William Faulkner’s Demons

The Civil War features in some dozen of Faulkner ’ s novels .
It is most prominent in those set in Yoknapatawpha County , an imaginary Mississippi landscape filled with battlefields and graveyards , veterans and widows , slaves and former slaves , draft dodgers and ghosts .
In “ Light in August , ” the Reverend Gail Hightower is haunted by his Confederate grandfather ; in “ Intruder in the Dust , ” the lawyer Gavin Stevens insists that all the region ’ s teen-age boys are obsessed with the hours before Pickett ’ s Charge at Gettysburg .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ spared the torturous influence of the war , whether he flees the region , as Quentin Compson does , in “ The Sound and the Fury , ” or whether , like Rosa Coldfield , in “ Absalom , Absalom !
, ” she stays .
A new book by Michael Gorra , “ The Saddest Words : William Faulkner ’ s Civil War ” ( Liveright ) , traces Faulkner ’ s literary depictions of the military conflict in the nineteenth century and his personal engagement with the racial conflict of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the novelist himself , is the real war of Gorra ’ s subtitle .
In “ The Saddest Words , ” Faulkner emerges as a character as tragic as any he invented : a writer who brilliantly portrayed the way that the South ’ s refusal to accept its defeat led to cultural decay , but a Southerner whose private letters and public statements were riddled with the very racism that his books so pointedly damned .
Cowley was the editor of “ The Portable Faulkner , ” a 1946 anthology that collected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and novels , ordering them chronologically according to their story lines rather than by their publication dates .
It was an attempt to rescue Faulkner from an unsurprising obscurity : many of his books are difficult , and many had been published during the Great Depression or the Second World War , when both the money and the appetite for such writing was scarce .
To make a living , Faulkner had turned to writing screenplays , including those for “ The Big Sleep ” and “ To Have and Have Not.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s genius , providing in the anthology a figurative as well as a literal map that showed the contours and connections of Yoknapatawpha County and its people .
The volume put Faulkner ’ s earlier novels back into print , and helped readers make sense of his modernist texts .
Cowley had already published a similar anthology of Hemingway ’ s work ; it was a subsequent profile of “ Papa ” for Life that occasioned Faulkner ’ s letter begging off any such publicity .
Faulkner expressed his desire for authorial anonymity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If I had not existed , someone else would have written me , Hemingway , Dostoyevsky , all of us , ” he told The Paris Review .
“ Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare ’ s plays .
But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night ’ s Dream , not who wrote them , but that somebody did .
The artist is of no importance .
Only what he creates is important.
” It ’ s hard to say whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s aversion to publicity in general or were instead a response to his particular stumbles with the press , but he seemed to know how much his personal reputation might damage the reputation of his work .
Faulkner had grown up using racial slurs and deployed them in correspondence ; after he became well known , he continued to write and say things that were just as scandalous , if not more so .
In a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Memphis , he suggested that justice was delivered by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no innocent man of any race had ever been lynched .
In an article for Life , he seemed to equate the N.A.A.C.P .
with the white-supremacist Citizens ’ Council , and opposed what he called the “ compulsory integration ” of the South by the North .
He told the New York Herald Tribune that he longed for the return of the “ benevolent autocracy ” of slavery , in which “ Negroes would be better off because they ’ d have some one to look after them.
” In 1956 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Prize and around the time the federal government began deploying him as an international ambassador for democracy and human rights , he told a journalist that if that same government used troops to enforce integration in the South he would do as his Confederate great-grandfather had done before him .
“ If it came to fighting , ” he said , “ I ’ d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.
” The outcry was swift .
W. E. B @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debate on the steps of the Mississippi courthouse where Emmett Till ’ s murderers had been acquitted the year before .
Faulkner declined , saying , “ I do not believe there is a debatable point between us.
” He also issued a carefully hedged statement : the words attributed to him , he insisted , were ones “ no sober man would make , nor , it seems to me , any sane man believe.
” ( Faulkner was a notorious drunk , but elsewhere he seemed to subscribe to the in-vino-veritas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also published an apologia in Ebony titled “ If I Were a Negro , ” calling for moderation on racial questions and appealing for civil-rights advocates to “ go slow , pause for a moment.
” The remarks were not well received , and the denials convinced no one who was not already intent on defending Faulkner .
James Baldwin excoriated him in the pages of Partisan Review , writing that Faulkner was exactly like “ the bulk of relatively articulate white Southerners of good-will , ” in that his arguments “ have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost entirely and helplessly dishonest , when not , indeed , insane.
” Baldwin understood that there was no middle ground between segregationists and integrationists , and no reconciling the equal rights and freedoms articulated in the Constitution with the discrimination and oppression of Jim Crow .
With regard to Faulkner , he asked , “ Where is the evidence of the struggle he has been carrying on there on behalf of the Negro ?
Why , if he and his enlightened confreres in the South have been boring from within to destroy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ panic when the walls show any signs of falling ?
” Faulkner was unwilling in his own life to adequately acknowledge the evils of slavery and segregation , but he did so with savage thoroughness in his fiction .
He was a Hieronymus Bosch of prose : his tortured imagination filled story after story with sins of every form and with characters turned grotesque by committing them .
Though much historical fiction is escapist , Faulkner ’ s is brutalizing , depicting a South debased first by degeneracy and then by the refusal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the face of defeat .
In 1936 , the same year that Margaret Mitchell offered the world a romance between the roguish Rhett Butler and the Southern belle Scarlett O ’ Hara , Faulkner published a story of rape and incest and racist terror .
It was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of the Civil War , and Americans made clear which version of events they wanted to remember : “ Absalom , Absalom !
” sold around ten thousand copies ; “ Gone with the Wind ” sold more than a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Absalom , Absalom !
” was Faulkner ’ s ninth novel , published ten years after his first .
In that astonishing decade , he also wrote “ The Sound and the Fury , ” “ As I Lay Dying , ” and “ Light in August.
” A high-school dropout , Faulkner experimented with poetry as a teen-ager , then enlisted to fight in the First World War with the Royal Air Force .
It ’ s unclear why he didn ’ t join the U.S. Army ; in any case @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finished training , and he was discharged .
Faulkner brought home an officer ’ s uniform and the “ u ” he had added to his family ’ s surname to make it seem more English .
Both were part of the persona he cultivated at the University of Mississippi , where fellow-students mockingly called him Count No ’ Count .
His family had once been prominent in the part of Mississippi where he was born—his lineage included bankers and businessmen—but Faulkner was not much of a student .
He took a few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spending more years on campus as the school ’ s postmaster .
That didn ’ t last long , either : busy playing cards and golfing during business hours , he neglected to forward mail , misdelivered some letters while throwing others in the garbage , refused to prepare return receipts , and , when he could be bothered to open the office at all , often sat inside it working on his first book .
That was a collection of poetry , “ The Marble Faun , ” probably the most traditional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the books Faulkner published—he borrowed the title from Nathaniel Hawthorne and the style from the Romantics and the Symbolists .
But the prose that followed was all his own .
Faulkner ’ s fiction does not have influences so much as analogues .
He burned down houses with the gothic zeal of Edgar Allan Poe , staged moral crises as dramatically as Dostoyevsky , and fashioned fanatics who would have pleased Herman Melville .
He created characters who migrated from one novel to another , and he wrote stream-of-consciousness narration that featured broken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , almost thirteen-hundred-word sentence in “ Absalom , Absalom !
” includes parentheses , question marks , granddaughters , spinsters , demons , dragons , chickens , coffins , Washington , Lincoln , and Faustus .
That novel has many narrative voices , but the character connecting them is Quentin Compson , who also appears in “ The Sound and the Fury , ” published seven years earlier .
Quentin is a descendant of a Confederate general and a governor of Mississippi and the heir to an estate first acquired from a Chickasaw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now crumbling in the center of town and subdivided to cover the cost of his college tuition .
“ The Sound and the Fury ” has four sections , each devoted to a different character : Quentin , his brothers Benjy and Jason , and the Compson family ’ s cook , Dilsey .
The novel is a passion play in which the two heirs to authority and power are deceitful and depraved and the two reviled members of society are honorable and decent .
The novel begins on Holy Saturday inside the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who is profoundly mentally disabled , and it ends on Easter Sunday with Dilsey , whose sincere piety and caregiving contrast with the degeneracy of the family she serves and that of the former Confederacy , in which she is trapped .
While the sections focussed on Benjy , Quentin , and Jason are told in the first person and reflect the wandering or wayward character of their minds , the final section features an omniscient narrator and includes a sermon on how society is redeemed by its least respected members .
Listening @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” of the Compson family , who is Christlike in his needs , and their Black servant , who is Christlike in meeting them .
The last shall be first , and in Faulkner ’ s novel they already are .
For all their philosophizing , Jason and Quentin and their father can not reason their way out of evil and toward goodness .
An American Hamlet , Quentin is half mad and half in love with his sister ; he is so consumed by his obsession with sexual purity and racial honor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Harvard allows him to escape the fate of all the other failed members of his family .
It is from one of his desolate soliloquies that Gorra takes the title of his book .
Sitting in his dorm room more than a thousand miles from Mississippi , Quentin reconstructs a partial memory of something his father once told him : “ every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans well-being and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until time its not even time until it was .
”

