newyorker--2020-12-01--The Biggest Challenge Facing Joe Biden’s New Economic Team

Traditionally , Democratic Presidents have tended to appoint eminent figures from Capitol Hill or Wall Street to senior economic roles , along with some prominent macroeconomists .
The economic team that Joe Biden ’ s transition announced on Monday is more diverse , and it reflects the evolution of the Democratic Party .
That ’ s not to say there won ’ t be any people with ties to Wall Street .
Brian Deese , a former Obama aide who is set to head the National Economic Council , and Adewale ( Wally ) Adeyemo , the prospective Deputy Secretary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for BlackRock , the biggest asset manager in the country .
Both are key jobs .
But , if confirmed , Janet Yellen , the former chair of the Fed , will be Adeyemo ’ s boss and the first female Secretary of the Treasury .
Cecilia Rouse , a highly regarded economist at Princeton , would be the first African-American to lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers .
Neera Tanden , the president and C.E.O .
of the Center for American Progress , a liberal think tank , would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Management and Budget .
Ultimately , what matters most isn ’ t the background of Biden ’ s appointees but what policy measures they promote .
The new team consists largely of people who have advocated a vigorous response to the coronavirus pandemic and a longer-term emphasis on raising wages , reducing inequality , and fostering greener , more inclusive growth .
( Not coincidentally , these are all key elements of the “ Build Back Better ” platform that Biden laid out during the election campaign . )
In her four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to 2018 , Yellen stressed the importance of maintaining a tight labor market for raising the living standards of workers , particularly low-skilled ones .
Rouse , a labor economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama Administration , is an expert on education , and she is also the co-author of a famous paper that showed how blind orchestra auditions led to the hiring of more female musicians .
Her colleagues on the new Council include Jared Bernstein , a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the State of Working America , an essential annual guide to economic trends , including wages and inequality , and Heather Boushey , the head of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the author of “ Unbound , ” which examined how inequality holds back the economy .
• After the election , assaults on truth and the press continue .
• Lessons of failed power grabs , in America and overseas .
• Could banks bail us out of the climate crisis ?
Tanden , a former aide to Hillary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of time tangling with supporters of Bernie Sanders on Twitter .
In terms of policy , though , her views have moved with the center-left consensus .
Earlier this year , she published a think piece arguing that corporate governance should be reformed so that “ the mission of companies is to focus on workers and their communities , as well as shareholders ” —a position also advocated by Elizabeth Warren .
Deese , a Yale Law School graduate , worked at the White House throughout the Obama Administration .
He helped negotiate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entry into the 2015 Paris climate accord .
Reversing Donald Trump ’ s withdrawal of the United States from the agreement is something that Biden will be able to get done early in his Administration .
The great question hanging over his new economic team , for all its promise and expertise , is what kind of more ambitious aims it will be able to achieve , now that the G.O.P .
has won fifty seats in the new Senate and is favored to win at least one of the two runoff races @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political environment , advisers to Biden have been advocating other policies that aren ’ t hostage to congressional approval , such as taking steps to reduce prescription-drug prices and forcing federal contractors to pay a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour .
But the Biden economic team is also keenly aware that many of its policy proposals will likely have to go through , or around , Mitch McConnell , the Senate Majority Leader .
Even in advance of Biden taking office , some of the President-elect ’ s advisers are hoping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus spending bill—possibly as early as next week , when it could be attached to a continuing spending resolution that is needed to fund the rest of the government through the New Year .
Before Thanksgiving , Biden publicly called on Congress to “ come together and pass a Covid-relief package.
” In an interview with NPR , Bernstein emphasized the urgency of the situation .
“ Composition is important , ” he said .
“ Size is very important .
But speed is so essential right now.
” This warning came as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
growth would turn negative in the first quarter of next year .
The problem is that the two sides on Capitol Hill are still very far apart .
Earlier this year , the House Democrats passed a three-trillion-dollar Covid-relief bill , the HEROES Act .
In October , Senate Republicans tried and failed to pass a “ skinny ” bill worth five hundred billion dollars .
More recently , McConnell has argued that the encouraging news about forthcoming vaccines has reduced the need for a bigger package .
Biden and his team @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the House Speaker , and Chuck Schumer , the Democratic leader in the Senate .
But , with the virus spreading alarmingly , jobless claims rising , and the widespread availability of a vaccine at least several months away , they are quietly encouraging the Democratic leaders to come to terms with McConnell on a compromise deal that doesn ’ t satisfy all of their demands .
Such a deal might include extending unemployment benefits , the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses , and moratoriums on evictions for renters , and also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and municipalities .
Many independent experts agree that this type of action is essential to prevent another downward lurch in the economy and more human suffering .
“ We need at least one more large relief package to sustain the unemployed , small businesses , and state and local governments , ” Ernie Tedeschi , a former Treasury Department economist who works at the advisory firm Evercore-ISI , told me .
“ Any deal of a trillion dollars or more would be enough to sustain us until the second half of next year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faster the recovery will be.
” At about five per cent of the G.D.P.
, another trillion-dollar spending deal would be one of the biggest stimulus packages that the U.S. government has introduced outside of wartime .
Given the scale of the shock that Covid-19 represents , spending on this scale is entirely appropriate .
But getting such a package through the Senate would involve a compromise from McConnell , and so far there is no sign of him shifting .
After his well-documented efforts to sabotage the Obama Presidency , many Democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ If McConnell controls the Senate , he ’ s going to block the kind of relief package that we need , ” Jon Ossoff , the Democratic candidate in one of Georgia ’ s runoff elections , told the Washington Post ’ s Greg Sargent , on Monday .
“ And that means not just short-term , direct economic relief , but also the kind of infrastructure-jobs-clean energy program necessary to support long-term recovery.
” The Biden team is hoping that this analysis is too pessimistic .
In addition to getting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the lame-duck session , the incoming Administration needs the next Congress to pass a spending bill devoted to some longer-term priorities , such as infrastructure and an expansion of tax credits for working families with children .
But Biden ’ s advisers are under no illusions about the scale of the political challenge ahead .
If the Republicans win just one of the Georgia runoffs , the filibuster will definitely remain in effect , and the new President will need to get sixty votes to pass any major legislation .
In some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden could circumvent this problem by courting a few Republican senators and authorizing new spending programs through the budget-reconciliation process , which requires only fifty-one votes .
The Biden team is too experienced to take this possibility seriously .
Under the Senate rules , reconciliation requires a prior budget resolution , which would have to be authorized by McConnell , as the Majority Leader .
“ McConnell is the one who controls whether or not there are reconciliation bills that only need fifty-one votes , ” Tedeschi explained .
“ And it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a reconciliation bill come to the floor that wouldn ’ t have got a majority of Republican voters anyway.
” If McConnell doesn ’ t budge , which seems the most likely outcome , Democrats ’ only option will be to go around him and win over enough Republican senators to get sixty votes .
Tedeschi , for one , doesn ’ t think such an outcome is out of the question .
Many of Biden ’ s infrastructure proposals , such as weatherizing buildings , installing solar panels , and improving transport @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political districts all across the country , he pointed out .
“ While that may not necessarily be decisive to all Republican senators , it will go a long way toward warming them up to some sort of scaled-back infrastructure proposal from the Biden Administration , ” Tedeschi said .
“ It also helps that there are a lot of elements of the 2017 Republican tax cut that are expiring next year or the year after.
” Biden could propose making permanent some of the expiring provisions , which include several tax breaks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deductibility for interest payments and full expensing of capital investments .
“ It would have to be a quid pro quo , of course , ” Tedeschi added .
Cattle trading of this nature is far from what Biden had in mind last summer , when he laid out his economic program , which also included proposals to raise the national minimum wage to fifteen dollars , strengthen the bargaining position of workers , advance racial equity , add a new public option to Obamacare , and fund more research and development in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That was a different time , when Democrats could still hope of controlling both houses of Congress .
After the mixed results of the election , the political calculus has changed .
Now the goal of the incoming Administration is to achieve as much as it can and prevent McConnell from blocking progress .
Read More About the Presidential Transition • Donald Trump has survived impeachment , twenty-six sexual-misconduct accusations , and thousands of lawsuits .
His luck may well end now that Joe Biden is the next President .
• With @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the election , Republicans are looking to strategies that might remain even after rebuffs both at the polls and in court .
• With the Trump Presidency ending , we need to talk about how to prevent the moral injuries of the past four years from happening again .
• If 2020 has demonstrated anything , it is the need to rebalance the economy to benefit the working class .
There are many ways a Biden Administration can start .
• Trump is being forced to give up his attempt to overturn the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an alternative reality around himself will continue .
• Sign up for our daily newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists .

