of Harvard researchers began studying it , too .
For several months after the bombing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Initiative interviewed key participants .
They wanted to know how , in a city famous for its political and law-enforcement rivalries , so many people had worked together so seamlessly , and how that kind of behavior might be encouraged in the future .
“ We wanted to understand the elements of that reaction , ” Leonard Marcus , a crisis-leadership expert and the founding director of the initiative , said .
“ What is it about humans ?
What is it that would bring us together ?
” Eric McNulty , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a birder , came up with an analogy : he said that the behavior reminded him of “ swarm intelligence ” —the phenomenon in which groups of animals act in concert .
Birds flocking , fish schooling , ants creating colonies—each individual knowing what to do .
Marcus and his colleagues ran with the idea .
In a series of reports and , later , a book , they proposed that swarm intelligence in people occurs when all the members of a group come together to create a synergy that magnifies their individual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of unselfish behavior that one sees on the battlefield , when soldiers know that they depend on one another for their lives .
Swarm intelligence is more instinctual than coöperation , in which people work deliberately together to achieve a common goal ; it ’ s an emotional and reactive behavior , not a plan that can be written out on a flowchart .
Sometimes it happens on a sports team , as with the 2004 Boston Red Sox , the self-described “ bunch of idiots ” who took delight in the game @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Series title in eighty-six years .
Sometimes it doesn ’ t : the 2012 Red Sox , despite having some of the best talents in the league , lacked a certain chemistry and came in last in their division .
It can happen when there ’ s no team at all , as when thousands of people mobilized to make masks for hospital workers during the current pandemic .
It arises from the feeling that we ’ re in this together .
The pandemic , clearly , is a medical and scientific crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hospitals and labs .
But our response also depends on social coöperation .
Although it ’ s true that leaders who understand the science will do better than those that don ’ t , science isn ’ t all that matters ; without unity of purpose , we ’ ll fail .
How can leaders encourage such unity ?
What can they do to help all of us , as a group , act more intelligently ?
In Boston , the qualities of swarm intelligence began to emerge almost immediately after the explosions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ P.M. on a sunny Monday afternoon , nearly three hours after the first runners crossed the finish line ; amid the fear and confusion , medical volunteers and bystanders rushed to the wounded , applying tourniquets and carrying them to the medical tent that had been set up for the runners .
That was no surprise : decades of research have shown that people ’ s initial responses to disaster are almost always altruistic .
Swarm intelligence capitalizes on this fact .
What was more surprising was how Boston ’ s leaders reacted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nearby Westin Copley Place hotel as a staging area ; in a conference room there , Governor Deval Patrick assembled a command center , where about thirty key leaders , all with different areas of responsibility , gathered .
Rather than asserting his dominance or authority , Patrick went around the room , asking each person , “ How can I help ?
” Almost everyone there had worked together for years , so they trusted one another ’ s expertise and judgment .
Richard Serino , who was then the deputy administrator @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Security , in Washington , D.C. , had grown up in Boston and worked for three decades at Boston ’ s department of emergency medical services ; he ’ d served as chief of E.M.S.
, and as the “ medical-incident commander ” for the marathon .
Serino had been near the finish line earlier that day , then travelled to Harvard to give a guest lecture ; when he heard about the bombing , he raced back .
Now , in the command center , he found himself surrounded by people who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ point , he was on the phone with Janet Napolitano , the Secretary of Homeland Security .
“ Make sure you tell everybody you ’ re the highest-ranking official from the department , ” he recalled her saying .
“ Yes , ma ’ am , ” he replied .
But Serino , who had trained with many of the people in the room , running disaster simulations , ignored the advice .
“ I wasn ’ t about to pull rank on anyone , ” he told me .
Turf battles are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hero—and the marathon route ran through eight police jurisdictions .
Patrick took a quick poll to decide who should lead the investigation and determined that Richard DesLauriers , the special agent in charge of the Boston Division of the F.B.I.
, who was also on the scene , would take the lead , with other agencies providing support .
Then he went around the room again , locking eyes with each person in turn .
“ Are you O.K .
with that ?
” he asked .
He didn ’ t move on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Like a flight attendant addressing passengers in the emergency row , he wanted each person to affirmatively buy in .
That set the tone .
“ It wouldn ’ t be fair to say that everything went wonderfully all week , ” Serino said .
“ But when you step back and look at the over-all response , I think it went very well.
” In these early interactions , the Harvard team identified five elements that lay the groundwork for the enactment of swarm intelligence .
