newyorker--2020-02-27--“The Invisible Man,” Reviewed: A Horror Film of Diabolical Twists and Empty Showmanship

The writer and director Leigh Whannell ’ s new , loose adaptation of H. G. Wells ’ s 1897 novel “ The Invisible Man ” harks back to a much earlier invisible-man tale : the Ring of Gyges , from Plato ’ s Republic .
Gyges found a ring that could turn him invisible , and he used the power to become a rapist—to “ commit adultery with the queen.
” The teller of the tale , a character named Glaucon , claims that anyone who possessed the ring would use it “ to go into houses and have intercourse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s version of “ The Invisible Man , ” likewise , is the story of a predator , and a sexual predator—even though it would be a spoiler to go into great detail about his crimes .
For that matter , Whannell ’ s “ The Invisible Man ” is a movie that begs not to be described , because more or less everything interesting in it has to do with plot , and its plot twists deliver most of its considerable pleasures .
In other words , obliqueness alert : I will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to avoid spoilers .
The movie is launched with a backstory of abuse .
Elisabeth Moss plays Cecilia Kass , an architect who , in the first scene , stealthily and fearfully escapes from a gated and electronically guarded oceanfront compound , in Northern California , where she lives with her boyfriend , Adrian Griffin ( Oliver Jackson-Cohen ) , a fabulously wealthy inventor who specializes in optics .
Adrian ’ s abusive violence is quickly in evidence when he punches his fist through the window of the escape vehicle—driven by Cecilia ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Cecilia takes refuge in the home of her friend James Lanier ( Aldis Hodge ) , a police officer , and his teen-age daughter , Sydney ( Storm Reid ) , and stays there in a state of panic , unwilling even to set foot outside for fear that Adrian is spying on her and planning to harm her .
Adrian ’ s house is decked out with a panoply of security cameras and other devices ( which Cecilia fiddled with before leaving ) , and she left him because of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ manipulation—to which he subjected her .
Adrian “ controlled how I looked , ” she tells James and Emily , and also what she wore and ate , and when she went out ; then , she adds , he controlled what she said and was trying to control what she thought .
What ’ s more , she says that he wanted her to have his child—and , knowing that , with a child , she ’ d be essentially tied to him for life , she secretly took birth-control pills .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ thinks , finally put to rest , soon thereafter , when Adrian turns up dead at his home ; she ’ s even somewhat moved , if a bit bewildered , when she finds that Adrian has made her one of his heirs .
It ’ s then , however , that strange things start happening .
Something goes bump in the night ; then there ’ s a minor mishap in the kitchen , a door that ’ s ajar and a chain that ’ s swinging .
( These uncanny doings @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a puff of chilly breath that appears , on a cold morning , from no discernible mouth . )
A blanket is pulled from a bed by invisible hands ; an invisible backside indents a seat cushion ; belongings that Cecilia put in one place turn up in another .
Yet when she describes these phenomena to those closest to her , they react skeptically , thinking that she ’ s losing her mind .
The invisible man—Adrian , she assumes—is gaslighting her in the classic sense of the word ; he ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ making those around her doubt it , too .
Moreover , the invisible man starts playing wicked tricks on Cecilia ’ s friends and family , in an effort to drive them away from her and leave her all the more vulnerable to his depredations .
Whannell concocts these schemes with clever attentiveness to the role of current technology ; cell phones , laptop computers , passwords , and security devices all play crucial and natural roles in the action .
The premise also gives rise to plenty of lower-tech horrors , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ creating memorable impressions of knives and guns suspended in the air .
At the same time , there are other tricks that are stunning in their imaginative power and yet left utterly undeveloped visually and thematically—including one , involving white paint , that inevitably invokes metaphors of race , which the film both suggests and instantly drops .
The pleasures of “ The Invisible Man ” are authentic yet sharply mitigated .
The plot-centricity of the film is its source of delight but also its basic trouble .
Whannell got his start as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Saw ” movies and a quartet of “ Insidious ” ones—he directed the third installment ) .
As the writer and director of “ The Invisible Man , ” he is , above all , a writer ; he comes up with some diabolically clever twists that give rise to some exciting action and some keenly defined moral themes , notably when Cecilia , tired of merely eluding the invisible man , plans to turn the tables on him and exact revenge .
Whannell is a great provider of raw material—which , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the screen with a textureless efficiency , only rarely reflecting anything like an aesthetic idea .
A good screenwriter is more than a plotter of plots ; it ’ s someone who digs into character and offers insight , which is why , often , the roles of screenwriter and director are best divided between two people working collaboratively—the screenwriter offers a framework that a strong director transforms and expands in the creation of the scenes and the images .
Several sequences of “ The Invisible Man ” make clever use of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surveillance devices ; others are springboards and backgrounds for striking effects .