Traditionally, Democratic Presidents have tended to appoint eminent figures from Capitol Hill or Wall Street to senior economic roles, along with some prominent macroeconomists. The economic team that Joe Biden’s transition announced on Monday is more diverse, and it reflects the evolution of the Democratic Party. That’s not to say there won’t be any people with ties to Wall Street. Brian Deese, a former Obama aide who is set to head the National Economic Council, and Adewale (Wally) Adeyemo, the prospective Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, have both worked for BlackRock, the biggest asset manager in the country. Both are key jobs. But, if confirmed, Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Fed, will be Adeyemo’s boss and the first female Secretary of the Treasury. Cecilia Rouse, a highly regarded economist at Princeton, would be the first African-American to lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Neera Tanden, the president and C.E.O. of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, would be the first Indian-American head of the Office of Management and Budget.
Ultimately, what matters most isn’t the background of Biden’s appointees but what policy measures they promote. The new team consists largely of people who have advocated a vigorous response to the coronavirus pandemic and a longer-term emphasis on raising wages, reducing inequality, and fostering greener, more inclusive growth. (Not coincidentally, these are all key elements of the “Build Back Better” platform that Biden laid out during the election campaign.) In her four years running the Fed, from 2014 to 2018, Yellen stressed the importance of maintaining a tight labor market for raising the living standards of workers, particularly low-skilled ones. Rouse, a labor economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama Administration, is an expert on education, and she is also the co-author of a famous paper that showed how blind orchestra auditions led to the hiring of more female musicians. Her colleagues on the new Council include Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who has frequently co-authored editions of the State of Working America, an essential annual guide to economic trends, including wages and inequality, and Heather Boushey, the head of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the author of “Unbound,” which examined how inequality holds back the economy.
Editor’s Picks
Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, has spent a good deal of time tangling with supporters of Bernie Sanders on Twitter. In terms of policy, though, her views have moved with the center-left consensus. Earlier this year, she published a think piece arguing that corporate governance should be reformed so that “the mission of companies is to focus on workers and their communities, as well as shareholders”—a position also advocated by Elizabeth Warren. Deese, a Yale Law School graduate, worked at the White House throughout the Obama Administration. He helped negotiate budget deals with Republicans and the U.S. entry into the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Reversing Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the agreement is something that Biden will be able to get done early in his Administration. The great question hanging over his new economic team, for all its promise and expertise, is what kind of more ambitious aims it will be able to achieve, now that the G.O.P. has won fifty seats in the new Senate and is favored to win at least one of the two runoff races in Georgia. In this potentially constrictive political environment, advisers to Biden have been advocating other policies that aren’t hostage to congressional approval, such as taking steps to reduce prescription-drug prices and forcing federal contractors to pay a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour. But the Biden economic team is also keenly aware that many of its policy proposals will likely have to go through, or around, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader.
Even in advance of Biden taking office, some of the President-elect’s advisers are hoping that McConnell will agree to a new coronavirus spending bill—possibly as early as next week, when it could be attached to a continuing spending resolution that is needed to fund the rest of the government through the New Year. Before Thanksgiving, Biden publicly called on Congress to “come together and pass a Covid-relief package.” In an interview with NPR, Bernstein emphasized the urgency of the situation. “Composition is important,” he said. “Size is very important. But speed is so essential right now.” This warning came as economists at JPMorgan Chase predicted that G.D.P. growth would turn negative in the first quarter of next year.
The problem is that the two sides on Capitol Hill are still very far apart. Earlier this year, the House Democrats passed a three-trillion-dollar Covid-relief bill, the HEROES Act. In October, Senate Republicans tried and failed to pass a “skinny” bill worth five hundred billion dollars. More recently, McConnell has argued that the encouraging news about forthcoming vaccines has reduced the need for a bigger package. Biden and his team are wary of antagonizing Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate. But, with the virus spreading alarmingly, jobless claims rising, and the widespread availability of a vaccine at least several months away, they are quietly encouraging the Democratic leaders to come to terms with McConnell on a compromise deal that doesn’t satisfy all of their demands. Such a deal might include extending unemployment benefits, the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses, and moratoriums on evictions for renters, and also provide some more help for stricken states and municipalities.
Many independent experts agree that this type of action is essential to prevent another downward lurch in the economy and more human suffering. “We need at least one more large relief package to sustain the unemployed, small businesses, and state and local governments,” Ernie Tedeschi, a former Treasury Department economist who works at the advisory firm Evercore-ISI, told me. “Any deal of a trillion dollars or more would be enough to sustain us until the second half of next year. And the bigger the package the faster the recovery will be.”
At about five per cent of the G.D.P., another trillion-dollar spending deal would be one of the biggest stimulus packages that the U.S. government has introduced outside of wartime. Given the scale of the shock that Covid-19 represents, spending on this scale is entirely appropriate. But getting such a package through the Senate would involve a compromise from McConnell, and so far there is no sign of him shifting. After his well-documented efforts to sabotage the Obama Presidency, many Democrats are understandably wary of the Majority Leader. “If McConnell controls the Senate, he’s going to block the kind of relief package that we need,” Jon Ossoff, the Democratic candidate in one of Georgia’s runoff elections, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, on Monday. “And that means not just short-term, direct economic relief, but also the kind of infrastructure-jobs-clean energy program necessary to support long-term recovery.”
The Biden team is hoping that this analysis is too pessimistic. In addition to getting a Covid-relief bill passed before the end of the lame-duck session, the incoming Administration needs the next Congress to pass a spending bill devoted to some longer-term priorities, such as infrastructure and an expansion of tax credits for working families with children. But Biden’s advisers are under no illusions about the scale of the political challenge ahead. If the Republicans win just one of the Georgia runoffs, the filibuster will definitely remain in effect, and the new President will need to get sixty votes to pass any major legislation.
In some circles, there have been suggestions that Biden could circumvent this problem by courting a few Republican senators and authorizing new spending programs through the budget-reconciliation process, which requires only fifty-one votes. The Biden team is too experienced to take this possibility seriously. Under the Senate rules, reconciliation requires a prior budget resolution, which would have to be authorized by McConnell, as the Majority Leader. “McConnell is the one who controls whether or not there are reconciliation bills that only need fifty-one votes,” Tedeschi explained. “And it’s very unlikely that he would let a reconciliation bill come to the floor that wouldn’t have got a majority of Republican voters anyway.”


newyorker--2020-12-01--The Fatal Flaw of “The Queen’s Gambit”

The Fatal Flaw of “The Queen’s Gambit”