The first is unity of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their goal was to save lives , with all other goals subservient to that .
The second is the adoption of a spirit of generosity , in which each participant seeks to help others succeed .
“ When everybody on your team crosses the line before you , that ’ s your best day , ” Joseph Henderson , a former director for emergency preparedness at the Centers for Disease Control , explained .
( He is now a senior distinguished fellow at Harvard ’ s T. H. Chan School of Public Health @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in your lane ” —respecting the authority and expertise of others ; the fourth is “ checking your ego at the door ” —declining to seek credit or assign blame .
Finally , there ’ s interpersonal trust and respect : “ You don ’ t wait for an emergency to exchange business cards , ” Serino said , quoting a maxim of disaster response .
Using this swarm-intelligence scorecard , President Trump ’ s coronavirus response scores zero out of five .
Unity of mission is lacking : it ’ s unclear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saving lives , safeguarding the stock market , or winning reëlection .
As he makes clear whenever he mocks his subordinates , he does not lead his team with anything resembling a generous spirit .
“ He just can ’ t seem to care about anyone else besides himself , ” Olivia Troye , who served as Vice-President Mike Pence ’ s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force , told Susan B. Glasser , last month .
Trump—who has repeatedly contradicted the statements of his own scientific experts— can not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ego at the door .
And long-standing trust among team members is impossible in an Administration that hires and fires frequently , and which has hollowed out the government ’ s scientific institutions .
It ’ s easy to see how these kinds of actions might result in what Marcus has called “ suspicion leadership ” —a dynamic in which all parties mistrust one another , defend their turf , and become obsessed with their differences .
The dysfunction does not stop with Trump ’ s inner circle .
It trickles out into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tribalism , denial of science , and a disdain for altruistic behavior , such as social distancing and mask wearing .
By contrast , in ways big and small , many of the most effective leaders during the pandemic have built the conditions for swarm intelligence in their states and counties .
Early in the pandemic , Andrew Cuomo , Gavin Newsom , and other governors sent an important signal by agreeing to share equipment and intelligence .
“ He ’ s not going to get any votes from Massachusetts , ” Leonard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s decision to send ventilators to that state .
“ But there ’ s a sense that our fates are intermingled ; that we ’ re not going to do things that are just about me , but about this interconnection that we ’ re discovering.
” In Ohio , one of the first things the Republican governor Mike DeWine did in his response to the virus was to convene a task force of experts .
He listened to their advice and kept the infection curve low .
In his press conferences , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who seems modest by nature , stresses unity of mission , trust in his experts , and generosity of spirit .
Usually , after a brief update , he turns the briefing over to Jon Husted , the lieutenant governor .
In the pandemic ’ s early months , they then ceded the floor to Amy Acton , the state ’ s smart and empathetic health-department director ; Acton acquired a large Facebook fan club and had a T-shirt line created in her honor .
Doctors , health experts , recovered patients @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have appeared via videoconference .
DeWine sometimes ends on a folksy note , hosting virtual appearances from everyday Ohioans , such as the wildlife officer Bryan Postlethwait , who sang “ Rise Up , ” a song he ’ d written to inspire his fellow-citizens .
Instead of taking credit or casting blame , DeWine seeks to stake out an egoless middle ground between medical experts and President Trump and his base .

The last time my neighbors and I sheltered in place was seven years ago, in April, 2013. On April 15th, two bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon; three people were killed, and more than two hundred and fifty injured. As the wounded were rushed to twenty-seven hospitals, people stayed inside, in case of further attacks. The police closed the streets to inspect suspicious packages. A few days later, after the bombers had been identified, a manhunt began. One of the bombers was killed following a shootout with the police, and the other was captured after an extensive chase, which involved a citywide lockdown. The bombers shot three people while they were on the run—an M.I.T. police officer, a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority police officer, and a Boston police officer. One of them died immediately, and another a year later.
There are many differences between that experience and the pandemic that we’re caught up in now. The lockdown during the hunt for the bombers was short—less than twenty hours—and, considering the scale and surprise of the attack, the disruption was quite small. Although we experienced a sense of vulnerability, the threat we faced was specific and visible, not microscopic and pervasive. The whole event was over within days. But the most striking difference, at least from today’s perspective, has to do with leadership. Back then, for the most part, elected officials spoke with one voice, and there was little squabbling, blame-gaming, or turf-grabbing. It was a week of anxiety, punctuated by false reports and periods of chaos, but, in the realm of disaster response, the Boston Marathon bombing was a case study in professionalism.
