newyorker--2020-12-26--“The Age of Innocence” at a Moment of Increased Appetite for Eating the Rich

Wharton recognized her place in the pyramid of the super-rich : tantalizingly close to the pinnacle , but never quite there .
( For her , a difficult financial decision would take the shape of having to give up plans for ornate iron gates at the Mount , her thirty-five-room mansion in Massachusetts . )
To continue to live as she was accustomed , she needed a new hit .
“ The Age of Innocence , ” which Wharton produced in seven months , offered her the chance to make money by writing about money—a return to form after four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ publishers frankly told her , weren ’ t selling .
From her perch thousands of miles from the gatekeepers of New York society , and nearly fifty years on from the eighteen-seventies setting she had chosen , Wharton invited the hoi polloi right into the living rooms of Manhattan ’ s upper crust , for an insider ’ s exposé .
“ Fate had planted me in New York , ” she writes in her memoir , “ A Backward Glance , ” “ and my instinct as a story-teller counselled me to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Pictorial Review serialized the novel for eighteen thousand dollars ; it easily earned out its advance , selling a hundred and fifteen thousand copies in the first year and earning Wharton a total of fifty thousand dollars .
Wharton used the influx of cash to buy a second house in France , a former convent with vast terraces and crenellated walls , in Hyères , on the Côte d ’ Azur .
Never one for mixing with locals , she summoned American and British friends to her elegant , immaculate French homes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her life there .
The money solidified her rank and fortune , and insured that she ’ d forever command huge fees .
She grew richer than ever by offering up her people for derision and envy .
Rereading “ The Age of Innocence ” now—a hundred years after its publication , and at a moment of increased appetite for eating the rich—is a bizarre exercise in glee .
Amid the forging of a second Gilded Age , we have perhaps a surfeit of one-per-cent-focussed entertainment , with “ Succession , ” “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and “ The Crown.
” ( The next Julian Fellowes production is actually titled “ The Gilded Age.
” ) There ’ s a perverse satisfaction to taking in the couture , jewel-box dining rooms , and Dutch-still-life feasts that populate these tales of the one per cent .
The glamour and excess is bait for readers and viewers who want to admire the trappings of wealth even as they root for the downfall of the wealthy .
“ The Age of Innocence ” is the direct ancestor of this type of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most shows that employ “ wealth consultants , ” here the author is the expert .
From its first scene , the novel is conditioning its readers in how to watch and judge .
All the main players are in their opera boxes , observing one another instead of the production of “ Faust.
” Newland Archer enters the club box at the old Academy of Music , and trains his eye on his fiancée , May Welland .
Next to him , Lawrence Lefferts , “ the foremost authority on ‘ form @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his opera glass toward the same box and catches a glimpse of Ellen Olenska , the woman who will poach Newland ’ s heart .
He hands the glasses to Sillerton Jackson , society ’ s authority on lineage and rank , who takes in the Countess Olenska—freshly returned home to the United States , after a disastrous , abusive marriage in Europe—and proclaims his amazement that she would dare to show her face in public .
We ’ re watching the characters watch one another .
Surveillance is constant .
“ One @ @ @ @ @ @ @ minute in that great seminary of a house , with all the doors wide open , and always a servant bringing tea , or a log for the fire , or a newspaper , ” Ellen complains about Skuytercliff , one of the novel ’ s grand estates .
“ Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself ?
” Newland and Ellen dash around looking for privacy that they can only find far outside the city , when they lunch along the river outside Boston , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ train station in Jersey City .
Dinner-party guests glance down the table to see what effects their remarks provoke ; they spy carriages that are in front of houses they ought not to be ; Newland notes that even the “ livery-stable-keepers , butlers and cooks ” know who is free each evening .
Novelists before Wharton understood that storytelling was an act of exposure , but she built it into the architecture of “ The Age of Innocence ” and weaponized it .
And status made her story more than believable—it made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her dear friend and lover Walter Berry the book , he told her , “ Yes , it ’ s good .
But of course you and I are the only people who will ever read it .
We are the last people left who can remember New York and Newport as they were then , and nobody else will be interested.
” Wharton writes , perhaps half-jokingly , in “ A Backward Glance , ” that she “ secretly agreed with him.
” But readers on the cusp of the Roaring Twenties @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , for entertainment that ran contrary to their own depleted , weary lives , and that painted the rich as out of touch .
With an exacting penchant for real-life details ( she researched , for example , what months and years “ Faust ” played at the opera and what flowers men wore in buttonholes in the evening ) , Wharton homed in on the details that would make “ The Age of Innocence ” feel like a tour of a mercifully bygone era .
Wharton was the kind of woman who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coats for her beloved dogs .
She directed her publisher , Scribner , to secretly send eight thousand dollars of her royalties to her dear friend Henry James , disguised as an advance for his novel “ The Ivory Tower.
” She lodged for several weeks each year at Paris ’ s legendary Hôtel de Crillon , formerly the palace of King Louis XV , while her servants closed one of her French houses and opened the other .
In France , she employed a butler , a housekeeper , a chef , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ footman , and a staff of gardeners and kitchen workers .
She searched for twenty years , as Janet Flanner explained in a 1929 Profile in this magazine , for “ some eighteenth-century Chinese Chippendale wall paper of which she originally possessed a fragment.
” She loathed anything remotely tacky—her first book , “ The Decoration of Houses , ” is a treatise on how to avoid turning one ’ s palatial estate into a gilded grab bag of colliding European styles , as newly minted millionaires were wont to do in their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ simply violate her aesthetics ; Wharton popularized the theory of “ the morality of taste , ” that one ’ s home indicates one ’ s rectitude .
( Martin Scorsese ’ s sumptuous film adaptation of “ The Age of Innocence , ” from 1993 , is such a wild success , in part , because of its near-fetishistic attention to household detail—Mrs .
Wharton would have expected nothing less . )
Wharton ’ s taste is what makes the minutely chronicled interiors of “ The Age of Innocence ” such artful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for what Wharton cuttingly calls “ a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets , rosewood consoles , round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels , and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany.
” May ’ s drawing room , which is considered “ a great success ” by her peers , features “ sofas and armchairs of pale brocade .
.
.
cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver toys , porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames.
” It ’ s cloying and claustrophobic , a silly , rich woman ’ s folly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ boldly planned ” mansion is so overloaded it might as well be neon , with every expense put on display for maximum effect .
Even the plants are expensive ; in the conservatory , “ camellias and tree ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.
” When Newland imagines himself trapped in his future marriage to May , it ’ s the house that he pictures : “ a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood , ” “ purple satin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe.
” A stilted life of repetition and tchotchkes .
In “ A Backward Glance , ” Wharton railed against cramming “ every room with curtains , lambrequins , jardinières of artificial plants , wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws , and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing-tables.
” She knew that these private homes were practically sacred to their owners , and that unveiling and ridiculing them publicly was aggressive , even forty years on .
But their proportions and embellishments are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ three drawing rooms in a row ( one done in sea-green , the next in crimson , and the final in “ bouton d ’ or ” ) .
These are houses we now visit in their new iterations as museums and post to our Instagram feeds as markers of culture .
The sheer bounty of stuff is impressive to most , but not to Wharton .
Nobody in Wharton ’ s novel is financially punished ; that would spoil the fun—making them too much like us .
( Besides , Lily Bart @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” already met exactly that kind of tragic , impoverished end . )
Newland and May maintain their status as keystones of the Manhattan élite .
Even after a Madoff-level financial scam , Beaufort lives out his days in glittering European cities .
Ellen sails for Paris , where thirty years later , in the novel ’ s fiendish , poignant coda , a widowed Newland stands outside her building—situated , not accidentally , on a similar Seventh Arrondissement street as Wharton ’ s Rue de Varenne—but can not bring himself to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ readers the chance to imagine ourselves as better actors , more appreciative and deserving of the riches on display .
But , in the end , it shuts us out , alongside Newland , as “ a man-servant came out on the balcony , drew up the awnings , and closed the shutters.
” The glittering rooms can be viewed only on Wharton ’ s terms .
• The funniest New Yorker cartoons , as chosen by our Instagram followers .
• Helen Rosner on the best cookbooks .
• Ian Crouch recounts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ • Sheldon Pearce on the albums that helped him navigate a lost plague year .
• New Yorker writers on the best books they read this year .