I picked up Walter Tevis ’ s novel “ The Queen ’ s Gambit , ” from 1983 , at Skylight Books , in Los Angeles , sometime around 2002 .
It was a staff pick , and the blurb on the blue index card taped underneath said something like “ sleeper gem by dude who wrote ‘ The Man Who Fell to Earth , ’ about an orphaned chess prodigy addicted to downers—read this now.
” On the cover , Michael Ondaatje , the author of “ The English Patient , ” said that he reread it “ every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of it.
” I read it in two days , and over the years I have reread it probably a dozen times .
From its first sentence ( “ Beth learned of her mother ’ s death from a woman with a clipboard ” ) to its last , it was my platonic ideal of a novel .
I loved its respect for the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line ( “ From the back row Beth put up her hand .
It was the first time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how this general efficiency made its richer emotional and physical details stand out , like brightly wrapped Christmas gifts set under a sparse tree .
“ Do I have to care about chess ?
” people would ask when I recommended the novel .
I promised them that anyone who has ever felt lost , rejected , or underestimated while nurturing a fierce , mute hope that something residing deep within them might somehow save their life would love this book .
Following its début in October , “ The Queen ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ became the streaming platform ’ s No .
1 show in sixty-three countries and its most-watched “ limited scripted series ” ever .
( The show also appears to be responsible for compounding an ongoing , pandemic-induced chess boom , as measured in online chess activity as well as sales of chess sets and accessories . )
I began watching the day it came out .
I felt a twinge of familiarity in the austere rows of metal beds in the Methuen Home—the orphanage where Beth lives after her mother ’ s sudden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home of her adoptive mother , Mrs. Wheatley , in suburban Lexington .
But I could not summon any similar spark of recognition for Beth herself .
As Beth ’ s chess career took off , I was interested in where it took her—drab gymnasiums , then grand Midwest hotels , then grander international hotels—but I did not care much what happened when she got there .
At the same time I was being given the gift of seeing this imagined world come sumptuously to life , it was also being taken away @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of loss was obvious : Anya Taylor-Joy is way too good-looking to play Beth Harmon .
A complaint such as this one , about the beautiful performers who take the place of our ordinary book characters , is common , even tedious .
The Web site TV Tropes has an entry devoted to Adaptational Attractiveness , wherein “ someone who was originally fat , plain , or even downright ugly is played by a much more conventionally attractive actor.
” ( One writer has helpfully mapped adaptational attractiveness onto a spectrum known as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s adaptation of Sally Rooney ’ s novel “ Normal People ” confused some fans who thought that Marianne , a bullied outcast in the book , was perhaps not most effectively played by Daisy Edgar-Jones , who probably spends her free time modelling .
I agreed with this criticism a hundred per cent , but I also sobbed through the whole series , every second of Marianne ’ s pain piercing my heart like a dagger carved from the finest ebony , polished to match the shine of Edgar-Jones ’ s eyes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ve had enough really hot friends to believe that their relationships are just as tragic and confusing as anyone else ’ s .
Actors Are Too Hot Hill is a silly place to die , yet the acclaim for “ The Queen ’ s Gambit ” series , which stars an actual former model , has stranded me there , unable to descend until I have said my piece .
Allow me to shout from my lone perch at its summit that Beth Harmon is not pretty , and there is no story @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she is .
We know that Beth is unattractive because it is written down .
It is one of the first things we find out about her , right after she arrives at Methuen .
“ You are the ugliest white girl ever .
Your nose is ugly and your face is ugly and your skin is like sandpaper .
You white trash cracker bitch , ” her bully and future friend Jolene declares .
Beth does not respond , “ knowing that it was true.
” Beth spends her girlhood in this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chess in the basement and , when she can ’ t , playing chess games in her mind .
When she can ’ t sleep or concentrate , she lies awake , tense , her stomach contracted , tasting “ vinegar in her mouth.
” Her homeliness seems , for a while , like destiny : she watches pretty girls get adopted out of Methuen as she remains there to grow up .
At twelve , she finally finds a home with Mrs. Wheatley , who is both an arguably bad parent and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She takes the shame of feeling plain into her new life , however : “ Sometimes when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls ’ room between classes , her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose , she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth.
” Tevis mentions Beth ’ s ugliness too often for readers to imagine that it is just some routine , awkward part of childhood that slips away @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s squeaky tones settling gradually into a mannish timbre , or because some nice girlfriend—she has none , after Jolene—takes her to Sephora .
Instead , Beth becomes reasonably attractive by learning to play chess and then excelling at it .
The first moment that Beth is able to regard her reflection without disgust comes right after she wins her third tournament game .
Some forty pages later , a chess player turned journalist named Townes tells Beth , “ You ’ ve even gotten good-looking.
” Toward the end of the book @ @ @ @ @ @ @ magazines , declares , “ You ’ ve lost your ugly.
” I ’ m not gathering these pieces of evidence to suggest that “ The Queen ’ s Gambit ” is a book about looks—it ’ s not like in “ Clueless ” when Alicia Silverstone yelps , “ Project !
” and we soon see dorky Brittany Murphy sporting a choker , hitting on guys .
Here is the book ’ s most explicit mention of Beth ’ s physical confidence as an adult : “ Beth was wearing a dark-green @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and sleeves .
She had slept soundly the night before .
She was ready for him.
” Chess helps her to inhabit her body comfortably , and this allows her to play better chess .
It ’ s the playing-better-chess part of the deal that really matters to her .
Beth ’ s transformation—not into a swan , exactly , but a better-looking duckling—doesn ’ t need to be mimicked exactly for the adaptation to work .
The problem has to do with the fundamentals of storytelling , in the tradition of Syd @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Cat !
” —the character has to want something .
Book Beth ’ s want is as thick as the cheap wool sweaters she wears as a child while yearning for cashmere , as thick as the “ cold , pale butter ” she spreads on restaurant rolls and eats as an adopted teen , after a childhood of thin , institutional French dressing .
Her addiction is a great , yawning want , at first for the warmth and safety that those green downers give her and , as an adult @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her if she can manage to ditch them .
Of course , her greatest want , the one that thrums on almost every page , is to play chess—and then to be the best at chess .
Early on , having been told that she is “ phenomenal ” at the game , she looks up the word .
“ The dictionary said : ‘ extraordinary ; outstanding ; remarkable.
’ She repeated these words silently to herself now , ‘ extraordinary ; outstanding ; remarkable.
’ They became a tune in her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Beth ’ s mind , she is still at the orphanage ; the tune is aspirational .
Anya Taylor-Joy , however , is singing this tune from the moment we meet her—not as a secret wish that chess can save her from poverty , ugliness , and obscurity , but as a boast .
Even as an orphan , in her sweet white nightgown , elbow-checking Jolene , smiling with sexy snideness , there ’ s no question that Netflix Beth will land on her feet .
She walks into every room @ @ @ @ @ @ @ move is tucking her chin into her chest , looking up at people with widened eyes—a disdainful miming of submission .
The scene in Tevis ’ s novel in which Beth goes to her first chess championship , having no idea how to conduct herself or what is expected of her , is re-created almost line for line in the series .
“ Do you have a clock ?
” the boy checking in players asks , and Beth says no .
He asks , “ What ’ s your rating ?
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t have a rating.
” Tevis ’ s book is uninflected in some ways , inviting the reader ’ s projections , but we have enough information to make some good guesses as to how unpretty , anxious Beth might deliver these lines .
Taylor-Joy ’ s tone , though , is one of impatient self-regard , in this moment and most others .
She doesn ’ t need chess to survive .
She ’ s a confident girl who finds everyone annoying and wears great clothes and flies off to beautiful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If she didn ’ t play chess and weren ’ t such a bitch , it would be “ Emily in Paris.
” The series actually begins in Paris , with Beth waking up drunk in a hotel room .
If you novelized the series , rather than the other way around , it would begin something like this : “ On awakening , Beth Harmon crawled out of a hundred-and-ten-gallon porcelain bathtub and , wet clothes clinging to her perfect form , slipped instantly on the Italian tile floor.
” I might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have waited in vain for any indication that Beth needed someone to bear witness to her triumph .
Drama happens , she wins , she loses , she takes pills , she stops taking them , she sleeps with this guy and then that one , someone dies—but there are no stakes .
Watching the show , I kept thinking , This might be an interesting , dicey , and potentially moving situation for an orphaned drug addict obsessed with chess—and then Taylor-Joy would pout a little or balance her face seductively on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eyes as lizards employ neck frills .
There ’ s not a single moment when I thought , Please let this work out ; please let this go well ; please let Beth thrive .
I don ’ t mean to suggest that Taylor-Joy is a bad actress .
But she exudes mattering .
The core of “ The Queen ’ s Gambit ” —a young woman struggling to matter at all becomes a great chess player—might be impossible for her to play .
The series copies virtually everything from the book aside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end , Beth sits down in a Moscow park across from an old Russian man and a chessboard .
Instead of Tevis ’ s line , “ Would you like to play chess ?
” , Beth issues a command : “ Let ’ s play.
” Why ask when you already know the answer ?