President Obama’s New Memoir Read an excerpt in this week’s issue.
A few months later, the United States Senate held a hearing to learn from the event’s emergency response. A team of Harvard researchers began studying it, too. For several months after the bombing, researchers with the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative interviewed key participants. They wanted to know how, in a city famous for its political and law-enforcement rivalries, so many people had worked together so seamlessly, and how that kind of behavior might be encouraged in the future. “We wanted to understand the elements of that reaction,” Leonard Marcus, a crisis-leadership expert and the founding director of the initiative, said. “What is it about humans? What is it that would bring us together?” Eric McNulty, a researcher on the team who was also a birder, came up with an analogy: he said that the behavior reminded him of “swarm intelligence”—the phenomenon in which groups of animals act in concert. Birds flocking, fish schooling, ants creating colonies—each individual knowing what to do.
Marcus and his colleagues ran with the idea. In a series of reports and, later, a book, they proposed that swarm intelligence in people occurs when all the members of a group come together to create a synergy that magnifies their individual capabilities. It’s the kind of unselfish behavior that one sees on the battlefield, when soldiers know that they depend on one another for their lives. Swarm intelligence is more instinctual than coöperation, in which people work deliberately together to achieve a common goal; it’s an emotional and reactive behavior, not a plan that can be written out on a flowchart. Sometimes it happens on a sports team, as with the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the self-described “bunch of idiots” who took delight in the game and won the franchise its first World Series title in eighty-six years. Sometimes it doesn’t: the 2012 Red Sox, despite having some of the best talents in the league, lacked a certain chemistry and came in last in their division. It can happen when there’s no team at all, as when thousands of people mobilized to make masks for hospital workers during the current pandemic. It arises from the feeling that we’re in this together.
The pandemic, clearly, is a medical and scientific crisis; the virus is being fought in hospitals and labs. But our response also depends on social coöperation. Although it’s true that leaders who understand the science will do better than those who don’t, science isn’t all that matters; without unity of purpose, we’ll fail. How can leaders encourage such unity? What can they do to help all of us, as a group, act more intelligently?
Marcus and his colleagues use the term “swarm intelligence” metaphorically, as a way of describing our ability to spontaneously work together in a crisis. The term draws not just on animal behavior but on evolutionary history. The biologist E. O. Wilson has described Homo sapiens as “eusocial”—one of a small number of species whose tendency to coöperate makes them successful. As Marcus and his colleagues see it, swarm intelligence relates to that evolutionary impulse. It’s a latent force that’s ready to emerge, given the right circumstances and leadership.
In Boston, the qualities of swarm intelligence began to emerge almost immediately after the explosions. The bombs went off at 2:49 P.M. on a sunny Monday afternoon, nearly three hours after the first runners crossed the finish line; amid the fear and confusion, medical volunteers and bystanders rushed to the wounded, applying tourniquets and carrying them to the medical tent that had been set up for the runners. That was no surprise: decades of research have shown that people’s initial responses to disaster are almost always altruistic. Swarm intelligence capitalizes on this fact.
What was more surprising was how Boston’s leaders reacted. Hundreds of responders were using the nearby Westin Copley Place hotel as a staging area; in a conference room there, Governor Deval Patrick assembled a command center, where about thirty key leaders, all with different areas of responsibility, gathered. Rather than asserting his dominance or authority, Patrick went around the room, asking each person, “How can I help?”
Almost everyone there had worked together for years, so they trusted one another’s expertise and judgment. Richard Serino, who was then the deputy administrator of FEMA at the Department of Homeland Security, in Washington, D.C., had grown up in Boston and worked for three decades at Boston’s department of emergency medical services; he’d served as chief of E.M.S., and as the “medical-incident commander” for the marathon. Serino had been near the finish line earlier that day, then travelled to Harvard to give a guest lecture; when he heard about the bombing, he raced back. Now, in the command center, he found himself surrounded by people who knew him as Ritchie. At one point, he was on the phone with Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security. “Make sure you tell everybody you’re the highest-ranking official from the department,” he recalled her saying. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. But Serino, who had trained with many of the people in the room, running disaster simulations, ignored the advice. “I wasn’t about to pull rank on anyone,” he told me.