What if the North had won the Civil War? That technically factual counterfactual animated almost all of William Faulkner’s writing. The Mississippi novelist was born thirty-two years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but he came of age believing in the superiority of the Confederacy: the South might have lost, but the North did not deserve to win. This Lost Cause revisionism appeared everywhere, from the textbooks that Faulkner was assigned growing up to editorials in local newspapers, praising the paternalism and the prosperity of the slavery economy, jury-rigging an alternative justification for secession, canonizing as saints and martyrs those who fought for the C.S.A., and proclaiming the virtues of antebellum society. In contrast with those delusions, Faulkner’s fiction revealed the truth: the Confederacy was both a military and a moral failure.
The Civil War features in some dozen of Faulkner’s novels. It is most prominent in those set in Yoknapatawpha County, an imaginary Mississippi landscape filled with battlefields and graveyards, veterans and widows, slaves and former slaves, draft dodgers and ghosts. In “Light in August,” the Reverend Gail Hightower is haunted by his Confederate grandfather; in “Intruder in the Dust,” the lawyer Gavin Stevens insists that all the region’s teen-age boys are obsessed with the hours before Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. In these books, no Southerner is spared the torturous influence of the war, whether he flees the region, as Quentin Compson does, in “The Sound and the Fury,” or whether, like Rosa Coldfield, in “Absalom, Absalom!,” she stays.
A new book by Michael Gorra, “The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War” (Liveright), traces Faulkner’s literary depictions of the military conflict in the nineteenth century and his personal engagement with the racial conflict of the twentieth. The latter struggle, within the novelist himself, is the real war of Gorra’s subtitle. In “The Saddest Words,” Faulkner emerges as a character as tragic as any he invented: a writer who brilliantly portrayed the way that the South’s refusal to accept its defeat led to cultural decay, but a Southerner whose private letters and public statements were riddled with the very racism that his books so pointedly damned.
It’s too late to cancel Faulkner; he already cancelled himself. “I will protest to the last: no photographs, no recorded documents,” he wrote in a letter to the critic Malcolm Cowley on February 11, 1949. “It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago and, like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them.”
Cowley was the editor of “The Portable Faulkner,” a 1946 anthology that collected and excerpted Faulkner’s short stories and novels, ordering them chronologically according to their story lines rather than by their publication dates. It was an attempt to rescue Faulkner from an unsurprising obscurity: many of his books are difficult, and many had been published during the Great Depression or the Second World War, when both the money and the appetite for such writing was scarce. To make a living, Faulkner had turned to writing screenplays, including those for “The Big Sleep” and “To Have and Have Not.” Cowley made the case for Faulkner’s genius, providing in the anthology a figurative as well as a literal map that showed the contours and connections of Yoknapatawpha County and its people. The volume put Faulkner’s earlier novels back into print, and helped readers make sense of his modernist texts. Cowley had already published a similar anthology of Hemingway’s work; it was a subsequent profile of “Papa” for Life that occasioned Faulkner’s letter begging off any such publicity.
Faulkner expressed his desire for authorial anonymity in other venues, too. “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us,” he told The Paris Review. “Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important.”
It’s hard to say whether those sentiments grew out of Faulkner’s aversion to publicity in general or were instead a response to his particular stumbles with the press, but he seemed to know how much his personal reputation might damage the reputation of his work. Faulkner had grown up using racial slurs and deployed them in correspondence; after he became well known, he continued to write and say things that were just as scandalous, if not more so. In a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Memphis, he suggested that justice was delivered by juries and lynch mobs alike and that no innocent man of any race had ever been lynched. In an article for Life, he seemed to equate the N.A.A.C.P. with the white-supremacist Citizens’ Council, and opposed what he called the “compulsory integration” of the South by the North. He told the New York Herald Tribune that he longed for the return of the “benevolent autocracy” of slavery, in which “Negroes would be better off because they’d have some one to look after them.” In 1956, several years after he won the Nobel Prize and around the time the federal government began deploying him as an international ambassador for democracy and human rights, he told a journalist that if that same government used troops to enforce integration in the South he would do as his Confederate great-grandfather had done before him. “If it came to fighting,” he said, “I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.”
The outcry was swift. W. E. B. Du Bois challenged Faulkner to a debate on the steps of the Mississippi courthouse where Emmett Till’s murderers had been acquitted the year before. Faulkner declined, saying, “I do not believe there is a debatable point between us.” He also issued a carefully hedged statement: the words attributed to him, he insisted, were ones “no sober man would make, nor, it seems to me, any sane man believe.” (Faulkner was a notorious drunk, but elsewhere he seemed to subscribe to the in-vino-veritas model of alcohol consumption.) He also published an apologia in Ebony titled “If I Were a Negro,” calling for moderation on racial questions and appealing for civil-rights advocates to “go slow, pause for a moment.”
The remarks were not well received, and the denials convinced no one who was not already intent on defending Faulkner. James Baldwin excoriated him in the pages of Partisan Review, writing that Faulkner was exactly like “the bulk of relatively articulate white Southerners of good-will,” in that his arguments “have no value whatever as arguments, being almost entirely and helplessly dishonest, when not, indeed, insane.” Baldwin understood that there was no middle ground between segregationists and integrationists, and no reconciling the equal rights and freedoms articulated in the Constitution with the discrimination and oppression of Jim Crow. With regard to Faulkner, he asked, “Where is the evidence of the struggle he has been carrying on there on behalf of the Negro? Why, if he and his enlightened confreres in the South have been boring from within to destroy segregation, do they react with such panic when the walls show any signs of falling?”
Gorra has no direct answer to Baldwin’s question, and he acknowledges that some readers may find in these biographical facts reason enough to banish Faulkner from syllabi, if not from shelves. But Baldwin’s essay is a condemnation of the writer’s personal politics, not his work; it never mentions Faulkner’s fiction. Gorra’s argument, however, depends on close readings of everything from individual sentences to symbols and characters and themes across the author’s novels, which collectively make the case that a racist person can be a radical writer. “Faulkner the man shared many of the closed society’s opinions and values,” Gorra writes. “But when the novelist could inhabit a character—when he slipped inside another mind and put those opinions into a different voice—he was almost always able to stand outside them, to place and to judge them.”
Faulkner was unwilling in his own life to adequately acknowledge the evils of slavery and segregation, but he did so with savage thoroughness in his fiction. He was a Hieronymus Bosch of prose: his tortured imagination filled story after story with sins of every form and with characters turned grotesque by committing them. Though much historical fiction is escapist, Faulkner’s is brutalizing, depicting a South debased first by degeneracy and then by the refusal to atone for it, even in the face of defeat. In 1936, the same year that Margaret Mitchell offered the world a romance between the roguish Rhett Butler and the Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, Faulkner published a story of rape and incest and racist terror. It was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of the Civil War, and Americans made clear which version of events they wanted to remember: “Absalom, Absalom!” sold around ten thousand copies; “Gone with the Wind” sold more than a million and won the Pulitzer Prize.
“Absalom, Absalom!” was Faulkner’s ninth novel, published ten years after his first. In that astonishing decade, he also wrote “The Sound and the Fury,” “As I Lay Dying,” and “Light in August.” A high-school dropout, Faulkner experimented with poetry as a teen-ager, then enlisted to fight in the First World War with the Royal Air Force. It’s unclear why he didn’t join the U.S. Army; in any case, the Armistice arrived before he had finished training, and he was discharged. Faulkner brought home an officer’s uniform and the “u” he had added to his family’s surname to make it seem more English. Both were part of the persona he cultivated at the University of Mississippi, where fellow-students mockingly called him Count No ’Count. His family had once been prominent in the part of Mississippi where he was born—his lineage included bankers and businessmen—but Faulkner was not much of a student. He took a few literature and language classes but ended up spending more years on campus as the school’s postmaster. That didn’t last long, either: busy playing cards and golfing during business hours, he neglected to forward mail, misdelivered some letters while throwing others in the garbage, refused to prepare return receipts, and, when he could be bothered to open the office at all, often sat inside it working on his first book.
That was a collection of poetry, “The Marble Faun,” probably the most traditional and certainly the least remarkable of all the books Faulkner published—he borrowed the title from Nathaniel Hawthorne and the style from the Romantics and the Symbolists. But the prose that followed was all his own. Faulkner’s fiction does not have influences so much as analogues. He burned down houses with the gothic zeal of Edgar Allan Poe, staged moral crises as dramatically as Dostoyevsky, and fashioned fanatics who would have pleased Herman Melville. He created characters who migrated from one novel to another, and he wrote stream-of-consciousness narration that featured broken syntax and typographical experiments. A single, almost thirteen-hundred-word sentence in “Absalom, Absalom!” includes parentheses, question marks, granddaughters, spinsters, demons, dragons, chickens, coffins, Washington, Lincoln, and Faustus.
That novel has many narrative voices, but the character connecting them is Quentin Compson, who also appears in “The Sound and the Fury,” published seven years earlier. Quentin is a descendant of a Confederate general and a governor of Mississippi and the heir to an estate first acquired from a Chickasaw chief in the early nineteenth century, now crumbling in the center of town and subdivided to cover the cost of his college tuition. “The Sound and the Fury” has four sections, each devoted to a different character: Quentin, his brothers Benjy and Jason, and the Compson family’s cook, Dilsey. The novel is a passion play in which the two heirs to authority and power are deceitful and depraved and the two reviled members of society are honorable and decent. The novel begins on Holy Saturday inside the constrained and tender consciousness of Benjy, who is profoundly mentally disabled, and it ends on Easter Sunday with Dilsey, whose sincere piety and caregiving contrast with the degeneracy of the family she serves and that of the former Confederacy, in which she is trapped. While the sections focussed on Benjy, Quentin, and Jason are told in the first person and reflect the wandering or wayward character of their minds, the final section features an omniscient narrator and includes a sermon on how society is redeemed by its least respected members. Listening in the sanctuary are the “idiot” of the Compson family, who is Christlike in his needs, and their Black servant, who is Christlike in meeting them.


newyorker--2020-11-23--“Gravitational,” by Alfred Corn

“Gravitational,” by Alfred Corn

A downdraft early in life I never pondered : Horses threw riders , divers bounced and plunged , I stumbled and hit the ground but at that age Not tall , didn ’ t fall far , so no bones fractured .
At what point did it start to feel uncanny , The way a scarf or jacket carelessly tossed On a chair or satin counterpane would half The time begin to creep and slide , consenting To a force I couldn ’ t—though in operation Could—see ?
And even coats hooked on a hanger Might later accept the earthward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the globe ’ s fierce center .
Deepening experience drove home What the ninth month demands of gravid women : To endure , and not complain of stressed backs , The drudgery of living in italics .
Terra ’ s a magnet , and we its iron filings , Arrayed in patterns preordained .
Much like The sun , which grips our blue-white planet tight , Whirling it like a bola , whirling its siblings— The solar kingpin himself caught in the drift Of a galaxy spinning at breakneck speed And yet so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t be Perceived .
Meanwhile , all bodies past age fifty Dread getting up from a squat , the mere one g As ruthless as a wrestler counteracting The thrust of tight-clenched quadriceps .
And even When you let the reins go slack to have a nap , Relentless suction functions , focussed on each bone , Your scaffolding half aware dispassionate hydraulics Will one day pull it six feet underground , a breech Birth , to be cradled where that horsepower meant to haul it .