When she began writing “The Age of Innocence,” in September, 1919, Edith Wharton needed a best-seller. The economic ravages of the First World War had cut her annual income by about sixty per cent. She’d recently bought and begun to renovate a country house, Pavillon Colombe, in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, where she installed new black-and-white marble floors in the dining room, replaced a “humpy” lawn with seven acres of lavish gardens, built a water-lily pond, and expanded the potager, to name just a few additions. She was still paying rent at her apartment at 53 Rue de Varenne, in Paris—a grand flat festooned with carved-wood cherubs and ornate fireplaces. The costs added up.
Wharton recognized her place in the pyramid of the super-rich: tantalizingly close to the pinnacle, but never quite there. (For her, a difficult financial decision would take the shape of having to give up plans for ornate iron gates at the Mount, her thirty-five-room mansion in Massachusetts.) To continue to live as she was accustomed, she needed a new hit. “The Age of Innocence,” which Wharton produced in seven months, offered her the chance to make money by writing about money—a return to form after four years of war stories that, her publishers frankly told her, weren’t selling. From her perch thousands of miles from the gatekeepers of New York society, and nearly fifty years on from the eighteen-seventies setting she had chosen, Wharton invited the hoi polloi right into the living rooms of Manhattan’s upper crust, for an insider’s exposé. “Fate had planted me in New York,” she writes in her memoir, “A Backward Glance,” “and my instinct as a story-teller counselled me to use the material nearest to hand.”
The Pictorial Review serialized the novel for eighteen thousand dollars; it easily earned out its advance, selling a hundred and fifteen thousand copies in the first year and earning Wharton a total of fifty thousand dollars. Wharton used the influx of cash to buy a second house in France, a former convent with vast terraces and crenellated walls, in Hyères, on the Côte d’Azur. Never one for mixing with locals, she summoned American and British friends to her elegant, immaculate French homes, spending most of the rest of her life there. The money solidified her rank and fortune, and insured that she’d forever command huge fees. She grew richer than ever by offering up her people for derision and envy.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Rereading “The Age of Innocence” now—a hundred years after its publication, and at a moment of increased appetite for eating the rich—is a bizarre exercise in glee. Amid the forging of a second Gilded Age, we have perhaps a surfeit of one-per-cent-focussed entertainment, with “Succession,” “Billions,” “The Undoing,” and “The Crown.” (The next Julian Fellowes production is actually titled “The Gilded Age.”) There’s a perverse satisfaction to taking in the couture, jewel-box dining rooms, and Dutch-still-life feasts that populate these tales of the one per cent. The glamour and excess is bait for readers and viewers who want to admire the trappings of wealth even as they root for the downfall of the wealthy.
“The Age of Innocence” is the direct ancestor of this type of entertainment, but, in contrast with most shows that employ “wealth consultants,” here the author is the expert. From its first scene, the novel is conditioning its readers in how to watch and judge. All the main players are in their opera boxes, observing one another instead of the production of “Faust.” Newland Archer enters the club box at the old Academy of Music, and trains his eye on his fiancée, May Welland. Next to him, Lawrence Lefferts, “the foremost authority on ‘form’ in New York,” swivels his opera glass toward the same box and catches a glimpse of Ellen Olenska, the woman who will poach Newland’s heart. He hands the glasses to Sillerton Jackson, society’s authority on lineage and rank, who takes in the Countess Olenska—freshly returned home to the United States, after a disastrous, abusive marriage in Europe—and proclaims his amazement that she would dare to show her face in public. We’re watching the characters watch one another.
Surveillance is constant. “One can’t be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all the doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for the fire, or a newspaper,” Ellen complains about Skuytercliff, one of the novel’s grand estates. “Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself?” Newland and Ellen dash around looking for privacy that they can only find far outside the city, when they lunch along the river outside Boston, or rattle home in a carriage from the train station in Jersey City. Dinner-party guests glance down the table to see what affects their remarks provoke; they spy carriages that are in front of houses they ought not to be; Newland notes that even the “livery-stable-keepers, butlers and cooks” know who is free each evening.
Novelists before Wharton understood that storytelling was an act of exposure, but she built it into the architecture of “The Age of Innocence” and weaponized it. And status made her story more than believable—it made the story real. When Wharton showed her dear friend and lover Walter Berry the book, he told her, “Yes, it’s good. But of course you and I are the only people who will ever read it. We are the last people left who can remember New York and Newport as they were then, and nobody else will be interested.” Wharton writes, perhaps half-jokingly, in “A Backward Glance,” that she “secretly agreed with him.” But readers on the cusp of the Roaring Twenties were hungry for glitz, for distraction, for entertainment that ran contrary to their own depleted, weary lives, and that painted the rich as out of touch. With an exacting penchant for real-life details (she researched, for example, what months and years “Faust” played at the opera and what flowers men wore in buttonholes in the evening), Wharton homed in on the details that would make “The Age of Innocence” feel like a tour of a mercifully bygone era.
Although Wharton spent her youth observing people like these up close, a series of unusual decisions—her broken engagement to the son of a déclassé social climber; her marriage to the down-and-out, unstable Teddy Wharton; her pursuit of a public career—pushed her further and further outside the nest. She didn’t mind much. By the time she moved to France, in 1910, Wharton occupied a strange place among the moneyed—still respected, but just enough of a wild card to get away with living however she pleased. She modelled Mrs. Manson Mingott, who lives in a strangely furnished mansion “in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park,” after her great-aunt Mrs. Mason Jones, but it’s hard not to see shades of Wharton herself—remote, imperious, unflinching—in the character.
Wharton was the kind of woman who employed a canine couturier to make custom-knitted coats for her beloved dogs. She directed her publisher, Scribner, to secretly send eight thousand dollars of her royalties to her dear friend Henry James, disguised as an advance for his novel “The Ivory Tower.” She lodged for several weeks each year at Paris’s legendary Hôtel de Crillon, formerly the palace of King Louis XV, while her servants closed one of her French houses and opened the other. In France, she employed a butler, a housekeeper, a chef, a chauffeur, a maid, a footman, and a staff of gardeners and kitchen workers. She searched for twenty years, as Janet Flanner explained in a 1929 Profile in this magazine, for “some eighteenth-century Chinese Chippendale wall paper of which she originally possessed a fragment.” She loathed anything remotely tacky—her first book, “The Decoration of Houses,” is a treatise on how to avoid turning one’s palatial estate into a gilded grab bag of colliding European styles, as newly minted millionaires were wont to do in their nineteenth-century McMansions. Overdecoration didn’t simply violate her aesthetics; Wharton popularized the theory of “the morality of taste,” that one’s home indicates one’s rectitude. (Martin Scorsese’s sumptuous film adaptation of “The Age of Innocence,” from 1993, is such a wild success, in part, because of its near-fetishistic attention to household detail—Mrs. Wharton would have expected nothing less.)
Wharton’s taste is what makes the minutely chronicled interiors of “The Age of Innocence” such artful character assassinations. The general style is for what Wharton cuttingly calls “a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany.” May’s drawing room, which is considered “a great success” by her peers, features “sofas and armchairs of pale brocade . . . cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver toys, porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames.” It’s cloying and claustrophobic, a silly, rich woman’s folly. Julius Beaufort’s hastily built, “boldly planned” mansion is so overloaded it might as well be neon, with every expense put on display for maximum effect. Even the plants are expensive; in the conservatory, “camellias and tree ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.” When Newland imagines himself trapped in his future marriage to May, it’s the house that he pictures: “a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood,” “purple satin and yellow tuftings,” “sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe.” A stilted life of repetition and tchotchkes.
In “A Backward Glance,” Wharton railed against cramming “every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing-tables.” She knew that these private homes were practically sacred to their owners, and that unveiling and ridiculing them publicly was aggressive, even forty years on. But their proportions and embellishments are also awe-inspiring—malachite fireplaces, Corinthian porticoes, three drawing rooms in a row (one done in sea-green, the next in crimson, and the final in “bouton d’or”). These are houses we now visit in their new iterations as museums and post to our Instagram feeds as markers of culture. The sheer bounty of stuff is impressive to most, but not to Wharton.


newyorker--2020-12-27--The Cryptic Crossword: No. 92

The Cryptic Crossword: No. 92

Some clues have been edited for clarity .
Subscribers can find explanations of the original puzzle ’ s answers in @ @ @

Some clues have been edited for clarity. Subscribers can find explanations of the original puzzle’s answers in our archive.


newyorker--2020-12-27--A Year of Historical Turning Points in New Yorker Fiction

Few years , in my lifetime , at least , have felt as historically pivotal as 2020 .
A once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands in this country alone , a prolonged national upwelling of protest against racism and police brutality , one of the most contested , divisive , and impactful Presidential elections ever : any of these things would have been enough to render the year memorable , something to tell your grandchildren about—if the planet survives climate change long enough for you to have them .
It ’ s hardly surprising that some of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fiction—or sent us to stories that explore other historical turning points and what led to them .
Allan Gurganus , for instance , looked back to the mid-nineteenth century , when a cholera epidemic swept through the Midwest , killing as much as ten per cent of the population in cities such as Cincinnati , St. Louis , and Detroit .
In his story , “ The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor , ” a new doctor in a small town in Illinois in 1849 is confronted with the deadly disease @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ The Sand Banks , 1861 ” twelve years later and a thousand miles southeast , on the Outer Banks of North Carolina .
There , change is on the way in the form of the Union Army , which the story ’ s hero , a young slave , the son of a plantation owner , will soon join .
In Marilynne Robinson ’ s “ Jack and Della , ” adapted from her new novel , “ Jack , ” a white man and a Black woman are drawn to each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time when America was beginning to rethink its anti-miscegenation laws , though not fast enough for Robinson ’ s characters .
Curtis Sittenfeld and Emma Cline , in “ A for Alone ” and “ White Noise , ” respectively , reflect on more recent turning points in American society : Sittenfeld sets her story in the early days of the Trump Presidency , when an artist muses on Mike Pence ’ s contention that a married man should never eat alone with a woman who is not his wife ; Cline writes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Weinstein , the day before the verdict in his criminal trial .
( The real Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault in February , a climactic moment in the # MeToo movement . )
George Saunders , in “ Love Letter , ” takes a step into the future , imagining a letter from a man to his grandson , reflecting on the turning point in the past that is—for us—now .
The grandfather lists the acts not performed , the stands not taken , that allowed a Trumplike President to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to succeed him , and all vestiges of democracy to be quashed .
“ I just want to say that history , when it arrives , may not look as you expect , based on the reading of history books , ” he writes .
“ Things in there are always so clear .
One knows exactly what one would have done.
” “ The doctor was soon the only person brave or fool enough to duck under the orange quarantine ropes , ignoring warning signs he himself had nailed to the doors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We were children yet , but not children for long .
Such was the life of a slave.
” “ She couldn ’ t be seen walking down the street with him without damage to her reputation , a risk a teacher can ’ t take.
” Before her lunch with Eddie Walsh , she writes : When did you last spend time alone with a woman who is not your wife ?
This time tomorrow , Harvey would know everything .
He believed , truly , that he would be exonerated .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ What would you have done ?
I know what you will say : you would have fought .
But how ?
How would you have fought ?
” • The funniest New Yorker cartoons , as chosen by our Instagram followers .
• Helen Rosner on the best cookbooks .
• Ian Crouch recounts the best jokes of the year .
• Sheldon Pearce on the albums that helped him navigate a lost plague year .
• New Yorker writers on the best books they read this year .