I picked up Walter Tevis’s novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” from 1983, at Skylight Books, in Los Angeles, sometime around 2002. It was a staff pick, and the blurb on the blue index card taped underneath said something like “sleeper gem by dude who wrote ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth,’ about an orphaned chess prodigy addicted to downers—read this now.” On the cover, Michael Ondaatje, the author of “The English Patient,” said that he reread it “every few years—for the pure pleasure and skill of it.” I read it in two days, and over the years I have reread it probably a dozen times. From its first sentence (“Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard”) to its last, it was my platonic ideal of a novel. I loved its respect for the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (“From the back row Beth put up her hand. It was the first time she had done this”) and how this general efficiency made its richer emotional and physical details stand out, like brightly wrapped Christmas gifts set under a sparse tree. “Do I have to care about chess?” people would ask when I recommended the novel. I promised them that anyone who has ever felt lost, rejected, or underestimated while nurturing a fierce, mute hope that something residing deep within them might somehow save their life would love this book.
Following its début in October, “The Queen’s Gambit,” according to Netflix, became the streaming platform’s No. 1 show in sixty-three countries and its most-watched “limited scripted series” ever. (The show also appears to be responsible for compounding an ongoing, pandemic-induced chess boom, as measured in online chess activity as well as sales of chess sets and accessories.) I began watching the day it came out. I felt a twinge of familiarity in the austere rows of metal beds in the Methuen Home—the orphanage where Beth lives after her mother’s sudden death—and in the matchy-matchy décor at the home of her adoptive mother, Mrs. Wheatley, in suburban Lexington. But I could not summon any similar spark of recognition for Beth herself. As Beth’s chess career took off, I was interested in where it took her—drab gymnasiums, then grand Midwest hotels, then grander international hotels—but I did not care much what happened when she got there. At the same time I was being given the gift of seeing this imagined world come sumptuously to life, it was also being taken away, and the reason for the sense of loss was obvious: Anya Taylor-Joy is way too good-looking to play Beth Harmon.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
A complaint such as this one, about the beautiful performers who take the place of our ordinary book characters, is common, even tedious. The Web site TV Tropes has an entry devoted to Adaptational Attractiveness, wherein “someone who was originally fat, plain, or even downright ugly is played by a much more conventionally attractive actor.” (One writer has helpfully mapped adaptational attractiveness onto a spectrum known as the Fassbender Scale.) Hulu’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People” confused some fans who thought that Marianne, a bullied outcast in the book, was perhaps not most effectively played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who probably spends her free time modelling. I agreed with this criticism a hundred per cent, but I also sobbed through the whole series, every second of Marianne’s pain piercing my heart like a dagger carved from the finest ebony, polished to match the shine of Edgar-Jones’s eyes and hair. I guess I’ve had enough really hot friends to believe that their relationships are just as tragic and confusing as anyone else’s.
Actors Are Too Hot Hill is a silly place to die, yet the acclaim for “The Queen’s Gambit” series, which stars an actual former model, has stranded me there, unable to descend until I have said my piece. Allow me to shout from my lone perch at its summit that Beth Harmon is not pretty, and there is no story about her that can be told if she is.
We know that Beth is unattractive because it is written down. It is one of the first things we find out about her, right after she arrives at Methuen. “You are the ugliest white girl ever. Your nose is ugly and your face is ugly and your skin is like sandpaper. You white trash cracker bitch,” her bully and future friend Jolene declares. Beth does not respond, “knowing that it was true.” Beth spends her girlhood in this lonely place, her only happiness learning chess in the basement and, when she can’t, playing chess games in her mind. When she can’t sleep or concentrate, she lies awake, tense, her stomach contracted, tasting “vinegar in her mouth.” Her homeliness seems, for a while, like destiny: she watches pretty girls get adopted out of Methuen as she remains there to grow up. At twelve, she finally finds a home with Mrs. Wheatley, who is both an arguably bad parent and just what independent, chilly Beth needs. She takes the shame of feeling plain into her new life, however: “Sometimes when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls’ room between classes, her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth.”
Tevis mentions Beth’s ugliness too often for readers to imagine that it is just some routine, awkward part of childhood that slips away with puberty, like a boy’s squeaky tones settling gradually into a mannish timbre, or because some nice girlfriend—she has none, after Jolene—takes her to Sephora. Instead, Beth becomes reasonably attractive by learning to play chess and then excelling at it. The first moment that Beth is able to regard her reflection without disgust comes right after she wins her third tournament game. Some forty pages later, a chess player turned journalist named Townes tells Beth, “You’ve even gotten good-looking.” Toward the end of the book, Jolene herself, seeing Beth in magazines, declares, “You’ve lost your ugly.”
I’m not gathering these pieces of evidence to suggest that “The Queen’s Gambit” is a book about looks—it’s not like in “Clueless” when Alicia Silverstone yelps, “Project!” and we soon see dorky Brittany Murphy sporting a choker, hitting on guys. Here is the book’s most explicit mention of Beth’s physical confidence as an adult: “Beth was wearing a dark-green dress with white piping at the throat and sleeves. She had slept soundly the night before. She was ready for him.” Chess helps her to inhabit her body comfortably, and this allows her to play better chess. It’s the playing-better-chess part of the deal that really matters to her.
Beth’s transformation—not into a swan, exactly, but a better-looking duckling—doesn’t need to be mimicked exactly for the adaptation to work. The problem has to do with the fundamentals of storytelling, in the tradition of Syd Field or Joseph Campbell or “Save the Cat!”—the character has to want something. Book Beth’s want is as thick as the cheap wool sweaters she wears as a child while yearning for cashmere, as thick as the “cold, pale butter” she spreads on restaurant rolls and eats as an adopted teen, after a childhood of thin, institutional French dressing. Her addiction is a great, yawning want, at first for the warmth and safety that those green downers give her and, as an adult, for the freedom sobriety will give her if she can manage to ditch them. Of course, her greatest want, the one that thrums on almost every page, is to play chess—and then to be the best at chess. Early on, having been told that she is “phenomenal” at the game, she looks up the word. “The dictionary said: ‘extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.’ She repeated these words silently to herself now, ‘extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.’ They became a tune in her mind.”
When this tune starts playing in Beth’s mind, she is still at the orphanage; the tune is aspirational. Anya Taylor-Joy, however, is singing this tune from the moment we meet her—not as a secret wish that chess can save her from poverty, ugliness, and obscurity, but as a boast. Even as an orphan, in her sweet white nightgown, elbow-checking Jolene, smiling with sexy snideness, there’s no question that Netflix Beth will land on her feet. She walks into every room like she owns it. One signature move is tucking her chin into her chest, looking up at people with widened eyes—a disdainful miming of submission.
The scene in Tevis’s novel in which Beth goes to her first chess championship, having no idea how to conduct herself or what is expected of her, is re-created almost line for line in the series. “Do you have a clock?” the boy checking in players asks, and Beth says no. He asks, “What’s your rating?” and Beth replies, “I don’t have a rating.” Tevis’s book is uninflected in some ways, inviting the reader’s projections, but we have enough information to make some good guesses as to how unpretty, anxious Beth might deliver these lines. Taylor-Joy’s tone, though, is one of impatient self-regard, in this moment and most others. She doesn’t need chess to survive. She’s a confident girl who finds everyone annoying and wears great clothes and flies off to beautiful places to be weird around guys. If she didn’t play chess and weren’t such a bitch, it would be “Emily in Paris.”
The series actually begins in Paris, with Beth waking up drunk in a hotel room. If you novelized the series, rather than the other way around, it would begin something like this: “On awakening, Beth Harmon crawled out of a hundred-and-ten-gallon porcelain bathtub and, wet clothes clinging to her perfect form, slipped instantly on the Italian tile floor.” I might have kept reading, but I would have waited in vain for any indication that Beth needed someone to bear witness to her triumph. Drama happens, she wins, she loses, she takes pills, she stops taking them, she sleeps with this guy and then that one, someone dies—but there are no stakes. Watching the show, I kept thinking, This might be an interesting, dicey, and potentially moving situation for an orphaned drug addict obsessed with chess—and then Taylor-Joy would pout a little or balance her face seductively on her hands, or employ those enormous eyes as lizards employ neck frills. There’s not a single moment when I thought, Please let this work out; please let this go well; please let Beth thrive.
I don’t mean to suggest that Taylor-Joy is a bad actress. But she exudes mattering. The core of “The Queen’s Gambit”—a young woman struggling to matter at all becomes a great chess player—might be impossible for her to play. The series copies virtually everything from the book aside from its central tension. At the end, Beth sits down in a Moscow park across from an old Russian man and a chessboard. Instead of Tevis’s line, “Would you like to play chess?,” Beth issues a command: “Let’s play.” Why ask when you already know the answer?


newyorker--2020-12-01--Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, December 1st

Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, December 1st

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newyorker--2020-12-02--Ask Kim Kierkegaardashian: In Search of Lost Before-Times Selfies