Audio: Read by the author.
A downdraft early in life I never pondered:
Horses threw riders, divers bounced and plunged,
I stumbled and hit the ground but at that age
Not tall, didn’t fall far, so no bones fractured.
At what point did it start to feel uncanny,
The way a scarf or jacket carelessly tossed
On a chair or satin counterpane would half
The time begin to creep and slide, consenting
To a force I couldn’t—though in operation
Could—see? And even coats hooked on a hanger
Might later accept the earthward invitation,
Coaxed loose and sucked toward the globe’s fierce center.
Deepening experience drove home
What the ninth month demands of gravid women:
To endure, and not complain of stressed backs,
The drudgery of living in italics.
Terra’s a magnet, and we its iron filings,
Arrayed in patterns preordained. Much like
The sun, which grips our blue-white planet tight,
Whirling it like a bola, whirling its siblings—
The solar kingpin himself caught in the drift
Of a galaxy spinning at breakneck speed
And yet so gravely slow, the rush can’t be
Perceived. Meanwhile, all bodies past age fifty
Dread getting up from a squat, the mere one g
As ruthless as a wrestler counteracting
The thrust of tight-clenched quadriceps. And even
When you let the reins go slack to have a nap,
Relentless suction functions, focussed on each bone,
Your scaffolding half aware dispassionate hydraulics
Will one day pull it six feet underground, a breech
Birth, to be cradled where that horsepower meant to haul it.


newyorker--2020-11-23--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons November 30, 2020

“ If we ’ re lucky , Aunt Jane will seat us at the children ’ s table—out of the @ @ @ @ @

“If we’re lucky, Aunt Jane will seat us at the children’s table—out of the line of fire.”
Cartoon by William Haefeli


newyorker--2020-11-23--The Silent Political Messaging in Ron Howard’s “Hillbilly Elegy” Adaptation

“ Hillbilly Elegy ” ( which drops Tuesday on Netflix ) provides yet more evidence that , when it comes to genres that confine rather than unleash cinematic creativity , superhero movies and other franchises have nothing on adaptations of memoirs by living public figures .
The director ’ s imagination is restricted by the blueprint set forth by the author-slash-protagonist—who is also available to complain , even publicly , about departures from the printed record .
The result , often , is movies that are devoid of moral complexity , psychological depth , and social purview .
In “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by Ron Howard and based on the best-selling memoir by J. D. Vance , the gap between artistic imagination and informational dosing is even more apparent than in other recent examples of the genre ( such as “ Just Mercy , ” which is nonetheless a far better film ) —and , peculiarly , the thinness of the adaptation arises not only from where the movie doesn ’ t go beyond the book but also from what , of its source material , it chooses to leave out .
The movie is framed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but apostrophized by the voice-over reminiscences of the character J.D .
( played , as an adult , by Gabriel Basso ) , who explains that he has lived most of his life in Ohio but has his roots , and his pleasures , deep in his ancestral hill country of Jackson , Kentucky , where he spent his joyful childhood summers .
There , he ’ s seen as a soft and chubby child of about ten ( played at that age by Owen Asztalos ) , pedalling to his cherished swimming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back in the lambent sunlight—is interrupted by a trio of older , more muscular boys who dunk him and hold him terrifyingly underwater .
On shore , one of them makes a sexual remark about J.D.
’ s mother ; he charges them and gets punched out—but , at that moment , three men from his family intervene ( confirming J.D.
’ s warm voice-over reminiscence about his family having his back ) , rescuing him and beating up one of his tormentors .
The men then bring him back to the house @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the family is returning home to Ohio , and young J.D .
bewilderedly asks his grandmother , called Mamaw ( and played by Glenn Close ) , why she ever moved away from that wonderful place .
Her daughter , J.D.
’ s mother Bev ( Amy Adams ) , gives the answer : “ Because when you ’ re knocked up at thirteen , you get the hell out of Dodge , that ’ s why.
” That ’ s the opening sequence of “ Hillbilly Elegy , ” putting J.D.
’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his very sense of identity under the aegis of sex and violence—of male violence and female sexuality .
These notions stand symbolically like silent sentinels throughout the film to suggest the raw , rough , dangerous world that formed J.D .
and that he carries with him , unexpressed , wherever he goes .
Bearing the imprint of these fierce attachments to clan and barely repressible passions , he is treated like a virtual savage in the world in which he , in the movie ’ s present tense , attempts to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Law School and the corporate law firms at which he ’ s competing for work as a summer intern .
They make him stand out—and the movie shows how J.D.
’ s crude energies get domesticated and channelled productively .
Howard puts the competition for an internship , strangely , at the center of the action .
On the verge of an interview for a prestigious and well-paying gig ( which J.D .
needs because his financial-aid package has been reduced , leaving him with a heavy financial burden ) , the protagonist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lindsay ( Haley Bennett ) , a harried mother of three who works in a shoe store , because their mother , Bev , has been rushed to the hospital with a heroin overdose .
So J.D .
drives from New Haven , Connecticut , to Middletown , Ohio , in one long night , with the prospect of an interview a few days later hanging over his head ; the premise of the movie becomes a tick-tock thriller , in which he must arrange Bev ’ s care in time for his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for him to make the ten-hour overnight drive and arrive in time for his appointment .
The parts of the drama fit together like a Rube Goldberg machine in order to show how J.D.
’ s immediate problems can be traced to their primal causes .
Bev , we learn , had been her high-school salutatorian , and made a good start after graduation as a nurse at the local hospital .
But , after her father died , she began abusing prescription medicine from her job , which made her act erratically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s roller skates in the locker room and skated through the I.C.U.
, which got her fired .
This started her on the downward spiral that culminates in the overdose , which threatens J.D.
’ s summer plans and , by implication , his law-school studies and , thus , his entire life .
Yet Bev ’ s inability to stay on the right track and care for herself and her family is , in turn , ascribed to her own rough childhood—her father ’ s habitual drunkenness and the violence that she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hit Mamaw , who , in turn , set him afire with a match .
The movie intersperses J.D.
’ s hurried effort to get Bev into rehab with flashbacks to his troubles during his teen years : the violent conflicts with Bev that he endured , and the instability of his home life with her as a result of her unstable relationships with men .
In a matched set of flashbacks , Bev ’ s boyfriend Matt ( Jesse C. Boyd ) , a cop , gets J.D .
and Lindsay a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boss , Ken ( Keong Sim ) , whom she marries impulsively .
Ken has allergies and forces the children to get rid of the dog .
A lax parent , he lets his skater son , Travis ( Morgan Gao ) —with whom J.D .
now bunks—slack off .
Ken has a “ Casino ” poster in his living room , which positions him as more culturally sophisticated ; he grows his own marijuana at home , and Travis smokes it .
Bev ’ s relationship with Ken is , in effect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the Vances ’ displaced-hillbilly way of life , and a marker of its alienation from American society at large .
This view of Appalachian alienation in action is made clearer by the movie ’ s depiction of J.D .
and his family as having no cultural attachment whatsoever .
The TV is often on in the house—young J.D .
likes to watch the political news but never has a word to say about it—and Bev is briefly seen sharing an enthusiasm for football with J.D .
Otherwise , J.D.
’ s family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ frustration , and striving .
Even Mamaw , though gloriously profane and cantankerous , is devoid of any ideas that don ’ t cut to the practicalities that she tackles with blunt force and ferocious familial devotion .
Miserable and confused by the new life with Ken and Travis that Bev has forced him into , J.D .
neglects his studies , acts out , risks serious trouble , and is wrenched from that household by Mamaw , who takes him in and administers tough love .
The crucial scene in the film @ @ @ @ @ @ @ car , when J.D .
and Mamaw have a fierce argument .
In the course of it , she sharply lectures young J.D .
about the mighty exertions of study and discipline that it will take for him to “ be somebody , ” and about her reason for putting the hard work into raising him : “ Who ’ s gon na take care of this family when I ’ m gone ?
” It ’ s exemplary of the film that this is Mamaw ’ s great aria ; she has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Neither does J.D.
, for that matter .
After high school , he joins the Marines and serves in Iraq , but that experience doesn ’ t figure into the movie at all—he says nothing about them in the course of the film .
He doesn ’ t mention whatever culture shock he must have experienced at Yale ( instead , it is portrayed in a pat scene near the start of the film , where , at a dinner with prospective employers , one refers to his family and neighbors as “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worse than a cop-out ; it ’ s an insult , one that ’ s all too typical of movies that depict poor or working people and presume that , because they lack education , they lack ideas , inclinations , a fund of experiences to discuss .
The characters in “ Hillbilly Elegy ” aren ’ t literally silent ; the director , Ron Howard , and the screenwriter , Vanessa Taylor , are more discerning than that .
Rather , the characters are talkative about their immediate efforts—and their harshly florid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ re silent about whatever they may be thinking about beyond the matters at hand .
They ’ re reduced not to their life stories but to the dramatic specifics of the movie .
Beyond that , they simply don ’ t exist .
Yet , paradoxically , this cultural blankness , this reductiveness , isn ’ t just an error of omission on Howard ’ s part ; it plays like a calculated aspect of the drama—and , even more strangely , like a positive trait , a mark of authenticity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ images , and tones are as formless and as vague as its characters ’ mental lives , and that vagueness replaces elements of Vance ’ s book which are politically and ideologically quite explicit—and which have been criticized for the simplistic lessons that they extract from his experience .
In his book , Vance hectors poor Americans like his family members about lack of thrift and lack of discipline ( “ We spend our way into the poorhouse .
.
.
.
Our homes are a chaotic mess .
.
.
.
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and we don ’ t make our kids study when we ’ re parents ” ) and , detailing a litany of destructive behavior in his community , concludes , “ Public policy can help , but there is no government that can fix these problems for us .
.
.
.
We created them , and only we can fix them.
” Howard ’ s movie doesn ’ t include a single line of such ideological advocacy—it doesn ’ t suggest that the character of J.D .
has any political thoughts at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suppression of political ideas or concerns , it evinces the same politically regressive ideas at the core of Vance ’ s memoir .
There is a single line , in a subplot of the movie , that suggests precisely the political maneuver that the film ’ s aesthetic and dramatic texturelessness is meant to pull off .
It involves J.D.
’ s law-school girlfriend , Usha ( Freida Pinto ) .
The couple have a warm and close relationship , yet J.D .
has been reticent about his family background , and it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back home that spurs him to open up about it .
When he speaks of his grandparents ’ migration from hill country to Ohio in search of work , Usha likens it to her father ’ s experience as an immigrant , who , she says , came to the United States “ with nothing ; he had to just find his way.
” This is all that “ Hillbilly Elegy ” has to say about Usha ’ s father , but her comment about him reverberates through the film ’ s portrayal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ movie ’ s vision of America is one of “ nothing ” except self-interest and self-improvement ; it ’ s one in which the only reach beyond the self is the one that embraces family , in which pleasure is a distraction and a danger , and culture is a fraud and a lure .
With his soupy , impersonal manipulations of memory and experience , void of the burrs that attach them to the world at large , Howard , whether intentionally or not , has made a libertarian ’ s fantasy @