Few years, in my lifetime, at least, have felt as historically pivotal as 2020. A once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands in this country alone, a prolonged national upwelling of protest against racism and police brutality, one of the most contested, divisive, and impactful Presidential elections ever: any of these things would have been enough to render the year memorable, something to tell your grandchildren about—if the planet survives climate change long enough for you to have them.
It’s hardly surprising that some of the anxiety of this unmooring year trickled into fiction—or sent us to stories that explore other historical turning points and what led to them. Allan Gurganus, for instance, looked back to the mid-nineteenth century, when a cholera epidemic swept through the Midwest, killing as much as ten per cent of the population in cities such as Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Detroit. In his story, “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” a new doctor in a small town in Illinois in 1849 is confronted with the deadly disease. David Wright Faladé set his story “The Sand Banks, 1861” twelve years later and a thousand miles southeast, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There, change is on the way in the form of the Union Army, which the story’s hero, a young slave, the son of a plantation owner, will soon join. In Marilynne Robinson’s “Jack and Della,” adapted from her new novel, “Jack,” a white man and a Black woman are drawn to each other in Missouri in the nineteen-fifties—at a time when America was beginning to rethink its anti-miscegenation laws, though not fast enough for Robinson’s characters.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Curtis Sittenfeld and Emma Cline, in “A for Alone” and “White Noise,” respectively, reflect on more recent turning points in American society: Sittenfeld sets her story in the early days of the Trump Presidency, when an artist muses on Mike Pence’s contention that a married man should never eat alone with a woman who is not his wife; Cline writes from the mind of a fictionalized Harvey Weinstein, the day before the verdict in his criminal trial. (The real Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault in February, a climactic moment in the #MeToo movement.)
George Saunders, in “Love Letter,” takes a step into the future, imagining a letter from a man to his grandson, reflecting on the turning point in the past that is—for us—now. The grandfather lists the acts not performed, the stands not taken, that allowed a Trumplike President to win a second term, his son to succeed him, and all vestiges of democracy to be quashed. “I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books,” he writes. “Things in there are always so clear. One knows exactly what one would have done.”
“The doctor was soon the only person brave or fool enough to duck under the orange quarantine ropes, ignoring warning signs he himself had nailed to the doors of those farmhouses worst hit.”
“We were children yet, but not children for long. Such was the life of a slave.”
“She couldn’t be seen walking down the street with him without damage to her reputation, a risk a teacher can’t take.”
Before her lunch with Eddie Walsh, she writes: When did you last spend time alone with a woman who is not your wife?
This time tomorrow, Harvey would know everything. He believed, truly, that he would be exonerated. How could he not be?
“What would you have done? I know what you will say: you would have fought. But how? How would you have fought?”
2020 in Review


newyorker--2020-12-27--Dear Pepper: Sisterly Love

Dear Pepper: Sisterly Love

Dear Pepper is a monthly advice-column comic by Liana Finck .
If you have questions for Pepper about how to act in difficult situations , please direct them to dearpepperquestions @ gmail.com .
Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity .
My sister is pretty amazing .
She ’ s a graduate student in a dual-degree program , is married , and has a baby turning one very soon .
She works hard to take care of the little one , be supportive of her husband , and keep the house mostly in order—all while also pursuing her studies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a great guy who usually does his fair share of the housework and child care—but his job has been putting him through the wringer lately .
On top of that , they recently moved to his home town to be closer to his family , with the plan that his retired mother would be able to provide significant support watching the baby during the day .
The pandemic , and his parents ’ apathy toward public health ( and frequent trips to Florida ) , have thrown a serious wrench into that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ herself to the bone balancing everything—and , despite his best efforts , my busy brother-in-law can ’ t help enough to really give her the break she needs .
I wish I knew how to help her in this situation .
I can ’ t force his parents to behave more responsibly , nor would that wasp ’ s nest be worth poking at this time of year .
I ’ m a new employee , so I ’ m not allowed personal leave yet , and I can ’ t drive up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far away now to help .
With the holidays approaching , she ’ ll have exams to study for on top of numerous family obligations .
Can you think of any way I can help ?
I ’ m racking my brain , but I can ’ t seem to find something meaningful to do from afar .
This is where , if I were a real advice columnist and not a tongue-tied dog , I would sum up the particularly impossible struggles faced by working ( or formerly working ) moms during @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t , though , so please accept this assortment of random nuts and bolts .
Maybe one of them will fit .
How would your sister feel about day care , taking into consideration its potential risks and rewards ?
Might she and her husband be able to afford a babysitter—perhaps you or your parents could pitch in to help pay for one ?
Is there any way she ’ d feel comfortable letting her parents-in-law help out , after all ?
Maybe your sister could drop the baby off at the in-laws @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come over ?
Or set ground rules for outdoor excursions ?
Does your sister know anyone ( friend , family , or for hire ) who would be willing to drop everything and move into her household COVID pod to help with the kid ?
Does she have space ?
If the answer to all these questions is no , as I suspect it is—because all the contingencies that I ’ ve laid out imply huge privilege , of one form or another—then I ’ m afraid your sister has an impossible situation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to suck it up , like so many people with young children or old parents , bear the lasting consequences to her career , and await a vaccine .
If this answer sounds deeply unsatisfying , dense , and unfair , that ’ s because it ’ s not the real answer .
The real answer is that what your sister is up against is insidious sexism , at a grand scale .
Why , when something comes up , do women ’ s careers tend to be so much more flexible than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take time off or quit their jobs in a child-care emergency so much more often than their husbands do ?
Sexism takes many forms in this country—including a lack of decent and affordable child care ; the tendency of women to wind up in less stable , less powerful , and lower-paying jobs ; and a general assumption that children are more their mother ’ s responsibilities than their father ’ s .
It ’ s time for these things to change .
Help make that happen .
That ’ s my answer @

Dear Pepper is a monthly advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to dearpepperquestions@gmail.com. Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.
Dear Pepper,
My sister is pretty amazing. She’s a graduate student in a dual-degree program, is married, and has a baby turning one very soon. She works hard to take care of the little one, be supportive of her husband, and keep the house mostly in order—all while also pursuing her studies online, full time.
My brother-in-law is a great guy who usually does his fair share of the housework and child care—but his job has been putting him through the wringer lately.
On top of that, they recently moved to his home town to be closer to his family, with the plan that his retired mother would be able to provide significant support watching the baby during the day.
The pandemic, and his parents’ apathy toward public health (and frequent trips to Florida), have thrown a serious wrench into that plan. Now my sister is working herself to the bone balancing everything—and, despite his best efforts, my busy brother-in-law can’t help enough to really give her the break she needs.
I wish I knew how to help her in this situation. I can’t force his parents to behave more responsibly, nor would that wasp’s nest be worth poking at this time of year. I’m a new employee, so I’m not allowed personal leave yet, and I can’t drive up every weekend. Our parents live too far away now to help. With the holidays approaching, she’ll have exams to study for on top of numerous family obligations.
Can you think of any way I can help? I’m racking my brain, but I can’t seem to find something meaningful to do from afar.
Sincerely,
Floundering Sister
Dear Sister,
This is where, if I were a real advice columnist and not a tongue-tied dog, I would sum up the particularly impossible struggles faced by working (or formerly working) moms during this terrible pandemic.
I can’t, though, so please accept this assortment of random nuts and bolts.
Maybe one of them will fit.
How would your sister feel about day care, taking into consideration its potential risks and rewards? Might she and her husband be able to afford a babysitter—perhaps you or your parents could pitch in to help pay for one? Is there any way she’d feel comfortable letting her parents-in-law help out, after all? Maybe your sister could drop the baby off at the in-laws’ house, rather than having them come over? Or set ground rules for outdoor excursions? Does your sister know anyone (friend, family, or for hire) who would be willing to drop everything and move into her household COVID pod to help with the kid? Does she have space?
If the answer to all these questions is no, as I suspect it is—because all the contingencies that I’ve laid out imply huge privilege, of one form or another—then I’m afraid your sister has an impossible situation on her hands. She will have to suck it up, like so many people with young children or old parents, bear the lasting consequences to her career, and await a vaccine.
If this answer sounds deeply unsatisfying, dense, and unfair, that’s because it’s not the real answer. The real answer is that what your sister is up against is insidious sexism, at a grand scale. Why, when something comes up, do women’s careers tend to be so much more flexible than men’s? Why do women take time off or quit their jobs in a child-care emergency so much more often than their husbands do?
Sexism takes many forms in this country—including a lack of decent and affordable child care; the tendency of women to wind up in less stable, less powerful, and lower-paying jobs; and a general assumption that children are more their mother’s responsibilities than their father’s.
It’s time for these things to change. Help make that happen. That’s my answer.
My best,
Pepper


