newyorker--2020-04-13--“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” a Human Tale of Reproductive Rights

“ Never Rarely Sometimes Always , ” the third feature film from the Brooklyn-born and -based director and writer Eliza Hittman , opens with a high-school talent show .
On an auditorium stage , a series of sweetly corny , retro-style performances takes place : a trio of crooning letter-sweater-wearing boys ; a rhinestone-suited Elvis impersonator ; a crew of clean-cut , poodle-skirted , bobby-socked dancers .
But the tone shifts when a dark-haired girl with an acoustic guitar steps out to perform a cover version of “ He ’ s Got the Power , ” by the early-sixties girl @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a pink satin bomber jacket , with her eyelids painted in gold glitter , but her voice is pure anguish , and the originally upbeat song turns , in her hands , into a howl .
“ He makes me do things I don ’ t want to do / He makes me say things I don ’ t want to say / And even though I want to break away / I can ’ t stop saying I adore him / I can ’ t stop doing things for him , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s got the power / the power of love over me.
” The girl is Autumn Callahan ( Sidney Flanigan ) , and this is the first and last time during the movie in which she will be so overtly expressive .
“ Slut !
” a boy in the audience cough-yells , interrupting Autumn ’ s song halfway , and though she finishes her performance , this destabilizing slur , coupled with the song ’ s lyrics , echo the oppressive circumstances that conspire to mute her .
Like Hittman ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Like Love ” and 2017 ’ s “ Beach Rats ” — “ Never Rarely Sometimes Always ” explores the ways in which an alienated young person in difficult circumstances is kept from articulating her needs and desires , not just by her own youth and naïveté but by the cruel diktats of the world around her .
Autumn , we soon grasp , is pregnant , and the movie focusses tightly on her journey to dismantle the ticking time bomb of this pregnancy , as she and her cousin and friend , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to New York from their small , grimly post-industrial Pennsylvania town in an attempt to procure an abortion .
I met up with Hittman , who is forty , in late February , to discuss her film .
It was the week leading up to its New York release , and , initially , we had planned to walk around the Port Authority Bus Terminal , where Autumn and Skylar shelter miserably when they run low on funds .
The arrival of the coronavirus , however , had foiled that plan ( much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the movie ’ s theatrical run—it is now streaming online ) , and Focus Features , the studio that had distributed the film , arranged for us to meet for lunch , instead , at the tony restaurant situated in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel , in midtown .
From the height of the thirty-fifth floor , where we sat , the city gleamed like a magnificent but far-off artifact , very different from the grimy , close-at-hand , sometimes menacing version of New York that is depicted in the film .
“ One @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was making this was [ Robert ] Bresson ’ s ‘ A Man Escaped , ’ ” Hittman told me .
“ Where you see , in very physical and tactile detail , a man ’ s journey to set himself free from prison.
” Like Bresson ’ s protagonist , a member of the French Resistance whose minute exertions to break out of his jail cell that movie painstakingly follows , Autumn is unswervingly determined to free herself of the burden of unwanted pregnancy , beginning with a painful-to-watch attempt at a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pursuit of local assistance at a pro-life clinic , and culminating with an exhausting journey across state lines , once she realizes that , as a minor , she can not have an abortion in Pennsylvania without parental permission .
In its profound sensitivity to everyday detail , “ Never Rarely Sometimes Always ” makes the viewer aware of the mundane challenges that dog every step its heroines manage to take along that path—from the large , cheap suitcase bumped along with difficulty on subway steps , to the dwindling-down-to-nothing funds in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ late-night dozes taken on the subway , in lieu of a place to stay , waiting out the hours until finally , blessedly , the abortion might be over and done with .
( The film serves as the début of Flanigan as well as of Ryder , and they are both excellent , giving performances that are affecting because of—rather than in spite of—their understated tone . )
Hittman told me that she didn ’ t want to focus on what brought on Autumn ’ s moment of crisis .
We never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exactly happened with the boys at school , or even what she is like when she is not experiencing the extreme duress of a crisis .
Instead , the director decided to zero in on the crisis itself .
“ It was about showing the active obstacles in Autumn ’ s way , ” she said .
“ I wanted to make it as slice of life as possible .
She ’ s trying to tackle what she can tackle , undo what ’ s been done.
” With the extremely limited emotional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disposal , her expectations are simultaneously reduced and barely achievable .
Watching Hittman ’ s films , I found them fairly removed from most contemporary American fare , and , perhaps , more reminiscent of a certain vein of naturalistic European cinema , like that of the Belgian Dardenne brothers or the Romanian Cristian Mungiu , with its minor-scale but politically resonant explorations of issues of class and gender .
And yet the realities of young people ’ s lives that Hittman depicts in her work are at the heart of current-day American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” is scant of dialogue , and Autumn and Skylar are rarely introspective .
In her work , the director has remained dedicated to exploring the inner lives of kids whose feelings , though intense , are often a mystery not just to their peers and elders but to their own selves as well : “ It ’ s about giving the audience insight into what the issue is , and then watching the characters fumble through the world , ” she told me .
But “ Never Rarely Sometimes Always ” still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oppressive American landscape , whose prejudices and inequalities inform its characters ’ most minute interactions and gestures .
It ’ s a movie whose political significance works in tandem with its deep interest in the human element .
Autumn and Skylar are young working-class women in what Hittman portrays as , still , very much a man ’ s world , and their truncated resources and opportunities—geographically , economically , socially—make that world that much smaller .
We can see it at the local supermarket , where they work as cashiers , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ customers ’ come-ons , and silently withstand the harassment of their manager , their faces tight with disgust as they stoically slip him their till ’ s balance while he covers their hands in kisses .
We see it in Autumn ’ s relationship with her frustrated , hostile father , who chides the hungry-for-affection family dog for being a “ slut ” ( “ Look how easy she is , ” he crows ) ; we see it in Skylar ’ s acquiescence to the amorous demands of a worldlier , wealthier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to New York , and in their understanding that this is simply the price a woman in a rough spot must pay in order to negotiate the help of a man .
And , of course , we see it in the more abstract machinations of the systems dedicated to women ’ s reproductive health , in which care is obtained precariously , if at all , and where the ability to make decisions is so often taken out of a woman ’ s hands .
Watching “ Never Rarely Sometimes Always @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to retain hope for its protagonists on their grim quest , but , for Hittman , the movie is not completely pessimistic .
“ It ’ s not about a self-destructive character , ” she told me , and the end offers the audience a measure of release .
“ For the moment , we can experience some peacefulness with her .
”

“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” the third feature film from the Brooklyn-born and -based director and writer Eliza Hittman, opens with a high-school talent show. On an auditorium stage, a series of sweetly corny, retro-style performances takes place: a trio of crooning letter-sweater-wearing boys; a rhinestone-suited Elvis impersonator; a crew of clean-cut, poodle-skirted, bobby-socked dancers. But the tone shifts when a dark-haired girl with an acoustic guitar steps out to perform a cover version of “He’s Got the Power,” by the early-sixties girl group the Exciters. She is dressed in a pink satin bomber jacket, with her eyelids painted in gold glitter, but her voice is pure anguish, and the originally upbeat song turns, in her hands, into a howl. “He makes me do things I don’t want to do / He makes me say things I don’t want to say / And even though I want to break away / I can’t stop saying I adore him / I can’t stop doing things for him,” she sings. “He’s got the power / the power of love over me.”
The girl is Autumn Callahan (Sidney Flanigan), and this is the first and last time during the movie in which she will be so overtly expressive. “Slut!” a boy in the audience cough-yells, interrupting Autumn’s song halfway, and though she finishes her performance, this destabilizing slur, coupled with the song’s lyrics, echo the oppressive circumstances that conspire to mute her. Like Hittman’s previous films—2013’s “It Felt Like Love” and 2017’s “Beach Rats”—“Never Rarely Sometimes Always” explores the ways in which an alienated young person in difficult circumstances is kept from articulating her needs and desires, not just by her own youth and naïveté but by the cruel diktats of the world around her. Autumn, we soon grasp, is pregnant, and the movie focusses tightly on her journey to dismantle the ticking time bomb of this pregnancy, as she and her cousin and friend, Skylar (Talia Ryder), travel to New York from their small, grimly post-industrial Pennsylvania town in an attempt to procure an abortion.
I met up with Hittman, who is forty, in late February, to discuss her film. It was the week leading up to its New York release, and, initially, we had planned to walk around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where Autumn and Skylar shelter miserably when they run low on funds. The arrival of the coronavirus, however, had foiled that plan (much like it would soon come to foil the movie’s theatrical run—it is now streaming online), and Focus Features, the studio that had distributed the film, arranged for us to meet for lunch, instead, at the tony restaurant situated in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in midtown. From the height of the thirty-fifth floor, where we sat, the city gleamed like a magnificent but far-off artifact, very different from the grimy, close-at-hand, sometimes menacing version of New York that is depicted in the film. “One movie I was thinking about when I was making this was [Robert] Bresson’s ‘A Man Escaped,’ ” Hittman told me. “Where you see, in very physical and tactile detail, a man’s journey to set himself free from prison.” Like Bresson’s protagonist, a member of the French Resistance whose minute exertions to break out of his jail cell that movie painstakingly follows, Autumn is unswervingly determined to free herself of the burden of unwanted pregnancy, beginning with a painful-to-watch attempt at a self-induced miscarriage, continuing with a fruitless pursuit of local assistance at a pro-life clinic, and culminating with an exhausting journey across state lines, once she realizes that, as a minor, she cannot have an abortion in Pennsylvania without parental permission.
In its profound sensitivity to everyday detail, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” makes the viewer aware of the mundane challenges that dog every step its heroines manage to take along that path—from the large, cheap suitcase bumped along with difficulty on subway steps, to the dwindling-down-to-nothing funds in a secreted-away pouch, to the flutter-lidded, late-night dozes taken on the subway, in lieu of a place to stay, waiting out the hours until finally, blessedly, the abortion might be over and done with. (The film serves as the début of Flanigan as well as of Ryder, and they are both excellent, giving performances that are affecting because of—rather than in spite of—their understated tone.) Hittman told me that she didn’t want to focus on what brought on Autumn’s moment of crisis. We never learn who impregnated her, or what exactly happened with the boys at school, or even what she is like when she is not experiencing the extreme duress of a crisis. Instead, the director decided to zero in on the crisis itself. “It was about showing the active obstacles in Autumn’s way,” she said. “I wanted to make it as slice of life as possible. She’s trying to tackle what she can tackle, undo what’s been done.” With the extremely limited emotional and practical resources at Autumn’s disposal, her expectations are simultaneously reduced and barely achievable.
Watching Hittman’s films, I found them fairly removed from most contemporary American fare, and, perhaps, more reminiscent of a certain vein of naturalistic European cinema, like that of the Belgian Dardenne brothers or the Romanian Cristian Mungiu, with its minor-scale but politically resonant explorations of issues of class and gender. And yet the realities of young people’s lives that Hittman depicts in her work are at the heart of current-day American society. “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is scant of dialogue, and Autumn and Skylar are rarely introspective. In her work, the director has remained dedicated to exploring the inner lives of kids whose feelings, though intense, are often a mystery not just to their peers and elders but to their own selves as well: “ It’s about giving the audience insight into what the issue is, and then watching the characters fumble through the world,” she told me. But “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” still allows for an intimate look at an oppressive American landscape, whose prejudices and inequalities inform its characters’ most minute interactions and gestures. It’s a movie whose political significance works in tandem with its deep interest in the human element.
Autumn and Skylar are young working-class women in what Hittman portrays as, still, very much a man’s world, and their truncated resources and opportunities—geographically, economically, socially—make that world that much smaller. We can see it at the local supermarket, where they work as cashiers, and where they must jokingly brush off older customers’ come-ons, and silently withstand the harassment of their manager, their faces tight with disgust as they stoically slip him their till’s balance while he covers their hands in kisses. We see it in Autumn’s relationship with her frustrated, hostile father, who chides the hungry-for-affection family dog for being a “slut” (“Look how easy she is,” he crows); we see it in Skylar’s acquiescence to the amorous demands of a worldlier, wealthier boy the two girls meet on their way to New York, and in their understanding that this is simply the price a woman in a rough spot must pay in order to negotiate the help of a man. And, of course, we see it in the more abstract machinations of the systems dedicated to women’s reproductive health, in which care is obtained precariously, if at all, and where the ability to make decisions is so often taken out of a woman’s hands. Watching “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” I sometimes found it hard to retain hope for its protagonists on their grim quest, but, for Hittman, the movie is not completely pessimistic. “It’s not about a self-destructive character,” she told me, and the end offers the audience a measure of release. “For the moment, we can experience some peacefulness with her.”