Ask Kim Kierkegaardashian is an advice column by a mashup of the nineteenth-century existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the reality star and fashion maven Kim Kardashian West .
Are you suffering an existential crisis ?
Vexed about what to wear ?
Send your questions to kimkierkegaard1 @ gmail.com ( or address them to @ kimkierkegaard on Twitter ) .
Questions may be edited for clarity and length .
I recently lost all my photos from the past two years or so .
I feel silly because this shouldn ’ t happen in 2020 .
I ’ ve tried my best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and gratitude .
I recognize the privilege that is embedded in this and tell myself that , with all of the calamities in the world , my problem barely registers .
And yet , I can ’ t help but feel a little sorrow every now and then , and I think about the loss often .
Perhaps it would not have hit so hard if it hadn ’ t occurred when what we now refer to as the “ Before Times ” also seem lost .
I used photos as a visual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as my coping mechanism early in the pandemic , when nostalgia set in .
It ’ s not the photos of milestones that I miss so much as the photos of quiet moments ( a mirror selfie or two ) , a moment here and there when I felt glamorous and beautiful .
I ’ m not sure why , knowing how much I valued them , that I didn ’ t take better care of them .
Perhaps you could offer some perspective ?
Unfathomable loss is one of the hottest styles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re on trend .
But it ’ s a hard look to pull off .
Whether it ’ s two years of photos , those final five pounds , or your faith in an orderly universe , the art of losing is very hard to master .
Even I haven ’ t figured it out .
For years , a video crew documented my every move .
I wrote a book to memorialize my D.M.s and tweets , so that one day my writings could be closely studied .
And my Instagram @ @ @ @ @ @ @ despair and all the looks I ’ m desperate to hold onto .
( Incidentally , I love duck lips for selfies , because they accentuate my lips and cheekbones and because , like ducks , we have wings with which to soar yet are content to waddle . )
But in a sense , it ’ s all for nothing .
Loss and change are bouncers who toss you out of the club of life come daybreak , regardless of how famous you are .
You can ’ t even bring your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pain of loss—even a loss as technologically contingent and quotidian as an erased phone—is that it gives us a hint of the final hard-drive crash in store for us all .
However , that which makes it painful also makes it useful .
The sting of loss forces us to confront how tied we have become to the merely temporal and gives us a chance to recalibrate that attachment .
Everything you own and everything you love is like a Harry Winston diamond-cluster necklace—strictly on loan for your brief walk down life ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been lost than can ever be accounted for , from the Library of Alexandria to the innocence of youth .
Nothing can change that—not even re-creating your childhood home and every car your parents owned when you were a kid , complete with the same vanity license plates , and arranging the cars in the same order in the driveway as they were parked when you were little .
The past is still irrecoverably lost .
The “ Before Times ” have gone the way of flip phones and skinny jeans .
Loss @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , not bugs , as our Silicon Valley overlords might put it , the same overlords who coaxed us to memorialize our every living moment on cell-phone cameras in the first place .
Hard drives inevitably crash , people inevitably die , and I inevitably can ’ t remember where I parked my Mercedes-Maybach sedan , painted matte Cashmere White , and end up having to buy a new one .
So try to separate the loss of your photos from the self-inflicted despair that you feel as a result of it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ two dumbbells ?
A philosophy student was working out with ten-pound dumbbells to get Michelle Obama arms for tank-top season .
The student accidentally dropped one of those weights on her toe and cried out in pain .
Then she took the second dumbbell , flung it on the same toe deliberately , and collapsed in screaming agony .
The first dropped dumbbell is the initial loss of your photos .
The second , intentionally flung weight—more painful than the first—is the self-inflicted pain of dwelling on the loss .
Stop hurling that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get back to doing what your photographs captured you doing in the first place—savoring the moments of life .
Pose for new selfies , instead of rueing the selfies you ’ ve lost .
Consider how your photographs have not disappeared , per se , but been transformed into memories , into a letter to an advice column , into grist for the mill of understanding existence—like a beloved pair of jeans reworked into patches of a quilt .
Ponder the innumerable works of art that have been inspired by losses great and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you take now will be richer for being infused with the knowledge that they may not last forever—they will one day return to electronic dust , to that mysterious , impenetrable cloud to which all things get uploaded .
Now form your duck lips , and click .

Ask Kim Kierkegaardashian is an advice column by a mashup of the nineteenth-century existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the reality star and fashion maven Kim Kardashian West. Are you suffering an existential crisis? Vexed about what to wear? Send your questions to kimkierkegaard1@gmail.com (or address them to @kimkierkegaard on Twitter). Questions may be edited for clarity and length.
Dear Kim Kierkegaardashian,
I recently lost all my photos from the past two years or so. I feel silly because this shouldn’t happen in 2020.
I’ve tried my best to move beyond sadness by practicing mindfulness and gratitude. I recognize the privilege that is embedded in this and tell myself that, with all of the calamities in the world, my problem barely registers. And yet, I can’t help but feel a little sorrow every now and then, and I think about the loss often. Perhaps it would not have hit so hard if it hadn’t occurred when what we now refer to as the “Before Times” also seem lost.
I used photos as a visual diary, and looking through them served as my coping mechanism early in the pandemic, when nostalgia set in. It’s not the photos of milestones that I miss so much as the photos of quiet moments (a mirror selfie or two), a moment here and there when I felt glamorous and beautiful. I’m not sure why, knowing how much I valued them, that I didn’t take better care of them.
Perhaps you could offer some perspective?
Signed,
Paradise Lost
Dear Paradise Lost,
Unfathomable loss is one of the hottest styles of 2020, so at least you’re on trend. But it’s a hard look to pull off. Whether it’s two years of photos, those final five pounds, or your faith in an orderly universe, the art of losing is very hard to master.
Even I haven’t figured it out. For years, a video crew documented my every move. I wrote a book to memorialize my D.M.s and tweets, so that one day my writings could be closely studied. And my Instagram is full of selfies documenting my glamorous despair and all the looks I’m desperate to hold onto. (Incidentally, I love duck lips for selfies, because they accentuate my lips and cheekbones and because, like ducks, we have wings with which to soar yet are content to waddle.)
But in a sense, it’s all for nothing. Loss and change are bouncers who toss you out of the club of life come daybreak, regardless of how famous you are. You can’t even bring your memories with you. Part of the pain of loss—even a loss as technologically contingent and quotidian as an erased phone—is that it gives us a hint of the final hard-drive crash in store for us all.
However, that which makes it painful also makes it useful. The sting of loss forces us to confront how tied we have become to the merely temporal and gives us a chance to recalibrate that attachment. Everything you own and everything you love is like a Harry Winston diamond-cluster necklace—strictly on loan for your brief walk down life’s red carpet. More things have been lost than can ever be accounted for, from the Library of Alexandria to the innocence of youth. Nothing can change that—not even re-creating your childhood home and every car your parents owned when you were a kid, complete with the same vanity license plates, and arranging the cars in the same order in the driveway as they were parked when you were little. The past is still irrecoverably lost. The “Before Times” have gone the way of flip phones and skinny jeans.
Loss and change are features of our existence—features, not bugs, as our Silicon Valley overlords might put it, the same overlords who coaxed us to memorialize our every living moment on cell-phone cameras in the first place. Hard drives inevitably crash, people inevitably die, and I inevitably can’t remember where I parked my Mercedes-Maybach sedan, painted matte Cashmere White, and end up having to buy a new one.
So try to separate the loss of your photos from the self-inflicted despair that you feel as a result of it. Have you heard the parable of the two dumbbells? A philosophy student was working out with ten-pound dumbbells to get Michelle Obama arms for tank-top season. The student accidentally dropped one of those weights on her toe and cried out in pain. Then she took the second dumbbell, flung it on the same toe deliberately, and collapsed in screaming agony.
The first dropped dumbbell is the initial loss of your photos. The second, intentionally flung weight—more painful than the first—is the self-inflicted pain of dwelling on the loss.
Stop hurling that dumbbell at your toe, and instead get back to doing what your photographs captured you doing in the first place—savoring the moments of life. Pose for new selfies, instead of rueing the selfies you’ve lost. Consider how your photographs have not disappeared, per se, but been transformed into memories, into a letter to an advice column, into grist for the mill of understanding existence—like a beloved pair of jeans reworked into patches of a quilt. Ponder the innumerable works of art that have been inspired by losses great and small. Think of how the photographs you take now will be richer for being infused with the knowledge that they may not last forever—they will one day return to electronic dust, to that mysterious, impenetrable cloud to which all things get uploaded.
Now form your duck lips, and click.
(And then, you know, back up your hard drive.)
XOXO
Kim Kierkegaardashian


