newyorker--2020-07-24--America Is a Country Besieged by Its Own President

This week marked the fifty-first anniversary of the moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin ( Buzz ) Aldrin .
I am just about old enough to remember how , in Leeds , the city in northern England where I grew up , people gathered around their radios and television sets to witness the historic event .
My paternal grandmother , a fiery Irish woman , refused to believe it was real : the entire thing had been staged in a desert somewhere , she insisted .
That was a minority position .
To most of the world , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It wouldn ’ t be accurate to say that most of the people I grew up with loved the United States , or even openly admired it .
Barely disguised resentment at the manner in which this country had eclipsed the British Empire was combined with a widespread contention that America was a shallow place beset by crass commercialism , high crime rates , and gaping racial rifts .
But beneath the British condescension , there was also a respect for America : its technological know-how , its organizational efficiency , its democratic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When my dad was away , working in Scotland , he saw the U.S.S .
John F. Kennedy sail up the Firth of Forth .
The vast aircraft carrier was almost a quarter of a mile long , he reported back to us in wonderment .
A half century later , the rest of the world is looking on in horror as this country lurches from one disaster to another .
Trapped in a leadership vacuum created by the narcissistic reality-TV star who occupies the Oval Office , the United States seems powerless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that most industrialized countries contained months ago .
As the cumulative number of infections surpasses four million , an economic rebound that began when many states prematurely reopened their economies appears to be stalling .
And , with an election just three and a half months away , that same President , in a desperate effort to save his political skin , seems intent on creating violent clashes in some of America ’ s biggest conurbations .
So many bad things are happening , it ’ s hard to keep up .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rapidly .
On Wednesday , more than eleven hundred deaths were reported nationwide—the highest figure since May , according to the Covid Tracking Project—and on Thursday there were more than a thousand .
“ The epidemic in the United States resembled that of a developing country , ” Dr. David Ho , a virologist at Columbia University , told MSNBC ’ s Rachel Maddow , on Wednesday night .
“ This is certainly very , very sad to see.
” Things are so bad that it is tempting to describe the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phrase , which I have used myself on occasion , doesn ’ t fully capture the current situation .
Even in these dire circumstances , parts of the American system are still functioning as they were designed to .
Across the country , medical professionals , public-health officials , and local politicians are trying their damnedest to fight the virus .
Public opinion is generally supportive of more stringent measures .
According to a survey that the research firm Morning Consult carried out for Politico , a large majority of Americans would support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fines or prison sentences for scofflaws .
Meanwhile , Trump is still trying to exploit the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd .
Early on , these efforts were met with some resistance .
In early June , when he wanted to summon the U.S. Army into American cities , the Pentagon brass , including the Defense Secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , opposed the idea .
But Trump doesn ’ t like being thwarted .
With the connivance of Attorney General William Barr , his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a military-sounding name for dispatching agents under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security onto the streets of Portland in camouflage gear , armed with tear gas and rubber bullets .
On Wednesday night , federal agents teargassed the city ’ s mayor , Ted Wheeler , as he joined protesters on the streets .
Earlier in the day , President Trump had announced that he was sending federal agents into two more American cities—Albuquerque and Chicago—under the guise of expanding an anti-crime initiative , Operation Legend .
Barr launched the campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was named after LeGend Talifarro , a four-year-old who was shot and killed in June , in Kansas City , where the first federal agents were dispatched .
From the start , local elected officials in Portland opposed the decision to send paramilitary forces to their city .
“ Authoritarian governments , not democratic republics , send unmarked authorities after protesters , ” the Oregon senator Jeff Merkley tweeted , last week .
There has also been pushback from other quarters .
A Pentagon spokesperson said , “ We saw this take place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some law enforcement that wore uniforms that make them appear military .
.
.
.
The Secretary has expressed a concern of this within the Administration , that we want a system where people can tell the difference.
” On Wednesday , Tom Ridge , a veteran Republican who served as the governor of Pennsylvania and as the first Secretary of Homeland Security , said that the agency wasn ’ t established “ to be the President ’ s personal militia.
” Ridge added , “ Had I been governor even now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with any federal agency to reduce crime or lawlessness in any of the cities .
But .
.
.
it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to a unilateral , uninvited intervention into one of my cities.
” In Chicago , Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that the city would gladly accept federal assistance in fighting crime , but she also issued a warning .
“ We welcome actual partnership , but we do not welcome dictatorship , ” she said .
“ We do not welcome authoritarianism , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrests and detainments of our residents , and that is something I will not tolerate.
” These developments suggest that America as a whole isn ’ t failing—not yet , anyway .
But its system of government , its stated values , and its claims to greatness are all under siege by a President who lacks the moral compass , self-doubt , and respect for historical norms that would restrain another leader .

This week marked the fifty-first anniversary of the moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin. I am just about old enough to remember how, in Leeds, the city in northern England where I grew up, people gathered around their radios and television sets to witness the historic event. My paternal grandmother, a fiery Irish woman, refused to believe it was real: the entire thing had been staged in a desert somewhere, she insisted.
That was a minority position. To most of the world, the landing symbolized American leadership and power. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that most of the people I grew up with loved the United States, or even openly admired it. Barely disguised resentment at the manner in which this country had eclipsed the British Empire was combined with a widespread contention that America was a shallow place beset by crass commercialism, high crime rates, and gaping racial rifts. But beneath the British condescension, there was also a respect for America: its technological know-how, its organizational efficiency, its democratic traditions, and its sheer heft. When my dad was away, working in Scotland, he saw the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy sail up the Firth of Forth. The vast aircraft carrier was almost a quarter of a mile long, he reported back to us in wonderment.
A half century later, the rest of the world is looking on in horror as this country lurches from one disaster to another. Trapped in a leadership vacuum created by the narcissistic reality-TV star who occupies the Oval Office, the United States seems powerless to arrest the spread of a pandemic that most industrialized countries contained months ago. As the cumulative number of infections surpasses four million, an economic rebound that began when many states prematurely reopened their economies appears to be stalling. And, with an election just three and a half months away, that same President, in a desperate effort to save his political skin, seems intent on creating violent clashes in some of America’s biggest conurbations.
So many bad things are happening, it’s hard to keep up. In many states, COVID-19 hospitalizations are rising rapidly. On Wednesday, more than eleven hundred deaths were reported nationwide—the highest figure since May, according to the Covid Tracking Project—and on Thursday there were more than a thousand. “The epidemic in the United States resembled that of a developing country,” Dr. David Ho, a virologist at Columbia University, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, on Wednesday night. “This is certainly very, very sad to see.”
Things are so bad that it is tempting to describe the United States as a failing state. That shorthand phrase, which I have used myself on occasion, doesn’t fully capture the current situation. Even in these dire circumstances, parts of the American system are still functioning as they were designed to. Across the country, medical professionals, public-health officials, and local politicians are trying their damnedest to fight the virus. Public opinion is generally supportive of more stringent measures. According to a survey that the research firm Morning Consult carried out for Politico, a large majority of Americans would support statewide mask mandates that are enforced with fines or prison sentences for scofflaws.
Meanwhile, Trump is still trying to exploit the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd. Early on, these efforts were met with some resistance. In early June, when he wanted to summon the U.S. Army into American cities, the Pentagon brass, including the Defense Secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposed the idea. But Trump doesn’t like being thwarted. With the connivance of Attorney General William Barr, his Administration put together Operation Diligent Valor, a military-sounding name for dispatching agents under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security onto the streets of Portland in camouflage gear, armed with tear gas and rubber bullets. On Wednesday night, federal agents teargassed the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, as he joined protesters on the streets.
Earlier in the day, President Trump had announced that he was sending federal agents into two more American cities—Albuquerque and Chicago—under the guise of expanding an anti-crime initiative, Operation Legend. Barr launched the campaign a couple of weeks ago. It was named after LeGend Talifarro, a four-year-old who was shot and killed in June, in Kansas City, where the first federal agents were dispatched.
From the start, local elected officials in Portland opposed the decision to send paramilitary forces to their city. “Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters,” the Oregon senator Jeff Merkley tweeted, last week. There has also been pushback from other quarters. A Pentagon spokesperson said, “We saw this take place back in June, when there were some law enforcement that wore uniforms that make them appear military. . . . The Secretary has expressed a concern of this within the Administration, that we want a system where people can tell the difference.”
On Wednesday, Tom Ridge, a veteran Republican who served as the governor of Pennsylvania and as the first Secretary of Homeland Security, said that the agency wasn’t established “to be the President’s personal militia.” Ridge added, “Had I been governor even now, I would welcome the opportunity to work with any federal agency to reduce crime or lawlessness in any of the cities. But . . . it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to a unilateral, uninvited intervention into one of my cities.”