The Gashlycrumb Boomers

A is for Anne , who fell off a cruise , B is for Barry , shocked dead by cable news .
C is for Cathy , stampeded at a sale , D is for Debra , whose attempt to FaceTime for help failed .
E is for Ellen , who tripped on lawn gnomes , F is for Frank , whacked at one of his two homes .
G is for Gerald , who gambled his life , H is for Harold , lanced by an extremely dull knife .
J is for Joy , a victim of Murphy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Karen , impaled ( metal straw ) .
L is for Laura , inflammatorily jointed , M is for Michael , who died “ disappointed.
” N is for Nancy , extinct like bar soap , O is for Olaf , who gave up all hope .
P is for Paul , consumed by his recliner , R is for Rhonda , whose ghost blames the vegan food at the diner .
S is for Susan , who screamed “ kids these days ” till blue , T is for Ted , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U is for Ulric , pecked by the birds he watched , V is for Victor , whose seventy-five-dollar steak was botched .
W is for Wallace , who bought the wrong Groupon , X is for Xavier , he choked on Grey Poupon .
Y is for Yemi , destroyed by a tweet , Z is for Zachary , simply rendered obsolete .

Illustration by Landis Blair
With apologies to Edward Gorey.
A is for Anne, who fell off a cruise,
B is for Barry, shocked dead by cable news.
C is for Cathy, stampeded at a sale,
D is for Debra, whose attempt to FaceTime for help failed.
E is for Ellen, who tripped on lawn gnomes,
F is for Frank, whacked at one of his two homes.
G is for Gerald, who gambled his life,
H is for Harold, lanced by an extremely dull knife.
J is for Joy, a victim of Murphy’s Law,
K is for Karen, impaled (metal straw).
L is for Laura, inflammatorily jointed,
M is for Michael, who died “disappointed.”
N is for Nancy, extinct like bar soap,
O is for Olaf, who gave up all hope.
P is for Paul, consumed by his recliner,
R is for Rhonda, whose ghost blames the vegan food at the diner.
S is for Susan, who screamed “kids these days” till blue,
T is for Ted, who died on that hill, too.
U is for Ulric, pecked by the birds he watched,
V is for Victor, whose seventy-five-dollar steak was botched.
W is for Wallace, who bought the wrong Groupon,
X is for Xavier, he choked on Grey Poupon.
Y is for Yemi, destroyed by a tweet,
Z is for Zachary, simply rendered obsolete.


newyorker--2020-01-07--The Paris Review, a Poem a Day, and an Iran Explainer: Three Podcasts to Listen to in January

Happy 2020 , podcast enthusiasts .
This year , the traditional January sensations—reflection , rejuvenation , resolution—have alternated , necessarily , with alarm , and the podcasts I ’ m recommending this month seek to edify across the spectrum .
During the holidays , I plunged into the excellent “ Paris Review Podcast , ” a wonder of literary delights and artful sound design that deftly navigates the journal ’ s history , presenting recent material and selections from its vast archive with confidence and humor .
Co-produced by Stitcher , it ’ s minimally hosted , allowing us to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Brendan Francis Newnam is the senior producer , and John DeLore is the sound designer . )
In its first episode , from 2017 , a snippet of conversation between George Plimpton and Maya Angelou—involving her process , the Bible , a bottle of sherry , and lyricism—segues into quiet but precocious jazz , and then into a Denis Johnson story , pleasingly read by Wallace Shawn .
An episode from November is bookended by a Dylan Thomas letter and audio of birds recorded outside his former house .
The whole experience , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , amounts to a near-perfect blend of profundity and ephemera—like one ’ s own thoughts , mercifully elevated .
A comment of Toni Morrison ’ s about language and beauty in “ The Paris Review Podcast ” ( “ I think of beauty as an absolute necessity .
.
.
.
it ’ s what we were born for ” ) , in addition to a terrific recent “ In Our Time ” episode on Auden , prompted a revelation : that glorious literary language has been underrepresented in my podcast-listening , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Poetry Foundation ’ s podcast “ Audio Poem of the Day ” features a single poem , delivered daily , usually read by its author .
I ’ ve been listening via an app , where poems generally arrive without fanfare , unexplained , immersive ; one can listen in nourishing installments or in a hypnotic stream .
This year ’ s episodes begin with Richard Wilbur ’ s “ Year ’ s End ” : “ We fray into the future , rarely wrought / Save in the tapestries of afterthought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Barrages of applause / Come muffled from a buried radio .
/ The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
” ( The New Yorker ’ s “ Poetry Podcast , ” it must be said , is also quite good . )
The first episode of the wide-ranging NPR history podcast “ Throughline , ” from last February , was about the 1953 coup d ’ état in Iran , and it was so jarring and smart that I wished that the whole series , co-hosted and co-produced by Ramtin Arablouei @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into Iranian political history .
But other episodes have been as intriguing , on subjects including the impeachment of Andrew Johnson , the siege of Mecca , the interminable reign of Mitch McConnell , and country music à la Lil Nas X .
This month , “ Four Days in August , ” that first episode , offers newly useful , and grim , perspective on U.S.-Iranian history ( in 2013 , the C.I.A .
publicly admitted its role in overthrowing the elected Prime Minister , Mohammad Mossadegh ) , as does “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , about key points of U.S.-Iranian conflict since the 1979 Revolution .
For perspective on acts of war and their murky linguistic justifications , listen to the Peabody-winning “ Radiolab ” episode “ 60 Words , ” a collaboration with BuzzFeed from 2014 , about the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force , the legal basis for the so-called war on terror .
Meanwhile , another “ Throughline ” episode on the U.S. and Iran , one imagines , is to come .