“Hillbilly Elegy” (which drops Tuesday on Netflix) provides yet more evidence that, when it comes to genres that confine rather than unleash cinematic creativity, superhero movies and other franchises have nothing on adaptations of memoirs by living public figures. The director’s imagination is restricted by the blueprint set forth by the author-slash-protagonist—who is also available to complain, even publicly, about departures from the printed record. The result, often, is movies that are devoid of moral complexity, psychological depth, and social purview. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” which is directed by Ron Howard and based on the best-selling memoir by J. D. Vance, the gap between artistic imagination and informational dosing is even more apparent than in other recent examples of the genre (such as “Just Mercy,” which is nonetheless a far better film)—and, peculiarly, the thinness of the adaptation arises not only from where the movie doesn’t go beyond the book but also from what, of its source material, it chooses to leave out.
The movie is framed in flashbacks, starting in the past but apostrophized by the voice-over reminiscences of the character J.D. (played, as an adult, by Gabriel Basso), who explains that he has lived most of his life in Ohio but has his roots, and his pleasures, deep in his ancestral hill country of Jackson, Kentucky, where he spent his joyful childhood summers. There, he’s seen as a soft and chubby child of about ten (played at that age by Owen Asztalos), pedalling to his cherished swimming hole, where his reverie—floating on his back in the lambent sunlight—is interrupted by a trio of older, more muscular boys who dunk him and hold him terrifyingly underwater. On shore, one of them makes a sexual remark about J.D.’s mother; he charges them and gets punched out—but, at that moment, three men from his family intervene (confirming J.D.’s warm voice-over reminiscence about his family having his back), rescuing him and beating up one of his tormentors. The men then bring him back to the house, which is being packed up: the family is returning home to Ohio, and young J.D. bewilderedly asks his grandmother, called Mamaw (and played by Glenn Close), why she ever moved away from that wonderful place. Her daughter, J.D.’s mother, Bev (Amy Adams), gives the answer: “Because when you’re knocked up at thirteen, you get the hell out of Dodge, that’s why.”
That’s the opening sequence of “Hillbilly Elegy,” putting J.D.’s memory, his homeland, and his very sense of identity under the aegis of sex and violence—of male violence and female sexuality. These notions stand symbolically like silent sentinels throughout the film to suggest the raw, rough, dangerous world that formed J.D. and that he carries with him, unexpressed, wherever he goes. Bearing the imprint of these fierce attachments to clan and barely repressible passions, he is treated like a virtual savage in the world in which he, in the movie’s present tense, attempts to make his way: the world of Yale Law School and the corporate law firms at which he’s competing for work as a summer intern. They make him stand out—and the movie shows how J.D.’s crude energies get domesticated and channelled productively.
Howard puts the competition for an internship, strangely, at the center of the action. On the verge of an interview for a prestigious and well-paying gig (which J.D. needs because his financial-aid package has been reduced, leaving him with a heavy financial burden), the protagonist is summoned home by his sister, Lindsay (Haley Bennett), a harried mother of three who works in a shoe store, because their mother, Bev, has been rushed to the hospital after a heroin overdose. So J.D. drives from New Haven, Connecticut, to Middletown, Ohio, in one long night, with the prospect of an interview a few days later hanging over his head; the premise of the movie becomes a tick-tock thriller, in which he must arrange Bev’s care in time for his departure, at an hour early enough for him to make the ten-hour overnight drive and arrive in time for his appointment.
The parts of the drama fit together like a Rube Goldberg machine in order to show how J.D.’s immediate problems can be traced to their primal causes. Bev, we learn, had been her high-school salutatorian, and made a good start after graduation as a nurse at the local hospital. But, after her father died, she began abusing prescription medicine from her job, which made her act erratically. She put on a colleague’s roller skates in the locker room and skated through the I.C.U., which got her fired. This started her on the downward spiral that culminates in the overdose, which threatens J.D.’s summer plans and, by implication, his law-school studies and, thus, his entire life. Yet Bev’s inability to stay on the right track and care for herself and her family is, in turn, ascribed to her own rough childhood—her father’s habitual drunkenness and the violence that she witnessed as a result, when Papaw hit Mamaw, who, in turn, set him afire with a match.
The movie intersperses J.D.’s hurried effort to get Bev into rehab with flashbacks to his troubles during his teen years: the violent conflicts with Bev that he endured, and the instability of his home life with her as a result of her unstable relationships with men. In a matched set of flashbacks, Bev’s boyfriend Matt (Jesse C. Boyd), a cop, gets J.D. and Lindsay a dog—but Bev dumps that boyfriend for her boss, Ken (Keong Sim), whom she marries impulsively. Ken has allergies and forces the children to get rid of the dog. A lax parent, he lets his skater son, Travis (Morgan Gao)—with whom J.D. now bunks—slack off. Ken has a “Casino” poster in his living room, which positions him as more culturally sophisticated; he grows his own marijuana at home, and Travis smokes it. Bev’s relationship with Ken is, in effect, the intrusion of élite liberal culture into the Vances’ displaced-hillbilly way of life, and a marker of its alienation from American society at large.
This view of Appalachian alienation in action is made clearer by the movie’s depiction of J.D. and his family as having no cultural attachment whatsoever. The TV is often on in the house—young J.D. likes to watch the political news but never has a word to say about it—and Bev is briefly seen sharing an enthusiasm for football with J.D. Otherwise, J.D.’s family members are blank repositories of trouble, frustration, and striving. Even Mamaw, though gloriously profane and cantankerous, is devoid of any ideas that don’t cut to the practicalities that she tackles with blunt force and ferocious familial devotion. Miserable and confused by the new life with Ken and Travis that Bev has forced him into, J.D. neglects his studies, acts out, risks serious trouble, and is wrenched from that household by Mamaw, who takes him in and administers tough love. The crucial scene in the film is one that takes place in a car, when J.D. and Mamaw have a fierce argument. In the course of it, she sharply lectures young J.D. about the mighty exertions of study and discipline that it will take for him to “be somebody,” and about her reason for putting the hard work into raising him: “Who’s gonna take care of this family when I’m gone?” It’s exemplary of the film that this is Mamaw’s great aria; she has nothing to say about anything else.
Neither does J.D., for that matter. After high school, he joins the Marines and serves in Iraq, but that experience doesn’t figure into the movie at all—he says nothing about them in the course of the film. He doesn’t mention whatever culture shock he must have experienced at Yale (instead, it is portrayed in a pat scene near the start of the film, where, at a dinner with prospective employers, one refers to his family and neighbors as “rednecks”). This silence is worse than a cop-out; it’s an insult, one that’s all too typical of movies that depict poor or working people and presume that, because they lack education, they lack ideas, inclinations, a fund of experiences to discuss. The characters in “Hillbilly Elegy” aren’t literally silent; the director, Ron Howard, and the screenwriter, Vanessa Taylor, are more discerning than that. Rather, the characters are talkative about their immediate efforts—and their harshly florid style of speech is quaint and piquant—but they’re silent about whatever they may be thinking about beyond the matters at hand. They’re reduced not to their life stories but to the dramatic specifics of the movie. Beyond that, they simply don’t exist.