Turf battles are common following disasters—everyone wants to be the hero—and the marathon route ran through eight police jurisdictions. Patrick took a quick poll to decide who should lead the investigation and determined that Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the Boston Division of the F.B.I., who was also on the scene, would take the lead, with other agencies providing support. Then he went around the room again, locking eyes with each person in turn. “Are you O.K. with that?” he asked. He didn’t move on until the person said, “Yes.” Like a flight attendant addressing passengers in the emergency row, he wanted each person to affirmatively buy in.
That set the tone. “It wouldn’t be fair to say that everything went wonderfully all week,” Serino said. “But when you step back and look at the over-all response, I think it went very well.”
In these early interactions, the Harvard team identified five elements that lay the groundwork for the enactment of swarm intelligence. The first is unity of purpose: the participants all knew that their goal was to save lives, with all other goals subservient to that. The second is the adoption of a spirit of generosity, in which each participant seeks to help others succeed. “When everybody on your team crosses the line before you, that’s your best day,” Joseph Henderson, a former director for emergency preparedness at the Centers for Disease Control, explained. (He is now a senior distinguished fellow at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health.) The third is “staying in your lane”—respecting the authority and expertise of others; the fourth is “checking your ego at the door”—declining to seek credit or assign blame. Finally, there’s interpersonal trust and respect: “You don’t wait for an emergency to exchange business cards,” Serino said, quoting a maxim of disaster response.
Using this swarm-intelligence scorecard, President Trump’s coronavirus response scores zero out of five. Unity of mission is lacking: it’s unclear whether his team’s mission is saving lives, safeguarding the stock market, or winning reëlection. As he makes clear whenever he mocks his subordinates, he does not lead his team with anything resembling a generous spirit. “He just can’t seem to care about anyone else besides himself,” Olivia Troye, who served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force, told Susan B. Glasser, last month. Trump—who has repeatedly contradicted the statements of his own scientific experts—cannot stay in his lane or check his ego at the door. And long-standing trust among team members is impossible in an Administration that hires and fires frequently, and which has hollowed out the government’s scientific institutions.
It’s easy to see how these kinds of actions might result in what Marcus has called “suspicion leadership”—a dynamic in which all parties mistrust one another, defend their turf, and become obsessed with their differences. The dysfunction does not stop with Trump’s inner circle. It trickles out into the population, where it manifests as tribalism, denial of science, and a disdain for altruistic behavior, such as social distancing and mask wearing.


newyorker--2020-10-26--“The Old Land,” by Aleksandar Hemon

“The Old Land,” by Aleksandar Hemon

In the old land , People perished not from hunger But from gorging on lust and liver .
Birds flew backward , thoughts swarmed Against foreheads .
Grass vined up stakes , Sprouted out of the eyes of the impaled .
In the old land , The mountains were seasonally flattened , Carved and rolled up like woven prayer mats .
The sky was shallow and piebald in the fall , Striped and shiny when it rained or snowed , So splendorous we ’ d go blind , lose our minds .
In the old land , Homes were made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on blood , melted pennies , bones .
Streets zigzagged like startled antelopes .
Life and death were simple and whole , No need for explanation , let alone hope .
In the old land , Love was meant for strangers and their dogs , Yowling , licking wounds , sore lymph nodes .
We were living our long lives at home , Until we sank and resurfaced in this void , Different skins , goggled eyes , nowhere to go .
Just to be as we were , we had to destroy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many Scared elsewheres , banging at our doors .

Audio: Read by the author.
In the old land,
People perished not from hunger
But from gorging on lust and liver.
Birds flew backward, thoughts swarmed
Against foreheads. Grass vined up stakes,
Sprouted out of the eyes of the impaled.
In the old land,
The mountains were seasonally flattened,
Carved and rolled up like woven prayer mats.
The sky was shallow and piebald in the fall,
Striped and shiny when it rained or snowed,
So splendorous we’d go blind, lose our minds.
In the old land,
Homes were made of honeycomb and straw,
Cars ran on blood, melted pennies, bones.
Streets zigzagged like startled antelopes.
Life and death were simple and whole,
No need for explanation, let alone hope.
In the old land,
Love was meant for strangers and their dogs,
Yowling, licking wounds, sore lymph nodes.
We were living our long lives at home,
Until we sank and resurfaced in this void,
Different skins, goggled eyes, nowhere to go.
Just to be as we were, we had to destroy
All the wrong distant lands, the many
Scared elsewheres, banging at our doors.