The first episode of “The Paris Review Podcast” features Maya Angelou discussing her writing process with George Plimpton. Photograph from Getty
Happy 2020, podcast enthusiasts. This year, the traditional January sensations—reflection, rejuvenation, resolution—have alternated, necessarily, with alarm, and the podcasts I’m recommending this month seek to edify across the spectrum. During the holidays, I plunged into the excellent “Paris Review Podcast,” a wonder of literary delights and artful sound design that deftly navigates the journal’s history, presenting recent material and selections from its vast archive with confidence and humor. Co-produced by Stitcher, it’s minimally hosted, allowing us to discover its pleasures for ourselves. (Brendan Francis Newnam and John DeLore are the senior producers, and DeLore is the lead sound designer.) In its first episode, from 2017, a snippet of conversation between George Plimpton and Maya Angelou—involving her process, the Bible, a bottle of sherry, and lyricism—segues into quiet but precocious jazz, and then into a Denis Johnson story, pleasingly read by Wallace Shawn. An episode from November is bookended by a Dylan Thomas letter and audio of birds recorded outside his former house. The whole experience, floating from one provocative thing to another, amounts to a near-perfect blend of profundity and ephemera—like one’s own thoughts, mercifully elevated.
A comment of Toni Morrison’s about language and beauty in “The Paris Review Podcast” (“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. . . . it’s what we were born for”), in addition to a terrific recent “In Our Time” episode on Auden, prompted a revelation: that glorious literary language has been underrepresented in my podcast-listening, and I needed to remedy that immediately. The Poetry Foundation’s podcast “Audio Poem of the Day” features a single poem, delivered daily, usually read by its author. I’ve been listening via an app, where poems generally arrive without fanfare, unexplained, immersive; one can listen in nourishing installments or in a hypnotic stream. This year’s episodes begin with Richard Wilbur’s “Year’s End”: “We fray into the future, rarely wrought / Save in the tapestries of afterthought. / More time, more time. Barrages of applause / Come muffled from a buried radio. / The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.” (The New Yorker’s “Poetry Podcast,” it must be said, is also quite good.)
The first episode of the wide-ranging NPR history podcast “Throughline,” from last February, was about the 1953 coup d’état in Iran, and it was so jarring and smart that I wished that the whole series, co-hosted and co-produced by Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah, would delve further into Iranian political history. But other episodes have been as intriguing, on subjects including the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the siege of Mecca, the interminable reign of Mitch McConnell, and country music à la Lil Nas X. This month, “Four Days in August,” that first episode, offers newly useful, and grim, perspective on U.S.-Iranian history (in 2013, the C.I.A. publicly admitted its role in overthrowing the elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh), as does “Rules of Engagement,” from July, about key points of U.S.-Iranian conflict since the 1979 Revolution. For perspective on acts of war and their murky linguistic justifications, listen to the Peabody-winning “Radiolab” episode “60 Words,” a collaboration with BuzzFeed from 2014, about the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the legal basis for the so-called war on terror. Meanwhile, another “Throughline” episode on the U.S. and Iran, one imagines, is to come.


newyorker--2020-01-07--Douglas Stuart Reads “Found Wanting”

Douglas Stuart Reads “Found Wanting”

How Does a Plant Grow Without Soil ?
Air plants have no stems and don ’ t require soil to @ @ @ @ @ also related to .
.
.
pineapples ?
We explore the ways in which air @ @ @ @ @ Tillandsia , are much more than a millennial hobby—they are one of nature ’ s @ @ @ @ @ they ’ re an obsession that connects people all over the world .

Photograph by Clive Smith
Douglas Stuart reads his story from the January 13, 2020, issue of the magazine. Stuart, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, will publish his first novel, “Shuggie Bain,” in February. This is his first published piece of fiction.


The Mechanical Muse

The history of intelligent machines is one of moving goalposts : Sure , a machine can do this , but can it do that ?
The “ that ” is often an achievement that strikes us as strongly connected to emotion—that seems especially human .
A robot that can clean the crumbs from your living room isn ’ t nearly as impressive , or scary , as one that can leave you with a lump in your throat .
Poetry is a good place to move the end zone : it ’ s rooted in the inspirational and the comical—the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its forms , it edges toward the computational and algorithmic .
Poetry even seems to have been implicit in the bold 1955 manifesto that first announced the field of artificial intelligence , declaring that “ an attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language , form abstractions and concepts.
” The pioneers of A.I .
never mentioned poetry outright , but , if you squint , you might see its spirit in their ambitions to investigate the “ rules ” connecting human thought with word “ manipulation ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between creativity and randomness—not to mention in their grander goal of creating machines that would “ improve themselves.
” There are more resonances between programming and poetry than you might think .
Computer science is an art form of words and punctuation , thoughtfully placed and goal-oriented , even if not necessarily deployed to evoke surprise or longing .
Laid out on a page , every program uses indentations , stanzas , and a distinctive visual hierarchy to convey meaning .
In the best cases , a close-reader of code will be rewarded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way ideas have been captured in words .
Programming has its own sense of minimalist aesthetics , born of the imperative to create software that doesn ’ t take up much space and doesn ’ t take long to execute .
Coders seek to express their intentions in the fewest number of commands ; William Carlos Williams , with his sparse style and simple , iconic images , would appreciate that .
One poet ’ s “ road not taken ” is one programmer ’ s “ if-then-else ” statement .
Generations of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finding different ways to say “ Hello , World.
” Arguably , you could say the same for poets .
Many programmers have links to poetry—Ada Lovelace , the acknowledged first programmer ever , was Lord Byron ’ s daughter—but it ’ s a challenge to fully bridge the gap .
Sonnets occupy something of a sweet spot : they ’ re a rich art form ( good for poets ) with clear rules ( good for machines ) .
Ranjit Bhatnagar , an artist and programmer , appreciates both sides .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ art project that mines the Twittersphere for tweets in iambic pentameter .
First , using a pronouncing dictionary created at Carnegie Mellon , he built a program to count syllables and recognize meter .
Then , with a separate piece of code to identify rhymes , he started to assemble sonnets .
For the first National Novel Generation Month ( NaNoGenMo ) , in 2013 , Bhatnagar submitted “ I got a alligator for a pet !
, ” a collection of five hundred and four sonnets created with Pentametron .
Bhatnagar ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an entire tweet , or essentially one complete thought ( or at least what counts as a thought on Twitter ) .
It also did its best to abide by strict rules of meter and rhyme .
This is how “ Good night !
Tomorrow is another day : ) ” ( the titles are machine-written , too ) , begins : I pay attention to the little shit yeah , teacher aren ’ t trying anymore… : ) Not even going to encourage it .
I never been in twitter jail before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in my bio ?
I wanted some banana pudding to Don ’ t be a menace is a classic tho Know what ’ s amazing ?
Johnnie Walker Blue Another day another dollar tho .
Tomorrow is another awesome day She going hard and he ’ s complaining so I never liked Sabrina anyway .
Fuck my retainer has a crack in it This Maybelline mascara is the shit !
!
!
In Bhatnagar ’ s most recent collection of computer-assisted sonnets , “ Encomials , ” he relaxes these constraints .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ human-generated , Bhatnagar realized , he had to strike a delicate balance between accuracy and authenticity .
“ If it made too many mistakes , then it wouldn ’ t look human , so my hope was that it would be just enough mistakes , ” he said .
On a whim , Bhatnagar looked in the debug logs of Pentametron , a repository of tweets that had been discarded because they were close to iambic pentameter but not perfect .
Text in this trash heap had been stripped of punctuation and capitalization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new program to comb through this corpus and write sonnets with enjambed lines—that is , phrases that flow over naturally from one line to the next : I wan na be a little kid again .
I ’ m feeling kinda empty on the low .
You should unwind a little now and then .
Team Stacie looking like a sleepy hoe .
Back to the Sunshine State .
The devil is a lie .
I hate myself a lot sometimes , I mean , possessive , holy shit , this is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ catching dimes .
I ’ m not the only one , I ’ m pinning this again .
I love a windy sunny day .
Not coming out until tonight .
I miss the happy me .
I got ta find a way .
I always fall into the bullshit .
Why ?
Socks on in bed—the devil is a lie .
Bhatnagar ’ s algorithms use a clever mix of data mining and pattern matching to build sonnets from the dross of the Twittersphere .
This is more poetry as collage than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a poet , but , like many , I had early schoolroom experiences learning to write poetry .
My wonderfully creative second-grade teacher , Mrs. Clack , had us spend all kinds of time doing special projects ; it was the year I learned what a limerick was .
I couldn ’ t get enough of Edward Lear in long form ( “ The Owl and the Pussy-Cat ” ) or short ( “ There was a Young Lady whose chin .
.
.
” ) , and , encouraged by Mrs. Clack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some little limericks of my own .
I loved the wordplay and also the formulaic nature of the composition ; perhaps this was an early stirring of the mathematician and computer scientist I would become .
A limerick is , in some sense , described by an algorithm : A Mad Lib–ish start ( “ There was a ( n ) [ old man / young lady ] [ from / with / who ] .
.
.
” ) , followed by five lines of prescribed meter in an aabba rhyme scheme @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in my head again and again , turning out dozens of nonsense limericks , complete with the requisite little-kid scatology .
Years later , when Mrs. Snyder ’ s British-literature class introduced me to the sonnet , I once again took naturally to a poetic recipe , working the cadence of iambic pentameter into my head and creating satisfying doggerel in the ababcdcdefefgg template .
I ’ ll spare you an example .
So , if kids can learn to write poems from scratch , what about machines ?
I was able to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of examples .
My brain—like the brains of most children—didn ’ t need much material to begin the process of mimicry .
With machine learning , the latest A.I .
technology , computers might finally be able to follow suit .
But even the most sophisticated machine-learning techniques out there—the deep neural networks that are today ’ s most cutting-edge technology—need lots and lots of data in order to train , or become more accurate at a given task .
The neural-network architecture , modelled and named after our own brain circuitry , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as language translation ( e.g .
Google Translate ) and image recognition ( think picture tagging ) , largely owing to the ready availability of data : the Internet is full of words and photos for these neurons to train on in silico .
But , in the absence of enough data , machines can ’ t begin learning in the first place .
This is why the seemingly simple task of teaching a machine to compose a sonnet is such a complex programming feat ; deep-learning machines need more inputs than the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a computer scientist at the University of Southern California , was among the first researchers who studied how deep neural nets could be used to attack the challenges of translation .
Knight ’ s general expertise is in natural language processing , the area of computer science that is all about generating and understanding human language .
Without neural nets , even the best programs couldn ’ t write complete sentences .
They could only string together bits of language .
As Knight says , they “ couldn ’ t keep a theme @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the grammar going.
” In 2015 , Marjan Ghazvininejad , one of Knight ’ s graduate students , began working on Hafez , a program used to generate sonnets and other poetic forms named after the fourteenth-century Persian lyricist .
There were two parts to her project : first , codifying the rules for composition—the template that every sonnet would fit—then deciding what to put in the template .
The first stage was easy : programmers are good at coming up with rules , and programs are good at following them .
Plus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s team came up with some clever innovations , such as telling the computer to pick the last word of each line first , then plucking rhyming pairs that seemed topically similar .
But where would the words come from in the first place ?
Even though the world of lyrical poetry is data poor—there are only so many sonnets available on the Internet—Ghazvininejad and her collaborators realized that the nearby world of song lyrics is data rich .
Her team decided to train their program on ninety-five thousand songs pulled from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Hafez responded to a given topic—say , Presidential elections—then collected rhyming words from within the database and strung them together using its ever-improving neural networks .
Ghazvininejad had spent years studying language processing , but even she was impressed by the results .
Hafez spat out one sonnet that included the phrase “ Honky Tonkin Resolution.
” According to Knight , the phrase appeared only once or twice in Google search results : Hafez was quite literally creating original work—and maybe was a child of the sixties .
Training also helped create @ @ @ @ @ @ @ touches .
One poem , generated from the prompt “ wave , ” has a sinister , futuristic feel : People picking up electric chronic .
The balance like a giant tidal wave , Never ever feeling supersonic , Or reaching any very shallow grave .
An open space between awaiting speed , And looking at divine velocity .
A faceless nation under constant need , Without another curiosity .
Or maybe going through the wave equation .
An ancient engine offers no momentum , About the power from an old vibration , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ venom .
Surrounded by a sin Omega T , On the other side of you and me .
The diction here feels credibly consistent ; “ velocity , ” “ momentum , ” and “ vibration ” all belong to a similar mathy register .
“ Divine , ” “ omega , ” and “ power ” create another tonal through line .
Moreover , there is a sense of thematic coherence , glimmers of narrative .
And yet , although I ’ m no critic—just a reader—I can still tell there ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ read it and find myself getting jammed rather than enjambed .
I feel the presence of the machine , stuck in the literary uncanny valley .
It ’ s fair to ask : Does that matter ?
As it turns out , Hafez was dreamed up and executed as a submission to the 2016 Turing Tests in the Creative Arts at Dartmouth , which I helped organize .
A machine passes the Turing Test if it can prove itself to be indistinguishable from a human .
Hafez ’ s challenge was to fool @ @ @ @ @ @ @ written by real live poets .
In the end , it did win the competition , but it didn ’ t pass the Turing Test .
Hafez was better than the other machines but still distinguishable from a person .
When the machine-written sonnets were interspersed among human-written works , there wasn ’ t a single A.I .
poet that fooled a majority of the competition ’ s judges .
The Turing Test has long been a standard for assessing artificial intelligence , but , in the context of making art—rather than simulating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or the most interesting , metric .
One of my colleagues , Mary Flanagan , a poet , artist , and professor of digital humanities , thinks the notion that machine-generated poems should be expected to pass the Turing Test is boring .
“ Humans are already good at producing human-sounding sonnets , so why get a computer to do that ?
Do something new !
” Flanagan ’ s reaction raises another question : Given the power of new techniques in artificial intelligence , why not think more broadly about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ?
We could think of “ machine-generated ” as a kind of literary G.M.O .
tag—or we could think of it as an entirely new , and worthy , category of art .
As we interact more and more with machines , both knowingly and unknowingly , our own expectations around both work and art will change , and labels will start to dissolve .
The uncanny valley both widens and narrows as humans and writing gadgets evolve together .
In fact , almost all the work we read—including poetry—is touched by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but surely more in the future—are using computers as creative collaborators .
( If you ’ ve ever taken Gmail ’ s suggestions when crafting an e-mail , you , too , have been such a collaborator . )
John Seabrook has examined what this artificial intelligence could mean for the future of everyday , utilitarian acts of writing .
Last February , the OpenAI project , a multi-billion-dollar venture founded to promote “ friendly ” A.I.
, announced that its deep-learning program could complete sentences and even paragraphs .
After paragraphs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Why not sonnets , too ?
If we stop assessing robots by their imitative powers—how close they get to mastering humanness—we might begin to appreciate their creative powers in a new light .
We might even be moved by them .
In “ You Are Not a Gadget , ” Jaron Lanier , a virtual-reality pioneer and frequent philosophizer about the digital future , exhorts readers to resist the easy acceptance of technology as it is .
Perhaps machine sonnet-making is part of that resistance , a literary cyberpunk movement , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ways in which new high-tech tools seem familiar or jarring , we continue to discover aspects of what it means to be human , as writers and readers , creators and consumers .
Can a machine write poetry ?
What is poetry ?
The goalposts move again .