newyorker--2020-12-27--What We Get Wrong About America’s Crisis of Democracy

How the Bread-and-Butterfly survives , given the impossible demands of its diet , is a nice question .
Lewis Carroll was in part teasing Darwinian ideas , which depend on a struggle for existence in which , eventually , we all lose—nonexistence being the norm of living things , over time .
But the plight of the Bread-and-Butterfly comes to mind , too , when we contemplate what is called , not without reason , America ’ s crisis of democracy .
It always happens .
We are told again and again that American democracy is in peril and may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , after all , a defeated yet deranged President bunkers in the White House contemplating crazy conspiracy theories and perhaps even martial law , with the uneasy consent of his party and the rabid support of his base .
We are then told , with equal urgency , that what is wrong , ultimately , is deep , systemic , and Everybody ’ s Fault .
Perhaps there is a crisis of meaning , or of spirit ; perhaps it is a crisis caused by the condescension of self-important élites .
( In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at least as self-lacerating as they are condescending , as the latest rounds of self-laceration show . )
Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise—that the descent into authoritarianism is what needs to be explained , when the reality is that .
.
.
it always happens .
The default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them .
The default condition of humankind , traced across thousands of years of history , is some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never had a particularly settled commitment to democratic , rational government .
At a high point of national prosperity , long before manufacturing fell away or economic anxiety gripped the Middle West—in an era when “ silos ” referred only to grain or missiles and information came from three sober networks , and when fewer flew over flyover country—a similar set of paranoid beliefs filled American minds and came perilously close to taking power .
As this magazine ’ s political writer Richard Rovere documented in a beautifully sardonic 1965 collection , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group of people believed things as fully fantastical as the Trumpite belief in voting machines rerouted by dead Venezuelan socialists .
The intellectual forces behind Goldwater ’ s sudden rise thought that Eisenhower and J.F.K .
were agents , wittingly or otherwise , of the Communist conspiracy , and that American democracy was in a death match with enemies within as much as without .
( Goldwater was , political genealogists will note , a ferocious admirer and defender of Joe McCarthy , whose counsel in all things conspiratorial was Roy Cohn , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Goldwater was a less personally malevolent figure than Trump , and , yes , he lost his 1964 Presidential bid .
But , in sweeping the Deep South , he set a victorious neo-Confederate pattern for the next four decades of American politics , including the so-called Reagan revolution .
Nor were his forces naïvely libertarian .
At the time , Goldwater ’ s ghostwriter Brent Bozell spoke approvingly of Franco ’ s post-Fascist Spain as spiritually far superior to decadent America , much as the highbrow Trumpites talk of the Christian regimes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ question is not what causes autocracy ( not to mention the conspiratorial thinking that feeds it ) but what has ever suspended it .
We constantly create post-hoc explanations for the ascent of the irrational .
The Weimar inflation caused the rise of Hitler , we say ; the impoverishment of Tsarism caused the Bolshevik Revolution .
In fact , the inflation was over in Germany long before Hitler rose , and Lenin came to power not in anything that resembled a revolution—which had happened already under the leadership of far more pluralistic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by a militant minority .
Force of personality , opportunity , sheer accident : these were much more decisive than some neat formula of suffering in , autocracy out .
Donald Trump came to power not because of an overwhelming wave of popular sentiment—he lost his two elections by a cumulative ten million votes—but because of an orphaned electoral system left on our doorstep by an exhausted Constitutional Convention .
It ’ s true that our diagnoses , however dubious as explanations , still point to real maladies .
Certainly there are all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But Trump ’ s power was not rooted in economic interests , and his approval rating among his followers was the same when things were going well as it is now , when they ’ re going badly .
Then , too , some of the blandest occupants of the Oval Office were lofted there during previous peaks of inequality .
The way to shore up American democracy is to shore up American democracy—that is , to strengthen liberal institutions , in ways that are unglamorously specific and discouragingly minute .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ peer into our souls as to reduce the enormous democratic deficits under which the country labors , most notably an electoral landscape in which farmland tilts to power while city blocks are flattened .
This means remedying manipulative redistricting while reforming the Electoral College and the Senate .
Some of these things won ’ t be achievable , but all are worth pursuing—with the knowledge that , even if every box on our wonkish wish list were checked , no set-it-and-forget-it solution to democratic fragility would stand revealed .
The only way to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it always happens .
The temptation of anti-democratic cult politics is forever with us , and so is the work of fending it off .
The rule of law , the protection of rights , and the procedures of civil governance are not fixed foundations , shaken by events , but practices and habits , constantly threatened , frequently renewable .
“ A republic if you can keep it , ” Benjamin Franklin said .
Keeping a republic is a matter not of preserving it like pickles but of working it like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ serve alongside very weak tea .
But it is the essential diet to feed our democracy if we are to make what always happens , for a little while longer , happily unhappen .
♦

Illustration by João Fazenda
Readers of “Through the Looking-Glass” may recall the plight of the Bread-and-Butterfly, which, as the Gnat explains to Alice, can live only on weak tea with cream in it. “Supposing it couldn’t find any?” Alice asks. “Then it would die, of course,” the Gnat answers. “That must happen very often,” Alice reflects. “It always happens,” the Gnat admits, dolefully.
How the Bread-and-Butterfly survives, given the impossible demands of its diet, is a nice question. Lewis Carroll was in part teasing Darwinian ideas, which depend on a struggle for existence in which, eventually, we all lose—nonexistence being the norm of living things, over time. But the plight of the Bread-and-Butterfly comes to mind, too, when we contemplate what is called, not without reason, America’s crisis of democracy. It always happens. We are told again and again that American democracy is in peril and may even be on its deathbed. Today, after all, a defeated yet deranged President bunkers in the White House contemplating crazy conspiracy theories and perhaps even martial law, with the uneasy consent of his party and the rabid support of his base. We are then told, with equal urgency, that what is wrong, ultimately, is deep, systemic, and Everybody’s Fault. Perhaps there is a crisis of meaning, or of spirit; perhaps it is a crisis caused by the condescension of self-important élites. (In truth, those élites tend to be at least as self-lacerating as they are condescending, as the latest rounds of self-laceration show.)
Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise—that the descent into authoritarianism is what needs to be explained, when the reality is that . . . it always happens. The default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them. The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy.
America itself has never had a particularly settled commitment to democratic, rational government. At a high point of national prosperity, long before manufacturing fell away or economic anxiety gripped the Middle West—in an era when “silos” referred only to grain or missiles and information came from three sober networks, and when fewer flew over flyover country—a similar set of paranoid beliefs filled American minds and came perilously close to taking power. As this magazine’s political writer Richard Rovere documented in a beautifully sardonic 1965 collection, “The Goldwater Caper,” a sizable group of people believed things as fully fantastical as the Trumpite belief in voting machines rerouted by dead Venezuelan socialists. The intellectual forces behind Goldwater’s sudden rise thought that Eisenhower and J.F.K. were agents, wittingly or otherwise, of the Communist conspiracy, and that American democracy was in a death match with enemies within as much as without. (Goldwater was, political genealogists will note, a ferocious admirer and defender of Joe McCarthy, whose counsel in all things conspiratorial was Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor.)
Goldwater was a less personally malevolent figure than Trump, and, yes, he lost his 1964 Presidential bid. But, in sweeping the Deep South, he set a victorious neo-Confederate pattern for the next four decades of American politics, including the so-called Reagan revolution. Nor were his forces naïvely libertarian. At the time, Goldwater’s ghostwriter Brent Bozell spoke approvingly of Franco’s post-Fascist Spain as spiritually far superior to decadent America, much as the highbrow Trumpites talk of the Christian regimes of Putin and Orbán.
The interesting question is not what causes autocracy (not to mention the conspiratorial thinking that feeds it) but what has ever suspended it. We constantly create post-hoc explanations for the ascent of the irrational. The Weimar inflation caused the rise of Hitler, we say; the impoverishment of Tsarism caused the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, the inflation was over in Germany long before Hitler rose, and Lenin came to power not in anything that resembled a revolution—which had happened already under the leadership of far more pluralistic politicians—but in a coup d’état by a militant minority. Force of personality, opportunity, sheer accident: these were much more decisive than some neat formula of suffering in, autocracy out.
Donald Trump came to power not because of an overwhelming wave of popular sentiment—he lost his two elections by a cumulative ten million votes—but because of an orphaned electoral system left on our doorstep by an exhausted Constitutional Convention. It’s true that our diagnoses, however dubious as explanations, still point to real maladies. Certainly there are all sorts of reasons for reducing economic inequality. But Trump’s power was not rooted in economic interests, and his approval rating among his followers was the same when things were going well as it is now, when they’re going badly. Then, too, some of the blandest occupants of the Oval Office were lofted there during previous peaks of inequality.
The way to shore up American democracy is to shore up American democracy—that is, to strengthen liberal institutions, in ways that are unglamorously specific and discouragingly minute. The task here is not so much to peer into our souls as to reduce the enormous democratic deficits under which the country labors, most notably an electoral landscape in which farmland tilts to power while city blocks are flattened. This means remedying manipulative redistricting while reforming the Electoral College and the Senate. Some of these things won’t be achievable, but all are worth pursuing—with the knowledge that, even if every box on our wonkish wish list were checked, no set-it-and-forget-it solution to democratic fragility would stand revealed. The only way to stave off another Trump is to recognize that it always happens. The temptation of anti-democratic cult politics is forever with us, and so is the work of fending it off.
The rule of law, the protection of rights, and the procedures of civil governance are not fixed foundations, shaken by events, but practices and habits, constantly threatened, frequently renewable. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin said. Keeping a republic is a matter not of preserving it like pickles but of working it like dough—which sounds like something you’d serve alongside very weak tea. But it is the essential diet to feed our democracy if we are to make what always happens, for a little while longer, happily unhappen. ♦


newyorker--2020-12-27--Sunday Reading: Literary Portraits

Sunday Reading: Literary Portraits

In 1996 , Alec Wilkinson published a profile of Elmore Leonard , the author of “ Get Shorty ” and “ Out of Sight , ” among numerous other novels .
For years , Leonard employed a researcher to gain an insider ’ s perspective on the habits and tactics of the jailbirds , bail bondsmen , thieves , and other colorful characters that he brought to the page .
Leonard wrote his novels carefully , feeling his way through the plot .
Sometimes he got stuck .
At one point , while researching his book “ Cuba Libre , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dialogue is different , ” he said .
“ I can ’ t swing with it yet , and I don ’ t know what obscenities they used.
” Wilkinson skillfully traces Leonard ’ s process as the novelist constructs the narratives that engage and thrill us .
This week , we ’ re bringing you a selection of compelling literary portraits .
In “ After Empire , ” Ruth Franklin writes about the masterly artistry of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe .
In “ Bonhomie for a Southern Belletrist , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in her home town of Jackson , Mississippi , as she receives the French Legion of Honor .
In “ Man of Gamaliya , ” Milton Viorst recounts the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz ’ s battle against encroaching religious extremism in Egypt .
In “ Reading Japan , ” David Remnick explores the intricate—and profoundly personal—work of the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe .
Finally , in “ A Society of One , ” Claudia Roth Pierpont examines the life of Zora Neale Hurston , a leader of the Harlem Renaissance who expertly transformed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these pieces reveals something elusive about the lives of the artists behind our favorite novels .
We hope that you ’ ll enjoy diving into this collection over the holiday weekend .
How does Elmore Leonard get true grit ?
Chinua Achebe and the great African novel .
Kenzaburo Oe is the last of Japan ’ s politically engaged postwar writers—but the reasons for his surprise Nobel-ceremony announcement are personal .