newyorker--2020-07-24--The Improbable Charisma of Walter Mercado

When Walter Mercado was a boy , in Puerto Rico , a dying bird fell into his yard .
He held it and prayed for it , and the bird flapped its wings and started to fly .
A neighbor who was watching concluded that Mercado had been given healing powers by the grace of God .
Word spread through the village , and people began showing up at his door , begging his mother , “ Please , let me see Walter !
” She sat the enchanted boy on a special chair , and visitors would line up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Mercado recalled many years later , “ I turned into Walter of the Miracles.
” Apocryphal ?
Perhaps .
But the origin story , down to the makeshift throne , befits Mercado , who went on to become Latin America ’ s preëminent celebrity psychic and an international phenomenon .
At his height , in the nineties , he delivered daily horoscopes to a hundred and twenty million viewers on the Univision show “ Primer Impacto.
” His audiences ( “ my people , ” he called them , Pope-like ) anxiously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ empire extended to books , radio , and a syndicated newspaper column .
But you didn ’ t have to believe in astrology to see his appeal , which lay mostly in his opulence .
With his bejewelled robes , puffy helmet of hair , and taut sorcerer ’ s face , he was the Latin answer to Liberace : an androgynous peacock who turned campy excess into a form of pop mysticism .
Mercado , who died last November , in his late eighties , is the subject of a new Netflix @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Legend of Walter Mercado , ” directed by Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch .
( The title is taken from his trademark sign-off , which came with a kiss blown to the camera . )
We find Mercado at his home in San Juan—festooned with candelabra and statuary , but hardly palatial—along with his longtime assistant , Willie Acosta .
The obvious question is raised , and then answered : Acosta is “ family , ” according to Mercado , and Acosta insists , “ I have never touched Walter with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any earthbound sexuality , explaining , “ I have sexuality with the wind !
” When the filmmakers press him on whether he ’ s a virgin , he smirks and answers , “ The only one in town.
” It ’ s remarkable that a figure as flamboyant as Mercado permeated a culture so steeped in machismo and Catholicism .
His more-is-more aesthetic , like that of Liberace , Little Richard , and Siegfried and Roy , was so outrageous as to inoculate him against traditional gender constraints : he was just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He must have known , on some level , that his means of survival was to be less a human and more of an oracle .
Gay men who grew up following him on television saw him as a lifeline , someone they could watch alongside closed-minded relatives who just wanted to hear their horoscopes .
In “ Mucho Mucho Amor , ” one interviewee , identified as “ Mireya Lucio , Witch , ” aptly sums up his singular image : “ He has an augmented face that defies gender and maybe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a hybrid between really good male hair from the seventies and really good , glamorous grandma hair.
” Growing up in Ponce , Mercado had a mother who taught him to embrace his difference .
“ I decided at that time I ’ m going to fabricate , to create a famous person in me , ” he recalls .
He studied dance at the University of Puerto Rico ( his flamenco training is evident in his gestural flair ) and acted in telenovelas .
To promote a play that he was in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Hindu prince and talked astrology .
The appearance was so popular—a shock to the senses , one imagines—that in 1969 he was given his own recurring segment , “ Walter , Las Estrellas y Usted ” ( “ Walter , the Stars , and You ” ) .
A manager named Bill Bakula took him to the big time , turning him into “ the prophet of the New Age , ” as Mercado says .
Bakula , in his telling , helped Mercado cross over into the general market in Europe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to well-placed appearances with the likes of Howard Stern ( “ You ’ re bigger than Jesus Christ , aren ’ t you ?
” ) and Sally Jessy Raphael .
“ I was in the eye of the eagle , ” Mercardo says .
But Bakula was also his Judas .
In 1995 , Mercado signed a contract that gave Bakula ’ s company full rights to his name , image , likeness , and work , plunging Mercado into a six-year court battle .
( One line of the agreement read @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” which presumably included the astral plane . )
Two days after Mercado finally won back his brand , he had a heart attack and almost died .
He vanished from television in 2006 , leaving behind generations of viewers who considered him a touchstone .
Among them was Lin-Manuel Miranda , who , when he visited the hurricane-battered Puerto Rico , in January , 2019 , to reprise his role in “ Hamilton , ” sneaked in a meeting with Mercado .
“ You ’ re such a light in all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mercado , starstruck .
“ Increíble.
” Millennials , who have led a resurgence in astrology , embraced him as a meme .
The filmmakers must have had a crystal ball , because they managed to capture Mercado in what turned out to be his final year .
In the documentary ’ s sweet climax , the aging oracle , recovering from a fall , travels to Miami in a wheelchair , to be fêted at a museum retrospective of his life .
“ I ’ m ready for my closeup , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opening ( he ’ s too much of a showman to miss the “ Sunset Boulevard ” of it all ) , where he emerges on a gold throne , in a matching suit , to a literal fanfare .
He left the corporeal realm three months later .
The film , enamored of its outré subject , gives only passing consideration to hucksterism—after all , Mercado gave millions of people “ hope , ” to say nothing of sheer entertainment .
Did his astrology come from any sort of expertise ?
Does @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his own spiritual goop and alive in his Houdini-like ability to mesmerize , Mercado was difficult not to love , in the way that improbable people often are .
Like Mister Rogers , another television shaman , he created a kind of alternative church , one he had to build himself so that it could house someone as anomalous as he was .

A new Netflix documentary focusses on Walter Mercado, an astrologer and TV personality who defied all predictions. Photographer by Harry Langdon / Getty
When Walter Mercado was a boy, in Puerto Rico, a dying bird fell into his yard. He held it and prayed for it, and the bird flapped its wings and started to fly. A neighbor who was watching concluded that Mercado had been given healing powers by the grace of God. Word spread through the village, and people began showing up at his door, begging his mother, “Please, let me see Walter!” She sat the enchanted boy on a special chair, and visitors would line up to touch him. “Then,” Mercado recalled many years later, “I turned into Walter of the Miracles.”
Apocryphal? Perhaps. But the origin story, down to the makeshift throne, befits Mercado, who went on to become Latin America’s preëminent celebrity psychic and an international phenomenon. At his height, in the nineties, he delivered daily horoscopes to a hundred and twenty million viewers on the Univision show “Primer Impacto.” His audiences (“my people,” he called them, Pope-like) anxiously awaited his end-of-year forecasts, and his empire extended to books, radio, and a syndicated newspaper column. But you didn’t have to believe in astrology to see his appeal, which lay mostly in his opulence. With his bejewelled robes, puffy helmet of hair, and taut sorcerer’s face, he was the Latin answer to Liberace: an androgynous peacock who turned campy excess into a form of pop mysticism.
Mercado, who died last November, in his late eighties, is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, “Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado,” directed by Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch. (The title is taken from his trademark sign-off, which came with a kiss blown to the camera.) We find Mercado at his home in San Juan—festooned with candelabra and statuary, but hardly palatial—along with his longtime assistant, Willie Acosta. The obvious question is raised, and then answered: Acosta is “family,” according to Mercado, and Acosta insists, “I have never touched Walter with a finger.” Mercado claims not to have any earthbound sexuality, explaining, “I have sexuality with the wind!” When the filmmakers press him on whether he’s a virgin, he smirks and answers, “The only one in town.”
It’s remarkable that a figure as flamboyant as Mercado permeated a culture so steeped in machismo and Catholicism. His more-is-more aesthetic, like that of Liberace, Little Richard, and Siegfried and Roy, was so outrageous as to inoculate him against traditional gender constraints: he was just Walter, the one and only. He must have known, on some level, that his means of survival was to be less a human and more of an oracle. Gay men who grew up following him on television saw him as a lifeline, someone they could watch alongside closed-minded relatives who just wanted to hear their horoscopes. In “Mucho Mucho Amor,” one interviewee, identified as “Mireya Lucio, Witch,” aptly sums up his singular image: “He has an augmented face that defies gender and maybe even age, and his hair is a hybrid between really good male hair from the seventies and really good, glamorous grandma hair.”
Growing up in Ponce, Mercado had a mother who taught him to embrace his difference. “I decided at that time I’m going to fabricate, to create a famous person in me,” he recalls. He studied dance at the University of Puerto Rico (his flamenco training is evident in his gestural flair) and acted in telenovelas. To promote a play that he was in, he went on television costumed as a Hindu prince and talked astrology. The appearance was so popular—a shock to the senses, one imagines—that in 1969 he was given his own recurring segment, “Walter, Las Estrellas y Usted” (“Walter, the Stars, and You”). A manager named Bill Bakula took him to the big time, turning him into “the prophet of the New Age,” as Mercado says. Bakula, in his telling, helped Mercado cross over into the general market in Europe and then the United States, thanks to well-placed appearances with the likes of Howard Stern (“You’re bigger than Jesus Christ, aren’t you?”) and Sally Jessy Raphael. “I was in the eye of the eagle,” Mercardo says.
But Bakula was also his Judas. In 1995, Mercado signed a contract that gave Bakula’s company full rights to his name, image, likeness, and work, plunging Mercado into a six-year court battle. (One line of the agreement read “The territory shall be the universe,” which presumably included the astral plane.) Two days after Mercado finally won back his brand, he had a heart attack and almost died. He vanished from television in 2006, leaving behind generations of viewers who considered him a touchstone. Among them was Lin-Manuel Miranda, who, when he visited the hurricane-battered Puerto Rico, in January, 2019, to reprise his role in “Hamilton,” sneaked in a meeting with Mercado. “You’re such a light in all of our lives,” he tells Mercado, starstruck. “Increíble.” Millennials, who have led a resurgence in astrology, embraced him as a meme.
The filmmakers must have had a crystal ball, because they managed to capture Mercado in what turned out to be his final year. In the documentary’s sweet climax, the aging oracle, recovering from a fall, travels to Miami in a wheelchair, to be fêted at a museum retrospective of his life. “I’m ready for my closeup,” he says, en route to the opening (he’s too much of a showman to miss the “Sunset Boulevard” of it all), where he emerges on a gold throne, in a matching suit, to a literal fanfare. He left the corporeal realm three months later. The film, enamored of its outré subject, gives only passing consideration to hucksterism—after all, Mercado gave millions of people “hope,” to say nothing of sheer entertainment. Did his astrology come from any sort of expertise? Does any of it? So deep in his own spiritual goop and alive in his Houdini-like ability to mesmerize, Mercado was difficult not to love, in the way that improbable people often are. Like Mister Rogers, another television shaman, he created a kind of alternative church, one he had to build himself so that it could house someone as anomalous as he was.