newyorker--2020-11-23--Thanksgiving, the Coronavirus, and the Marshmallow Test

Thanksgiving , Hanukkah , Christmas—thanks to Pfizer ( with BioNTech ) and Moderna , these holidays are going to be the real marshmallow test for Americans , the chance to find out , at the end of this terrible year , what we ’ re still made of .
The famous Stanford psychology experiment has been an irresistible analogy for pundits ever since the coronavirus crisis began .
Paul Krugman , for instance , wrote in the Times , in June , that measures such as imposing social distancing were much like offering a young child a marshmallow , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from eating it for fifteen minutes she ’ ll get a second one .
“ You have to be strict and you have to be patient , staying the course until the pandemic is over , not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread , ” he wrote .
But back then the analogy wasn ’ t quite right .
Our behavior during the first wave of the pandemic—which was pretty exemplary , at least in the cities that were initially hit hardest—was less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sheer terror .
The marshmallow was poisoned ; if you ate it , you might die .
And , as the second and third waves came on , the analogy faltered in a different way : there was no fifteen-minute time limit .
As the summer and then the fall ground on , it began to seem as if we were trapped in a never-ending saga , and each week one could feel oneself weakening .
Some of the choices made were baffling : did anyone really need to head to South Dakota @ @ @ @ @ @ @ motorcyclists ( as opposed to just riding a motorcycle , alone , which is about as COVID-safe an activity as it gets ) ?
But birthdays and weddings are parts of being human , and it ’ s hard to pass them up .
Changing them around is possible—our family hosted a wedding with six people in attendance , all of whom had quarantined for two weeks , and , if it wasn ’ t what the bride and groom had imagined , it turned out to be wonderful in a whole different @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , among other things , to really know and trust one ’ s new in-laws . )
Still , the desire for things to just be normal is a powerful force .
It ’ s easy to place the blame for our weakening resolve on the current occupant of the White House—a man so unable to control his vanity that he arranged a series of rallies that possibly contributed to the spread of the virus during his campaign .
But the same trend was under way in Belgium , too , and in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ safely beyond his writ .
Even where I live , in Vermont , which has fared far better than any state , in large part because its levels of social trust are anomalously high , coronavirus numbers have begun to climb in recent weeks , with many of the cases linked to a hockey rink near the State House .
( Fortunately , the state has had just five COVID-related deaths since July , and currently there are only three infected patients in the I.C.U . )
Perhaps an indefinite suspension of normalcy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ask : of hard-pressed restaurant owners and salon owners , and also just of people in general .
Life in a high-consumer society has not , it turns out , been great preparation for delaying gratification .
We want .
So the news from the pharmaceutical giants that they have vaccines in the works that seem to be more than ninety-per-cent effective , and safe to boot , represents therapy not only for our immune systems but also our flagging will power .
( On Monday , Oxford University and AstraZeneca announced that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effective on average in trials , and it is cheaper and easier to store than the Pfizer and Moderna versions . )
Suddenly , the picture is different .
Now it ’ s not having to contemplate a world without Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas : it ’ s having to contemplate a world without one Thanksgiving and one Hanukkah and one Christmas .
Then , all signs indicate that , sometime next winter or spring , a pharmacist will stick a needle in your arm ( twice ) , and things will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is to get through to that singular event .
That should be doable .
Anyone can understand that , in the holiday season of 2020 , love of extended family and friends means staying safely at a distance .
Anyone can gear themselves up for wearing a mask if the duration is measured in months that you can count on your fingers .
The first health-care workers may get vaccinated in mid-December—that ’ s two or three weekends away .
Give yourself twenty or so weekends without parties—anyone can do that .
With @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is to get everyone around us safely there : it was devastatingly sad that people died of COVID-19 last March , but such deaths would be tragic in a different way this March .
We have reason to feel pride in our initial response to the virus : moved not just by fear but by the heroism of health-care and frontline workers , we did the right thing for a while .
We also have reason to feel shame : as a society , we couldn ’ t figure out how to get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to protect the most vulnerable as the pandemic wore on .
But now we have a tie-breaking opportunity to get it right .
If you keep your mask on , there ’ s no chance you ’ re going to eat that marshmallow .
More on the Coronavirus • To protect American lives and revive the economy , Donald Trump and Jared Kushner should listen to Anthony Fauci rather than trash him .
• We should look to students to conceive of appropriate school-reopening plans .
It is not too late to ask @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pregnant pediatrician on what children need during the crisis .
• Trump is helping tycoons who have donated to his reëlection campaign exploit the pandemic to maximize profits .
• Meet the high-finance mogul in charge of our economic recovery .
• The coronavirus is likely to reshape architecture .
What kinds of space are we willing to live and work in now ?

Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas—thanks to Pfizer (with BioNTech) and Moderna, these holidays are going to be the real marshmallow test for Americans, the chance to find out, at the end of this terrible year, what we’re still made of. The famous Stanford psychology experiment has been an irresistible analogy for pundits ever since the coronavirus crisis began. Paul Krugman, for instance, wrote in the Times, in June, that measures such as imposing social distancing were much like offering a young child a marshmallow, but telling her that if she can refrain from eating it for fifteen minutes she’ll get a second one. “You have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread,” he wrote.
But back then the analogy wasn’t quite right. Our behavior during the first wave of the pandemic—which was pretty exemplary, at least in the cities that were initially hit hardest—was less a matter of will power than of sheer terror. The marshmallow was poisoned; if you ate it, you might die. And, as the second and third waves came on, the analogy faltered in a different way: there was no fifteen-minute time limit. As the summer and then the fall ground on, it began to seem as if we were trapped in a never-ending saga, and each week one could feel oneself weakening.
Some of the choices made were baffling: did anyone really need to head to South Dakota to join with nearly half a million motorcyclists (as opposed to just riding a motorcycle, alone, which is about as COVID-safe an activity as it gets)? But birthdays and weddings are parts of being human, and it’s hard to pass them up. Changing them around is possible—our family hosted a wedding with six people in attendance, all of whom had quarantined for two weeks, and, if it wasn’t what the bride and groom had imagined, it turned out to be wonderful in a whole different, intense way. (One comes, among other things, to really know and trust one’s new in-laws.) Still, the desire for things to just be normal is a powerful force.
It’s easy to place the blame for our weakening resolve on the current occupant of the White House—a man so unable to control his vanity that he arranged a series of rallies that possibly contributed to the spread of the virus during his campaign. But the same trend was under way in Belgium, too, and in Italy, Peru, and other places safely beyond his writ. Even where I live, in Vermont, which has fared far better than any state, in large part because its levels of social trust are anomalously high, coronavirus numbers have begun to climb in recent weeks, with many of the cases linked to a hockey rink near the State House. (Fortunately, the state has had just five COVID-related deaths since July, and currently there are only three infected patients in the I.C.U.) Perhaps an indefinite suspension of normalcy turns out to be too much to ask: of hard-pressed restaurant owners and salon owners, and also just of people in general. Life in a high-consumer society has not, it turns out, been great preparation for delaying gratification. We want.
So the news from the pharmaceutical giants that they have vaccines in the works that seem to be more than ninety-per-cent effective, and safe to boot, represents therapy not only for our immune systems but also our flagging will power. (On Monday, Oxford University and AstraZeneca announced that their vaccine has so far proved seventy-per-cent effective on average in trials, and it is cheaper and easier to store than the Pfizer and Moderna versions.) Suddenly, the picture is different. Now it’s not having to contemplate a world without Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas: it’s having to contemplate a world without one Thanksgiving and one Hanukkah and one Christmas. Then, all signs indicate that, sometime next winter or spring, a pharmacist will stick a needle in your arm (twice), and things will start slowly returning to normal—and our job is to get through to that singular event.
That should be doable. Anyone can understand that, in the holiday season of 2020, love of extended family and friends means staying safely at a distance. Anyone can gear themselves up for wearing a mask if the duration is measured in months that you can count on your fingers. The first health-care workers may get vaccinated in mid-December—that’s two or three weekends away. Give yourself twenty or so weekends without parties—anyone can do that. With an end in sight, our job is to get everyone around us safely there: it was devastatingly sad that people died of COVID-19 last March, but such deaths would be tragic in a different way this March.
We have reason to feel pride in our initial response to the virus: moved not just by fear but by the heroism of health-care and frontline workers, we did the right thing for a while. We also have reason to feel shame: as a society, we couldn’t figure out how to get everyone to take the simple measures necessary to protect the most vulnerable as the pandemic wore on. But now we have a tie-breaking opportunity to get it right. If you keep your mask on, there’s no chance you’re going to eat that marshmallow.
More on the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-11-23--The Fight to Turn Georgia Blue

The Fight to Turn Georgia Blue

This month , Georgia flipped : its voters picked a Democrat for President for the first time since Bill Clinton @ @ @ @ @ To a significant degree , Charles Bethea says , this was owing to political organizing @ @ @ @ @ all , Donald Trump still received approximately seventy per cent of the white vote .
@ @ @ @ @ the political evolution of the state , and he speaks with two Democratic organizers : @ @ @ @ @ .
of the New Georgia Project , and Royce Reeves , Sr. , a city @ @ @ @ @ .

Download a transcript.|||
Photograph by Elijah Nouvelage / AFP / Getty
This month, Georgia flipped: its voters picked a Democrat for President for the first time since Bill Clinton’s first-term election. To a significant degree, Charles Bethea says, this was owing to political organizing among Black voters; after all, Donald Trump still received approximately seventy per cent of the white vote. Bethea tells David Remnick about the political evolution of the state, and he speaks with two Democratic organizers: Nsé Ufot, the C.E.O. of the New Georgia Project, and Royce Reeves, Sr., a city commissioner in Cordele, Georgia.