The history of intelligent machines is one of moving goalposts: Sure, a machine can do this, but can it do that? The “that” is often an achievement that strikes us as strongly connected to emotion—that seems especially human. A robot that can clean the crumbs from your living room isn’t nearly as impressive, or scary, as one that can leave you with a lump in your throat.
Poetry is a good place to move the end zone: it’s rooted in the inspirational and the comical—the deeply human—and yet, in many of its forms, it edges toward the computational and algorithmic. Poetry even seems to have been implicit in the bold 1955 manifesto that first announced the field of artificial intelligence, declaring that “an attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts.” The pioneers of A.I. never mentioned poetry outright, but, if you squint, you might see its spirit in their ambitions to investigate the “rules” connecting human thought with word “manipulation” and in their efforts to explore the relationship between creativity and randomness—not to mention in their grander goal of creating machines that would “improve themselves.”
There are more resonances between programming and poetry than you might think. Computer science is an art form of words and punctuation, thoughtfully placed and goal-oriented, even if not necessarily deployed to evoke surprise or longing. Laid out on a page, every program uses indentations, stanzas, and a distinctive visual hierarchy to convey meaning. In the best cases, a close-reader of code will be rewarded with a sense of awe for the way ideas have been captured in words. Programming has its own sense of minimalist aesthetics, born of the imperative to create software that doesn’t take up much space and doesn’t take long to execute. Coders seek to express their intentions in the fewest number of commands; William Carlos Williams, with his sparse style and simple, iconic images, would appreciate that. One poet’s “road not taken” is one programmer’s “if-then-else” statement. Generations of coders have taken their first steps by finding different ways to say “Hello, World.” Arguably, you could say the same for poets.
Many programmers have links to poetry—Ada Lovelace, the acknowledged first programmer ever, was Lord Byron’s daughter—but it’s a challenge to fully bridge the gap. Sonnets occupy something of a sweet spot: they’re a rich art form (good for poets) with clear rules (good for machines). Ranjit Bhatnagar, an artist and programmer, appreciates both sides. In 2012, he invented Pentametron, an art project that mines the Twittersphere for tweets in iambic pentameter. First, using a pronouncing dictionary created at Carnegie Mellon, he built a program to count syllables and recognize meter. Then, with a separate piece of code to identify rhymes, he started to assemble sonnets. For the first National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo), in 2013, Bhatnagar submitted “I got a alligator for a pet!,” a collection of five hundred and four sonnets created with Pentametron.
Bhatnagar’s code required that each line be an entire tweet, or essentially one complete thought (or at least what counts as a thought on Twitter). It also did its best to abide by strict rules of meter and rhyme. This is how “Good night! Tomorrow is another day :)” (the titles are machine-written, too), begins:
I pay attention to the little shit
yeah, teacher aren’t trying anymore… :)
Not even going to encourage it.
I never been in twitter jail before …. Two people wanna be in my bio ?
I wanted some banana pudding to
Don’t be a menace is a classic tho
Know what’s amazing? Johnnie Walker Blue Another day another dollar tho.
Tomorrow is another awesome day
She going hard and he’s complaining so
I never liked Sabrina anyway. Fuck my retainer has a crack in it
This Maybelline mascara is the shit!!!
In Bhatnagar’s most recent collection of computer-assisted sonnets, “Encomials,” he relaxes these constraints. For a machine to produce work that sounded human-generated, Bhatnagar realized, he had to strike a delicate balance between accuracy and authenticity. “If it made too many mistakes, then it wouldn’t look human, so my hope was that it would be just enough mistakes,” he said.
On a whim, Bhatnagar looked in the debug logs of Pentametron, a repository of tweets that had been discarded because they were close to iambic pentameter but not perfect. Text in this trash heap had been stripped of punctuation and capitalization after being disposed. Bhatnagar built a new program to comb through this corpus and write sonnets with enjambed lines—that is, phrases that flow over naturally from one line to the next:
I wanna be a little kid again.
I’m feeling kinda empty on the low.
You should unwind a little now and then.
Team Stacie looking like a sleepy hoe. Back to the Sunshine State. The devil is
a lie. I hate myself a lot sometimes,
I mean, possessive, holy shit, this is
the second time. I’m always catching dimes. I’m not the only one, I’m pinning this
again. I love a windy sunny day.
Not coming out until tonight. I miss
the happy me. I gotta find a way. I always fall into the bullshit. Why?
Socks on in bed—the devil is a lie.
Bhatnagar’s algorithms use a clever mix of data mining and pattern matching to build sonnets from the dross of the Twittersphere. This is more poetry as collage than true composition. I’m hardly a poet, but, like many, I had early schoolroom experiences learning to write poetry. My wonderfully creative second-grade teacher, Mrs. Clack, had us spend all kinds of time doing special projects; it was the year I learned what a limerick was. I couldn’t get enough of Edward Lear in long form (“The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”) or short (“There was a Young Lady whose chin . . . ”), and, encouraged by Mrs. Clack, I tried my hand at making some little limericks of my own.
I loved the wordplay and also the formulaic nature of the composition; perhaps this was an early stirring of the mathematician and computer scientist I would become. A limerick is, in some sense, described by an algorithm: A Mad Lib–ish start (“There was a(n) [old man / young lady] [from / with / who] . . . ”), followed by five lines of prescribed meter in an aabba rhyme scheme. I ran this little poetry program in my head again and again, turning out dozens of nonsense limericks, complete with the requisite little-kid scatology. Years later, when Mrs. Snyder’s British-literature class introduced me to the sonnet, I once again took naturally to a poetic recipe, working the cadence of iambic pentameter into my head and creating satisfying doggerel in the ababcdcdefefgg template. I’ll spare you an example.
So, if kids can learn to write poems from scratch, what about machines? I was able to start composing after reading just a handful of examples. My brain—like the brains of most children—didn’t need much material to begin the process of mimicry. With machine learning, the latest A.I. technology, computers might finally be able to follow suit. But even the most sophisticated machine-learning techniques out there—the deep neural networks that are today’s most cutting-edge technology—need lots and lots of data in order to train, or become more accurate at a given task. The neural-network architecture, modelled and named after our own brain circuitry, has been a boon to tasks such as language translation (e.g. Google Translate) and image recognition (think picture tagging), largely owing to the ready availability of data: the Internet is full of words and photos for these neurons to train on in silico. But, in the absence of enough data, machines can’t begin learning in the first place. This is why the seemingly simple task of teaching a machine to compose a sonnet is such a complex programming feat; deep-learning machines need more inputs than the average school kid.
Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, was among the first researchers who studied how deep neural nets could be used to attack the challenges of translation. Knight’s general expertise is in natural language processing, the area of computer science that is all about generating and understanding human language. Without neural nets, even the best programs couldn’t write complete sentences. They could only string together bits of language. As Knight says, they “couldn’t keep a theme going. Couldn’t even keep the grammar going.”