But the exposition is seemingly endless , because Whannell ’ s direction , as well as his construction of scenes , is , for the most part , of the straight-to-cable variety , taking portentousness for suspense and the illustration of facts for drama .
The characters don ’ t exist between their scenes because they ’ re given little identity , little personality within the scenes .
Though the movie rests heavily on its backstory , its protagonist has virtually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entirely takes Cecilia ’ s point of view , it foregrounds her experience in lieu of her knowledge , her memory , her insight .
The void is filled by Moss herself , whose resonant presence and subtle but fervent expressive power take the place of a scripted character ; Hodge ’ s nuanced and vigorous performance fills in for the movie ’ s virtually nonexistent societal context .
For all the ingenious twists that the movie offers , there ’ s a just-so aspect to “ The Invisible Man ” ; it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its contrivance and a sense that a flick of a finger could bring it all crashing down .
( Though why bother flicking when everyone knows that the point of the trick is the very flimsiness of its intricacy ? )
For all the authentic thrills that the film eventually delivers , it leaves the feeling of a terrific idea that ’ s been left on the drawing board .
Despite the seriousness of the movie ’ s themes , it ’ s a work of fervent showmanship .

The writer and director Leigh Whannell’s new, loose adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel “The Invisible Man” harks back to a much earlier invisible-man tale: the Ring of Gyges, from Plato’s Republic. Gyges found a ring that could turn him invisible, and he used the power to become a rapist—to “commit adultery with the queen.” The teller of the tale, a character named Glaucon, claims that anyone who possessed the ring would use it “to go into houses and have intercourse with whomever he wanted.” Whannell’s version of “The Invisible Man,” likewise, is the story of a predator, and a sexual predator—even though it would be a spoiler to go into great detail about his crimes.
For that matter, Whannell’s “The Invisible Man” is a movie that begs not to be described, because more or less everything interesting in it has to do with plot, and its plot twists deliver most of its considerable pleasures. In other words, obliqueness alert: I will keep my descriptions allusive in the effort to avoid spoilers.
The movie is launched with a backstory of abuse. Elisabeth Moss plays Cecilia Kass, an architect who, in the first scene, stealthily and fearfully escapes from a gated and electronically guarded oceanfront compound, in Northern California, where she lives with her boyfriend, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a fabulously wealthy inventor who specializes in optics. Adrian’s abusive violence is quickly in evidence when he punches his fist through the window of the escape vehicle—driven by Cecilia’s sister Emily (Harriet Dyer).
Cecilia takes refuge in the home of her friend James Lanier (Aldis Hodge), a police officer, and his teen-age daughter, Sydney (Storm Reid), and stays there in a state of panic, unwilling even to set foot outside for fear that Adrian is spying on her and planning to harm her. Adrian’s house is decked out with a panoply of security cameras and other devices (which Cecilia fiddled with before leaving), and she left him because of the devastating methods of surveillance and control—of psychological manipulation—to which he subjected her. Adrian “controlled how I looked,” she tells James and Emily, and also what she wore and ate, and when she went out; then, she adds, he controlled what she said and was trying to control what she thought. What’s more, she says that he wanted her to have his child—and, knowing that, with a child, she’d be essentially tied to him for life, she secretly took birth-control pills.
Cecilia’s fears are, she thinks, finally put to rest, soon thereafter, when Adrian turns up dead at his home; she’s even somewhat moved, if a bit bewildered, when she finds that Adrian has made her one of his heirs. It’s then, however, that strange things start happening. Something goes bump in the night; then there’s a minor mishap in the kitchen, a door that’s ajar and a chain that’s swinging. (These uncanny doings involve some deft effects, such as a puff of chilly breath that appears, on a cold morning, from no discernible mouth.) A blanket is pulled from a bed by invisible hands; an invisible backside indents a seat cushion; belongings that Cecilia put in one place turn up in another. Yet when she describes these phenomena to those closest to her, they react skeptically, thinking that she’s losing her mind.
The invisible man—Adrian, she assumes—is gaslighting her in the classic sense of the word; he’s making her doubt her sanity and making those around her doubt it, too. Moreover, the invisible man starts playing wicked tricks on Cecilia’s friends and family, in an effort to drive them away from her and leave her all the more vulnerable to his depredations. Whannell concocts these schemes with clever attentiveness to the role of current technology; cell phones, laptop computers, passwords, and security devices all play crucial and natural roles in the action.
The premise also gives rise to plenty of lower-tech horrors, as when invisible hands wield deadly weapons, creating memorable impressions of knives and guns suspended in the air. At the same time, there are other tricks that are stunning in their imaginative power and yet left utterly undeveloped visually and thematically—including one, involving white paint, that inevitably invokes metaphors of race, which the film both suggests and instantly drops.