Letters to Woofy

Kurt Vonnegut wrote these letters to his future wife , Jane Marie Cox , in the twilight of his teens and in his early twenties , during the tumultuous years of the Second World War .
He addresses her as Woofy , a nickname that , according to their daughter Edith Vonnegut , Cox didn ’ t particularly care for .
Their correspondence reveals a fitful courting , with a persistent Vonnegut peppering Cox with declarations of love , even as both attend casual dates with other people .
In 1943 , Vonnegut enlisted in the army , and , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the European front in 1944 .
Meanwhile , Cox finished college and began a job in the Office of Strategic Services , the office that would later become the C.I.A .
Vonnegut , who was trained as a reconnaissance scout , was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and spent time as a laborer in a German P.O.W .
camp in Dresden .
He witnessed the Allied firebombing of the city , an experience foundational to the writing of “ Slaughterhouse-Five ” many years later .
Vonnegut returned to America in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ married later that year—after his second proposal was accepted .
The pair ’ s correspondence is collected in “ Love , Kurt , ” which Random House will publish on December 1st .
—The Editors Naturally your recent letter ripped my heart from my wounded breast ( poetic license ) .
My Princeton friend , Morgan Bird ( It ’ s a Small World Department : he kissed you good-bye just before the Triangle Club pulled out of Union Station some two New Year ’ s Eves ago ) , and the rest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spent the week-end in a Raleigh hotel suite .
This contest of giants ended in a draw though I was awarded a decoration for valor beyond the call of duty for making a breakfast of beer Monday morning .
So many of my friends are commissioned that I can ’ t help feeling a little distinctive with absolutely nothing on my uniform but buttons .
Ryan and I are very happy as privates .
How long this attitude will hold out is a sober question .
Methinks it had better be durable enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In a couple of weeks I ’ ll know if I ’ m to be an officer , a college student , or a dead duck .
Lovey , I know what hell you ’ ve been going through being absolutely true to me .
I want you to know that I appreciate it .
Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder .
These once cool , tapering and artistic hands have been initiated into the more brutal mysteries of Ju-Jitsu .
I am now a match for any woman twice my size @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in July .
I shall probably try to see you as much as possible—or as much of you as possible .
Are you glad ?
If you want to break up an otherwise morbid summer I don ’ t care if you want to get married .
I , Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , am financially independent and in a position to afford a one-week honeymoon in the Seminole Hotel .
Apropos , are you ever going to get married ?
I am willing to fill out any required forms in duplicate , triplicate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all accessories thereof : not now , but sometime .
You don ’ t object to my playing with the idea , do you ?
I had another fine date with Nance last night .
One more , and I ’ d be head-over-heels in love with her , so last night was the last of a pleasant , mildly tight series .
You have a standing invitation to stay with her , here in Pittsburgh , and long before my assignment is completed at Tech I hope you take her up on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when you were very low , Woof , I remember your worrying about your feminine friends : that is , your lack of really good and loyal ones .
I ’ m pretty sure that worry was baseless , but I ’ d like to point out that Nance likes you one helluva lot , and is , whether you ’ ve ever looked at it that way or not , one of your best friends .
You two are the most wonderful pair of girls I ’ ve come across .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Mobile ; from Natchez to St. Joe .
.
.
.
Here ’ s that idea again , and if ever I ’ m commissioned I promise I ’ ll propose .
( Lt. and Mrs. J. C. Adams have now been in dreamland for eight months—I ’ d love to be that happy ! )
Nance and I have , without consulting you or Buck ( something like the Atlantic Charter without Stalin or Chiang ) , planned Heaven ( “ Everybody talkin ’ ‘ bout Heaven ain ’ t goin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of us .
Would you like to live in Charleston , one block from Calhoun ’ s grave and within sight of Fort Sumter ?
That ’ s just about where we figured Heaven was .
To be exact , it ’ s in a cottage ( with a studio ) in a hidden patio in the finest , and oldest part of town .
Not a church in the neighborhood is under 200 years old .
I just happened upon it .
The entrance is an inconspicuous little arch , guarded by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fine wine shop and a musty bookstore .
Both are tiny , and neither bothers to advertise beyond a small , neat shingle .
Both sell the fine , the very old , and the deliciously delicate .
Their clientele is a fraternity to which only the connoisseur may belong .
Within the gate is a long path between the buildings , and from this path you can peek between shutters into the musty back room of the wine shop where those rare bottles , which weren ’ t smashed by the roar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on blockade runners , still collect dust .
( ( Speaking of blockade runners—and hence Rhett Butler— : Scarlett O ’ Hara went to finishing school in Fayetteville , one mile from Fort Bragg . )
) The path opens into a patio , in which stands a giant old oak and a lush green-grass carpet .
A not-so-historical cottage ( it ’ s always summer in sleepy Charleston ) snoozes in the shade of the oak : room for four merry young people with tremendous appetites for happiness .
This may bore @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long since we ’ ve been together that I ’ ve grown self-conscious about what I say .
I must miss you , Woof , because I ’ m miserably lonely with hundreds of good friends about me .
During one of our rowdy “ in-love-with-each-other ” phases , it was your habit to pique me by asking , “ Why do you love me ?
” I ’ ve finally hit on a rational answer and I think it ’ s the right one .
I have a number of wild dreams @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the leaves .
Once conceived I tell you about them .
If they ’ re good dreams you take them up with a flood of enthusiasm and we ’ re very soon shrieking to each other about them in a transport of delight much greater than if the dream were realized .
Then we sink back , logically in each other ’ s arms , happily exhausted by a swift trip to heaven and back .
I asked Nance how many times she had seen me make you cry .
I hated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I hope is a step toward maturity , Woof— : I pray to God I never make you cry again .
I never enjoyed writing a letter so much as this one .
It flowed from me without a murmur .

“I’m overseas, dear heart, in a land full of poetic references which the censor won’t let me make,” a young Kurt Vonnegut writes to Jane Marie Cox. Photograph courtesy Kurt Vonnegut LLC
Kurt Vonnegut wrote these letters to his future wife, Jane Marie Cox, in the twilight of his teens and in his early twenties, during the tumultuous years of the Second World War. He addresses her as Woofy, a nickname that, according to their daughter Edith Vonnegut, Cox didn’t particularly care for. Their correspondence reveals a fitful courting, with a persistent Vonnegut peppering Cox with declarations of love, even as both attend casual dates with other people. In 1943, Vonnegut enlisted in the army, and, after a brief mobilization, was sent to the European front in 1944. Meanwhile, Cox finished college and began a job in the Office of Strategic Services, the office that would later become the C.I.A. Vonnegut, who was trained as a reconnaissance scout, was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and spent time as a laborer in a German P.O.W. camp in Dresden. He witnessed the Allied firebombing of the city, an experience foundational to the writing of “Slaughterhouse-Five” many years later. Vonnegut returned to America in 1945, and he and Cox were married later that year—after his second proposal was accepted. The pair’s correspondence is collected in “Love, Kurt,” which Random House will publish on December 1st. —The Editors
Dear Woofy:
Naturally your recent letter ripped my heart from my wounded breast (poetic license). My Princeton friend, Morgan Bird (It’s a Small World Department: he kissed you good-bye just before the Triangle Club pulled out of Union Station some two New Year’s Eves ago), and the rest of our picked squad of All-American Barflies spent the week-end in a Raleigh hotel suite. This contest of giants ended in a draw though I was awarded a decoration for valor beyond the call of duty for making a breakfast of beer Monday morning.
So many of my friends are commissioned that I can’t help feeling a little distinctive with absolutely nothing on my uniform but buttons. Ryan and I are very happy as privates. How long this attitude will hold out is a sober question. Methinks it had better be durable enough to last for duration and six months. In a couple of weeks I’ll know if I’m to be an officer, a college student, or a dead duck.
Lovey, I know what hell you’ve been going through being absolutely true to me. I want you to know that I appreciate it. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. These once cool, tapering and artistic hands have been initiated into the more brutal mysteries of Ju-Jitsu. I am now a match for any woman twice my size. I shall probably be back late in July. I shall probably try to see you as much as possible—or as much of you as possible. Are you glad? If you want to break up an otherwise morbid summer I don’t care if you want to get married. I, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., am financially independent and in a position to afford a one-week honeymoon in the Seminole Hotel.
Apropos, are you ever going to get married? I am willing to fill out any required forms in duplicate, triplicate, and quintuplicate for your hand and all accessories thereof: not now, but sometime. You don’t object to my playing with the idea, do you?
Write me a letter, sweet mamma.
Kurt
August 30th, 1943
Dear Woof:
I had another fine date with Nance last night. One more, and I’d be head-over-heels in love with her, so last night was the last of a pleasant, mildly tight series. You have a standing invitation to stay with her, here in Pittsburgh, and long before my assignment is completed at Tech I hope you take her up on it at least once. One time, when you were very low, Woof, I remember your worrying about your feminine friends: that is, your lack of really good and loyal ones. I’m pretty sure that worry was baseless, but I’d like to point out that Nance likes you one helluva lot, and is, whether you’ve ever looked at it that way or not, one of your best friends. You two are the most wonderful pair of girls I’ve come across. And I’ve been from Memphis to Mobile; from Natchez to St. Joe. . . .
Here’s that idea again, and if ever I’m commissioned I promise I’ll propose. (Lt. and Mrs. J. C. Adams have now been in dreamland for eight months—I’d love to be that happy!) Nance and I have, without consulting you or Buck (something like the Atlantic Charter without Stalin or Chiang), planned Heaven (“Everybody talkin’ ‘bout Heaven ain’t goin’ there”) for the four of us. Would you like to live in Charleston, one block from Calhoun’s grave and within sight of Fort Sumter? That’s just about where we figured Heaven was. To be exact, it’s in a cottage (with a studio) in a hidden patio in the finest, and oldest part of town. Not a church in the neighborhood is under 200 years old. I just happened upon it. The entrance is an inconspicuous little arch, guarded by an antique wrought-iron gate, between a fine wine shop and a musty bookstore. Both are tiny, and neither bothers to advertise beyond a small, neat shingle. Both sell the fine, the very old, and the deliciously delicate. Their clientele is a fraternity to which only the connoisseur may belong.
Within the gate is a long path between the buildings, and from this path you can peek between shutters into the musty back room of the wine shop where those rare bottles, which weren’t smashed by the roar of the Union naval guns, firing on blockade runners, still collect dust. ((Speaking of blockade runners—and hence Rhett Butler—: Scarlett O’Hara went to finishing school in Fayetteville, one mile from Fort Bragg.)) The path opens into a patio, in which stands a giant old oak and a lush green-grass carpet. A not-so-historical cottage (it’s always summer in sleepy Charleston) snoozes in the shade of the oak: room for four merry young people with tremendous appetites for happiness.
This may bore you. It’s been so long since we’ve been together that I’ve grown self-conscious about what I say. I must miss you, Woof, because I’m miserably lonely with hundreds of good friends about me. During one of our rowdy “in-love-with-each-other” phases, it was your habit to pique me by asking, “Why do you love me?” I’ve finally hit on a rational answer and I think it’s the right one. I have a number of wild dreams which come and go with the green in the leaves. Once conceived I tell you about them. If they’re good dreams you take them up with a flood of enthusiasm and we’re very soon shrieking to each other about them in a transport of delight much greater than if the dream were realized. Then we sink back, logically in each other’s arms, happily exhausted by a swift trip to heaven and back.
I asked Nance how many times she had seen me make you cry. I hated to hear her say four. This, I hope is a step toward maturity, Woof—: I pray to God I never make you cry again.
I never enjoyed writing a letter so much as this one. It flowed from me without a murmur.
Love,
Kurt