newyorker--2020-07-28--Olivia de Havilland, the Last Lioness of the Hollywood Studio System

I met Olivia de Havilland for the first and only time in Paris , in the summer of 2013 , in the garden of her stately home at 3 Rue Bénouville , in the Sixteenth Arrondissement .
I remember that it was unseasonably hot , even for June , because I was sweating through the pumpkin-colored silk blouse and leather pants I had bought on Rue Saint-Honoré to wear for the occasion .
My high heels kept getting caught in the cobblestones as I walked to de Havilland ’ s residence from the Metro ; by the time I arrived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , at dusk , I had blisters on both feet .
De Havilland , by contrast , looked as fresh as a bouquet chilling in a florist ’ s refrigerator .
She wore a lightweight pastel dress and a string of pearls , with her elegant puff of bone-white hair swept into a voluminous chignon .
She smelled like strong perfume—perhaps a vintage Jean Patou or Robert Piguet fragrance .
She had bright brown eyes and a peaches-and-cream complexion .
She was ninety-six years old and still disarmingly beautiful .
We sat in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wrought-iron table next to an ivy trellis .
De Havilland ’ s personal assistant , a young expat—the actress regularly hired young women who were new to Paris , who then passed the job along to other newcomers , in a kind of sororal daisy chain—brought us a small plate of tea sandwiches and a bottle of champagne on ice .
Drinking champagne every day , de Havilland told me , was her secret to eternal youth .
We kicked the bottle , and I tottered out of her house , an hour @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and flushed .
The visit feels to me now like a rose-colored dream , especially as I have no recording of our conversation ; this was at de Havilland ’ s specific request .
Our rendezvous was purely a “ getting to know you , ” brokered by a mutual friend as a first gentle tiptoe toward a magazine story I had long hoped to write about de Havilland ’ s life and career .
That story ended up fizzling , as some stories do—the magazine editor who was interested in it left @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Havilland , as she was known in France , did not want to speak to me on the phone in an official capacity .
( “ She hates ‘ phoners , ’ ” her lawyer , who handled her affairs , told me via e-mail . )
It was probably for the best—Mme .
was famously prickly when it came to guarding her image .
A few years later , de Havilland sued the showrunner Ryan Murphy for what she considered to be a defamatory portrayal on the FX series “ Feud , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a vicious gossip ; the case went all the way to the Supreme Court before the panel declined to hear it last year .
This was not de Havilland ’ s first legal battle but rather her final salvo in a lifetime of crusading for what she felt she deserved .
The actress , who died on Sunday , at the age of a hundred and four , is the namesake of a landmark law passed , in 1944 , as a result of her battle with Warner Bros. over her right @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who was born in Tokyo to English parents ( her mother was the stage actress Lilian Fontaine ; her father , Walter de Havilland , was an English professor and patent lawyer ) , signed with Warner Bros. in 1936 and rose to stardom playing the blushing ingénue .
She starred opposite Errol Flynn in films such as “ The Charge of the Light Brigade ” ( 1936 ) and “ The Adventures of Robin Hood ” ( 1938 ) , and the pair became an onscreen duo of sorts , with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Flynn ’ s swashbuckling rogue .
De Havilland—who planned to be an English teacher before she was discovered as an actress—brought a sense of studiousness and poise to her dramatic roles ; the tension in her performances came more from her tightly coiled control than from any sense of abandon .
She carried herself stick-straight , like a governess or a débutante , which made it all the more thrilling to watch when the rakish Flynn swept her off her feet .
Still , de Havilland was unsatisfied with the studio ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In 1939 , she achieved a small victory when she convinced Jack Warner ( with the help of his wife , Ann , whom de Havilland befriended and beseeched ) to loan her to M-G-M to play the brainy , selfless Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in “ Gone with the Wind , ” a role that she felt was finally equal to her acting chops .
She earned an Academy Award nomination for the performance , in the Best Supporting Actress category .
( Her co-star Hattie McDaniel won that year ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bros. , executives continued to send her scripts that she felt underutilized her talent .
She rejected them outright , leading the studio to issue her several punitive suspensions .
When de Havilland ’ s contract expired after seven years , Warner told her that she was still the studio ’ s property , owing to the time she had lost while not working .
De Havilland sued and took the case all the way to the California Supreme Court , which ultimately found in her favor , thereby setting a new rule @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a performer beyond seven calendar years .
As the Hollywood historian Karina Longworth explained in an episode of her podcast , “ You Must Remember This , ” about the case , “ Warner Brothers now had no recourse .
They , and all of the studios who used suspensions to control their talent had lost .
Olivia de Havilland was finally free.
” De Havilland was open about the fact that she craved heftier roles in large part because she desperately wanted to win an Oscar .
In particular , she wanted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sister , Joan Fontaine , who signed a contract with R.K.O .
Pictures the year before de Havilland signed with Warner Bros. ( Fontaine ended up beating de Havilland to Best Actress in a Leading Role , but not by much ; she won for her role in Hitchcock ’ s “ Suspicion , ” in 1942 , and de Havilland won for playing a desperate mother in “ To Each His Own , ” five years later , and won again for playing a wealthy woman who is constantly manipulated by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Heiress.
” ) The sisters had one of the longest-running and most well-documented family feuds in Hollywood history , even once going for years without speaking .
This rivalry grew in the press into its own cottage industry , prompting constant tabloid covers and a host of dime-store biographies .
The story was catnip to the public—famous sisters , battling it out for top billing—but , toward the end of her life , Fontaine insisted that it had all been overblown .
“ Two nice girls liking each other isn ’ t copy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2013 .
“ Let me just say , Olivia and I have never had a quarrel.
” I had hoped to discuss Fontaine with de Havilland during our visit , but she made it clear to me that the subject was off-limits .
( At the time , Fontaine was still alive ; she died six months later . )
Instead , she peppered our conversation with memories of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh , and waxed sentimental about Paris , where she had lived for more than fifty years .
She was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The book , which never emerged during her lifetime , was to be her second .
Her first , “ Every Frenchman Has One , ” came out in 1962 , nearly a decade after de Havilland relocated to Paris , where she moved into the town house on Rue Bénouville with her second husband , a suave magazine editor named Pierre Galante .
That book was a series of disconnected , fish-out-of-water essays about an American diva in Paris , in which she complained about her French maid , who never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a woman in France could be considered attractive without big breasts .
( “ I know just as well as you do that back home in the States if a girl ’ s got a delicate , elfin 32 she has no choice but to commit suicide , ” she wrote .
“ At the Lido , if you ’ ve got a delicate , elfin 32 , you ’ ve got a job.
” ) De Havilland separated from Galante , in 1962 ( they divorced years later ) , and never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , on her two children—a son , Benjamin , who died in 1991 , of Hodgkin ’ s lymphoma , and a daughter , Gisèle , who survives her .
Though she continued acting through the nineteen-eighties , her career never hit the heights that it attained when she was living in Los Angeles .
The elegance and slowness of Parisian life seemed to suit her ; even from abroad , she could still serve as a kind of distant grande dame of the industry , the last living lioness of the studio @ @ @ @ @ @ @ star , but stardom didn ’ t ruin her life , ” Longworth told me on Monday .
“ Nobody really thinks of her career as ending in decline or tragedy .
She had a happy ending , and , more than that , it was an ending of her own choice and making.
” I hope , one day , to finally read the memoir that de Havilland was working on when I met her .