newyorker--2020-12-02--The Best Movies of 2020

The Best Movies of 2020

Since March , the year in cinema has been defined by a near-total absence of significant theatrical releases—first , because theatres across the country were shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic and , subsequently , because even after they reopened people largely stayed away .
The new 007 film and the new Wes Anderson film , among dozens of others , were bumped to next year ’ s schedule ; “ Soul ” and “ Wonder Woman 1984 ” are being released on streaming sites rather than in theatres ; the Cannes Film Festival was cancelled , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ York Film Festival , were held online .
In spite of this , 2020 has been , against the odds , a wonderful year for new movies .
The absence of tentpole-type films—superhero spectacles , familiar franchises , star vehicles—had the welcome effect of thrusting independent films to the foreground .
With “ virtual cinema ” releases , art-house venues such as Film Forum and Film at Lincoln Center have stepped up to become , in effect , distributors ; streaming behemoths , including Netflix , Amazon , and the newcomer HBO Max @ @ @ @ @ @ @ houses ; and less prominent sites , digital versions of film festivals , and online self-distribution have taken the place of limited theatrical releases .
Nevertheless , I had the sense , through much of the year , that even the best new independent films were being met with a muted response , stemming in part from ( as I wrote about a month ago ) a lack of media buzz but also , relatedly , from a collective sense of numbness in the face of the pandemic ’ s collective and inequitably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to it .
The reality is that there isn ’ t a movie on the list of thirty-six below that has made a scintilla of difference in the nation ’ s crises this year , even if there are some great ones that address major political matters directly and movingly .
It ’ s hardly the filmmakers ’ fault .
There ’ s no reason to expect movies to make a practical difference in electoral politics ( despite Michael Moore ’ s longstanding efforts ) .
But , at a time of emergency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans and American political institutions has been in question , the impotence of movies to make a difference is an inescapable aspect of watching and thinking about cinema .
Considering the changed state of movies in the face of the pandemic is impossible , and immoral , without also considering the governmental failures—rooted in indifference , incompetence , malevolence , and greed—that have made the pandemic an ongoing medical and social catastrophe .
This year has served as a terrible reminder that there ’ s no such thing as normalcy—for many individuals and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a permanent state of affairs , and what ’ s normal , alas , is the systemic failure to recognize and respond to it .
Yet movies , generally speaking , aren ’ t up to the demands of depicting extraordinary events , whether they are the extremes of seemingly private life ( violence , death , sex ) or the enormities of politics and abuses of power .
The movie business as a whole—both Hollywood and independent—internalizes and reflects norms .
It emphasizes unity over candor , a good story over what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stories to fit arcs rather than creating forms to accommodate realities .
It fails to dramatize the connections between private life and the political situation , inner life and public power .
Because of generalized , ingrained , and internalized guardrails against the kind of imaginative freedom required to do so , filmmakers tend to be disinclined to break a dramatic framework in order to say what ’ s on their minds .
As a result , even some movies of progressive intent contribute to the drone of media conventions , and to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fatally undermine their substance .
In a time of crisis , form appears frivolous , style is suspect , and beauty is undervalued—mistakenly .
( Some of this year ’ s best films overtly confront this conflict . )
The inner truth of experience and the authenticity of emotion are , in and of themselves , cleansing to a defiled mediasphere .
The best of modern , post-classical filmmaking has always been an act of resistance , whether or not those films ’ subject matter is expressly political .
The fundamental politics of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the creation of new possibilities of expression—most significantly , the expression and inclusion of experiences and ideas otherwise kept out of movies , whether owing to intentional suppression or falsely innocent conventions of storytelling .
Progress in the arts , like progress in politics , isn ’ t linear ; it ’ s dialectical , in multiple dimensions , and involves unforeseeable responses to unforeseeable events , including sudden and dramatic eruptions of creative originality and visionary imagination .
At its best , filmmaking ( like film criticism ) points not at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ m anticipating a peaceful transition of political power at the beginning of next year , and also looking ahead to as yet unfathomable varieties of cinematic revolution to come .
A note on my list : I ’ ve counted as a 2020 release any new film that was made available online for any length of time this year , including those shown in online versions of festivals and special series .
I didn ’ t , however , include some notable ones that were available online but also have upcoming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year , such as Matías Piñeiro ’ s “ Isabella ” and Jia Zhangke ’ s “ Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue , ” both of which would have figured high on the list .
So would several films that came out this year but have been sitting in the vaults for some time , including “ Hill of Freedom ” ( 2014 , Hong Sang-soo ) , “ And When I Die , I Won ’ t Stay Dead ” ( 2015 , Billy Woodberry ) , and “ Jayhawkers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Also , Steve McQueen ’ s series “ Small Axe ” isn ’ t , as some have maintained , a TV series ; it ’ s a set of five feature films that he made in a short period of time—that ’ s quite an achievement in itself , which is rendered all the more imposing by the great artistic merit of them all .
All five are , separately , among my best films of the year .
Miranda July ’ s exuberant yet terrifying drama , about a patriarchal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s spirit of resistance and liberation , is realized with an exhilarating imaginative freedom .
Dramatizing the inseparable link between the battle for justice and the battle for historical truth , Spike Lee ’ s film follows a group of Black veterans of the Vietnam War who head back to Vietnam with motives as mixed now as they were then .
The Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu , who ’ s obsessed with the political implications of language , turns a classic dirty-cop thriller into an epistemological mosaic that ’ s centered on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ instead of speech—and on how it ’ s used to avoid government surveillance .
When the documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson learned that her elderly father , Richard , a psychiatrist , was exhibiting symptoms of dementia , she invited him to live with her and filmed their new shared adventure .
The result , which includes staged tragicomic sequences feigning Richard ’ s death and afterlife , plus the behind-the-scenes story of producing them , is a metafictional exploration of the metaphysical .
In Rebecca Zlotowski ’ s daringly subjective drama , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of her future is unexpectedly visited by her twenty-two-year-old cousin from Paris , a young woman who lives the fast life and draws her into it ; the girl ’ s ensuing whirl of reckless behavior proves radically and surprisingly transformative .
Sidney Flanigan plays a seventeen-year-old high-school student in rural Pennsylvania who , unable to get an abortion in that state without parental consent , travels to New York for the procedure .
The writer and director , Eliza Hittman , emphasizes the bureaucratic obstacles and administrative infrastructure abortion involves—and the inseparable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Sofia Coppola ’ s comedic drama , about an artist who confronts the gale-force personality of her worldly , suave father , is a bitterly ironic challenge to the venerable ideal of male Hollywood cool .
The second film in Steve McQueen ’ s “ Small Axe ” cycle is a bracingly original musical centered on a house party by and for Black Londoners of West Indian descent , where joy and expectation meet romance and danger .
McQueen , working with the cinematographer Shabier Kirchner , develops a boldly original style @ @ @ @ @ @ @