newyorker--2020-10-26--Early Holiday Shopping? Bid on Eva Braun’s Stockings, Hitler’s Cocktail Bar, and a Bible Autographed

Early Holiday Shopping? Bid on Eva Braun’s Stockings, Hitler’s Cocktail Bar, and a Bible Autographed by Donald Trump

James Riordan , a semiretired private-equity executive , has a photograph of Churchill , Stalin , and F.D.R.
, at Yalta , on the wall of his farmhouse , in Maine .
It was shot by Riordan ’ s cousin Fin Miller , who had been a member of General MacArthur ’ s security detail .
Last year , Riordan decided that he wanted to add to the tableau the signatures of the three men .
These so-called signature blocks were easy enough to track down , if not afford , on the historical-document market .
Then he thought , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get something from the loser ?
He began trolling the Internet in search of a Hitler signature and came across Alexander Historical Auctions , a small operation in Maryland that is known for trafficking in Nazi memorabilia , which almost every reputable dealer in historical documents and artifacts scorns .
In 2010 , Alexander Historical drew criticism for auctioning off Josef Mengele ’ s diaries .
This is how Riordan found himself on the Alexander mailing list and how he received an alert about an auction , this week , of hundreds of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s stockings and a giant aluminum cocktail bar , in the shape of a globe , with five brass barstools ( estimate : $ 150,000 to $ 250,000 ) .
It had been salvaged from Hitler ’ s private yacht when it was broken up at a boatyard on the Delaware River , in 1951 .
Another lot was prominently advertised : a Bible signed by Donald Trump .
“ The 5.5 x 8.5 in .
King James version is a 1,002pp .
edition published by Christian Art publishers , 2016 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ calf , with titles on spine and cover in embossed gold.
” The blurb mentions how Trump held up a Bible this past spring for his controversial photo op in front of St. John ’ s Church .
But this isn ’ t that one .
The auction house ’ s opening bid was five thousand dollars .
“ To see the Trump Bible next to the Hitler bar and Eva Braun ’ s negligee , as well as Ku Klux Klan memorabilia and some slave-auction receipts , you begin to think these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ historical interest , ” Riordan said last week .
“ These are touchstones for a global neo-fascist movement.
” For Riordan , it triggered anxiety about the potential , just before the election , for a Reichstag-fire moment : “ When the guy in the White House is actively courting every one of the groups whose memorabilia is being offered for sale , you ’ re tapping into a dark , dark undercurrent.
” The man doing the tapping is a sixty-two-year-old native of New Rochelle named Bill Panagopulos , the owner of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get flak for doing this , ” he said last week .
“ I started out thirty years ago , selling letters from Poe , Melville , Manet .
But no one knows who they are anymore , because they don ’ t teach that stuff in school .
Now people , under forty anyway , only know what ’ s on TV , and that ’ s moving images , which history-wise means World War II.
” Panagopulos ’ s father was a veteran of the Greek Navy whose home town of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ If you ask the average American who Susan B. Anthony or Clara Barton is , no one knows .
Heinrich Himmler ?
Yes , they know.
” He went on , “ I have a George Washington letter in the auction , where he ’ s writing to order two gross of buttons .
That ’ s a lot of buttons .
No one would need that many buttons for his household unless they were to clothe his slaves .
So it ’ s a great and important letter .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nazi material in the militaria market came home with servicemen after the war .
As they died , their estates dispersed it , and much of it has been purchased by Jewish collectors .
Panagopulos sold the Mengele diaries to the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and to an Orthodox Jew in Detroit .
“ I look at it as criminal evidence , ” Panagopulos said of the Nazi loot .
“ I had a friend , a dealer in New York , who was Jewish , and he told me , ‘ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I burn it.
’ I said , ‘ Shelly , you ’ re an idiot .
This is the only evidence we have.
’ ” Also , he said , “ the Germans made material so high quality that people who appreciate the craftsmanship collect it .
That sounds like bullshit , but it ’ s not .
Neo-Nazis don ’ t have the money or the intelligence to buy this stuff.
” Panagopulos said that if the Trump Bible had been the one from the St. John ’ s photo op he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grand , instead of merely five .
Because history .
He had urged the consignor to put the Bible up for sale before the election , in the event that Trump loses .
Apparently , there is very little official Presidential correspondence signed by Trump in circulation .
“ He doesn ’ t seem to send any messages at all , ” Panagopulos said .
There is also , in the auction , a Trump-autographed cover sheet from the House Judiciary Committee ’ s impeachment findings .
Someone who knew someone who knew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at a rally , to be signed .
“ What that is is a ‘ Fuck you ’ to the House , ” Panagopulos said .