I met Olivia de Havilland for the first and only time in Paris, in the summer of 2013, in the garden of her stately home at 3 Rue Bénouville, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. I remember that it was unseasonably hot, even for June, because I was sweating through the pumpkin-colored silk blouse and leather pants I had bought on Rue Saint-Honoré to wear for the occasion. My high heels kept getting caught in the cobblestones as I walked to de Havilland’s residence from the Metro; by the time I arrived at the door of her town house, at dusk, I had blisters on both feet. De Havilland, by contrast, looked as fresh as a bouquet chilling in a florist’s refrigerator. She wore a lightweight pastel dress and a string of pearls, with her elegant puff of bone-white hair swept into a voluminous chignon. She smelled like strong perfume—perhaps a vintage Jean Patou or Robert Piguet fragrance. She had bright brown eyes and a peaches-and-cream complexion. She was ninety-six years old and still disarmingly beautiful. We sat in her garden, at a delicate white wrought-iron table next to an ivy trellis. De Havilland’s personal assistant, a young expat—the actress regularly hired young women who were new to Paris, who then passed the job along to other newcomers, in a kind of sororal daisy chain—brought us a small plate of tea sandwiches and a bottle of champagne on ice. Drinking champagne every day, de Havilland told me, was her secret to eternal youth.
We kicked the bottle, and I tottered out of her house, an hour and a half later, feeling floaty and flushed. The visit feels to me now like a rose-colored dream, especially as I have no recording of our conversation; this was at de Havilland’s specific request. Our rendezvous was purely a “getting to know you,” brokered by a mutual friend as a first gentle tiptoe toward a magazine story I had long hoped to write about de Havilland’s life and career. That story ended up fizzling, as some stories do—the magazine editor who was interested in it left the industry, and Mme. de Havilland, as she was known in France, did not want to speak to me on the phone in an official capacity. (“She hates ‘phoners,’ ” her lawyer, who handled her affairs, told me via e-mail.) It was probably for the best—Mme. was famously prickly when it came to guarding her image. A few years later, de Havilland sued the showrunner Ryan Murphy for what she considered to be a defamatory portrayal on the FX series “Feud,” in which Catherine Zeta-Jones played her as a vicious gossip; the case went all the way to the Supreme Court before the panel declined to hear it last year.
This was not de Havilland’s first legal battle but rather her final salvo in a lifetime of crusading for what she felt she deserved. The actress, who died on Sunday, at the age of a hundred and four, is the namesake of a landmark law passed, in 1944, as a result of her battle with Warner Bros. over her right to exit her contract. De Havilland, who was born in Tokyo to English parents (her mother was the stage actress Lilian Fontaine; her father, Walter de Havilland, was an English professor and patent lawyer), signed with Warner Bros. in 1936 and rose to stardom playing the blushing ingénue. She starred opposite Errol Flynn in films such as “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1936) and “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), and the pair became an onscreen duo of sorts, with de Havilland playing the dulcet damsel to Flynn’s swashbuckling rogue. De Havilland—who planned to be an English teacher before she was discovered as an actress—brought a sense of studiousness and poise to her dramatic roles; the tension in her performances came more from her tightly coiled control than from any sense of abandon. She carried herself stick-straight, like a governess or a débutante, which made it all the more thrilling to watch when the rakish Flynn swept her off her feet.
When de Havilland’s contract expired after seven years, Warner Bros. told her that she was still the studio’s property. She sued. Photograph George Hurrell / Warner Bros / Kobal / Shutterstock
Still, de Havilland was unsatisfied with the studio’s tendency to shove her into romantic roles. In 1939, she achieved a small victory when she convinced Jack Warner (with the help of his wife, Ann, whom de Havilland befriended and beseeched) to loan her to M-G-M to play the brainy, selfless Melanie Hamilton Wilkes in “Gone with the Wind,” a role that she felt was finally equal to her acting chops. She earned an Academy Award nomination for the performance, in the Best Supporting Actress category. (Her co-star Hattie McDaniel won that year.) Still, when she returned to Warner Bros., executives continued to send her scripts that she felt underutilized her talent. She rejected them outright, leading the studio to issue her several punitive suspensions. When de Havilland’s contract expired after seven years, Warner told her that she was still the studio’s property, owing to the time she had lost while not working. De Havilland sued and took the case all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ultimately found in her favor, thereby setting a new rule in Hollywood that no studio could hold a performer beyond seven calendar years. As the Hollywood historian Karina Longworth explained in an episode of her podcast, “You Must Remember This,” about the case, “Warner Bros. now had no recourse. They and all of the studios who used suspensions to control their talent had lost. Olivia de Havilland was finally free.”
De Havilland was open about the fact that she craved heftier roles in large part because she desperately wanted to win an Oscar. In particular, she wanted to win an Oscar before her younger sister, Joan Fontaine, who signed a contract with R.K.O. Pictures the year before de Havilland signed with Warner Bros. (Fontaine ended up beating de Havilland to Best Actress in a Leading Role, but not by much; she won for her role in Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” in 1942, and de Havilland won for playing a desperate mother in “To Each His Own,” five years later, and won again for playing a wealthy woman who is constantly manipulated by the men around her, in “The Heiress.”) The sisters had one of the longest-running and most well-documented family feuds in Hollywood history, even once going for years without speaking. This rivalry grew in the press into its own cottage industry, prompting constant tabloid covers and a host of dime-store biographies. The story was catnip to the public—famous sisters, battling it out for top billing—but, toward the end of her life, Fontaine insisted that it had all been overblown. “Two nice girls liking each other isn’t copy,” Fontaine told a reporter in 2013. “Let me just say, Olivia and I have never had a quarrel.”
I had hoped to discuss Fontaine with de Havilland during our visit, but she made it clear to me that the subject was off-limits. (At the time, Fontaine was still alive; she died six months later.) Instead, she peppered our conversation with memories of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, and waxed sentimental about Paris, where she had lived for more than fifty years. She was spending her days working on her memoir. The book, which never emerged during her lifetime, was to be her second. Her first, “Every Frenchman Has One,” came out in 1962, nearly a decade after de Havilland relocated to Paris, where she moved into the town house on Rue Bénouville with her second husband, a suave magazine editor named Pierre Galante. That book was a series of disconnected, fish-out-of-water essays about an American diva in Paris, in which she complained about her French maid, who never scrubbed the bathtub, and marvelled that a woman in France could be considered attractive without big breasts. (“I know just as well as you do that back home in the States if a girl’s got a delicate, elfin 32 she has no choice but to commit suicide,” she wrote. “At the Lido, if you’ve got a delicate, elfin 32, you’ve got a job.”)
De Havilland separated from Galante, in 1962 (they divorced years later), and never married again. She focussed, instead, on her two children—a son, Benjamin, who died in 1991, of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and a daughter, Gisèle, who survives her. Though she continued acting through the nineteen-eighties, her career never hit the heights that it attained when she was living in Los Angeles. The elegance and slowness of Parisian life seemed to suit her; even from abroad, she could still serve as a kind of distant grande dame of the industry, the last living lioness of the studio system. “She was a big star, but stardom didn’t ruin her life,” Longworth told me on Monday. “Nobody really thinks of her career as ending in decline or tragedy. She had a happy ending, and, more than that, it was an ending of her own choice and making.” I hope, one day, to finally read the memoir that de Havilland was working on when I met her.


newyorker--2020-07-27--Emily Oster on Whether and How to Reopen Schools

The decision about whether to reopen schools may determine children ’ s futures , the survival of teachers , and @ @ @ @ @ to rebound .
Emily Oster , an economist at Brown University , reviews what we @ @ @ @ @ know about the dangers of in-person classes .
How likely are children to transmit the @ @ @ @ @ it to one another ?
Oster talks about the data with Joshua Rothman , and @ @ @ @ @ about this upcoming school year : How do we measure the trade-off between the lives @ @ @ @ @ if schools open and the long-term negative effects of learning lost if schools stay closed @ @ @ @ @ do when , inevitably , somebody dies ?
“ We ’ re going to have @ @ @ @ @ ’ t actually a right choice , ” she says .

Photograph by Bing Guan / Bloomberg / Getty
The decision about whether to reopen schools may determine children’s futures, the survival of teachers, and the economy’s ability to rebound. Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, reviews what we do and don’t know about the dangers of in-person classes. How likely are children to transmit the coronavirus? Will teachers spread it to one another? Oster talks about the data with Joshua Rothman, and opens up a knottier question about this upcoming school year: How do we measure the trade-off between the lives that will inevitably be lost if schools open and the long-term negative effects of learning lost if schools stay closed? What will a school do when, inevitably, somebody dies? “We’re going to have to accept that there isn’t actually a right choice,” she says.