Since March, the year in cinema has been defined by a near-total absence of significant theatrical releases—first, because theatres across the country were shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic and, subsequently, because even after they reopened people largely stayed away. The new 007 film and the new Wes Anderson film, among dozens of others, were bumped to next year’s schedule; “Soul” and “Wonder Woman 1984” are being released on streaming sites rather than in theatres; the Cannes Film Festival was cancelled, and many others, such as the New York Film Festival, were held online. In spite of this, 2020 has been, against the odds, a wonderful year for new movies. The absence of tentpole-type films—superhero spectacles, familiar franchises, star vehicles—had the welcome effect of thrusting independent films to the foreground. With “virtual cinema” releases, art-house venues such as Film Forum and Film at Lincoln Center have stepped up to become, in effect, distributors; streaming behemoths, including Netflix, Amazon, and the newcomer HBO Max, are playing the part of art houses; and less prominent sites, digital versions of film festivals, and online self-distribution have taken the place of limited theatrical releases. Nevertheless, I had the sense, through much of the year, that even the best new independent films were being met with a muted response, stemming in part from (as I wrote about a month ago) a lack of media buzz but also, relatedly, from a collective sense of numbness in the face of the pandemic’s collective and inequitably borne tragedy and the disastrous political response to it.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
The reality is that there isn’t a movie on the list of thirty-six below that has made a scintilla of difference in the nation’s crises this year, even if there are some great ones that address major political matters directly and movingly. It’s hardly the filmmakers’ fault. There’s no reason to expect movies to make a practical difference in electoral politics (despite Michael Moore’s longstanding efforts). But, at a time of emergency, in which the very survival of Americans and American political institutions has been in question, the impotence of movies to make a difference is an inescapable aspect of watching and thinking about cinema. Considering the changed state of movies in the face of the pandemic is impossible, and immoral, without also considering the governmental failures—rooted in indifference, incompetence, malevolence, and greed—that have made the pandemic an ongoing medical and social catastrophe.
This year has served as a terrible reminder that there’s no such thing as normalcy—for many individuals and for society at large, crisis is a permanent state of affairs, and what’s normal, alas, is the systemic failure to recognize and respond to it. Yet movies, generally speaking, aren’t up to the demands of depicting extraordinary events, whether they are the extremes of seemingly private life (violence, death, sex) or the enormities of politics and abuses of power. The movie business as a whole—both Hollywood and independent—internalizes and reflects norms. It emphasizes unity over candor, a good story over what’s really happening; it shapes stories to fit arcs rather than creating forms to accommodate realities. It fails to dramatize the connections between private life and the political situation, inner life and public power. Because of generalized, ingrained, and internalized guardrails against the kind of imaginative freedom required to do so, filmmakers tend to be disinclined to break a dramatic framework in order to say what’s on their minds. As a result, even some movies of progressive intent contribute to the drone of media conventions, and to their distortions; their tone and form fatally undermine their substance.
In a time of crisis, form appears frivolous, style is suspect, and beauty is undervalued—mistakenly. (Some of this year’s best films overtly confront this conflict.) The inner truth of experience and the authenticity of emotion are, in and of themselves, cleansing to a defiled mediasphere. The best of modern, post-classical filmmaking has always been an act of resistance, whether or not those films’ subject matter is expressly political. The fundamental politics of movies is the expansion of cinematic form, the creation of new possibilities of expression—most significantly, the expression and inclusion of experiences and ideas otherwise kept out of movies, whether owing to intentional suppression or falsely innocent conventions of storytelling. Progress in the arts, like progress in politics, isn’t linear; it’s dialectical, in multiple dimensions, and involves unforeseeable responses to unforeseeable events, including sudden and dramatic eruptions of creative originality and visionary imagination. At its best, filmmaking (like film criticism) points not at the present but toward the future. I’m anticipating a peaceful transition of political power at the beginning of next year, and also looking ahead to as yet unfathomable varieties of cinematic revolution to come.
A note on my list: I’ve counted as a 2020 release any new film that was made available online for any length of time this year, including those shown in online versions of festivals and special series. I didn’t, however, include some notable ones that were available online but also have upcoming releases by active distributors planned for next year, such as Matías Piñeiro’s “Isabella” and Jia Zhangke’s “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue,” both of which would have figured high on the list. So would several films that came out this year but have been sitting in the vaults for some time, including “Hill of Freedom” (2014, Hong Sang-soo), “And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead” (2015, Billy Woodberry), and “Jayhawkers” (2014, Kevin Willmott). Also, Steve McQueen’s series “Small Axe” isn’t, as some have maintained, a TV series; it’s a set of five feature films that he made in a short period of time—that’s quite an achievement in itself, which is rendered all the more imposing by the great artistic merit of them all. All five are, separately, among my best films of the year.
1. “Kajillionaire”
Photograph by Matt Kennedy / Focus Features
Miranda July’s exuberant yet terrifying drama, about a patriarchal family of scammers and a young woman’s spirit of resistance and liberation, is realized with an exhilarating imaginative freedom.
2. “Da 5 Bloods”
Dramatizing the inseparable link between the battle for justice and the battle for historical truth, Spike Lee’s film follows a group of Black veterans of the Vietnam War who head back to Vietnam with motives as mixed now as they were then.
3. “The Whistlers”
The Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, who’s obsessed with the political implications of language, turns a classic dirty-cop thriller into an epistemological mosaic that’s centered on a Canary Islands language which uses whistling instead of speech—and on how it’s used to avoid government surveillance.
4. “Dick Johnson Is Dead”
Photograph courtesy Netflix
When the documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson learned that her elderly father, Richard, a psychiatrist, was exhibiting symptoms of dementia, she invited him to live with her and filmed their new shared adventure. The result, which includes staged tragicomic sequences feigning Richard’s death and afterlife, plus the behind-the-scenes story of producing them, is a metafictional exploration of the metaphysical.
5. “An Easy Girl”
In Rebecca Zlotowski’s daringly subjective drama, a sixteen-year-old girl living in Cannes and unsure of her future is unexpectedly visited by her twenty-two-year-old cousin from Paris, a young woman who lives the fast life and draws her into it; the girl’s ensuing whirl of reckless behavior proves radically and surprisingly transformative.
6. “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”
Sidney Flanigan plays a seventeen-year-old high-school student in rural Pennsylvania who, unable to get an abortion in that state without parental consent, travels to New York for the procedure. The writer and director, Eliza Hittman, emphasizes the bureaucratic obstacles and administrative infrastructure abortion involves—and the inseparable connection of private life and public policy.
7. “On the Rocks”


newyorker--2020-12-03--The Climate Debt the U.S. Owes the World

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It goes without saying that Costa and her daughters had done nothing to cause the increase in global temperature that , in turn , allowed massive late-season hurricanes to form in their corner of the Atlantic .
And it goes without saying that Honduras will now have an even harder time paying for a changed energy system to help it convert to clean energy , as its commitments set in the Paris climate accord envision—its cobbled-together reconstruction plan is unsurprisingly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that the storms destroyed .
Such intuitions about blame and responsibility have usually been offered in airy moral terms , but a new report released on Wednesday puts them into numbers .
The analysis , from the activist group U.S .
Climate Action Network , draws on the work of Tom Athanasiou , at a California-based nonprofit called EcoEquity , and his colleagues at the Climate Equity Reference Project .
It tries to calculate how much of the burden each country should be bearing , based on its historical contribution to the cloud @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to pay ” —a reflection of how rich the nation became during the fossil-fuel era .
The report finds “ that the US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195 % below its 2005 emissions levels , reflecting a fair share range of 173-229 % .
” That is , we can ’ t meet our moral and practical burdens simply by reducing our own emissions ; we ’ ve already put so much carbon into the air ( and hence reduced the space @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that we need to make amends .
Of this hundred-and-ninety-five-per-cent reduction , Athanasiou says , seventy per cent would be made domestically , by building solar panels , rolling out electric cars , and insulating buildings .
“ This is about the maximum achievable by 2030 , though cuts of this magnitude would require a full Green New Deal war footing , ” he notes .
” The rest—the other 125 % —would come by way of financial and tech support for adaptation and rapid decarbonization in poor and developing countries.
” For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ companies ) have been announcing plans to reduce their emission levels to zero by mid-century .
As Athanasiou says , that ’ s a welcome development , but , he adds , “ Not one of these countries has made anything like an adequate move to support ambitious decarbonization and adaptation plans in the developing world .
Or even , despite lots of talk , to significantly cut fossil subsidies .
In fact , as I ’ m sure you know , a lot of the COVID recovery money has gone to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not used anything like its fair share of the planet ’ s carbon budget .
By decarbonizing , it will be doing far more than its fair share—and it won ’ t be able to , unless countries like the United States help foot the bill .
That is the only honorable , and only sensible , course : they don ’ t call it global warming for nothing , and you can ’ t control it anywhere without controlling it everywhere .
Our political debate has poisoned the idea of foreign aid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be a hard lift for the Biden Administration to come close to meeting the requirements of justice .
But it won ’ t be as hard a lift as Blanca Costa is facing these next few years , pulling a trash cart without her horses .
Lynne Quarmby is a professor of molecular biology at Simon Fraser University , in British Columbia .
She is also a veteran of many environmental campaigns , and the author , most recently , of “ Watermelon Snow : Science , Art , and a Lone Polar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way that algal blooms can tint a snowpack pink .
( Our interview has been edited for length and clarity . )
I first saw watermelon snow high in the backcountry of Yosemite .
What is it , and why should we be paying attention ?
From spring through summer , single-celled algae grow on alpine and polar snow .
In full bloom , the snow can look like watermelon flesh .
White snow reflects solar radiation , whereas colored snow absorbs more of that energy , causing more melt and algal growth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ algae exacerbate global warming by absorbing heat , or mitigate it by pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis , we don ’ t yet know .
The more pressing issue may be that algal blooms speed the melt of alpine snowpacks—freshwater reservoirs for many cities—spelling drought later in the season .
Under the microscope , the algae look like small jewels—diamond-encrusted rubies , sapphires , and emeralds .
Together with the algae , we find rotifers , tardigrades , and ciliates , their bellies full of red cells ; fungi with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with bacteria , archaea , and viruses .
From microbial communities like these , we are learning that evolution is as much about coöperation as it is about competition .
My concern is less about whether the algae are “ good ” or “ bad ” with respect to climate change than about the imminent extinction of this microscopic Serengeti .
You ’ ve been watching the Arctic , where the temperature is rising faster than anywhere else .
What lessons should the world to the south be taking in ?
Warm temperatures @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and oceanic currents , which for ten thousand years reliably drove stable climate patterns .
Driven by temperature differentials , atmospheric currents with altered speed and patterns impact climate—for example , the duration and intensity of droughts in North America .
At the same time , the influx of cold freshwater from melting glaciers and ice caps is changing ocean currents in complex ways .
In some cases , altered ocean currents are predicted to cause counterintuitive outcomes—for example , the cooling of northern Europe .
Changing ocean currents not only affect our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ circulation of nutrients .
Organisms across the food web are facing increasing temperatures and changing patterns of nutrient availability throughout the world ’ s oceans .
Finally , beyond the loss of habitat for ice algae and walruses , the shrinking of Arctic sea ice reduces the reflection of solar radiation and amplifies global warming .
And how do you keep from unproductive despair ?
I have direct experience with unproductive despair .
After several years of climate activism driven by fear , panic , and anger—two arrests , being sued by a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a seat in the Canadian Parliament—I was exhausted .
After getting my job back on track , I found myself rested but still irritable , angry , and unable to engage with environmental issues .
Finally , I recognized that I was suffering from a failure to grieve—a failure to acknowledge that , for many things I love , it is too late .
By slowly opening myself to grief , I began to find some peace .
The question became : How to live in this world with this knowledge ?
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life means engaging with others on issues that matter .
I work on letting go of the old life—the decadence of a fossil-fuel-driven world—and embracing my personal vision of a better future .
I sit with the grief , vigorously defend the truth , and engage in politics .
It ’ s a good life .
People subscribing to The New Yorker is what allows this newsletter to keep appearing for free .
I was first on its staff as a very young man in the nineteen-eighties , and it is a great @ @ @ @ @ @ @ again , because no magazine in the world supports more great writing and reporting ; it is , all these years later , a highlight of each week to pull a new copy from the mailbox .
Subscribe here .
Crucial new numbers have been released on the so-called production gap .
A consortium of researchers led by the Stockholm Environment Institute calculates that , to meet the temperature targets set in the Paris accord , “ the world will need to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6 % per year between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ planning and projecting an average annual increase of 2 % , which by 2030 would result in more than double the production consistent with the 1.5°C limit.
” Everyone ’ s after Joe Biden for a job , including the Australian former finance minister Mathias Cormann , who wants Biden ’ s support to become the next secretary-general of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development .
Environmentalists down under are opposed : Cormann has been an apologist for Australia ’ s truly dismal climate action and took the stage at Davos @ @ @ @ @ @ @ every coal mine is a bad thing for the environment.
” With the remarkable news last month that the governor of Michigan , Gretchen Whitmer , was shutting down the Line 5 oil pipeline beneath the Straits of Mackinac , attention shifted west to Minnesota , where Governor Tim Walz approved Line 3 , a tar-sands pipeline heavily opposed by indigenous campaigners .
Kendall Mackey , an organizer with 350.org ( which I helped found ) said to me that the Biden Administration could be asked to make the final call .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pause on oil-pipeline construction and a moratorium on any new projects or expansion projects while they review Trump-era approvals for conflict or undue influence of industry , ” she explained .
Tara Houska , an indigenous campaigner who has been battling Line 3 for years , told the Intercept that “ it is obvious on its face that this does not meet emissions standards—this does not meet our climate goals.
” It ’ s particularly sad to see pipeline workers arriving in a state already suffering from a dire coronavirus surge .