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten / Getty
In 1996, Alec Wilkinson published a profile of Elmore Leonard, the author of “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight,” among numerous other novels. For years, Leonard employed a researcher to gain an insider’s perspective on the habits and tactics of the jailbirds, bail bondsmen, thieves, and other colorful characters that he brought to the page. Leonard wrote his novels carefully, feeling his way through the plot. Sometimes he got stuck. At one point, while researching his book “Cuba Libre,” he grew frustrated. “The dialogue is different,” he said. “I can’t swing with it yet, and I don’t know what obscenities they used.” Wilkinson skillfully traces Leonard’s process as the novelist constructs the narratives that engage and thrill us.
More from the Archive Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past.
This week, we’re bringing you a selection of compelling literary portraits. In “After Empire,” Ruth Franklin writes about the masterly artistry of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. In “Bonhomie for a Southern Belletrist,” the novelist Richard Ford visits with Eudora Welty in her home town of Jackson, Mississippi, as she receives the French Legion of Honor. In “Man of Gamaliya,” Milton Viorst recounts the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s battle against encroaching religious extremism in Egypt. In “Reading Japan,” David Remnick explores the intricate—and profoundly personal—work of the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe. Finally, in “A Society of One,” Claudia Roth Pierpont examines the life of Zora Neale Hurston, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance who expertly transformed folk culture into art. Each of these pieces reveals something elusive about the lives of the artists behind our favorite novels. We hope that you’ll enjoy diving into this collection over the holiday weekend.
— Erin Overbey, archive editor
Illustration by Stephen Lack
How does Elmore Leonard get true grit?
Photograph by Steve Pyke
Chinua Achebe and the great African novel.
Why the French love Eudora Welty.
Naguib Mahfouz’s quintessential Egypt.
Photograph from Ullstein Bild / Getty
Kenzaburo Oe is the last of Japan’s politically engaged postwar writers—but the reasons for his surprise Nobel-ceremony announcement are personal.
Zora Neale Hurston, American contrarian.


newyorker--2020-12-27--Jenna Lyons’s J. Crew Afterlife

Jenna Lyons’s J. Crew Afterlife

As the beloved , public-facing creative leader of J .
Crew , Lyons ’ s personal life was on display more than the average retail executive ’ s .
In a catalogue from 2011 , she is pictured casually painting her four-year-old son ’ s toenails pink—an innocuous slice-of-motherhood moment that wound up becoming a subject of debate on national television .
During the same year , she lit up the tabloid circuit when she left her husband for another woman .
For many public figures , these sorts of news stories would represent major public-relations hiccups .
But for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ authenticity that made her all the more desirable to her legions of admirers .
Of course , nothing lasts forever , particularly in fashion .
By 2017 , J.
Crew ’ s sales had been tumbling for years , even as Lyons ’ s star continued to rise .
The company was struggling to adapt to the fickle consumer appetites brought on by fast fashion and Instagram .
That year , Lyons stepped down from her role at J .
Crew , and tried to find her own footing .
She admits it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , after her departure from J .
Crew , “ no one was calling me.
” It wasn ’ t until an accidental run-in with a television producer that she began thinking about a new future .
The result of that run-in is “ Stylish , ” a show on HBO Max that toes the line between reality television and documentary .
It chronicles Lyons ’ s sometimes messy reëmergence , following her as she launches two separate businesses : a faux-eyelash brand called Loveseen and a bigger , all-encompassing , Goop-esque life-style @ @ @ @ @ @ @ auditions a group of prospective employees for the new businesses .
The feedback she gives them demonstrates both brutal meticulousness and a deep generosity of spirit .
Lyons and I recently spoke , over Zoom , about fresh starts , the legacy of J .
Crew , and painting her son ’ s toenails pink .
Our conversation has been edited for clarity .
At the height of your career at J .
Crew , you were often described as “ the woman who dresses America.
” But the first episode of your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is called “ The Woman Who Dressed America ” —past tense .
Are you telegraphing that your days in retail fashion are behind you ?
I think so .
That chapter has really been written .
I think that phrase carried so much weight—it felt big .
I ’ m happy to move on .
How did you decide to get into television ?
Did you take the idea to HBO , or did they come to you ?
It was kind of a bizarre process .
I was in Los Angeles , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ guy comes up , named Matt Hannah .
He said , “ Aren ’ t you Jenna Lyons ?
” Later on , he asked for my number , saying he was wondering if I ’ d be interested in TV .
When he called , I said , “ Look , I don ’ t have a job .
No one ’ s been calling .
Take me to lunch.
” I told him that I don ’ t know anything about television and I don ’ t think I ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t want to do reality TV .
But we realized that we had a good conversation around the fact that there wasn ’ t really anything that did fashion , home , beauty .
And there wasn ’ t anything that felt honest .
Everything felt constructed .
There were a lot of makeover shows , but they all had a similar vibe .
Along the way , I was very concerned with it not being cheesy .
The show was originally going to be on TNT .
But , after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ‘ We think this show would be better on HBO.
’ They were thinking it would be a little bit more .
.
.
sparkly .
The way reality television is .
The show is a hybrid of reality TV and documentary , and a big part of it is you trying out prospective employees .
How did the casting work ?
One of the biggest challenges was that we wanted to make a hybrid of a reality show and a documentary , and we originally had two different [ production ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and people whose background was documentary .
Everyone was on board .
Everyone was excited .
But it just didn ’ t work , because they both had different ways of going about it .
The biggest conversations we had were around the casting .
In reality TV , there are no stakes .
You ’ re casting for just who ’ s going to make good TV .
But , for this , we were casting for people whom we wanted to work with .
It was a weird process .
Many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through word of mouth , but they all had to go through a traditional casting agent .
The casting agents were trying to see how spicy they were , and how good they ’ d be on TV .
In one episode , you admit how difficult it was to leave J .
Crew , but you also say that you wish you ’ d done it earlier .
Can you talk more about that ?
I think that I could have probably exited two to three years earlier , and it might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ struggling at the time .
There ’ s this thing that happens when you are in a company you are charged with , and feel responsible for the team .
When that is the case , and things get bad , you don ’ t want to go .
But then , of course , when things are really great , you don ’ t want to go , either .
How do you find the right time ?
It is really hard .
And I ’ d been there for so long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ got to the point where I was no longer as effective as I ’ d wanted to be .
I had so many people who were my senior team members .
I ’ d been with them for fifteen , twenty years .
At the office , we had one of those half walls that didn ’ t go up—I remember hearing some of my team saying , “ Oh , we ’ re not going to show her that .
She ’ ll never go for that.
” And what I realized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we needed to make changes , I needed to think differently and be open .
But the mere fact that I had team members who ’ d been with me for so long—they weren ’ t even going to propose things .
They were going to assume I ’ d say no—and rightly so .
I might be standing in the way of shift , because just my mere presence means that people might not think outside of the box they ’ ve been in , because they ’ re , like , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that works for Jenna.
” That ’ s not good for the company .
I really struggled with that .
You say that , after you left J .
Crew , nobody was calling you .
And you were pretty quiet from 2017 until this year .
What were you doing during that time ?
The first year , I was so depressed .
I realized that everything I did , everything I knew , everything I was invited to—it wasn ’ t because of me .
It was because of my job @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for me to think that it was because of me .
But you convince yourself along the way .
And you have to be careful of that .
I really sat there and realized , Oh , none of this is because of me .
And so what am I now ?
What do I have ?
I remember my son , Beckett , who is lying on the bed here next to me—I thought he ’ d be so excited to have me home .
But I wasn ’ t home whipping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I was kind of just sitting on the couch and having a hard time .
I thought it would be nice to just be around , but he seemed far more interested in me when I started to work again and he saw people in the house and exciting things happening .
The first year—and I say this with real honesty—I sat on my couch .
I didn ’ t take pottery classes .
I didn ’ t learn to speak French better .
I didn ’ t make bread .
In that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that I wasn ’ t doing anything .
But now , looking back , I needed to be quiet .
Was it the TV show that brought you out of that funk ?
Yeah .
I had to go and have meetings , and put real clothes on , and correspond .
It was strange .
I started to get fired up a little bit .
And I certainly wasn ’ t out in the public eye in any way , but we were heading into a scenario with lots of cameras and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to feel , like , O.K.
, maybe I do have a second chance here .
It ’ s scary .
The world can be very fickle and not welcoming and unkind .
I was older , and I wasn ’ t sure if I would have a voice , and if people would want to hear it .
J .
Crew announced it was filing for bankruptcy earlier this year .
What has it been like to be on the sidelines and watching those headlines ?
It ’ s very hard .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ wanting your kid to go to college and be O.K .
and be successful on their own .
I want the company to do well .
It feels like I gave a part of myself to that brand , and I love the brand and the people I know who are still there .
People write in my Instagram comments all the time , “ We miss you and we wish you ’ d go back to J.
Crew.
” And there ’ s a part of that that feels nice .
Oh @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
And I did do something good .
But I really want them to be O.K.
, and for it to be strong enough to live on .