newyorker--2020-01-07--“Jojo Rabbit” Captures the Horror and Absurdity of Our Trumpian Moment

On Sunday , President Donald Trump watched a football game aboard Air Force One on his way back from his Florida home , and he also threatened to attack Iranian cultural sites .
Later the same evening , the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave out its annual Golden Globe Awards , snubbing the film that serves as the best illustration of our current political and cultural predicament : “ Jojo Rabbit.
” Taika Waititi ’ s movie is about a ten-year-old boy who is a fervent Nazi until , just before Germany loses the war , he falls in love @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his attic .
The film has been criticized for making light of unspeakable crimes .
My colleague Richard Brody objected not so much to the film ’ s gags as to the empathy it shows to the haters , and , indeed , the movie can be read as a beautifully rendered version of a certain journalistic genre : the condescending portrayal of the misguided and misinformed Trump supporter .
But it can also be read as an account of the profound and willful idiocy that underlies political tragedy .
Seen this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ve seen it both times I ’ ve watched “ Jojo Rabbit ” —the movie is as brave and insightful a portrait of autocracy as any contemporary work of art has offered .
The protagonist , Jojo ( Roman Griffin Davis ) , has an imaginary friend , Adolf Hitler .
Early in the movie , the Hitler of Jojo ’ s imagination ( played by Waititi ) implores Jojo to disregard the opinions of others : “ People used to say a lot of nasty things about me .
‘ This guy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at that psycho , he ’ s going to get us all killed !
’ ” Those people are right , of course , but , at the moment when imaginary Hitler is speaking to Jojo , the real Hitler ’ s power is so immense that those true statements sound absurd to Jojo and millions of other Germans .
They believe in Hitler and what he tells them .
The movie ’ s most colorful propagandist is Fraulein Rahm ( Rebel Wilson ) , who is the source of much of Jojo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ upon a time , she tells a group of Hitler Youth , a Jew mated with a fish , and , since then , the Jews have been covered in scales .
“ The Aryans are one thousand times more civilized and advanced than any other race , ” she adds , to the boys ’ delight .
“ Now get your things together , kids .
It ’ s time to burn some books !
” Later , she provides a lesson in conspiracy thinking , when she tells the story of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him , and he became a massive drunk and a gambler , and he cheated on his wife , and he had an inappropriate relationship with my sister .
And then he drowned , in an unrelated accident , but it was Jew ’ s fault.
” Up to about the middle of the movie , the jokes are palatable and the parallels to the present day are clear .
There is the scene in which Jojo and his mother , Rosie ( Scarlett Johansson ) , play out a version of many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happy that the Allies are advancing .
“ Goddammit , why does that make you happy ?
” Jojo asks .
“ You hate your country that much ?
” Rosie explains , “ I love my country .
It ’ s the war I hate .
It ’ s pointless and stupid , and the sooner we have peace , the better.
” Jojo is outraged .
“ We will crush our enemies into dust !
And , when they are destroyed , we shall use their brains as toilets !
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the white tablecloth with green trim .
Rosie moves to end the debate .
“ O.K.
, no more politics , ” she says .
“ Dinner is neutral ground .
Table is Switzerland .
Let ’ s eat.
” Imaginary Hitler is at the table with them , but only Jojo can see him .
But then the jokes get harder to swallow .
The Gestapo shows up at the house .
We don ’ t know what they are looking for , but we know that there is a lot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Rosie is in the resistance , and Elsa ( Thomasin McKenzie ) , the Jewish girl , lives in the attic .
The gag here is in the heil-Hitlering : every new person who enters the scene greets every other individually , with a “ Heil Hitler , ” until we get to ten call-and-response “ Heil Hitler ” s .
There are several heil-Hitlering sequences—the scene drags on and on , and the dread builds .
The Gestapo men , dressed in black overcoats and hats , are ridiculous and terrifying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proves to be not only deathly dangerous but also ineffectual .
As far as we know , all that Rosie has been caught doing is distributing tiny ribbon-like flyers with the words “ Free Germany ” on them .
For this , she is hanged in the town square , where Jojo happens upon her body .
His grief looks ridiculous ( he tries , and fails , to tie his hanged mother ’ s shoe ) and his rage is misdirected ( he tries , and fails , to kill Elsa by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ devastating lesson : the great hollowing-out force of totalitarianism renders even tragedy absurd .
The only actual feat of heroism in the movie—the only act that involves sacrifice and has consequences—is committed by Captain Klenzendorf ( Sam Rockwell ) , a gay Nazi who , decked out in his end-of-days uniform adorned with red fringe , spits at Jojo and calls him a “ dirty Jew ” in order to save him from being executed by Russian soldiers , who , in short order , open machine fire on Klenzendorf and others .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ at all .
What “ Jojo Rabbit ” has to say about power , history , and humanity is terrifying .
We , Americans and humans , generally prefer other portrayals .
On Sunday , the HBO series “ Chernobyl ” won a Golden Globe for best limited series .
The series offers a version of the 1986 nuclear accident in which evil people who know exactly what they are doing exposed millions of people to radiation poisoning and then covered it up .
In the series , they are opposed by people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ capable of great accomplishments , such as conducting a thorough investigation , even under totalitarianism .
In its way , this is a comforting story , clearly preferable to having to consider that tens of millions of people died during the Second World War because of a maniac whom no one took seriously until he was suddenly in power , and whose insane ideas had incredible traction .
The ideas of history and politics contained in “ Jojo Rabbit ” are as accurate as they are terrifying .
We don ’ t want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enormous human tragedy , and we don ’ t want to think that tragedy , whether it ’ s enormous or not , can appear absurd .
Either possibility has dire implications for our own moment .
When the President of the United States is tweeting an imaginary “ legal notice ” of intent to bomb other countries , and when he announces and repeats his intention to target cultural sites , which is a war crime , and when he sincerely believes that this is the best way to be President , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in global history and politics , the absurd can not be tragic and the tragic can not be absurd .
But the truth of the matter is that we are careening into our darkest moment yet , and we look ridiculous doing it .
There is a movie about that .