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Central America has been through a wet version of Hell these past few weeks, as first a Category 4 and then a Category 5 hurricane crashed into the same part of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, dumping crippling amounts of rain on that country, Guatemala, and Honduras. Delphine Schrank opened an account of the toll on Honduras’s second-largest city, San Pedro Sula, for the Washington Post with this anecdote: “Blanca Costa crouched on a wooden cart with her three daughters under a highway bridge. . . . The cart was the one possession Costa was able to save when they clambered out [of their flooded house]. The three horses that pulled it, enabling her to earn money as a trash collector, were gone. It would take years, she said, to save enough to buy another one.”
It goes without saying that Costa and her daughters had done nothing to cause the increase in global temperature that, in turn, allowed massive late-season hurricanes to form in their corner of the Atlantic. And it goes without saying that Honduras will now have an even harder time paying for a changed energy system to help it convert to clean energy, as its commitments set in the Paris climate accord envision—its cobbled-together reconstruction plan is unsurprisingly focussed on rebuilding the bridges and roads that the storms destroyed.
Such intuitions about blame and responsibility have usually been offered in airy moral terms, but a new report released on Wednesday puts them into numbers. The analysis, from the activist group U.S. Climate Action Network, draws on the work of Tom Athanasiou, at a California-based nonprofit called EcoEquity, and his colleagues at the Climate Equity Reference Project. It tries to calculate how much of the burden each country should be bearing, based on its historical contribution to the cloud of greenhouse gases and its “capacity to pay”—a reflection of how rich the nation became during the fossil-fuel era. The report finds “that the US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195% below its 2005 emissions levels, reflecting a fair share range of 173-229%.” That is, we can’t meet our moral and practical burdens simply by reducing our own emissions; we’ve already put so much carbon into the air (and hence reduced the space that should rightly go to others) that we need to make amends. Of this hundred-and-ninety-five-per-cent reduction, Athanasiou says, seventy per cent would be made domestically, by building solar panels, rolling out electric cars, and insulating buildings. “This is about the maximum achievable by 2030, though cuts of this magnitude would require a full Green New Deal war footing,” he notes. ”The rest—the other 125%—would come by way of financial and tech support for adaptation and rapid decarbonization in poor and developing countries.”
For the past year, nations (and companies) have been announcing plans to reduce their emission levels to zero by mid-century. As Athanasiou says, that’s a welcome development, but, he adds, “Not one of these countries has made anything like an adequate move to support ambitious decarbonization and adaptation plans in the developing world. Or even, despite lots of talk, to significantly cut fossil subsidies. In fact, as I’m sure you know, a lot of the COVID recovery money has gone to the fossils.”
A country like Honduras has not used anything like its fair share of the planet’s carbon budget. By decarbonizing, it will be doing far more than its fair share—and it won’t be able to, unless countries like the United States help foot the bill. That is the only honorable, and only sensible, course: they don’t call it global warming for nothing, and you can’t control it anywhere without controlling it everywhere. Our political debate has poisoned the idea of foreign aid in recent years, and it will be a hard lift for the Biden Administration to come close to meeting the requirements of justice. But it won’t be as hard a lift as Blanca Costa is facing these next few years, pulling a trash cart without her horses.
Passing the Mic
Lynne Quarmby is a professor of molecular biology at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia. She is also a veteran of many environmental campaigns, and the author, most recently, of “Watermelon Snow: Science, Art, and a Lone Polar Bear.” The title refers to the way that algal blooms can tint a snowpack pink. (Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
I first saw watermelon snow high in the backcountry of Yosemite. What is it, and why should we be paying attention?
From spring through summer, single-celled algae grow on alpine and polar snow. In full bloom, the snow can look like watermelon flesh. White snow reflects solar radiation, whereas colored snow absorbs more of that energy, causing more melt and algal growth. Whether, on balance, the algae exacerbate global warming by absorbing heat, or mitigate it by pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis, we don’t yet know. The more pressing issue may be that algal blooms speed the melt of alpine snowpacks—freshwater reservoirs for many cities—spelling drought later in the season.
Under the microscope, the algae look like small jewels—diamond-encrusted rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. Together with the algae, we find rotifers, tardigrades, and ciliates, their bellies full of red cells; fungi with three arms; and slime, teeming with bacteria, archaea, and viruses. From microbial communities like these, we are learning that evolution is as much about coöperation as it is about competition. My concern is less about whether the algae are “good” or “bad” with respect to climate change than about the imminent extinction of this microscopic Serengeti.
Editor’s Picks
You’ve been watching the Arctic, where the temperature is rising faster than anywhere else. What lessons should the world to the south be taking in?
Warm temperatures in the Arctic are disrupting the atmospheric and oceanic currents, which for ten thousand years reliably drove stable climate patterns. Driven by temperature differentials, atmospheric currents with altered speed and patterns impact climate—for example, the duration and intensity of droughts in North America. At the same time, the influx of cold freshwater from melting glaciers and ice caps is changing ocean currents in complex ways. In some cases, altered ocean currents are predicted to cause counterintuitive outcomes—for example, the cooling of northern Europe.
Changing ocean currents not only affect our climate but also impact the previously predictable circulation of nutrients. Organisms across the food web are facing increasing temperatures and changing patterns of nutrient availability throughout the world’s oceans. Finally, beyond the loss of habitat for ice algae and walruses, the shrinking of Arctic sea ice reduces the reflection of solar radiation and amplifies global warming.
And how do you keep from unproductive despair?
I have direct experience with unproductive despair. After several years of climate activism driven by fear, panic, and anger—two arrests, being sued by a pipeline giant, and a run for a seat in the Canadian Parliament—I was exhausted. After getting my job back on track, I found myself rested but still irritable, angry, and unable to engage with environmental issues. Finally, I recognized that I was suffering from a failure to grieve—a failure to acknowledge that, for many things I love, it is too late. By slowly opening myself to grief, I began to find some peace. The question became: How to live in this world with this knowledge? For me, living a fulfilling, satisfying life means engaging with others on issues that matter. I work on letting go of the old life—the decadence of a fossil-fuel-driven world—and embracing my personal vision of a better future. I sit with the grief, vigorously defend the truth, and engage in politics. It’s a good life.
Climate School
People subscribing to The New Yorker is what allows this newsletter to keep appearing for free. I was first on its staff as a very young man in the nineteen-eighties, and it is a great pleasure to be writing regularly for it again, because no magazine in the world supports more great writing and reporting; it is, all these years later, a highlight of each week to pull a new copy from the mailbox. Subscribe here.