Jenna Lyons started posting on Instagram only this year, but in many ways she was an influencer long before influencers formally existed. She was hired at J. Crew in 1990, at age twenty-one, and, in the course of her twenty-six-year tenure there, she helped elevate the company from a faltering catalogue brand of sort of preppy, sort of essential stuff to a signature American fashion company. Along the way, Lyons, now fifty-two, became a different kind of retail executive, too. Whereas most of her peers at giant clothing companies remained anonymous, Lyons became the face of the brand. In 2008—when Michelle Obama wore J. Crew on the campaign trail and name-checked the label on late-night television—Lyons remade the company’s catalogue as an editorial property featuring a new section called “Jenna’s Picks.” In these pages, consumers got a window into Lyons’s particular kind of nerdy-tomboy glam, which included anything from floral-print ballet flats to rugged leather bags and neon-colored accent belts. The premise of this endeavor was that customers didn’t want access only to J. Crew’s clothing; they wanted access to Lyons, too.
As the beloved, public-facing creative leader of J. Crew, Lyons’s personal life was on display more than the average retail executive’s. In a catalogue from 2011, she is pictured casually painting her four-year-old son’s toenails pink—an innocuous slice-of-motherhood moment that wound up becoming a subject of debate on national television. During the same year, she lit up the tabloid circuit when she left her husband for a woman. For many public figures, these sorts of news stories would represent major public-relations hiccups. But for Lyons they represented a refreshing demonstration of authenticity that made her all the more desirable to her legions of admirers.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Of course, nothing lasts forever, particularly in fashion. By 2017, J. Crew’s sales had been tumbling for years, even as Lyons’s star continued to rise. The company was struggling to adapt to the fickle consumer appetites brought on by fast fashion and Instagram. That year, Lyons stepped down from her role at J. Crew, and tried to find her own footing. She admits it hasn’t been easy—she said that, after her departure from J. Crew, “no one was calling me.” It wasn’t until an accidental run-in with a television producer that she began thinking about a new future. The result of that run-in is “Stylish,” a show on HBO Max that toes the line between reality television and documentary. It chronicles Lyons’s sometimes messy reëmergence, following her as she launches two separate businesses: a faux-eyelash brand called Loveseen and a bigger, all-encompassing, Goop-esque life-style company. Along the way, she auditions a group of prospective employees for the new businesses. The feedback she gives them demonstrates both brutal meticulousness and a deep generosity of spirit.
Lyons and I recently spoke, over Zoom, about fresh starts, the legacy of J. Crew, and painting her son’s toenails pink. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
At the height of your career at J. Crew, you were often described as “the woman who dresses America.” But the first episode of your new show, “Stylish,” is called “The Woman Who Dressed America”—past tense. Are you telegraphing that your days in retail fashion are behind you?
I think so. That chapter has really been written. I think that phrase carried so much weight—it felt big. I’m happy to move on.
How did you decide to get into television? Did you take the idea to HBO, or did they come to you?
It was kind of a bizarre process. I was in Los Angeles, having lunch with a friend. This guy comes up, named Matt Hannah. He said, “Aren’t you Jenna Lyons?” Later on, he asked for my number, saying he was wondering if I’d be interested in TV. When he called, I said, “Look, I don’t have a job. No one’s been calling. Take me to lunch.”
I told him that I don’t know anything about television and I don’t think I’d be good on TV. And I don’t want to do reality TV. But we realized that we had a good conversation around the fact that there wasn’t really anything that did fashion, home, beauty. And there wasn’t anything that felt honest. Everything felt constructed. There were a lot of makeover shows, but they all had a similar vibe. Along the way, I was very concerned with it not being cheesy. The show was originally going to be on TNT. But, after they saw the edit, they said, ‘We think this show would be better on HBO.’ They were thinking it would be a little bit more . . . sparkly. The way reality television is.
The show is a hybrid of reality TV and documentary, and a big part of it is you trying out prospective employees. How did the casting work?
One of the biggest challenges was that we wanted to make a hybrid of a reality show and a documentary, and we originally had two different [production] teams—we had people whose background was reality and people whose background was documentary. Everyone was on board. Everyone was excited. But it just didn’t work, because they both had different ways of going about it. The biggest conversations we had were around the casting. In reality TV, there are no stakes. You’re casting for just who’s going to make good TV. But, for this, we were casting for people whom we wanted to work with. It was a weird process. Many of the people came onto the show through word of mouth, but they all had to go through a traditional casting agent. The casting agents were trying to see how spicy they were, and how good they’d be on TV.
In one episode, you admit how difficult it was to leave J. Crew, but you also say that you wish you’d done it earlier. Can you talk more about that?
I think that I could have probably exited two to three years earlier, and it might have been better. The business was struggling at the time. There’s this thing that happens when you are in a company you are charged with, and feel responsible for the team. When that is the case, and things get bad, you don’t want to go. But then, of course, when things are really great, you don’t want to go, either. How do you find the right time? It is really hard. And I’d been there for so long that I feel like I’d got to the point where I was no longer as effective as I’d wanted to be.
I had so many people who were my senior team members. I’d been with them for fifteen, twenty years. At the office, we had one of those half walls that didn’t go up—I remember hearing some of my team saying, “Oh, we’re not going to show her that. She’ll never go for that.” And what I realized was that, in a time when we needed to make changes, I needed to think differently and be open. But the mere fact that I had team members who’d been with me for so long—they weren’t even going to propose things. They were going to assume I’d say no—and rightly so. I might be standing in the way of shift, because just my mere presence means that people might not think outside of the box they’ve been in, because they’re, like, “Oh, this is the box that works for Jenna.” That’s not good for the company. I really struggled with that.
You say that, after you left J. Crew, nobody was calling you. And you were pretty quiet from 2017 until this year. What were you doing during that time?
The first year, I was so depressed. I realized that everything I did, everything I knew, everything I was invited to—it wasn’t because of me. It was because of my job and my title. It was false for me to think that it was because of me. But you convince yourself along the way. And you have to be careful of that. I really sat there and realized, Oh, none of this is because of me. And so what am I now? What do I have?
I remember my son, Beckett, who is lying on the bed here next to me—I thought he’d be so excited to have me home. But I wasn’t home whipping up ten-course meals and playing games. I was kind of just sitting on the couch and having a hard time. I thought it would be nice to just be around, but he seemed far more interested in me when I started to work again and he saw people in the house and exciting things happening. The first year—and I say this with real honesty—I sat on my couch. I didn’t take pottery classes. I didn’t learn to speak French better. I didn’t make bread. In that moment, I felt kind of embarrassed that I wasn’t doing anything. But now, looking back, I needed to be quiet.