newyorker--2020-07-27--An Elegy for the Landline in Literature

An Elegy for the Landline in Literature

“ The telephone rang .
It was an unusual hour for it to ring.
” These two sentences are drawn from Vladimir Nabokov ’ s short story “ Symbols and Signs , ” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 .
They are functionally perfect sentences in a functionally perfect story .
When the reader encounters them , an older couple is up late at night worrying about their son .
Earlier that day , they ’ d gone to visit him , for his birthday , at the sanatorium where he lives .
Once there , they were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A visit might upset him .
The couple had returned home in silence ; the father , unable to sleep , had decided that they would retrieve him the next day .
This is when the phone rings , and when everything , we think , is about to change .
But it doesn ’ t—the caller is a stranger , with the voice of a little girl .
Wrong number , the wife says .
The phone rings again .
Same caller .
The wife gives her instructions— “ You are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the zero ” —and hangs up .
The couple drink some tea .
They admire their gift for their son .
And then the story ends : “ The phone rang again.
” I think of this story often , for all kinds of reasons , but mostly because of the silence punctuated by the surprising ring of the telephone .
The sudden drama , the charge of meaning , the prospect of death conveyed before the call is even answered : this is the power that a phone—and a landline , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ source of suspense , of great and small action ; it is the noise of the world entering almost supernaturally into a room .
In fiction , it is a cherished and endangered device , one full of possibility .
It could , after all , be anyone calling .
Since its invention , in the nineteenth century , the landline has often been portrayed as sinister—the object through which fate comes to call .
Franz Kafka was famously scared of the telephone , and it played a nightmarish role in his writing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Castle.
” In his short story “ My Neighbor , ” a young businessman increasingly fears that a competitor is listening to his calls through the wall .
His telephone becomes the symbol of this despair , and by the end of the story he has totally unravelled : “ Sometimes I dance around , the receiver to my ear , spurred on by my anxiety , on my tiptoes , and still can not prevent my secrets from being given away.
” Kafka located one of the central qualities of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speak and be heard , but also to be destabilized , exposed to forces unseen .
That quality lapses easily into the supernatural .
The plot of Muriel Spark ’ s “ Memento Mori , ” from 1959 , is propelled by various characters receiving a phone call from a mysterious source , never revealed : “ Remember you must die.
” Is it God ?
In the third volume of “ In Search of Lost Time , ” Marcel Proust describes phone operators as “ Danaids of the Unseen , ” “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and—my personal favorite— “ the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible.
” In “ Lolita , ” the narrator , Humbert Humbert , notes that “ toilets―as also telephones―happened to be , for reasons unfathomable , the points where my destiny was liable to catch.
” The landline isn ’ t always an omen or portal , as in Kafka and Nabokov ; it can also be a vividly social fixture .
Partly this is because it ’ s inherently public , which can turn a call into a spectacle .
But there ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ position in space—and its anonymity ( before caller I.D . )
that allows writers to experiment with suspense .
Henry Green ’ s wonderful novel “ Party Going , ” from 1939 , depends almost entirely upon the telephone .
The book follows a group of young people heading from London to the Continent , where their enormously rich friend Max , a desirable and enigmatic bachelor , is throwing a house party .
When a thick fog descends upon London , their train is delayed , and they ’ re forced to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The rest of the plot finds them drifting between rooms ; talk becomes the subject of the novel , and the way that it ’ s channelled , shaped , and circumscribed by phone calls moves the story forward .
At the hotel , Max believes that he can ’ t be reached by Amabel , his beautiful and commanding lover , with whom he argued on the phone before he left ; he considers a courtship with Julia Wray , another member of the group .
Throughout the book , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ constant as characters argue and flirt and wait for the most important call of all , the one that will tell them that the train can depart .
Green builds a whole buzzing world around a single object , which binds the characters by making them reachable and unreachable—knowable and unknowable—at once .
This interplay between public and private—Who will pick up ?
What will they know ?
—is essential to the drama of the landline .
In Tessa Hadley ’ s début novel , “ Accidents in the Home , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , her best friend ’ s boyfriend and her own would-be lover , from the coin-operated phone in the house that her family is renting in Ireland .
It is her first such call , and she makes it in the cloakroom , pressed among the coats of her young children .
But David doesn ’ t pick up ; her best friend does .
For a second , Clare imagines the conversation they might have , the complaints about her family vacation she might rattle off ; her friend would “ recognize @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long line of such calls.
” And yet .
Clare realizes that her friend , Helly , has never given her David ’ s number .
Why would she have called it ?
She also realizes that , if she hangs up , Helly could dial a recall number that might expose her .
Helly discovering that it was an international call would “ be enough , Clare thought , to give her away.
” She hangs up .
“ Then she sat listening to the tone in the phone as though she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what had happened.
” The decline of the landline in fiction is , of course , part of its decline in life .
More than half of Americans live in households with no landlines ; that number rises to nearly seventy-five per cent among those ages twenty-five to thirty-four .
Late at night , a phone is probably not ringing ominously in the next room ; it ’ s buzzing on the nightstand , caller I.D .
flashing .
In fiction , characters , like people , are always reachable .
Text messages @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contact ; indeed , most of the calls in “ Party Going ” would not need to happen today .
And cell phones are , in many ways , far more intimate than landlines , divorced as they are from a fixed point in the home or on the street .
The cell phone generates its own dramas—the emoji-littered epistles of text messaging , the tug of social media—and it certainly deserves a larger role in literature , where it remains a somewhat stigmatized feature of modern life .
In a wonderful essay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Stephen Marche notes that writers often treat the smartphone like a hot potato , as though , “ if you mentioned a smartphone in a short story about intimate life , the subject of that story would be the smartphone .
”

“The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to ring.” These two sentences are drawn from Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Symbols and Signs,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1948. They are functionally perfect sentences in a functionally perfect story. When the reader encounters them, an older couple is up late at night worrying about their son. Earlier that day, they’d gone to visit him, for his birthday, at the sanatorium where he lives. Once there, they were told that he had recently attempted suicide. A visit might upset him. The couple had returned home in silence; the father, unable to sleep, had decided that they would retrieve him the next day. This is when the phone rings, and when everything, we think, is about to change. But it doesn’t—the caller is a stranger, with the voice of a little girl. Wrong number, the wife says. The phone rings again. Same caller. The wife gives her instructions—“You are turning the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero”—and hangs up. The couple drink some tea. They admire their gift for their son. And then the story ends: “The phone rang again.”
I think of this story often, for all kinds of reasons, but mostly because of the silence punctuated by the surprising ring of the telephone. The sudden drama, the charge of meaning, the prospect of death conveyed before the call is even answered: this is the power that a phone—and a landline, especially—can hold. The landline is a source of suspense, of great and small action; it is the noise of the world entering almost supernaturally into a room. In fiction, it is a cherished and endangered device, one full of possibility. It could, after all, be anyone calling.
Since its invention, in the nineteenth century, the landline has often been portrayed as sinister—the object through which fate comes to call. Franz Kafka was famously scared of the telephone, and it played a nightmarish role in his writing, including in his unfinished novel “The Castle.” In his short story “My Neighbor,” a young businessman increasingly fears that a competitor is listening to his calls through the wall. His telephone becomes the symbol of this despair, and by the end of the story he has totally unravelled: “Sometimes I dance around, the receiver to my ear, spurred on by my anxiety, on my tiptoes, and still cannot prevent my secrets from being given away.”
Kafka located one of the central qualities of the landline—the way that it allowed someone to speak and be heard, but also to be destabilized, exposed to forces unseen. That quality lapses easily into the supernatural. The plot of Muriel Spark’s “Memento Mori,” from 1959, is propelled by various characters receiving a phone call from a mysterious source, never revealed: “Remember you must die.” Is it God? In the third volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” Marcel Proust describes phone operators as “Danaids of the Unseen,” “the servants of the Mystery,” and—my personal favorite—“the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible.” In “Lolita,” the narrator, Humbert Humbert, notes that “toilets―as also telephones―happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch.”
The landline isn’t always an omen or portal, as in Kafka and Nabokov; it can also be a vividly social fixture. Partly this is because it’s inherently public, which can turn a call into a spectacle. But there’s also something about its fixedness—its set position in space—and its anonymity (before caller I.D.) that allows writers to experiment with suspense. Henry Green’s wonderful novel “Party Going,” from 1939, depends almost entirely upon the telephone. The book follows a group of young people heading from London to the Continent, where their enormously rich friend Max, a desirable and enigmatic bachelor, is throwing a house party. When a thick fog descends upon London, their train is delayed, and they’re forced to shelter in a hotel near the station. The rest of the plot finds them drifting between rooms; talk becomes the subject of the novel, and the way that it’s channelled, shaped, and circumscribed by phone calls moves the story forward. At the hotel, Max believes that he can’t be reached by Amabel, his beautiful and commanding lover, with whom he argued on the phone before he left; he considers a courtship with Julia Wray, another member of the group. Throughout the book, the landline is a motif, the one constant as characters argue and flirt and wait for the most important call of all, the one that will tell them that the train can depart. Green builds a whole buzzing world around a single object, which binds the characters by making them reachable and unreachable—knowable and unknowable—at once.
This interplay between public and private—Who will pick up? What will they know?—is essential to the drama of the landline. In Tessa Hadley’s début novel, “Accidents in the Home,” the main character, Clare, calls David, her best friend’s boyfriend and her own would-be lover, from the coin-operated phone in the house that her family is renting in Ireland. It is her first such call, and she makes it in the cloakroom, pressed among the coats of her young children. But David doesn’t pick up; her best friend does. For a second, Clare imagines the conversation they might have, the complaints about her family vacation she might rattle off; her friend would “recognize the phone call as belonging in a long line of such calls.” And yet. Clare realizes that her friend, Helly, has never given her David’s number. Why would she have called it? She also realizes that, if she hangs up, Helly could dial a recall number that might expose her. Helly discovering that it was an international call would “be enough, Clare thought, to give her away.” She hangs up. “Then she sat listening to the tone in the phone as though she might hear in there the aftershock of what had happened.”
The decline of the landline in fiction is, of course, part of its decline in life. More than half of Americans live in households with no landlines; that number rises to nearly seventy-five per cent among those ages twenty-five to thirty-four. Late at night, a phone is probably not ringing ominously in the next room; it’s buzzing on the nightstand, caller I.D. flashing. In fiction, characters, like people, are always reachable. Text messages offer a new, intermediate form of contact; indeed, most of the calls in “Party Going” would not need to happen today. And cell phones are, in many ways, far more intimate than landlines, divorced as they are from a fixed point in the home or on the street.
The cell phone generates its own dramas—the emoji-littered epistles of text messaging, the tug of social media—and it certainly deserves a larger role in literature, where it remains a somewhat stigmatized feature of modern life. In a wonderful essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Marche notes that writers often treat the smartphone like a hot potato, as though, “if you mentioned a smartphone in a short story about intimate life, the subject of that story would be the smartphone.”
Some of this unease may flow from the challenge that cell phones pose to the conventions of fiction, or to the conventions of what it used to be. In “Here and Now,” a collection of letters between J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster, the two novelists briefly consider how cell phones have changed their process. Coetzee acknowledges omitting such devices from his work, describing himself as a “twenty-first-century person writing fiction from which twenty-first-century tools of communication like the mobile phone are absent.” He wonders about their impact on the turning wheels of plot, and notes how they might especially change the adultery novel. “So much of the mechanics of novel writing, past and present, is taken up with making information available to characters or keeping it from them, with getting people together in the same room or holding them apart,” he writes in a letter from 2011, four years after the iPhone débuted. “If, all of a sudden, everyone has access to more or less everyone else—electronic access, that is—what becomes of all that plotting?”
It’s a good question, if a cranky one. Auster answers by noting that, although everyone has access to everyone, it is “only in a fragmented, ad hoc sort of way.” This is an apt description of communication today—the way that it’s constant but porous, somehow less solid for being more guaranteed. And yet Coetzee’s concerns still stand: the landline creates certain important restraints that cell phones do not. It allows for fictional worlds in which people can be plausibly held apart, unable to communicate, and then convened in a single burst. It allows for information to be withheld and released. It allows for something unpredictable to enter a room.
Uncertainty is invaluable in fiction. It is often what makes reading a novel so pleasurable: the instability of the world that we enter; the sense that something is going to happen, though we do not know what; the promise that what we imagine might, in fact, unfold. The mechanics of this uncertainty have often required certain objects: the broken-down car, the doorbell, the unopened package. The landline telephone is perhaps the greatest of these objects. In the twilight of its life, we might, like Nabokov, remember it as an open line of possibility, just waiting to ring.