On Sunday, President Donald Trump watched a football game aboard Air Force One on his way back from his Florida home, and he also threatened to attack Iranian cultural sites. Later the same evening, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave out its annual Golden Globe Awards, snubbing the film that serves as the best illustration of our current political and cultural predicament: “Jojo Rabbit.”
Taika Waititi’s movie is about a ten-year-old boy who is a fervent Nazi until, just before Germany loses the war, he falls in love with a Jewish girl who is hiding in his attic. The film has been criticized for making light of unspeakable crimes. My colleague Richard Brody objected not so much to the film’s gags as to the empathy it shows to the haters, and, indeed, the movie can be read as a beautifully rendered version of a certain journalistic genre: the condescending portrayal of the misguided and misinformed Trump supporter. But it can also be read as an account of the profound and willful idiocy that underlies political tragedy. Seen this way—and this is the way I’ve seen it both times I’ve watched “Jojo Rabbit”—the movie is as brave and insightful a portrait of autocracy as any contemporary work of art has offered.
The protagonist, Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), has an imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler. Early in the movie, the Hitler of Jojo’s imagination (played by Waititi) implores Jojo to disregard the opinions of others: “People used to say a lot of nasty things about me. ‘This guy is a lunatic!’ ‘Look at that psycho—he’s going to get us all killed!’ ” Those people are right, of course, but, at the moment when imaginary Hitler is speaking to Jojo, the real Hitler’s power is so immense that those true statements sound absurd to Jojo and millions of other Germans. They believe in Hitler and what he tells them.
The movie’s most colorful propagandist is Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson), who is the source of much of Jojo’s knowledge about Jews. Once upon a time, she tells a group of Hitler Youth, a Jew mated with a fish, and, since then, the Jews have been covered in scales. “The Aryans are one thousand times more civilized and advanced than any other race,” she adds, to the boys’ delight. “Now get your things together, kids. It’s time to burn some books!” Later, she provides a lesson in conspiracy thinking, when she tells the story of her uncle: “A Jew hypnotized him, and he became a massive drunk and a gambler, and he cheated on his wife, and he had an inappropriate relationship with my sister. And then he drowned, in an unrelated accident, but it was Jews’ fault.”
Up to about the middle of the movie, the jokes are palatable and the parallels to the present day are clear. There is the scene in which Jojo and his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), play out a version of many Americans’ holiday-dinner experiences. Rosie is happy that the Allies are advancing. “Goddammit, why does that make you happy?” Jojo asks. “You hate your country that much?” Rosie explains, “I love my country. It’s the war I hate. It’s pointless and stupid, and the sooner we have peace, the better.” Jojo is outraged. “We will crush our enemies into dust! And, when they are destroyed, we shall use their brains as toilets!” he says, slamming his little hands on the white tablecloth with green trim. Rosie moves to end the debate. “O.K., no more politics,” she says. “Dinner is neutral ground. Table is Switzerland. Let’s eat.” Imaginary Hitler is at the table with them, but only Jojo can see him.
But then the jokes get harder to swallow. The Gestapo shows up at the house. We don’t know what they are looking for, but we know that there is a lot to hide in Jojo’s house: Rosie is in the resistance, and Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), the Jewish girl, lives in the attic. The gag here is in the heil-Hitlering: every new person who enters the scene greets every other individual with a “Heil Hitler,” until we get to ten call-and-response “Heil Hitler”s. There are several heil-Hitlering sequences—the scene drags on and on, and the dread builds. The Gestapo men, dressed in black overcoats and hats, are ridiculous and terrifying at once.
Spoiler alert: resistance proves to be not only deathly dangerous but also ineffectual. As far as we know, all that Rosie has been caught doing is distributing tiny ribbon-like flyers with the words “Free Germany” on them. For this, she is hanged in the town square, where Jojo happens upon her body. His grief looks ridiculous (he tries, and fails, to tie his hanged mother’s shoe) and his rage is misdirected (he tries, and fails, to kill Elsa by stabbing her). This is another devastating lesson: the great hollowing-out force of totalitarianism renders even tragedy absurd.
The only actual feat of heroism in the movie—the only act that involves sacrifice and has consequences—is committed by Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), a gay Nazi who, decked out in his end-of-days uniform adorned with red fringe, spits at Jojo and calls him a “dirty Jew” in order to save him from being executed by Russian soldiers, who, in short order, open fire on Klenzendorf and others. Justice that follows totalitarianism is no justice at all.
What “Jojo Rabbit” has to say about power, history, and humanity is terrifying. We, Americans and humans, generally prefer other portrayals. On Sunday, the HBO series “Chernobyl” won a Golden Globe for best limited series. The series offers a version of the 1986 nuclear accident in which evil people who know exactly what they are doing exposed millions of people to radiation poisoning and then covered it up. In the series, they are opposed by people who are heroic, pure, and capable of great accomplishments, such as conducting a thorough investigation, even under totalitarianism. In its way, this is a comforting story, clearly preferable to having to consider that tens of millions of people died during the Second World War because of a maniac whom no one took seriously until he was suddenly in power, and whose insane ideas had incredible traction.
The ideas of history and politics contained in “Jojo Rabbit” are as accurate as they are terrifying. We don’t want to imagine that absurd incompetents can cause enormous human tragedy, and we don’t want to think that tragedy, whether it’s enormous or not, can appear absurd. Either possibility has dire implications for our own moment. When the President of the United States is tweeting an imaginary “legal notice” of intent to bomb other countries, and when he announces and repeats his intention to target cultural sites, which is a war crime, and when he sincerely believes that this is the best way to be President, we would prefer to think that, in global history and politics, the absurd cannot be tragic and the tragic cannot be absurd. But the truth of the matter is that we are careening into our darkest moment yet, and we look ridiculous doing it. There is a movie about that.


newyorker--2020-01-06--Should the U.S. Expect an Iranian Cyberattack?

A day after Donald Trump authorized a drone strike that killed Qassem Suleimani , the leader of Iran ’ s élite Quds Force , the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin from its National Terrorism Advisory System .
“ Iran maintains a robust cyber program and can execute cyber attacks against the United States , ” the alert said .
“ Iran is capable , at a minimum , of carrying out attacks with temporary disruptive effects against critical infrastructure in the United States.
” Another bullet point noted that “ an attack in the homeland may come with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , hackers claiming to be affiliated with Iran took over the Web site of the Federal Depository Library Program , an American government agency that distributes government publications , and inserted a picture of Trump being punched in the face , with blood dripping from his mouth .
“ Martyrdom , ” the accompanying message read , was Suleimani ’ s “ reward for years of implacable efforts .
With his departure and with God ’ s power , his work and path will not cease and severe revenge awaits those criminals who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blood and the blood of the other martyrs of last night ’ s incident.
” The hackers signed off with an additional threat : “ This is only [ a ] small part of Iran ’ s cyber ability !
We ’ re always ready.
” It was a sophomoric attack on an obscure federal agency , but those last two sentences are unassailable .
In 2010 , the United States and Israel covertly inserted malware into the automated control system at Iran ’ s Natanz nuclear facility , causing nearly a thousand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ necessary to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons , and the Stuxnet attack , as it came to be known , was credited with slowing down Iran ’ s nuclear program and driving the Iranians to the negotiating table .
Though neither Israel nor the United States has claimed credit for the attack , the ensuing nuclear deal , signed in 2015 , was seen as a triumph for the Obama Administration .
( Trump unilaterally walked away from the deal in 2018 . )
But an unintended consequence of Stuxnet—along with the inadvertent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wild , ” where it continues to be used by nation-state and rogue hackers—was that it inspired the Iranian government to accelerate the development of its own cyber army within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps .
The government also recruited thousands of volunteer “ patriotic ” hackers—among them , criminal gangs and ideologically aligned terrorist groups such as Hezbollah—who work independently , but with the regime ’ s implicit blessing .
( In its most recent bulletin , the D.H.S .
noted that “ Homegrown Violent Extremists could capitalize on the heightened tensions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ed Parsons and George Michael , who research cyber threats in the private sector , have pointed out , “ The Iranian regime has demonstrated greater appetite towards destructive or disruptive cyber-attacks in peacetime than any other nation.
” Cyber weapons also level the battlefield .
P. W. Singer , a senior fellow and strategist at New America , told me that , though a nation can ’ t create an air force in a matter of years , it can gain a great deal of cyber capability in that time .
Cyber @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to lacerate a community , a company , or a country , either .
In 2011 , for example , Iranian hackers breached the Dutch certificate authority , DigiNotar , and issued fake security certificates that allowed them to spy on the encrypted communications of tens of thousands of Iranian citizens .
Around the same time , Iranian hackers launched a relentless denial-of-service attack on some forty-six American companies , including A. T. & T. and JPMorgan Chase , which continually knocked them offline for a hundred and seventy-six days .
Though using @ @ @ @ @ @ @ managed to pierce the defenses of some of the biggest businesses in the United States , inflict millions of dollars of damage , and , at times , prevent banking customers from accessing their accounts .
A member of the same group also breached the control system of a dam not far from New York City .
Infrastructure such as water systems and electric grids are especially vulnerable to cyberattacks , not only because they are high-value targets , essential to sustaining life as we know it , but because they are largely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ researcher in the Netherlands identified twenty-six thousand industrial control systems across the United States whose undefended presence on the Internet makes them easy targets for malicious actors .
What would such an attack look like ?
In the winter of 2015 , Russian hackers briefly shut down the electric grid in western Ukraine , and the lights went out on up to two hundred and twenty-five thousand residents .
Over the next six hours , the trains stopped running , cash machines and gas pumps did not work , credit cards were worthless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were essentially cut off .
“ It is hard to set a limit on the potential damage hacking industrial control systems can lead to , ” the cybersecurity researcher Ofer Maor told The Independent , in 2018 .
“ Imagining an attack that causes a blackout is simple , but imagine a case where a vulnerability in a power plant ’ s control system can be used to bypass load limitations , driving the power plant to work overtime , leading to an explosion , or reversing a sewer pump to overflow sewers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by researchers at the University of Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies and Lloyd ’ s of London that was released in 2015 found that , if hackers disabled sections of the power supply to fifteen states and the District of Columbia , significant numbers of people would die as health and safety systems failed .
They estimated the economic cost to be as much as a trillion dollars .
In 2018 , U.S. officials acknowledged that Iran had been probing the American power grid and other critical infrastructure for the past few years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cyberattack .
James Lewis , the Technology Policy Program director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies , told me that cyber weapons enable Iranians to “ do things in the domestic United States , that they can ’ t do with their other weapons , like cruise missiles , because they can reach out and touch.
” ( At the same time , he questioned whether a cyberattack “ is violent enough to be justified as an attack.
” ) Even if there were a cyberattack , we might not know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Russian hackers were observed impersonating Iranian hackers ; they disguised their hack of the 2018 Olympics to look like it had come from North Korea .
Three years ago , the cybersecurity firm Dragos identified a group of hackers it dubbed Xenotime that it considered to be “ the world ’ s most dangerous cyber threat.
” The group was thought to be Iranian .
It was later traced to Moscow .
“ In cybersecurity , attribution is a big deal—who has hit you and how do you know , ” Singer said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cyberattack on the United States , he said , they may want to toss plausible deniability aside , take credit for it , and let the world know they were the perpetrators .
But , he cautioned , “ Iran may want to be loud and proud of an attack , but in turn you could have some nefarious third party that wants to look like Iran being loud and proud.
” There were many reasons to be concerned about a potential cyberattack before last Friday , Singer told me .
There are @ @ @ @