newyorker--2020-12-27--The Archives of an Unfulfilled Genius

The Archives of an Unfulfilled Genius

I have acquired an archive .
In late July , I drove up to Rhode Island to see Vicki Desjardins , who is the executrix of the last will and testament of Edward M. Stringham .
Ed worked in the collating department of The New Yorker from around 1950 to around 1990—approximately the span of years that William Shawn was the magazine ’ s editor-in-chief .
The collating department presaged the word processor : page proofs marked up by editors , authors , proofreaders , and fact checkers came into collating separately , and the changes were copied by hand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The work demanded legible handwriting and precision , as well as the detachment of a machine .
Vicki worked with Ed for about six years beginning in the early sixties , when she was Victoria Siembor , a Polish-American from Detroit , and they became lifelong friends .
The archive looks like a metaphor for their relationship : Ed was cerebral , engaged in a systematic effort to digest all the art and music and literature in the Western world .
Vicki is practical , brisk and loving , with a streak @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his death , she condensed his life ’ s work into Rubbermaid-style sealable plastic boxes .
After a visit with Vicki at her assisted-living facility , I drove to a nearby self-storage space to release Ed from captivity .
His effects were stacked on a wobbly shelf .
On the drive home , trapped in the car with the archive , I thought I would pass out from the fumes of mold and mildew .
But eventually the fumes created a wave of nostalgia , and I had the sense that Ed was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ York , I stacked the boxes in my bungalow in Rockaway , which is not climate-controlled—no way would they fit in my crammed Manhattan apartment—with the intention of taking a “ core sample ” and finding a permanent home for the archive .
In a workplace where arguably everyone hoped to be published or promoted or even to succeed Mr. Shawn as editor-in-chief , Ed was an anomaly .
He seemed content to be a cog in the machine—a crucial cog , as the whole enterprise swirled around the collating department , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ original overqualified editorial employee .
He had no special love of the work .
When a proof came in , even if it was a measly three galleys , he would divvy it up , and , if necessary , use long division to bloodlessly carve a piece into equal parts and distribute it to his colleagues .
When I worked in collating , and Ed was my boss , I never saw him do more than his share of the work .
He arrived at the office late—usually after twelve , sometimes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because until the editors , proofreaders , and fact checkers had done their job , there was nothing for us to collate .
We made up for it at the other end of the day , staying till the work was done .
Only then was Ed free to pursue his own agenda , bending over the big draftsman ’ s table he used as a desk , reading and writing far into the night .
Unless you worked for Ed or he had cultivated a friendship with you—because , say , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ literature—you could be at the magazine for years and not get to know him .
He would never have attended an office party .
He is the probable inspiration for the character called the Ghost , who wanders the halls at night in Jay McInerney ’ s “ Bright Lights , Big City , ” occasionally sighted by a fact checker working late .
And yet the career collator led a fugitive life on the margins of literature .
In his downtime in collating , Ed would sit in a tattered old armchair @ @ @ @ @ @ @ smoking cigarettes and drinking takeout coffee , chatting with one or another of his colleagues .
He had known Jack Kerouac up at Columbia in the nineteen-forties , before the term “ Beat ” was coined , when Kerouac was looking for a publisher for his first novel , “ The Town and the City , ” which came out in 1950 .
Both “ On the Road ” and “ The Dharma Bums ” contain sketches of a character who sounds a lot like Ed .
In “ On the Road ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tom is a sad , handsome fellow , sweet , generous , and amenable ; only once in a while he suddenly has fits of depression and rushes off without saying a word to anyone .
This night he was overjoyed .
‘ Sal , where did you find these absolutely wonderful people ?
I ’ ve never seen anyone like them.
’ ” Ed had also known Neal Cassady , the model for Dean Moriarty , who worked in New York as a parking valet and took cars for joyrides .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said Ed , who never had a driver ’ s license .
But unless you drew Ed out about books or art or music , he was , certainly for some of the more businesslike people at the office , just some weird old hunched-over guy to hand proofs to and otherwise avoid .
The archive could dispel that impression .
The papers of Edward M. Stringham fall roughly into three categories : diaries ; notes on literature , music , and art ; and correspondence .
The archive could form a prominent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of stationery .
The marble composition books are of many different brands and vintages , some with the price on the cover : Pen-Tab ( $ 1.99 ) , Eastern Tablet ( 79¢ ) , Square Deal ( $ 1.19 ) .
Vicki had started to go through the diaries , and even farmed some out to a friend at the University of Rhode Island , but confided that they were .
.
.
repetitive : Ed wrote regularly about his attempts to quit smoking and drinking and lose weight—his were a heightened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The light , precise hand , always in pencil , brought Ed back in full force : his voice , his charm , his reservoir of sadness .
Naturally , I looked for myself first .
I did not find much : “ Mary helped.
” “ At least she is eager.
” Ed writes dispassionately about the office .
The day ’ s work at The New Yorker— “ a horrible Gould proof , ” “ a Mehta revise ” —carries no more weight than the hour he arrived at his desk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get up early , the later he sleeps ) , what he ate for lunch and where he ate it ( soup , bacon-tomato-and-lettuce ; Chock Full o ’ Nuts , Stouffer ’ s ) , how long and in whose office he managed to lie down for a rest ( Knapp ’ s , 6:10-7:10 ) .
He documents trips to the dry cleaner , the liquor store , the bank , libraries , bookstores , record shops ( remember Sam Goody ? )
.
Money is a preoccupation , as is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It was payday & I was determined to do something constructive with my money .
I got a new diamond needle for the phonograph.
” When I knew Ed , he lived on East Twenty-eighth Street between Lexington and Third , but for many years he had an apartment up near Columbia University .
If his routine was steady , his emotional life was like something out of Beckett .
Wherever he goes , he has apartment woes : leaks , mice , a broken refrigerator , “ the bitch ” downstairs who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has some physical complaint : eyes , kidneys , bladder , toothache , headache , stomach ache , cold , flu , hernia , worrisome growths , broken bones .
He gets drunk and falls down .
He goes cruising .
He lusts after sailors—especially sailors with blond crewcuts—and suffers sexual humiliation .
Every day is worse than the day before .
“ I ’ m certain I will never see New Year ’ s 1987 alive , ” he writes in 1986 .
( He died in 1994 . )
Most of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ near the end he needs an entire volume for just two months , because , in his solitude and anxiety , he writes every ten or twenty minutes .
“ Really desperate today .
Can ’ t go on like this , ” he writes .
But he goes on .

I have acquired an archive. In late July, I drove up to Rhode Island to see Vicki Desjardins, who is the executrix of the last will and testament of Edward M. Stringham. Ed worked in the collating department of The New Yorker from around 1950 to around 1990—approximately the span of years that William Shawn was the magazine’s editor-in-chief. The collating department presaged the word processor: page proofs marked up by editors, authors, proofreaders, and fact checkers came into collating separately, and the changes were copied by hand onto a single proof for the printer. The work demanded legible handwriting and precision, as well as the detachment of a machine. Vicki worked with Ed for about six years beginning in the early sixties, when she was Victoria Siembor, a Polish-American from Detroit, and they became lifelong friends. The archive looks like a metaphor for their relationship: Ed was cerebral, engaged in a systematic effort to digest all the art and music and literature in the Western world. Vicki is practical, brisk and loving, with a streak of the zealous cleaning lady. At his death, she condensed his life’s work into Rubbermaid-style sealable plastic boxes.
After a visit with Vicki at her assisted-living facility, I drove to a nearby self-storage space to release Ed from captivity. His effects were stacked on a wobbly shelf. On the drive home, trapped in the car with the archive, I thought I would pass out from the fumes of mold and mildew. But eventually the fumes created a wave of nostalgia, and I had the sense that Ed was travelling with me. Back in New York, I stacked the boxes in my bungalow in Rockaway, which is not climate-controlled—no way would they fit in my crammed Manhattan apartment—with the intention of taking a “core sample” and finding a permanent home for the archive.
In a workplace where arguably everyone hoped to be published or promoted or even to succeed Mr. Shawn as editor-in-chief, Ed was an anomaly. He seemed content to be a cog in the machine—a crucial cog, as the whole enterprise swirled around the collating department, but a cog nonetheless. He was the original overqualified editorial employee. He had no special love of the work. When a proof came in, even if it was a measly three galleys, he would divvy it up, and, if necessary, use long division to bloodlessly carve a piece into equal parts and distribute it to his colleagues. When I worked in collating, and Ed was my boss, I never saw him do more than his share of the work. He arrived at the office late—usually after twelve, sometimes not till three—but that was O.K., because until the editors, proofreaders, and fact checkers had done their job, there was nothing for us to collate.
We made up for it at the other end of the day, staying till the work was done. Only then was Ed free to pursue his own agenda, bending over the big draftsman’s table he used as a desk, reading and writing far into the night. Unless you worked for Ed or he had cultivated a friendship with you—because, say, you were Hungarian and he was studying Hungarian literature—you could be at the magazine for years and not get to know him. He would never have attended an office party. He is the probable inspiration for the character called the Ghost, who wanders the halls at night in Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” occasionally sighted by a fact checker working late. And yet the career collator led a fugitive life on the margins of literature.
In his downtime in collating, Ed would sit in a tattered old armchair with his back to the window, smoking cigarettes and drinking takeout coffee, chatting with one or another of his colleagues. He had known Jack Kerouac up at Columbia in the nineteen-forties, before the term “Beat” was coined, when Kerouac was looking for a publisher for his first novel, “The Town and the City,” which came out in 1950. Both “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums” contain sketches of a character who sounds a lot like Ed. In “On the Road” it’s Tom Saybrook: “Tom is a sad, handsome fellow, sweet, generous, and amenable; only once in a while he suddenly has fits of depression and rushes off without saying a word to anyone. This night he was overjoyed. ‘Sal, where did you find these absolutely wonderful people? I’ve never seen anyone like them.’ ” Ed had also known Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty, who worked in New York as a parking valet and took cars for joyrides. “He was a marvellous driver,” said Ed, who never had a driver’s license. But unless you drew Ed out about books or art or music, he was, certainly for some of the more businesslike people at the office, just some weird old hunched-over guy to hand proofs to and otherwise avoid. The archive could dispel that impression.
The papers of Edward M. Stringham fall roughly into three categories: diaries; notes on literature, music, and art; and correspondence. The archive could form a prominent display in a museum of the history of stationery. The marble composition books are of many different brands and vintages, some with the price on the cover: Pen-Tab ($1.99), Eastern Tablet (79¢), Square Deal ($1.19). Vicki had started to go through the diaries, and even farmed some out to a friend at the University of Rhode Island, but confided that they were . . . repetitive: Ed wrote regularly about his attempts to quit smoking and drinking and lose weight—his were a heightened version of the diaries of Everyman.
The light, precise hand, always in pencil, brought Ed back in full force: his voice, his charm, his reservoir of sadness. Naturally, I looked for myself first. I did not find much: “Mary helped.” “At least she is eager.” Ed writes dispassionately about the office. The day’s work at The New Yorker—“a horrible Gould proof,” “a Mehta revise”—carries no more weight than the hour he arrived at his desk (the more firmly he resolves to get up early, the later he sleeps), what he ate for lunch and where he ate it (soup, bacon-tomato-and-lettuce; Chock Full o’ Nuts, Stouffer’s), how long and in whose office he managed to lie down for a rest (Knapp’s, 6:10-7:10). He documents trips to the dry cleaner, the liquor store, the bank, libraries, bookstores, record shops (remember Sam Goody?). Money is a preoccupation, as is stereo equipment. From 1954: “It was payday & I was determined to do something constructive with my money. I got a new diamond needle for the phonograph.”
When I knew Ed, he lived on East Twenty-eighth Street between Lexington and Third, but for many years he had an apartment up near Columbia University. If his routine was steady, his emotional life was like something out of Beckett. Wherever he goes, he has apartment woes: leaks, mice, a broken refrigerator, “the bitch” downstairs who complains about his hi-fi. He always has some physical complaint: eyes, kidneys, bladder, toothache, headache, stomach ache, cold, flu, hernia, worrisome growths, broken bones. He gets drunk and falls down. He goes cruising. He lusts after sailors—especially sailors with blond crewcuts—and suffers sexual humiliation. Every day is worse than the day before. “I’m certain I will never see New Year’s 1987 alive,” he writes in 1986. (He died in 1994.) Most of the notebooks cover six months, but near the end he needs an entire volume for just two months, because, in his solitude and anxiety, he writes every ten or twenty minutes. “Really desperate today. Can’t go on like this,” he writes. But he goes on.