newyorker--2020-07-27--Rand Paul Thanks Tom Cotton for Replacing Him as Most Hated Person in Senate

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Calling it the “ passing of the baton , ” Senator Rand Paul on Monday thanked Senator Tom Cotton for replacing him as the most hated person in the United States Senate .
Paul expressed surprise and no small amount of admiration at Cotton ’ s feat , telling reporters that being ousted from the most-detested perch was “ something that , quite frankly , I didn ’ t see coming.
” “ When I started attacking Dr. Fauci , I pretty much thought I had the title sewn up , ” Paul said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ count on was that someone like Tom was going to come out of nowhere , saying slavery was necessary.
” According to Senate insiders , Cotton beat out a daunting field of competitors for Senator Paul ’ s crown , including Mitch McConnell , Susan Collins , and Ted Cruz .
While he praised Cotton ’ s audacity in snatching the most-loathed mantle , Paul warned that keeping the title for the long haul is another challenge altogether .
“ Becoming despised is easy—staying despised is what separates the men from the boys @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said that , I firmly believe that Tom Cotton has what it takes .
”

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it the “passing of the baton,” Senator Rand Paul on Monday thanked Senator Tom Cotton for replacing him as the most hated person in the United States Senate.
Paul expressed surprise and no small amount of admiration at Cotton’s feat, telling reporters that being ousted from the most-detested perch was “something that, quite frankly, I didn’t see coming.”
“When I started attacking Dr. Fauci, I pretty much thought I had the title sewn up,” Paul said. “What I didn’t count on was that someone like Tom was going to come out of nowhere, saying slavery was necessary.”
According to Senate insiders, Cotton beat out a daunting field of competitors for Senator Paul’s crown, including Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Ted Cruz.
While he praised Cotton’s audacity in snatching the most-loathed mantle, Paul warned that keeping the title for the long haul is another challenge altogether.
“Becoming despised is easy—staying despised is what separates the men from the boys,” Paul said. “Having said that, I firmly believe that Tom Cotton has what it takes.”


newyorker--2020-07-27--Pandemic Legacy, the Board-Game Series for the Age of the Coronavirus

In a list of retail shortages from early March , plague historians will include toilet paper , baking yeast , and , at some stores , every kind of meat except shrimp and ribs .
They should also mention a coöperative board game called Pandemic .
In 2004 , not long after the SARS virus wound a deadly path through China , Singapore , and Canada , Matt Leacock , then a designer at Yahoo , started working on the game during his off hours .
Pandemic came out four years later , and made its way from classrooms to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ short-lived gift shop at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—eventually jostling for shelf space among Hasbro stalwarts like Monopoly and Clue in Walmarts across the country .
A favorite among doctors battling the coronavirus , Pandemic has grown from curiosity to cathartic release , offering , in miniature , a finite version of our stricken world .
In the past decade , board games have exploded in popularity and variety , and thousands of new games come out every year .
Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter have encouraged the emergence of a lucrative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ M. Lang , who crafts games set in ancient Egypt and feudal Japan , have been able to raise millions of dollars before they ’ ve even finished making their promised sets .
Across North America , board game cafés and bars have popped up , from Game Knight Lounge , in Portland , Oregon , to the Uncommons , in Manhattan , to capitalize on a new generation ’ s interest .
Modern board-games fans , bored with Life and Scrabble , pursue novelty , drawn by themes that reflect their esoteric @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was released in 2016 , players control corporations and institutions , vying to erect domed cities and fill the dusty ocean beds of Mars with fish and water .
It ’ s ranked the fourth-best game of all time on the Web site BoardGameGeek .
Humbler conceits have proven just as popular .
Elizabeth Hargrave ’ s Wingspan , about nurturing birds in a nature preserve , relies on data from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology .
The game has sold out every one of its print runs since it came out last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , set to appear in August , revolves around migrating monarch butterflies .
Pandemic resembles the Parker Brothers classic Risk—there ’ s a world map and continents associated with different colors—but the goal is reversed .
Instead of seeking world domination , as you raise and spread armies against your friends , you must work with other players to stop the march of multiple diseases that threaten to devastate the Earth .
Each player controls a character who is uniquely suited to the game ’ s tasks .
The dispatcher can shuttle another @ @ @ @ @ @ @ treat more cases of a disease than his colleagues .
The scientist can find a cure a little quicker .
Players take in the totality of the board and advise one another , wincing together when the results are grim , cheering together when they eradicate a disease .
Leacock began devising Pandemic after the bad blood resulting from a particularly acrimonious board-game experience—his wife was among the unhappy players—spilled into real life .
Enter the attractive spell cast by coöperative game play : the people around you remain your friends ; your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the board .
Coöperative board games have been gaining popularity , and , in the decade since Pandemic was released , new versions of the game , like novel strains of the flu , have cropped up every year or so .
Sometimes the changes are mostly cosmetic : the tenth-anniversary edition comes in a handsome blue case meant to resemble a first-aid kit .
Recently , Pandemic ’ s publisher , Z-Man Games , announced that Leacock would collaborate once again with Rob Daviau , a veteran Hasbro game designer , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their more complex Pandemic Legacy saga , which was begun in 2015 .
In a legacy-style game , every time you play , the board might be permanently altered , leaving behind traces of previous decisions and their consequences .
Daviau has said that the idea occurred to him while he was tinkering with a new version of Clue .
He wondered why Mr. Boddy , apparently untraumatized , kept inviting the same murderous guests to his manor , over and over .
What would it be like if the ghost of games @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an ordinary round of Pandemic , when disease overwhelms a city , an outbreak occurs , and the infection spreads to other states or countries .
In the first season of Pandemic Legacy , each game takes place in a given month of a single year .
A city pummelled by infection begins to destabilize , and distress simmers among its people .
Characters can be scarred and perish .
Further outbreaks blossom into riots .
Buildings descend into a heap of ashes .
As the infected become increasingly restive , you have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
When the players begin the game again , weeks have passed , and they must confront the same web of cities , now wrecked by disease and unrest .
Half a decade after the release of Pandemic Legacy : Season 1 , the series has revealed itself to be an uncanny fit for the age of COVID-19 .
“ It starts simply .
A virus tougher than the rest , ” the unfortunately prophetic Season 1 teaser reads .
“ But as January turns to February , things take a turn for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus .
What results is a year that will never be forgotten.
” The story is also more than a sum of the players ’ past missteps and misfortunes .
As the game progresses , a stack of cards directs players to specific panels attached to a set of “ top secret ” dossiers , along with cardboard containers that conceal game pieces .
( Designers appreciate the delight players take in handling thick tokens and small cubes ; Pandemic ’ s ninety-six “ disease ” cubes , in four colors , mix @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and more game pieces lie hidden in cardboard containers , like chocolates in an advent calendar . )
The first thing you learn in this meticulous unboxing is that one of the four diseases has mutated into an untreatable form that scientists call C0dA .
The name seems to reflect the way in which the game unfolds .
As you play , the story develops and new characters emerge : a quarantine specialist in a leather jacket shields the populace from new infections ; an operations expert with a walkie-talkie and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The world changes and yet you return again and again to the beginning of the game .
C0dA , incurable , still looms .
Many of the top-secret panels hide stickers to fill in blank spaces in the rule book , leading to more—and more complex—decisions .
“ A minute to learn ... a lifetime to master , ” the motto of the black-and-white-disk-flipping game Othello , is not always taken to heart by game designers .
Like vintage-car collectors marvelling at shifters and carburetors , indie-board-game enthusiasts revel in elaborate systems of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such structures often overwhelm casual players .
Gloomhaven , a fantasy-themed role-playing game—Dungeons & Dragons , without the improvised storytelling—is the highest-rated game of all time on BoardGameGeek ; it ’ s also discouragingly complex for the uninitiated .
In this respect , Pandemic Legacy performs a magic trick : as part of the story , the player must earn the rules , tying each new dictum to the suspense of the narrative .
You learn about how to deploy roadblocks only after you absorb the fact that C0dA outbreaks might necessitate the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with infection .
The rules don ’ t just constrict the world—they construct it , too .