A day after Donald Trump authorized a drone strike that killed Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s élite Quds Force, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin from its National Terrorism Advisory System. “Iran maintains a robust cyber program and can execute cyber attacks against the United States,” the alert said. “Iran is capable, at a minimum, of carrying out attacks with temporary disruptive effects against critical infrastructure in the United States.” Another bullet point noted that “an attack in the homeland may come with little or no warning.” Shortly after, hackers claiming to be affiliated with Iran took over the Web site of the Federal Depository Library Program, an American government agency that distributes government publications, and inserted a picture of Trump being punched in the face, with blood dripping from his mouth. “Martyrdom,” the accompanying message read, was Suleimani’s “reward for years of implacable efforts. With his departure and with God’s power, his work and path will not cease and severe revenge awaits those criminals who have tainted their filthy hands with his blood and the blood of the other martyrs of last night’s incident.” The hackers signed off with an additional threat: “This is only [a] small part of Iran’s cyber ability! We’re always ready.” It was a sophomoric attack on an obscure federal agency, but those last two sentences are unassailable.
In 2010, the United States and Israel covertly inserted malware into the automated control system at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, causing nearly a thousand centrifuges to self-destruct. The centrifuges were necessary to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, and the Stuxnet attack, as it came to be known, was credited with slowing down Iran’s nuclear program and driving the Iranians to the negotiating table. Though neither Israel nor the United States has claimed credit for the attack, the ensuing nuclear deal, signed in 2015, was seen as a triumph for the Obama Administration. (Trump unilaterally walked away from the deal in 2018.) But an unintended consequence of Stuxnet—along with the inadvertent release of the virus into the “wild,” where it continues to be used by nation-state and rogue hackers—was that it inspired the Iranian government to accelerate the development of its own cyber army within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The government also recruited thousands of volunteer “patriotic” hackers—among them, criminal gangs and ideologically aligned terrorist groups such as Hezbollah—who work independently, but with the regime’s implicit blessing. (In its most recent bulletin, the D.H.S. noted that “Homegrown Violent Extremists could capitalize on the heightened tensions to launch individual attacks.”) As Ed Parsons and George Michael, who research cyber threats in the private sector, have pointed out, “The Iranian regime has demonstrated greater appetite towards destructive or disruptive cyber-attacks in peacetime than any other nation.”
Cyber weapons also level the battlefield. P. W. Singer, a senior fellow and strategist at New America, told me that, though a nation can’t create an air force in a matter of years, it can gain a great deal of cyber capability in that time. Cyber weapons do not have to be cutting edge to lacerate a community, a company, or a country, either. In 2011, for example, Iranian hackers breached the Dutch certificate authority, DigiNotar, and issued fake security certificates that allowed them to spy on the encrypted communications of tens of thousands of Iranian citizens. Around the same time, Iranian hackers launched a relentless denial-of-service attack on some forty-six American companies, including A. T. & T. and JPMorgan Chase, which continually knocked them offline for a hundred and seventy-six days. Though using a blunt instrument, the attackers still managed to pierce the defenses of some of the biggest businesses in the United States, inflict millions of dollars of damage, and, at times, prevent banking customers from accessing their accounts. A member of the same group also breached the control system of a dam not far from New York City.
Water systems, electrical grids, and other infrastructure are especially vulnerable to cyberattacks, not only because they are high-value targets, essential to sustaining life as we know it, but because they are largely unguarded. In October, a cybersecurity researcher in the Netherlands identified twenty-six thousand industrial control systems across the United States whose undefended presence on the Internet makes them easy targets for malicious actors. What would such an attack look like? In the winter of 2015, Russian hackers briefly shut down the electrical grid in western Ukraine, and the lights went out on up to two hundred and twenty-five thousand residents. Over the next six hours, the trains stopped running, cash machines and gas pumps did not work, credit cards were worthless, and communications with the wider world were essentially cut off. “It is hard to set a limit on the potential damage hacking industrial control systems can lead to,” the cybersecurity researcher Ofer Maor told The Independent, in 2018. “Imagining an attack that causes a blackout is simple, but imagine a case where a vulnerability in a power plant’s control system can be used to bypass load limitations, driving the power plant to work overtime, leading to an explosion, or reversing a sewer pump to overflow sewers across an entire city.”
A study by researchers at the University of Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies and Lloyd’s of London that was released in 2015 found that, if hackers disabled sections of the power supply to fifteen states and the District of Columbia, significant numbers of people would die as health and safety systems failed. They estimated the economic cost to be as much as a trillion dollars. In 2018, U.S. officials acknowledged that Iran had been probing the American power grid and other critical infrastructure for the past few years, potentially laying the groundwork for a cyberattack. James Lewis, the Technology Policy Program director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me that cyber weapons enable Iranians to “do things in the domestic United States that they can’t do with their other weapons, like cruise missiles, because they can reach out and touch.” (At the same time, he questioned whether a cyberattack “is violent enough to be justified as an attack.”)
Even if there were a cyberattack, we might not know its provenance. Not long ago, Russian hackers were observed impersonating Iranian hackers; they disguised their hack of the 2018 Olympics to look like it had come from North Korea. Three years ago, the cybersecurity firm Dragos identified a group of hackers it dubbed Xenotime, which it considered to be “the world’s most dangerous cyber threat.” The group was thought to be Iranian. It was later traced to Moscow. “In cybersecurity, attribution is a big deal—who has hit you and how do you know,” Singer said. If the Iranians do launch a cyberattack on the United States, he said, they may want to toss plausible deniability aside, take credit for it, and let the world know they were the perpetrators. But, he cautioned, “Iran may want to be loud and proud of an attack, but in turn you could have some nefarious third party that wants to look like Iran being loud and proud.” There were many reasons to be concerned about a potential cyberattack before last Friday, Singer told me. There are even more now.


newyorker--2020-01-06--Terry Gross Talks with David Remnick

Terry Gross Talks with David Remnick

David Remnick has appeared as a guest of Terry Gross on “ Fresh Air ” a number of times over @ @ @ @ @ Russia , Muhammad Ali , and other subjects .
Gross , who has hosted “ @ @ @ @ @ forty-five years , is a defining voice of NPR , and is perhaps the most @ @ @ @ @ .
In October , 2019 , the tables turned , and Gross joined Remnick as @ @ @ @ @ interview at the New Yorker Festival .
They spoke about how she first found her @ @ @ @ @ the role of feminism in establishing NPR , the limits of her expertise , and @ @ @ @ @ give up to prepare for serious conversations day after day .

Photograph by Daniel Dorsa / NYT / Redux
David Remnick has appeared as a guest of Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” a number of times over the years, talking about Russia, Muhammad Ali, and other subjects. Gross, who has hosted “Fresh Air” for nearly forty-five years, is a defining voice of NPR, and is perhaps the most celebrated interviewer of our time. In October, 2019, the tables turned, and Gross joined Remnick as his guest for a live interview at the New Yorker Festival. They spoke about how she first found her way to the microphone, the role of feminism in establishing NPR, the limits of her expertise, and what she has had to give up to prepare for serious conversations day after day.


newyorker--2020-01-06--The Breathtaking Unravelling of the Middle East After Qassem Suleimani’s Death

The flag-draped coffin of General Qassem Suleimani was thronged by wailing mobs in Tehran on Monday , as the fallout from his death , in a U.S. air strike , accelerated with breathtaking speed .
Iran has not seen such an outpouring of emotion on the streets since the death of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini , in 1989 .
His successor , Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , wept openly—as did other political leaders and military officers—as he prayed over the casket .
Esmail Gha ’ ani , Suleimani ’ s successor as head of the Quds Force , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vowed to confront the United States .
“ We promise to continue down martyr Soleimani ’ s path as firmly as before , with the help of God , and , in return for his martyrdom , we aim to get rid of America from the region , ” Gha ’ ani said at the funeral .
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went on five Sunday talk shows—curiously , wearing a red tie on two shows and a blue tie on three others—to brag about the U.S. operation .
“ We took a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he said , on CNN ’ s “ State of the Union.
” “ There is less risk today to American forces in the region as a result of that attack.
” Yet nothing seems further from the truth .
Some form of conflict between the United States and the Islamic Republic , overt or covert , seems more possible now than it has at any time since the 1979 Revolution .
The U.S. investment in neighboring Iraq—thousands of American lives , hundreds of billions of dollars in American treasure , decades of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rippling effects across the Middle East .
Diplomatic missions in other Middle Eastern and South Asian countries are on virtual lockdown , with American citizens urged to evacuate Iraq and Iran and lie low elsewhere in the region .
Instead of being a dead bad guy , Suleimani appears almost as potent in his “ martyrdom ” as he was in life .
His death has already spurred anti-American sentiment across the Middle East .
It has unified Iran ’ s divided society .
And it has also precipitated the first action to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presence in the region—Suleimani ’ s primary mission since he took over the Quds Force , in 1998 .
With almost no debate , the Iraqi Parliament voted on Sunday to expel more than five thousand American troops and other foreign forces , jeopardizing a six-year campaign by a U.S.-led coalition against ISIS .
Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi called the U.S. operation against Suleimani a “ political assassination ” and pressed for “ urgent measures ” to either oust U.S. troops or limit their mission to training Iraqi forces .
“ Despite @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might face , it remains best for Iraq on principle and practically , ” he said .
The vote passed 170–0 , largely by Shiite members ; even more Sunnis and Kurds didn ’ t vote at all .
The resolution still needs the signature of the Prime Minister , who is Iraq ’ s Commander-in-Chief , though Mahdi is only in a caretaker role since his resignation , in November .
So the Parliament ’ s move is still subject to the fractured and fragile politics of Iraq .
Yet the U.S.-led @ @ @ @ @ @ @ military operations against ISIS , also known by its Arabic name , Daesh , which has been resurging in recent months .
It still has between fourteen thousand and eighteen thousand jihadi militants in Iraq and Syria , according to U.S. intelligence estimates .
U.S. troops have now assumed a defensive posture—just protecting themselves—against possible retaliation by either pro-Iranian militias or by Iran .
“ This has limited our capacity to conduct training with partners and to support their operations against Daesh and we have therefore paused these activities , subject to continuous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a statement .
The hiatus is a boon to ISIS , which has carried out dozens of bombings and targeted assassinations since the fall of its caliphate , last March .
Ironically , the only issue on which Iran and the United States ever coöperated militarily—sometimes operating out of the same Iraqi bases—was fighting the Sunni extremist group .
Tensions between the two countries may provide further space for ISIS to regroup .
In Iran , Suleimani ’ s coffin was flown to three cities—Ahvaz , the holy city of Mashhad , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ processions where huge crowds shouted “ Death to America ” and burned American flags .
In Tehran , Suleimani ’ s daughter , Zeinab , told hundreds of thousands of mourners—Iran claimed millions—that her father ’ s death would be avenged .
“ The families of the American soldiers in western Asia .
.
.
will spend their days waiting for the death of their children , ” she said , producing cheers .
“ You crazy Trump , the symbol of ignorance , the slave of Zionists , don ’ t think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finish everything.
” Suleimani ’ s death plays to a central concept of Shiite Islam—martyrdom by a minority fighting for survival against bigger rivals—that dates back to the founding of Islam ’ s second branch , in the seventh century .
The fury has unified disparate sectors of Iranian society , which just weeks ago was riven by street protests challenging the government in dozens of cities .
President Hassan Rouhani , who won an upset victory seven years ago , after calling for diplomacy with the United States to end tensions over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a scathing warning during a condolence call with Suleimani ’ s family over the weekend .
“ The Americans really did not realize what a grave error they have committed , ” he said .
“ Revenge for his blood will be exacted on that day when the filthy hands of America will be cut off forever from the region.
” Iran ’ s information and telecommunications minister , Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi , denounced Trump as “ a terrorist in a suit.
” On Monday , General Amir Ali Hajizadeh warned that Iran @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Firing a couple of missiles , hitting a base , or even killing Trump is not valuable enough to compensate for martyr Suleimani ’ s blood , ” he said , on state-controlled television .
“ The only thing that can compensate for his blood is the complete removal of America from the region and taking away their evil from the oppressed people of the region.
” A senior Revolutionary Guard general , Gholamali Abuhamzeh , said that Iran had identified thirty-five U.S. targets in the region , and also others in Israel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gulf .
“ The Strait of Hormuz is a vital thoroughfare for the West , and a large number of American destroyers and warships cross the Strait of Hormuz , the Sea of Oman , and the Persian Gulf , ” he said .
Iran also announced that it would no longer limit the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium , the fuel to make a nuclear weapon .
The limit was a key part of the historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ( J.C.P.O.A . )
nuclear deal , brokered in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s six major powers .
Trump withdrew the United States , unilaterally , in May , 2018 , and re-imposed sanctions six months later .
The other five countries—Britain , China , France , Germany , and Russia—stuck to the terms .
But in mid-2019 Iran began gradually to breach its commitments , on the grounds that it was not receiving the economic benefits promised in the deal .
This is its fifth breach .
The deal is still not dead .
“ If the United States and Iran are genuinely interested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the U.S. and Iran to return to compliance with their J.C.P.O.A .
commitments , ” Daryl Kimball , the executive director of the Arms Control Association , told me .
The Iranian Foreign Minister , Mohammad Javad Zarif , tweeted that all five steps were “ reversible upon EFFECTIVE implementation of reciprocal obligations.
” The verbal warfare between the United States and Iran is increasingly playing out in all caps on Twitter .
Zarif noted , however , that Tehran would continue to coöperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Iran ’ s nuclear program .