newyorker--2020-12-28--Roman Coppola’s Newest Collaborators Are His Kids

Quarantining , for months on end , on the same premises as one ’ s extended family might sound like a recipe for interpersonal disaster .
But not if you ’ re a member of the Coppola clan and can spread out over more than fifteen hundred acres in Napa .
“ It ’ s been wonderful to have this time with my mom and dad , ” Roman Coppola , the fifty-five-year-old director , producer , and screenwriter , said the other day , over Zoom .
“ My kids were able to be around their aunts and uncles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been having a lot of sleepovers—it ’ s been a little like summer camp.
” Coppola ’ s parents , the director Francis and his wife , Eleanor , an artist and a writer , own a vineyard .
Roman and his family moved up there from L.A. in March ; his sister Sofia , the director , had been in residence with her family as well .
Coppola ’ s manner is gently formal ; with his trim salt-and-pepper beard and dark-blue blazer ( accessorized with a natty pocket square ) , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ merchant banker .
While in Napa , he has been teaching animation classes to his three children : Alessandro , who is five , Marcello , seven , and Pascal , nine .
“ I showed them a YouTube video where Terry Gilliam talks about the animations he made in his Monty Python days , ” Coppola said .
“ They ’ ve been doing these cutouts , and then we have this little animation stand and a stop-motion app we use.
” He panned his laptop to reveal the kids ’ arrangements @ @ @ @ @ @ @ armor , big red lips , Mt .
Rushmore .
“ Marcello made up a joke the other day , ” he said .
“ Do you want to tell it , silly ?
” Marcello ’ s sandy head popped into view .
“ O.K .
!
” he began .
“ What did the charming Italian man say when he got a crazy-bad sunburn ?
” He waited a beat .
“ He said , ‘ I ’ m a-peeling !
’ ” Coppola has directed two feature films , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Mind of Charles Swan III , ” but most of his career has charted a more diffuse approach .
“ Anything that goes zig and then zag draws me in , ” he said .
“ My heroes have always been polymaths like Buckminster Fuller.
” In his thirties , he directed several music videos , including the Strokes ’ “ Someday ” and “ Last Nite , ” which helped imprint the group ’ s scruffy , denim-and-sneakers look on the public ’ s imagination ; later , he produced and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( They collaborated on the script for Anderson ’ s upcoming movie , “ The French Dispatch.
” ) He also established the Directors Bureau , which produces commercials and music videos , started a tote-bag company , and co-created the Amazon TV show “ Mozart in the Jungle.
” Coppola ’ s quarantine schedule has been hectic .
He co-directed “ Mariah Carey ’ s Magical Christmas Special , ” a glitter-strewn extravaganza , for Apple TV , and reunited with the Strokes to direct a video for their new song @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in which the band plays baseball against robots .
He also directed a video for Paul McCartney ’ s “ Find My Way , ” from his latest album , “ McCartney III , ” on which the former Beatle plays all the instruments himself .
It was shot remotely , with Coppola in Napa and McCartney at his home studio , in Sussex : “ I was thinking , What if we get a crazy amount of security cameras that can be controlled through one brain—we ended up having fifty-three , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing ?
” McCartney ran through the song once at the piano .
“ I was , like , ‘ Mr .
McCartney , that was great.
’ Then on to the harpsichord .
We did vocals , backing vocals , acoustic guitar , electric guitar , drums , and we hardly needed to adjust the cameras.
” He went on , “ We took a couple of breaks , he had a cup of tea— ” A shriek was heard from off camera .
“ Hey , guys ?
Guys !
Just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” Coppola called .
The screeching stopped , then resumed .
Coppola laughed .
“ It was really just a document of an artist at work , ” he continued , referring to the McCartney video .
“ The only thing I was sad about was that I didn ’ t get to meet him in person.
” The footage from the fifty-three cameras was edited into a tapestry of tightly framed squares that appear to slide and shift , tile-puzzle style , to evoke the layered nature of McCartney ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Coppola has been thinking about making a third feature .
“ I ’ d like my kids to have the experiences I had as a kid , being on my dad ’ s movie sets , ” he said .
“ Like , ‘ Oh , they ’ re doing the napalm drop today , so I ’ m going to skip school , ’ which in retrospect was kind of remarkable.
” Meanwhile , he ’ s creating a communication platform called CASBU , which aims to be a more efficient alternative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time to look at what the kids had made .
Coppola tapped the animation app on his phone .
A screech rose up , scoring a scene of Mt .
Rushmore hastening to escape from a farting baby chick ; in another scene , huge lips danced above a knight ’ s body .
“ When they were screaming , I thought they were just messing around , but they were making their animation !
” Coppola said .
“ Hey , Alessandro , I saw your movie !
It ’ s amazing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” ♦

Roman Coppola Illustration by João Fazenda
Quarantining, for months on end, on the same premises as one’s extended family might sound like a recipe for interpersonal disaster. But not if you’re a member of the Coppola clan and can spread out over more than fifteen hundred acres in Napa. “It’s been wonderful to have this time with my mom and dad,” Roman Coppola, the fifty-five-year-old director, producer, and screenwriter, said the other day, over Zoom. “My kids were able to be around their aunts and uncles and cousins, so we’ve been having a lot of sleepovers—it’s been a little like summer camp.” Coppola’s parents, the director Francis and his wife, Eleanor, an artist and a writer, own a vineyard. Roman and his family moved up there from L.A. in March; his sister Sofia, the director, had been in residence with her family as well.
Coppola’s manner is gently formal; with his trim salt-and-pepper beard and dark-blue blazer (accessorized with a natty pocket square), he brings to mind an artistically inclined merchant banker. While in Napa, he has been teaching animation classes to his three children: Alessandro, who is five, Marcello, seven, and Pascal, nine. “I showed them a YouTube video where Terry Gilliam talks about the animations he made in his Monty Python days,” Coppola said. “They’ve been doing these cutouts, and then we have this little animation stand and a stop-motion app we use.” He panned his laptop to reveal the kids’ arrangements of pictures clipped from magazines—a knight in armor, big red lips, Mt. Rushmore.
“Marcello made up a joke the other day,” he said. “Do you want to tell it, silly?” Marcello’s sandy head popped into view.
“O.K.!” he began. “What did the charming Italian man say when he got a crazy-bad sunburn?” He waited a beat. “He said, ‘I’m a-peeling!’ ”
Coppola has directed two feature films, “CQ” and “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,” but most of his career has charted a more diffuse approach. “Anything that goes zig and then zag draws me in,” he said. “My heroes have always been polymaths like Buckminster Fuller.” In his thirties, he directed several music videos, including the Strokes’ “Someday” and “Last Nite,” which helped imprint the group’s scruffy, denim-and-sneakers look on the public’s imagination; later, he produced and co-wrote films with his friend Wes Anderson. (They collaborated on the script for Anderson’s upcoming movie, “The French Dispatch.”) He also established the Directors Bureau, which produces commercials and music videos, started a tote-bag company, and co-created the Amazon TV show “Mozart in the Jungle.”
“What do you think he pays for a lair like this?” Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Coppola’s quarantine schedule has been hectic. He co-directed “Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special,” a glitter-strewn extravaganza, for Apple TV, and reunited with the Strokes to direct a video for their new song “The Adults Are Talking,” in which the band plays baseball against robots. He also directed a video for Paul McCartney’s “Find My Way,” from his latest album, “McCartney III,” on which the former Beatle plays all the instruments himself. It was shot remotely, with Coppola in Napa and McCartney at his home studio, in Sussex: “I was thinking, What if we get a crazy amount of security cameras that can be controlled through one brain—we ended up having fifty-three, I think—and then have him just do his thing?” McCartney ran through the song once at the piano. “I was, like, ‘Mr. McCartney, that was great.’ Then on to the harpsichord. We did vocals, backing vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, and we hardly needed to adjust the cameras.” He went on, “We took a couple of breaks, he had a cup of tea—”
A shriek was heard from off camera. “Hey, guys? Guys! Just keep doing your animation, O.K.?” Coppola called. The screeching stopped, then resumed. Coppola laughed. “It was really just a document of an artist at work,” he continued, referring to the McCartney video. “The only thing I was sad about was that I didn’t get to meet him in person.” The footage from the fifty-three cameras was edited into a tapestry of tightly framed squares that appear to slide and shift, tile-puzzle style, to evoke the layered nature of McCartney’s work with his instruments.
Lately, Coppola has been thinking about making a third feature. “I’d like my kids to have the experiences I had as a kid, being on my dad’s movie sets,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh, they’re doing the napalm drop today, so I’m going to skip school,’ which in retrospect was kind of remarkable.” Meanwhile, he’s creating a communication platform called CASBU, which aims to be a more efficient alternative to e-mail and texting.
It was time to look at what the kids had made. Coppola tapped the animation app on his phone. A screech rose up, scoring a scene of Mt. Rushmore hastening to escape from a farting baby chick; in another scene, huge lips danced above a knight’s body. “When they were screaming, I thought they were just messing around, but they were making their animation!” Coppola said. “Hey, Alessandro, I saw your movie! It’s amazing! Yours, too, Marcello!” ♦


newyorker--2020-12-28--Daily Cartoon: Monday, December 28th

Daily Cartoon: Monday, December 28th

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