It ’ s also history , and a message , of a kind .
♦

James Riordan, a semiretired private-equity executive, has a photograph of Churchill, Stalin, and F.D.R., at Yalta, on the wall of his farmhouse, in Maine. It was shot by Riordan’s cousin Fin Miller, who had been a member of General MacArthur’s security detail. Last year, Riordan decided that he wanted to add to the tableau the signatures of the three men. These so-called signature blocks were easy enough to track down, if not afford, on the historical-document market. Then he thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to get something from the loser? He began trolling the Internet in search of a Hitler signature and came across Alexander Historical Auctions, a small operation in Maryland that is known for trafficking in Nazi memorabilia, which almost every reputable dealer in historical documents and artifacts scorns. In 2010, Alexander Historical drew criticism for auctioning off Josef Mengele’s diaries.
This is how Riordan found himself on the Alexander mailing list and how he received an alert about an auction, this week, of hundreds of Third Reich items, including Eva Braun’s stockings and a giant aluminum cocktail bar, in the shape of a globe, with five brass barstools (estimate: $150,000 to $250,000). It had been salvaged from Hitler’s private yacht when it was broken up at a boatyard on the Delaware River, in 1951. Another lot was prominently advertised: a Bible signed by Donald Trump. “The 5.5 x 8.5 in. King James version is a 1,002pp. edition published by Christian Art publishers, 2016. The cover and spine are black faux calf, with titles on spine and cover in embossed gold.” The blurb mentions how Trump held up a Bible this past spring for his controversial photo op in front of St. John’s Church. But this isn’t that one. The auction house’s opening bid was five thousand dollars.
“To see the Trump Bible next to the Hitler bar and Eva Braun’s negligee, as well as Ku Klux Klan memorabilia and some slave-auction receipts, you begin to think these aren’t just items of legitimate historical interest,” Riordan said last week. “These are touchstones for a global neo-fascist movement.” For Riordan, it triggered anxiety about the potential, just before the election, for a Reichstag-fire moment: “When the guy in the White House is actively courting every one of the groups whose memorabilia is being offered for sale, you’re tapping into a dark, dark undercurrent.”
The man doing the tapping is a sixty-two-year-old native of New Rochelle named Bill Panagopulos, the owner of Alexander Historical. “Of course I get flak for doing this,” he said last week. “I started out thirty years ago, selling letters from Poe, Melville, Manet. But no one knows who they are anymore, because they don’t teach that stuff in school. Now people, under forty anyway, only know what’s on TV, and that’s moving images, which history-wise means World War II.” Panagopulos’s father was a veteran of the Greek Navy whose home town of Kalavryta was wiped out by the Germans. “If you ask the average American who Susan B. Anthony or Clara Barton is, no one knows. Heinrich Himmler? Yes, they know.”
He went on, “I have a George Washington letter in the auction, where he’s writing to order two gross of buttons. That’s a lot of buttons. No one would need that many buttons for his household unless they were to clothe his slaves. So it’s a great and important letter. But who cares, right?”
Most Nazi material in the militaria market came home with servicemen after the war. As they died, their estates dispersed it, and much of it has been purchased by Jewish collectors. Panagopulos sold the Mengele diaries to the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and to an Orthodox Jew in Detroit.
“And the award for scariest costume goes to . . . the one guy not wearing a mask.” Cartoon by Daryl Seitchik Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“I look at it as criminal evidence,” Panagopulos said of the Nazi loot. “I had a friend, a dealer in New York, who was Jewish, and he told me, ‘Every time I get this material, I burn it.’ I said, ‘Shelly, you’re an idiot. This is the only evidence we have.’ ” Also, he said, “the Germans made material so high quality that people who appreciate the craftsmanship collect it. That sounds like bullshit, but it’s not. Neo-Nazis don’t have the money or the intelligence to buy this stuff.”
Panagopulos said that if the Trump Bible had been the one from the St. John’s photo op he’d have asked for a hundred grand, instead of merely five. Because history. He had urged the consignor to put the Bible up for sale before the election, in the event that Trump loses. Apparently, there is very little official Presidential correspondence signed by Trump in circulation. “He doesn’t seem to send any messages at all,” Panagopulos said. There is also, in the auction, a Trump-autographed cover sheet from the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment findings. Someone who knew someone who knew Panagopulos had presented it to the President at a rally, to be signed. “What that is is a ‘Fuck you’ to the House,” Panagopulos said. It’s also history, and a message, of a kind. ♦