In a list of retail shortages from early March, plague historians will include toilet paper, baking yeast, and, at some stores, every kind of meat except shrimp and ribs. They should also mention a coöperative board game called Pandemic. In 2004, not long after the SARS virus wound a deadly path through China, Singapore, and Canada, Matt Leacock, then a designer at Yahoo, started working on the game during his off hours. Pandemic came out four years later, and made its way from classrooms to medical schools—it was a staple of the short-lived gift shop at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—eventually jostling for shelf space among Hasbro stalwarts like Monopoly and Clue in Walmarts across the country. A favorite among doctors battling the coronavirus, Pandemic has grown from curiosity to cathartic release, offering, in miniature, a finite version of our stricken world.
In the past decade, board games have exploded in popularity and variety, and thousands of new games come out every year. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter have encouraged the emergence of a lucrative publishing system: veteran designers like Eric M. Lang, who crafts games set in ancient Egypt and feudal Japan, have been able to raise millions of dollars before they’ve even finished making their promised sets. Across North America, board game cafés and bars have popped up, from Game Knight Lounge, in Portland, Oregon, to the Uncommons, in Manhattan, to capitalize on a new generation’s interest.
Modern board-games fans, bored with Life and Scrabble, pursue novelty, drawn by themes that reflect their esoteric interests. In Terraforming Mars, which was released in 2016, players control corporations and institutions, vying to erect domed cities and fill the dusty ocean beds of Mars with fish and water. It’s ranked the fourth-best game of all time on the Web site BoardGameGeek. Humbler conceits have proven just as popular. Elizabeth Hargrave’s Wingspan, about nurturing birds in a nature preserve, relies on data from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The game has sold out every one of its print runs since it came out last year; Hargrave’s next project, set to appear in August, revolves around migrating monarch butterflies.
Pandemic resembles the Parker Brothers classic Risk—there’s a world map and continents associated with different colors—but the goal is reversed. Instead of seeking world domination, as you raise and spread armies against your friends, you must work with other players to stop the march of multiple diseases that threaten to devastate the Earth. Each player controls a character who is uniquely suited to the game’s tasks. The dispatcher can shuttle another character between continents. The medic can treat more cases of a disease than his colleagues. The scientist can find a cure a little quicker. Players take in the totality of the board and advise one another, wincing together when the results are grim, cheering together when they eradicate a disease. Leacock began devising Pandemic after the bad blood resulting from a particularly acrimonious board-game experience—his wife was among the unhappy players—spilled into real life. Enter the attractive spell cast by coöperative game play: the people around you remain your friends; your enemy is the unfolding of events on the board.
Coöperative board games have been gaining popularity, and, in the decade since Pandemic was released, new versions of the game, like novel strains of the flu, have cropped up every year or so. Sometimes the changes are mostly cosmetic: the tenth-anniversary edition comes in a handsome blue case meant to resemble a first-aid kit. Recently, Pandemic’s publisher, Z-Man Games, announced that Leacock would collaborate once again with Rob Daviau, a veteran Hasbro game designer, to create the third and final installment to their more complex Pandemic Legacy saga, which was begun in 2015.
In a legacy-style game, every time you play, the board might be permanently altered, leaving behind traces of previous decisions and their consequences. Daviau has said that the idea occurred to him while he was tinkering with a new version of Clue. He wondered why Mr. Boddy, apparently untraumatized, kept inviting the same murderous guests to his manor, over and over. What would it be like if the ghost of games past could haunt the present? In an ordinary round of Pandemic, when disease overwhelms a city, an outbreak occurs, and the infection spreads to other states or countries. In the first season of Pandemic Legacy, each game takes place in a given month of a single year. A city pummelled by infection begins to destabilize, and distress simmers among its people. Characters can be scarred and perish. Further outbreaks blossom into riots. Buildings descend into a heap of ashes. As the infected become increasingly restive, you have the option to lob grenades at them. When the players begin the game again, weeks have passed, and they must confront the same web of cities, now wrecked by disease and unrest. Half a decade after the release of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, the series has revealed itself to be an uncanny fit for the age of COVID-19.
“It starts simply. A virus tougher than the rest,” the unfortunately prophetic Season 1 teaser reads. “But as January turns to February, things take a turn for the worse. This is no ordinary virus. What results is a year that will never be forgotten.” The story is also more than a sum of the players’ past missteps and misfortunes. As the game progresses, a stack of cards directs players to specific panels attached to a set of “top secret” dossiers, along with cardboard containers that conceal game pieces. (Designers appreciate the delight players take in handling thick tokens and small cubes; Pandemic’s ninety-six “disease” cubes, in four colors, mix a satisfying object with a stressful conceit, and more game pieces lie hidden in cardboard containers, like chocolates in an advent calendar.)
The first thing you learn in this meticulous unboxing is that one of the four diseases has mutated into an untreatable form that scientists call C0dA. The name seems to reflect the way in which the game unfolds. As you play, the story develops and new characters emerge: a quarantine specialist in a leather jacket shields the populace from new infections; an operations expert with a walkie-talkie and a hard hat quickly erects research stations. The world changes and yet you return again and again to the beginning of the game. C0dA, incurable, still looms.
Many of the top-secret panels hide stickers to fill in blank spaces in the rule book, leading to more—and more complex—decisions. “A minute to learn... a lifetime to master,” the motto of the black-and-white-disk-flipping game Othello, is not always taken to heart by game designers. Like vintage-car collectors marvelling at shifters and carburetors, indie-board-game enthusiasts revel in elaborate systems of dos and don’ts. But such structures often overwhelm casual players. Gloomhaven, a fantasy-themed role-playing game—Dungeons & Dragons, without the improvised storytelling—is the highest-rated game of all time on BoardGameGeek; it’s also discouragingly complex for the uninitiated. In this respect, Pandemic Legacy performs a magic trick: as part of the story, the player must earn the rules, tying each new dictum to the suspense of the narrative. You learn about how to deploy roadblocks only after you absorb the fact that C0dA outbreaks might necessitate the drastic step of blockading a city rife with infection. The rules don’t just constrict the world—they construct it, too.
The plot of Season 2, which begins three generations in the future, suggests that the fight against C0dA did not put an end to the planet’s troubles. Most of the world, now ruined by disease, is unreachable, and the players, a small band of workers trying to bring food and supplies to the few stronghold cities that remain, must navigate a much smaller map. The release date of the third Pandemic Legacy game, delayed for months, has only recently been announced. This spring, while publishers of nonfiction titles scrambled to sign up authors to write COVID-19-themed books, Z-Man Games feared that the arrival of the final installment of Pandemic Legacy might appear inappropriately apt. Players, meanwhile, were quick to point out the uneasy feeling that the simulation had become reality. (“I didn’t agree to playtest Season 3 of Pandemic Legacy,” a fan remarked on Twitter, “And honestly this feels like more of an escape room.”)


newyorker--2020-07-27--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons August 3 & 10, 2020

“ I ’ m relaxed enough that I ’ ve stopped thinking about the drive here , but not so @ @ @ @ @ not thinking about the drive back .
”

“I’m relaxed enough that I’ve stopped thinking about the drive here, but not so relaxed that I’m not thinking about the drive back.”
Cartoon by Christopher Weyant


newyorker--2020-07-27--“We Are Gone,” by David Baker

“We Are Gone,” by David Baker

Even the night cooling down is slick with heat .
Even the sheet we share like a humming skin .
From three stories up the sounds of the street , drinkers at the curb , a wet hiss of dry tires , is a rhythm through our box fan , like panting .
When we sleep it is piecemeal until morning .
Listen , the years are short .
They are nothing .
I write each morning , while you are at work .
In the heat of day , I walk to the library , cold water at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a new book back in the elm-lined shade .
At night I meet you at the top of the stairs .
Where are you gone , who loved me so long one summer far from home ?
Days are long .
Even the heat is lovelier there , as memory is .
We make lemonade from powder .
Little wonder the years are less than a breath , like a song on the radio heard as the rhythm of languor .
Whistle of the ice-cream truck .
Drinkers at the curb .
Days @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , such tenderness .
When we sleep sometimes it is to dream of the days .
Where are they gone ?
Meeting on the stairs , laughter and light , a small meal , a bottle of wine .
When we wake it is piecemeal , until we are gone .

Audio: Read by the author.
Even the night cooling down is slick with heat.
Even the sheet we share like a humming skin.
From three stories up the sounds of the street,
drinkers at the curb, a wet hiss of dry tires,
is a rhythm through our box fan, like panting.
When we sleep it is piecemeal until morning.
•
Listen, the years are short. They are nothing.
I write each morning, while you are at work.
In the heat of day, I walk to the library, cold
water at the fountain, air-conditioned air; walk
with a new book back in the elm-lined shade.
At night I meet you at the top of the stairs.
•
Where are you gone, who loved me so long
one summer far from home? Days are long.
Even the heat is lovelier there, as memory is.
We make lemonade from powder. Little wonder
the years are less than a breath, like a song
on the radio heard as the rhythm of languor.
•
Whistle of the ice-cream truck. Drinkers at the curb.
Days and nights of heat, of sex, such tenderness.
When we sleep sometimes it is to dream of the days.
Where are they gone? Meeting on the stairs,
laughter and light, a small meal, a bottle of wine.
When we wake it is piecemeal, until we are gone.


newyorker--2020-07-27--Bryan Washington on “Lowercase Love Stories”