The flag-draped coffin of General Qassem Suleimani was thronged by wailing mobs in Tehran on Monday, as the fallout from his death, in a U.S. air strike, accelerated with breathtaking speed. Iran has not seen such an outpouring of emotion on the streets since the death of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wept openly—as did other political leaders and military officers—as he prayed over the casket. Esmail Gha’ani, Suleimani’s successor as head of the Quds Force, the élite wing of the Revolutionary Guards, vowed to confront the United States. “We promise to continue down martyr Soleimani’s path as firmly as before, with the help of God, and, in return for his martyrdom, we aim to get rid of America from the region,” Gha’ani said at the funeral.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went on five Sunday talk shows—curiously, wearing a red tie on two shows and a blue tie on three others—to brag about the U.S. operation. “We took a bad guy off the battlefield,” he said, on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “There is less risk today to American forces in the region as a result of that attack.” Yet nothing seems further from the truth. Some form of conflict between the United States and the Islamic Republic, overt or covert, seems more possible now than it has at any time since the 1979 Revolution. The U.S. investment in neighboring Iraq—thousands of American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars in American treasure, decades of American diplomacy—appears to be unravelling, with rippling effects across the Middle East. Diplomatic missions in other Middle Eastern and South Asian countries are on virtual lockdown, with American citizens urged to evacuate Iraq and Iran and lie low elsewhere in the region.
Instead of being a dead bad guy, Suleimani appears almost as potent in his “martyrdom” as he was in life. His death has already spurred anti-American sentiment across the Middle East. It has unified Iran’s divided society. And it has also precipitated the first action to wind down or end the American military presence in the region—Suleimani’s primary mission since he took over the Quds Force, in 1998.
With almost no debate, the Iraqi Parliament voted on Sunday to expel more than five thousand American troops and other foreign forces, jeopardizing a six-year campaign by a U.S.-led coalition against ISIS. Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi called the U.S. operation against Suleimani a “political assassination” and pressed for “urgent measures” to either oust U.S. troops or limit their mission to training Iraqi forces. “Despite the internal and external difficulties that we might face, it remains best for Iraq on principle and practically,” he said. The vote passed 170–0, largely by Shiite members; even more Sunnis and Kurds didn’t vote at all. The resolution still needs the signature of the Prime Minister, who is Iraq’s commander-in-chief, though Mahdi is only in a caretaker role since his resignation, in November. So the Parliament’s move is still subject to the fractured and fragile politics of Iraq.
Yet the U.S.-led coalition felt sufficiently threatened that it suspended military operations against ISIS, also known by its Arabic name, Daesh, which has undergone a resurgence in recent months. It still has between fourteen thousand and eighteen thousand jihadi militants in Iraq and Syria, according to U.S. intelligence estimates. U.S. troops have now assumed a defensive posture—just protecting themselves—against possible retaliation by either pro-Iranian militias or by Iran. “This has limited our capacity to conduct training with partners and to support their operations against Daesh and we have therefore paused these activities, subject to continuous review,” the coalition said, in a statement. The hiatus is a boon to ISIS, which has carried out dozens of bombings and targeted assassinations since the fall of its caliphate, last March. Ironically, the only issue on which Iran and the United States ever coöperated militarily—sometimes operating out of the same Iraqi bases—was fighting the Sunni extremist group. Tensions between the two countries may provide further space for ISIS to regroup.
In Iran, Suleimani’s coffin was flown to three cities—Ahvaz, the holy city of Mashhad, and then the capital in Tehran—for memorial processions where huge crowds shouted “Death to America” and burned American flags. In Tehran, Suleimani’s daughter, Zeinab, told hundreds of thousands of mourners—Iran claimed millions—that her father’s death would be avenged. “The families of the American soldiers in western Asia . . . will spend their days waiting for the death of their children,” she said, producing cheers. “You crazy Trump, the symbol of ignorance, the slave of Zionists, don’t think that the killing of my father will finish everything.”
Suleimani’s death plays to a central concept of Shiite Islam—martyrdom by a minority fighting for survival against bigger rivals—that dates back to the founding of Islam’s second branch, in the seventh century. The fury has unified disparate sectors of Iranian society, which just weeks ago was riven by street protests challenging the government in dozens of cities.
President Hassan Rouhani, who won an upset victory seven years ago, after calling for diplomacy with the United States to end tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, issued a scathing warning during a condolence call with Suleimani’s family over the weekend. “The Americans really did not realize what a grave error they have committed,” he said. “Revenge for his blood will be exacted on that day when the filthy hands of America will be cut off forever from the region.” Iran’s information and telecommunications minister, Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi, denounced Trump as “a terrorist in a suit.”
On Monday, General Amir Ali Hajizadeh warned that Iran would retaliate on multiple fronts. “Firing a couple of missiles, hitting a base, or even killing Trump is not valuable enough to compensate for martyr Suleimani’s blood,” he said, on state-controlled television. “The only thing that can compensate for his blood is the complete removal of America from the region and taking away their evil from the oppressed people of the region.” A senior Revolutionary Guard general, Gholamali Abuhamzeh, said that Iran had identified thirty-five U.S. targets in the region, and also others in Israel and the oil-exporting lanes in the Persian Gulf. “The Strait of Hormuz is a vital thoroughfare for the West, and a large number of American destroyers and warships cross the Strait of Hormuz, the Sea of Oman, and the Persian Gulf,” he said.
Iran also announced that it would no longer limit the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium, the fuel to make a nuclear weapon. The limit was a key part of the historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.) nuclear deal, brokered in 2015, between Iran and the world’s six major powers. Trump withdrew the United States, unilaterally, in May, 2018, and re-imposed sanctions six months later. The other five countries—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—stuck to the terms. But in mid-2019 Iran began gradually to breach its commitments, on the grounds that it was not receiving the economic benefits promised in the deal. This is its fifth breach. The deal is still not dead. “If the United States and Iran are genuinely interested in de-escalation, it is still possible for the U.S. and Iran to return to compliance with their J.C.P.O.A. commitments,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told me. The Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweeted that all five steps were “reversible upon EFFECTIVE implementation of reciprocal obligations.” The verbal warfare between the United States and Iran is increasingly playing out in all caps on Twitter. Zarif noted, however, that Tehran would continue to coöperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, which closely monitors aspects of Iran’s nuclear program.
As tensions escalated and more than three thousand new U.S. troops began deploying to the region, President Trump spent the weekend playing golf near his Mar-a-Lago resort, in Florida, and spewing threats on Twitter in his spare time. On Saturday, he vowed to strike fifty-two Iranian targets—“some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture”—if Iran targets Americans or U.S. assets. “Those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD,” he added. “The USA wants no more threats!” he tweeted. The choice of fifty-two is from the fifty-two Americans held hostage after the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, in 1979.


newyorker--2020-01-06--Daily Cartoon: Monday, January 6th

Daily Cartoon: Monday, January 6th

“ I would take them down , but don ’ t you think we ’ ll need some good vibes @ @ @ @ @ is imminent ?
”

“I would take them down, but don’t you think we’ll need some good vibes now that another world war is imminent?”