newyorker--2020-11-24--Why Newsmax Supports Trump’s False Voter-Fraud Claims

I recently spoke by phone with Ruddy about the future of Newsmax and his relationship with the President .
During our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we also discussed how Trump ’ s media consumption has changed during his Presidency , how Newsmax has covered Trump ’ s false claims about voting fraud , and whether Ruddy feels any responsibility for misinforming his viewers .
How do you see the conservative media environment changing after January , when Trump leaves office , if you do see it changing ?
I think it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ ll be growing , not diminishing .
Assuming that Joe Biden is inaugurated President , which every probability study says will be the case , there ’ ll be a demand for media that is in opposition to his Administration .
We saw the success of media like MSNBC and CNN , whose ratings skyrocketed , and the Times .
I think you ’ re going to see that on the right side of the aisle .
You have said that you think Fox News was inconsistent in its support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
How so ?
And do you think that being unwavering in support of either Donald Trump or the Republican Party is important to conservative media ?
I think it ’ s been inconsistent , and I would say it ’ s been schizophrenic .
It , at times , is very supportive , almost to the point you would say of maybe drinking the Kool-Aid , on their opinion shows , and then , on the weekends , extremely hostile .
And I think what Newsmax has done has been fairly consistent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being supportive of the President and his policies , but I think if you looked at our digital coverage , for instance , it ’ s always been very balanced and fair .
You have shot down this idea of Newsmax becoming Trump TV .
Would you want to have the President on as a contributor ?
What role do you see Trump playing ?
Well , he ’ s an omnivore when it comes to media .
He loves all media .
There ’ s no differentiation .
He likes to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well before he became President using all these platforms .
I think he probably expects that he ’ ll be able to do that once he leaves .
So I don ’ t see him tethered or tied down with any one media , and that ’ s why I don ’ t think he ’ s going to say , “ O.K.
, I ’ m going to make Newsmax my mouthpiece or my platform.
” Nor would we find that a good idea , either .
I built a solid news @ @ @ @ @ @ @ estimate we reach over thirty million Americans each month through all our different outlets .
Why wouldn ’ t you want that ?
I ’ ve always been committed to being a news organization .
And the President ’ s a political force , and he ’ s a personality .
You wouldn ’ t want The New Yorker to become the Biden Yorker .
Right , but I thought you said that you had an editorial policy of being supportive of him .
Well , editorially , we have our perspective , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fairly liberal one .
Wouldn ’ t the distinction be an editorial line in favor of liberalism or conservatism , versus a line in favor of a specific human being ?
Well , he was President of the United States , so we have been editorially supportive of him and his policies .
I ’ m not thinking that we ’ re here to say he ’ s a great guy .
We ’ re here to say , “ We agree basically with his tax deregulation and free-market approaches to government policy.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ lines that were different , we would oppose it .
I personally have disagreed with him , and I ’ ve said it publicly .
I ’ m very pro-immigration .
I think the country needs more immigrants , not less .
What ’ s your personal relationship with him like at this point ?
We ’ re friends .
He ’ s called me twice in the past five days .
I ’ m always amazed at the amount of equanimity he has , with everything going on in the world , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He ’ s quite—what ’ s the word ?
—engaged with media as well , on top of all of that .
And yet he seems pretty calm , and it ’ s sort of the old Donald Trump .
One possibility would be that he wasn ’ t spending that much time running the government , which is why he ’ d have more time to call you or watch TV or be more equanimous .
That ’ s not the anecdotal evidence we ’ re getting from people that work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exhausted by his work habits .
The guy never sleeps , and he ’ s always engaging people , at any time , any hour .
Come on .
It seems like he just watches a lot of Fox News .
Yeah , I ’ m amazed he spends so much time doing it .
I don ’ t think it ’ s necessarily been a positive aspect of his Presidency , but the guy loves media .
In some ways , it ’ s good , because I think Donald Trump is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intimidated by him .
They ’ re certainly intimidated by the office of the President .
So the fact that he ’ s listening to shows , or watching shows like “ Morning Joe , ” or Cuomo , actually gets him to hear information he wouldn ’ t normally hear at the White House .
Do you really believe that ?
Yes .
And I think all of those liberal shows have had some effect on his policies and positions and approaches .
What would be an example of that ?
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think he pretty much backed down from that position .
I think on the coronavirus , you might not be happy , but the government has embraced a mask policy .
I don ’ t think he would have done that had he not been pushed by the media to do it .
It was not his inclination .
As someone who knows him , could you explain why his inclination would be to put kids in cages without their parents at the border , or to not have people wear masks when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t want to defend every position he takes .
Let ’ s take the masks .
I think there are only two or three studies on the effectiveness of masks , and they showed that they were not very effective in controlling the disease .
Do you know that ?
There are more studies now that show masks are effective , but go on .
Even people with medical masks still had a twenty per cent risk of catching the virus , even with all the precautions they were taking .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a hundred and seventy-two studies showed that N95 masks offer ninety-six per cent protection against transmission of the virus , and surgical masks offer sixty-seven per cent protection . ]
So I think when you look at some of that , he ’ s probably thinking , You know what ?
Is it really worth it to run around with all these masks ?
Sweden hasn ’ t had a mask policy .
They ’ re not worse off , really , than any other European country .
I thought they had higher @ @ @ @ @ @ @ case fatality rate remains significantly higher than Finland ’ s and Norway ’ s . ]
But regardless , you think he ’ s reading these studies on masks and coming to the conclusion that they ’ re not effective , or something else ?
Well , it ’ s laughable to think he ’ s sitting there reading the study .
That ’ s what I was hinting at .
I don ’ t want to say anything derogatory , but he gets his information when he hears people on programs or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to hear the information , or see it presented to him .
And he ’ ll make a decision based on that .
It seems like he has a lot of people giving him bad information , either personally or through the media .
I ’ m wondering whether you , as a purveyor of that information , are ever concerned that you ’ re doing a disservice to him , or the country , by peddling this stuff out there .
I don ’ t think we initiate it at all .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ conference where Rudy Giuliani , the President ’ s lawyer , says that there ’ s voter fraud , and gives examples , I don ’ t see , by us covering it , that we are becoming the purveyor back to the President on that .
It doesn ’ t make any sense .
He ’ s obviously coming up with it .
We ’ re reporting on factual evidence of anecdotal vote fraud .
And you know what ?
It ’ s so close , let him have his day in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has repeatedly lost in court , and failed to show evidence of widespread voter fraud . ]
I think it ’ s all right .
Hillary Clinton said in August that under no circumstances should Joe Biden concede .
And I do think that Donald Trump should concede when the certifications come in .
So , if Trump tried to get Republican state legislatures to overturn the certificated votes , would your network take a strong stand against that ?
I would not support it .
I would not support going to state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you know what ?
I haven ’ t seen people that are mentioning that as a .
.
.
Reuters reported that that was the White House strategy .
That ’ s why I brought it up .
Well , Dick Morris has mentioned it on Newsmax , and other people have suggested it , that the states are the ultimate arbiters on the electors .
That doesn ’ t feel dangerous to you in any way ?
I think it ’ s not a good thing .
I think that the questioning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ court , is just as reasonable as when Al Gore did it in the 2000 election .
I think what bothers people a lot , on the right side , is this idea that Trump is not even entitled .
He should just accept that he ’ s not entitled .
I think he ’ s entitled to a recount process .
Well , he ’ s not saying , “ We want a recount.
” He ’ s tweeting that he won , and that there ’ s massive voter fraud , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I think that ’ s what people are objecting to .
It ’ s not that he ’ s not allowed to make legal filings .