In “ Heirlooms , ” your story in this week ’ s issue , Ben , a young man in Houston , is playing host to Mitsuko , the mother of his boyfriend , Mike , who ’ s flown to Japan on the spur of the moment to visit his dying father .
Mike ’ s parents are divorced , and so the switcheroo—Mike going to Japan , his mother coming from Japan—has something of the setup of a farce , or an updated version of an old-fashioned drawing-room comedy .
What appealed to you about this basic premise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me , you know ?
I thought it ’ d be fun to parse the ways that a seemingly commonplace miscommunication—a mismanagement of flight dates , which might be a fairly major logistical fuck-up , sure , but not necessarily one that ’ s implausible in scale—could yield life-altering shifts among everyone involved .
I ’ m finding that found families are a recurring motif in my work , and when the members of those communities come from seemingly disparate , or at least parallel , origin points , you end up with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this story , as in past ones—I ’ m thinking of “ Visitor ” —there ’ s a great focus on hospitality .
Here , Ben must accommodate in his apartment for weeks a woman whom he ’ s never met .
Why is hospitality such a theme in your stories , and do you have general thoughts about it ?
The act of caring for someone is transactional , irrespective of the intimacy underlying each gesture , but the question of who ’ s benefitting from that transaction , and how , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When I ’ m trying to figure who a character is , and why they are the way that they are , I spend a pretty inordinate amount of time circling around their love languages .
The ways that a character expresses their affection , or their inability to conjure it , tells me a good deal about what might drive them in the midst of any particular story .
And what might be even more interesting to me are the roads a character navigates ( or doesn ’ t ) toward that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the creases in a character ’ s relationships—whether they ’ re platonic or romantic or familial—are the spaces that I ’ m most interested in parsing : they yield tensions that can be trickier to define , and consequently more fascinating to untangle .
At the same time , hospitality also ties into the pillars of pleasure and comfort .
The way one pleasure ranks in relation to another for a character tells me just as much about them as their desires and disdains and all of the other details—and what ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ differ wildly among folks in a relationship , or the simulacrum of a relationship .
So if the comfort implicit in physical intimacy ( or the type of physical intimacy , or the degree of physical intimacy ) is less important to a character than sharing a childhood recipe , or telling a story about a relative that ’ s been passed through their family for decades , then the first thing I ’ m wondering is , Why , and then , How will this impact their respective revolutions among other characters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a trip to fool around with how much of themselves characters give one another ( or don ’ t ) and under what circumstances ( and why ) .
The story often flashes back to scenes from the relationship between Ben , who ’ s Black , and Mike , who ’ s Asian-American .
What ’ s the nature of their relationship—what keeps them together in a turbulent situation ?
Most of the narrative is concerned with their trying to figure out that exact thing—like , what do you call a romantic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of what its participants believe a relationship should be ?
One way of playing with that narrative , for me , was splitting the novel that this story ’ s pulled from into two voices : Benson ’ s and Mike ’ s .
I ’ m a little infatuated with how shifting vantage points and time lines around a single inciting incident can invert that moment ’ s emotional weight ; giving both men room to speak on the situation felt like one way to arrive at a clearer sense of where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how they end up where they do .
And then there ’ s the larger question of what each character believes that a lasting relationship between two queer cis men , living as minorities in the States , can ultimately look like ( or if there even is an “ ultimately ” to consider ) .
Neither of them has a roadmap , so to speak , in the way that their straight friends and peers do .
They don ’ t have comps .
So each of them has learned by doing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and failing again , and fucking things up into some semblance of joy , and attempting to reconjure that joy in whatever form that they can , even if it hurts them and those around them—and then they have to figure out how to deal with that .
It was really important to me to avoid being prescriptive regarding their relationship—what interested me the most was Mike and Benson ’ s attempts to figure it out on their own terms , whatever those looked like .
But anyway .
It isn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , because the door is open .
And they both know that the door is open ( which is very different from its just being open ) .
But they choose to stay ( maybe ) .
So figuring out whether it ’ s for one another , or for themselves , or for some other thing that they can ’ t quite define is the journey that I ’ m interested in taking with them .
“ Heirlooms ” is adapted from your novel “ Memorial , ” which will be published @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fit into the overarching narrative of the novel , and how do its themes resonate with those of the novel ?
The story is one running thread in a novel consisting of many shades of thick and thin threads .
I ’ ve been calling “ Memorial ” “ a gay slacker dramedy , ” which I stand by , in that it ’ s a narrative whose trajectories are neither hard-line nor without definition .
And I ’ ve been calling it “ a lowercase love story , ” which I also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ points are the quieter moments inhabiting each character ’ s negotiations of one another .
One buddy of mine read it early and called it a novel about ambiguity , and a few other friends said they thought it was about how to find a home , and what made a home , and whether a lasting home is out there for anyone .
I ’ d just as soon say it ’ s about two queer dudes in Houston trying to figure their shit out , and then one of their mothers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sort of .
A large part of what got me to finish the book was trying to condense the narrative ’ s themes into something tangible , whatever that looked like .
So I ’ m taking a lot of joy , which has been hard to come by lately , from seeing readers contort them and form their own impressions of where each character ends up .

Photograph by Louis Do
In “Heirlooms,” your story in this week’s issue, Ben, a young man in Houston, is playing host to Mitsuko, the mother of his boyfriend, Mike, who’s flown to Japan on the spur of the moment to visit his dying father. Mike’s parents are divorced, and so the switcheroo—Mike going to Japan, his mother coming from Japan—has something of the setup of a farce, or an updated version of an old-fashioned drawing-room comedy. What appealed to you about this basic premise?
The mundanity was pretty attractive to me, you know? I thought it’d be fun to parse the ways that a seemingly commonplace miscommunication—a mismanagement of flight dates, which might be a fairly major logistical fuck-up, sure, but not necessarily one that’s implausible in scale—could yield life-altering shifts among everyone involved. I’m finding that found families are a recurring motif in my work, and when the members of those communities come from seemingly disparate, or at least parallel, origin points, you end up with a ton of flexibility narratively.
In this story, as in past ones—I’m thinking of “Visitor”—there’s a great focus on hospitality. Here, Ben must accommodate in his apartment for weeks a woman whom he’s never met. Why is hospitality such a theme in your stories, and do you have general thoughts about it?
The act of caring for someone is transactional, irrespective of the intimacy underlying each gesture, but the question of who’s benefitting from that transaction, and how, isn’t always immediately apparent. When I’m trying to figure who a character is, and why they are the way that they are, I spend a pretty inordinate amount of time circling around their love languages. The ways that a character expresses their affection, or their inability to conjure it, tells me a good deal about what might drive them in the midst of any particular story. And what might be even more interesting to me are the roads a character navigates (or doesn’t) toward that self-realization. In a lot of ways, the creases in a character’s relationships—whether they’re platonic or romantic or familial—are the spaces that I’m most interested in parsing: they yield tensions that can be trickier to define, and consequently more fascinating to untangle.
At the same time, hospitality also ties into the pillars of pleasure and comfort. The way one pleasure ranks in relation to another for a character tells me just as much about them as their desires and disdains and all of the other details—and what’s especially fun is when those pleasures differ wildly among folks in a relationship, or the simulacrum of a relationship. So if the comfort implicit in physical intimacy (or the type of physical intimacy, or the degree of physical intimacy) is less important to a character than sharing a childhood recipe, or telling a story about a relative that’s been passed through their family for decades, then the first thing I’m wondering is, Why, and then, How will this impact their respective revolutions among other characters? I think it’s always a trip to fool around with how much of themselves characters give one another (or don’t) and under what circumstances (and why).
The story often flashes back to scenes from the relationship between Ben, who’s Black, and Mike, who’s Asian-American. What’s the nature of their relationship—what keeps them together in a turbulent situation?
Most of the narrative is concerned with their trying to figure out that exact thing—like, what do you call a romantic relationship whose undefined corners overtake the vision of what its participants believe a relationship should be? One way of playing with that narrative, for me, was splitting the novel that this story’s pulled from into two voices: Benson’s and Mike’s. I’m a little infatuated with how shifting vantage points and time lines around a single inciting incident can invert that moment’s emotional weight; giving both men room to speak on the situation felt like one way to arrive at a clearer sense of where their relationship was taking them, and how they end up where they do. And then there’s the larger question of what each character believes that a lasting relationship between two queer cis men, living as minorities in the States, can ultimately look like (or if there even is an “ultimately” to consider).
Neither of them has a roadmap, so to speak, in the way that their straight friends and peers do. They don’t have comps. So each of them has learned by doing, and trying, and failing, and failing again, and fucking things up into some semblance of joy, and attempting to reconjure that joy in whatever form that they can, even if it hurts them and those around them—and then they have to figure out how to deal with that. It was really important to me to avoid being prescriptive regarding their relationship—what interested me the most was Mike and Benson’s attempts to figure it out on their own terms, whatever those looked like.
But anyway. It isn’t as if neither of them can leave, because the door is open. And they both know that the door is open (which is very different from its just being open). But they choose to stay (maybe). So figuring out whether it’s for one another, or for themselves, or for some other thing that they can’t quite define is the journey that I’m interested in taking with them.
“Heirlooms” is adapted from your novel “Memorial,” which will be published in October. How does this story fit into the overarching narrative of the novel, and how do its themes resonate with those of the novel?
The story is one running thread in a novel consisting of many shades of thick and thin threads. I’ve been calling “Memorial” “a gay slacker dramedy,” which I stand by, in that it’s a narrative whose trajectories are neither hard-line nor without definition. And I’ve been calling it “a lowercase love story,” which I also stand by, in that its focal points are the quieter moments inhabiting each character’s negotiations of one another. One buddy of mine read it early and called it a novel about ambiguity, and a few other friends said they thought it was about how to find a home, and what made a home, and whether a lasting home is out there for anyone. I’d just as soon say it’s about two queer dudes in Houston trying to figure their shit out, and then one of their mothers enters the picture to help them, sort of.
A large part of what got me to finish the book was trying to condense the narrative’s themes into something tangible, whatever that looked like. So I’m taking a lot of joy, which has been hard to come by lately, from seeing readers contort them and form their own impressions of where each character ends up.