Even as Fox News acknowledges that Joe Biden is the President-elect, Newsmax Media—a conservative multimedia company that includes a Web site and a television channel—has supported Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud, and has seen a spike in ratings, with as many as 1.1 million people tuning in to its nightly broadcasts. Newsmax’s C.E.O., Christopher Ruddy, began his career as a journalist at the New York Post and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, where he specialized in conspiracies about Bill and Hillary Clinton, even going so far as to write a book calling into question the circumstances surrounding the death of Vince Foster, the Clintons’ friend and the deputy White House counsel. In 1998, Ruddy founded Newsmax, which became known for its anti-Clinton content; in the Trump era, it served as a platform for Trump boosters like Diamond and Silk and Sean Spicer. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Trump’s allies have explored buying Newsmax, as part of an effort to build a Trump-branded alternative to Fox News; Ruddy replied that he wasn’t interested in turning his company into Trump TV. Nevertheless, Ruddy, a longtime Mar-a-Lago member and friend of the President’s, has claimed that Fox and other conservative media outlets have offered insufficient support to Trump, especially during the past several weeks.
I recently spoke by phone with Ruddy about the future of Newsmax and his relationship with the President. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed how Trump’s media consumption has changed during his Presidency, how Newsmax has covered Trump’s false claims about voting fraud, and whether Ruddy feels any responsibility for misinforming his viewers.
How do you see the conservative media environment changing after January, when Trump leaves office, if you do see it changing?
I think it’s going to be as robust as ever. It’ll be growing, not diminishing. Assuming that Joe Biden is inaugurated President, which every probability study says will be the case, there’ll be a demand for media that is in opposition to his Administration. We saw the success of media like MSNBC and CNN, whose ratings skyrocketed, and the Times. I think you’re going to see that on the right side of the aisle.
You have said that you think Fox News was inconsistent in its support of Trump during the past four years. How so? And do you think that being unwavering in support of either Donald Trump or the Republican Party is important to conservative media?
I think it’s been inconsistent, and I would say it’s been schizophrenic. It, at times, is very supportive, almost to the point you would say of maybe drinking the Kool-Aid, on their opinion shows, and then, on the weekends, extremely hostile. And I think what Newsmax has done has been fairly consistent. We have an editorial policy of being supportive of the President and his policies, but I think if you looked at our digital coverage, for instance, it’s always been very balanced and fair.
You have shot down this idea of Newsmax becoming Trump TV. Would you want to have the President on as a contributor? What role do you see Trump playing?
Well, he’s an omnivore when it comes to media. He loves all media. There’s no differentiation. He likes to be on all platforms. He did exceedingly well before he became President using all these platforms. I think he probably expects that he’ll be able to do that once he leaves. So I don’t see him tethered or tied down with any one media, and that’s why I don’t think he’s going to say, “O.K., I’m going to make Newsmax my mouthpiece or my platform.” Nor would we find that a good idea, either. I built a solid news organization over twenty years, and we estimate we reach over thirty million Americans each month through all our different outlets.
Why wouldn’t you want that?
I’ve always been committed to being a news organization. And the President’s a political force, and he’s a personality. You wouldn’t want The New Yorker to become the Biden Yorker.
Right, but I thought you said that you had an editorial policy of being supportive of him.
Well, editorially, we have our perspective, just as CNN and MSNBC have a fairly liberal one.
Wouldn’t the distinction be an editorial line in favor of liberalism or conservatism, versus a line in favor of a specific human being?
Well, he was President of the United States, so we have been editorially supportive of him and his policies. I’m not thinking that we’re here to say he’s a great guy. We’re here to say, “We agree basically with his tax deregulation and free-market approaches to government policy.” I think if he was taking lines that were different, we would oppose it. I personally have disagreed with him, and I’ve said it publicly. I’m very pro-immigration. I think the country needs more immigrants, not less.
What’s your personal relationship with him like at this point?
We’re friends. He’s called me twice in the past five days.
What’s his mental state?
I’m always amazed at the amount of equanimity he has, with everything going on in the world, in politics, and running the government. He’s quite—what’s the word?—engaged with media as well, on top of all of that. And yet he seems pretty calm, and it’s sort of the old Donald Trump.
One possibility would be that he wasn’t spending that much time running the government, which is why he’d have more time to call you or watch TV or be more equanimous.
That’s not the anecdotal evidence we’re getting from people that work there, who say that they are exhausted by his work habits. The guy never sleeps, and he’s always engaging people, at any time, any hour.
Come on. It seems like he just watches a lot of Fox News.
Yeah, I’m amazed he spends so much time doing it. I don’t think it’s necessarily been a positive aspect of his Presidency, but the guy loves media. In some ways, it’s good, because I think Donald Trump is a larger-than-life figure. People are very intimidated by him. They’re certainly intimidated by the office of the President. So the fact that he’s listening to shows, or watching shows like “Morning Joe,” or Cuomo, actually gets him to hear information he wouldn’t normally hear at the White House.
Do you really believe that?
Yes. And I think all of those liberal shows have had some effect on his policies and positions and approaches.
What would be an example of that?
The cages thing on the border. I think he pretty much backed down from that position. I think on the coronavirus, you might not be happy, but the government has embraced a mask policy. I don’t think he would have done that had he not been pushed by the media to do it. It was not his inclination.
As someone who knows him, could you explain why his inclination would be to put kids in cages without their parents at the border, or to not have people wear masks when wearing them could save lives?
I don’t want to defend every position he takes. Let’s take the masks. I think there are only two or three studies on the effectiveness of masks, and they showed that they were not very effective in controlling the disease. Do you know that?
There are more studies now that show masks are effective, but go on.
Even people with medical masks still had a twenty per cent risk of catching the virus, even with all the precautions they were taking. [A World Health Organization-funded analysis of a hundred and seventy-two studies showed that N95 masks offer ninety-six per cent protection against transmission of the virus, and surgical masks offer sixty-seven per cent protection.] So I think when you look at some of that, he’s probably thinking, You know what? Is it really worth it to run around with all these masks? Sweden hasn’t had a mask policy. They’re not worse off, really, than any other European country.
I thought they had higher death rates. [Sweden’s case fatality rate remains significantly higher than Finland’s and Norway’s.] But regardless, you think he’s reading these studies on masks and coming to the conclusion that they’re not effective, or something else?
Well, it’s laughable to think he’s sitting there reading the study.
That’s what I was hinting at.
I don’t want to say anything derogatory, but he gets his information when he hears people on programs or when he asks them. He likes to hear the information, or see it presented to him. And he’ll make a decision based on that.
It seems like he has a lot of people giving him bad information, either personally or through the media. I’m wondering whether you, as a purveyor of that information, are ever concerned that you’re doing a disservice to him, or the country, by peddling this stuff out there.
I don’t think we initiate it at all. If we’re reporting a press conference where Rudy Giuliani, the President’s lawyer, says that there’s voter fraud, and gives examples, I don’t see, by us covering it, that we are becoming the purveyor back to the President on that. It doesn’t make any sense. He’s obviously coming up with it. We’re reporting on factual evidence of anecdotal vote fraud. And you know what? It’s so close, let him have his day in court. [The Trump legal team has repeatedly lost in court, and failed to show evidence of widespread voter fraud.] I think it’s all right. Hillary Clinton said in August that under no circumstances should Joe Biden concede. And I do think that Donald Trump should concede when the certifications come in.


newyorker--2020-11-24--Love Poems for the Office . . . or Wherever

“ Zoom Calls in the Time of Coronavirus ( Part 1 ) ” Mary is sitting on her Peloton , pedalling and talking .
Ben is in his car , waiting to go into a car wash. Terry is in his daughter ’ s room , surrounded by pink stuffed animals .
Greg is brushing his teeth , which makes it hard to hear him .
No one cares .
It ’ s Zoom .
Zoom is from the Greek for “ no one gives a fuck anymore.
” “ Shakespeare Never Used the Word ‘ Ping ’ and Neither @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ping me , ” I want to punch you .
It ’ s true .
“ Bio break , ” too .
It makes me cringe .
And , if I am being honest , I don ’ t care about your ducks or the row they ’ re in .
I don ’ t know what “ net-net ” means unless it ’ s being said by an excited tennis announcer .
Come to think of it , let ’ s not circle back or drill down or take a deep dive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ playing field or create action items .
And I really don ’ t care if this won ’ t scale .
And may I add that , going forward , I would like to park this project .
And this job .
I quit .
Now .
Sorry .
I have a hard stop .
“ Zoom Calls in the Time of Coronavirus ( Part 2 ) ” Why , yes , that was my five-year-old son running back and forth , nude , behind me , shouting , “ Anus !
Anus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ barked and my husband yelled and I leaned away from the computer so that no one would hear me scream “ Greg !
For Christ ’ s sake , can you get the fucking kids out of here ?
!
” and then smoothly sat back up only to see the rather stunned faces of my colleagues and hear my boss remind everyone to mute themselves .
“ Zoom Calls in the Time of Coronavirus ( Part 3 ) ” Each of us talked about the past eight months , about what we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at home .
I can speak French now , I said .
And I learned the names of all eighty-eight constellations in the night sky .
Also karate .
I took up karate .
Online class .
Unicycling is fun , if you know how , and I do now .
This is what I have done with my time over the past eight months , I said .
Wish .
I meant wish I had done with my time over the past eight months instead of what I did do , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same clothes day after day , eat mocha-chip ice cream for breakfast , and say things on Zoom calls like “ Oh , for Christ ’ s sake , what is the point ?
” This excerpt is drawn from “ Love Poems for the Office , ” by John Kenney , out in December from G. P. Putnam ’ s Sons .

Photograph from Adobe Stock
“Zoom Calls in the Time of Coronavirus (Part 1)”
Mary is sitting on her Peloton,
pedalling and talking.
Ben is in his car,
waiting to go into a car wash.
Terry is in his daughter’s room,
surrounded by pink stuffed animals.
Greg is brushing his teeth,
which makes it hard to hear him.
No one cares.
It’s Zoom.
Zoom is from the Greek for
“no one gives a fuck anymore.”
“Shakespeare Never Used the Word ‘Ping’ and Neither Should You”
When you say
“ping me,”
I want to punch you.
It’s true.
“Bio break,” too.
It makes me cringe.
And, if I am being honest,
I don’t care about your ducks or the row they’re in.
I don’t know what “net-net” means
unless it’s being said by an excited tennis announcer.
Come to think of it,
let’s not circle back
or drill down
or take a deep dive
or take it offline
or level the playing field
or create action items.
And I really don’t care
if this won’t scale.
And may I add that,
going forward,
I would like to park this project.
And this job.
I quit.
Now.
Sorry.
I have a hard stop.
“Zoom Calls in the Time of Coronavirus (Part 2)”
Why, yes,
that was my five-year-old son
running back and forth,
nude,
behind me,
shouting,
“Anus! Anus! Anus!”
while the dog barked
and my husband yelled
and I leaned away from the computer
so that no one would hear me scream
“Greg! For Christ’s sake, can you get the fucking kids out of here?!”
and then smoothly sat back up
only to see the rather stunned faces
of my colleagues
and hear my boss
remind everyone
to mute themselves.
“Mythirde-mailtotechsupportregardingmyfreakingstickyspacebar”
Notsureifyoureceivedmypreviouse-mails.
Ihaveastickyspacebarandit’smakingmyworkverydifficult.
Isthereanywayyoucouldgetbacktome?
I’matextension6679.
Ore-mail.
Createaworkorder.
Somesignthatyouareawareoftheproblem.
Becauseitisaproblem.
ClientsarewonderingwhatthehellIam
sayinginmye-mails,
deciperhingthemlikeit’ssomekindof
BletchleyParkthingduringtheSecondWorldWar.
JustanoteontheBletchleyParkthing.
TheyactuallycrackedtheEnigmaCode.
AllI’mlookingforisaloaner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Zoom Calls in the Time of Coronavirus (Part 3)”
Each of us talked about the past eight months,
about what we’d accomplished
with all this time at home.
I can speak French now, I said.
And I learned the names
of all eighty-eight constellations
in the night sky.
Also karate. I took up karate. Online class.
Unicycling is fun,
if you know how, and I do now.
This is what I have done
with my time
over the past eight months,
I said.
Wish.
I meant wish I had done
with my time
over the past eight months
instead of what I did do,
which was almost nothing,
except wear the same clothes
day after day,
eat mocha-chip ice cream
for breakfast,
and say things on Zoom calls like
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, what is the point?”
This excerpt is drawn from “Love Poems for the Office,” by John Kenney, out in December from G. P. Putnam’s Sons.


newyorker--2020-11-24--Patricia Lockwood Reads “The Winged Thing”

Patricia Lockwood reads her story from the November 30 , 2020 , issue of the magazine .
Lockwood has published @ @ @ @ @ the memoir “ Priestdaddy , ” which came out in 2017 .
Her first novel @ @ @ @ @ Talking About This , ” from which this story is adapted , will come out @ @ @

Photograph by Grep Hoax
Patricia Lockwood reads her story from the November 30, 2020, issue of the magazine. Lockwood has published two collections of poetry and the memoir “Priestdaddy,” which came out in 2017. Her first novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” from which this story is adapted, will come out next year.