The pleasures of “The Invisible Man” are authentic yet sharply mitigated. The plot-centricity of the film is its source of delight but also its basic trouble. Whannell got his start as a screenwriter (of a trio of “Saw” movies and a quartet of “Insidious” ones—he directed the third installment). As the writer and director of “The Invisible Man,” he is, above all, a writer; he comes up with some diabolically clever twists that give rise to some exciting action and some keenly defined moral themes, notably when Cecilia, tired of merely eluding the invisible man, plans to turn the tables on him and exact revenge. Whannell is a great provider of raw material—which, as a director, he transfers to the screen with a textureless efficiency, only rarely reflecting anything like an aesthetic idea.
A good screenwriter is more than a plotter of plots; it’s someone who digs into character and offers insight, which is why, often, the roles of screenwriter and director are best divided between two people working collaboratively—the screenwriter offers a framework that a strong director transforms and expands in the creation of the scenes and the images. Several sequences of “The Invisible Man” make clever use of the edges of the frame in relation to surveillance devices; others are springboards and backgrounds for striking effects. But the exposition is seemingly endless, because Whannell’s direction, as well as his construction of scenes, is, for the most part, of the straight-to-cable variety, taking portentousness for suspense and the illustration of facts for drama. The characters don’t exist between their scenes because they’re given little identity, little personality within the scenes. Though the movie rests heavily on its backstory, its protagonist has virtually no substance; though the movie almost entirely takes Cecilia’s point of view, it foregrounds her experience in lieu of her knowledge, her memory, her insight. The void is filled by Moss herself, whose resonant presence and subtle but fervent expressive power take the place of a scripted character; Hodge’s nuanced and vigorous performance fills in for the movie’s virtually nonexistent societal context.
For all the ingenious twists that the movie offers, there’s a just-so aspect to “The Invisible Man”; it simultaneously arouses awe at the intricacy of its contrivance and a sense that a flick of a finger could bring it all crashing down. (Though why bother flicking when everyone knows that the point of the trick is the very flimsiness of its intricacy?)
For all the authentic thrills that the film eventually delivers, it leaves the feeling of a terrific idea that’s been left on the drawing board. Despite the seriousness of the movie’s themes, it’s a work of fervent showmanship.


newyorker--2020-02-27--How the Indian Government Watched Delhi Burn

Two things happened in Delhi on Tuesday , and the gulf between them illustrated India ’ s wild , alarming swerve from normalcy .
At the Presidential palace , Donald Trump concluded a two-day visit by attending a ceremonial dinner : an evening of gold-leaf-crusted mandarin oranges , wild Himalayan morels , and gifts of Kashmiri silk carpets .
Half a dozen miles away , northeast Delhi was convulsed with violence .
Since Sunday , mobs had been destroying the shops and homes of Muslims , vandalizing mosques , and assaulting Muslims on the streets .
In their chants of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Hindu deity , their loyalties were clear .
The attackers were Hindu nationalists , part of a right wing that has been empowered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi ’ s government ; many of them were even members of his party .
The Delhi police , who are supervised by Modi ’ s home minister , seemed to side with the mobs ; one video caught cops smashing CCTV cameras , while another showed them helping men gather stones to throw .
Several reports said that policemen stood by while the attackers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ few spurts , Muslims retaliated , and the streets witnessed periods of full-scale clashes .
A policeman was killed , and an intelligence officer was murdered and dumped in a drain .
At least thirty-eight people have died : shot , beaten , burned .
At the Trump banquet , the Navy band played “ Can You Feel the Love Tonight.
” The mayhem came after a winter of protest .
Since early December , millions of Indians have assembled across the country to object to a new law that promises fast-tracked Indian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bangladeshi refugees of every major South Asian faith except Islam .
The law is limited in its scope but momentous in how overtly it separates Indianness from Islam .
It ’ s a move characteristic of Modi ’ s Bharatiya Janata Party ( B.J.P . )
and its allied groups , who regard India ’ s two hundred million Muslims as an undesirable part of an ideal Hindu nation .
The protesters against the law have , in nearly every case , been peaceful , but their sit-ins and marches have been met @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gas , house raids , arbitrary detentions , police brutality , Internet shutdowns .
In speeches , Modi ’ s colleagues have suggested that dissenters should be shot .
The B.J.P.
’ s top leaders—the Prime Minister included—seem to excel at creating conditions in which violence can unfold .
On Sunday , in Delhi , a local B.J.P .
politician named Kapil Mishra gave an ultimatum to the police : clear the roads of protesters or allow his followers to do so .
His speech was inflammatory , but he faced no trouble @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has a record of tolerating , and even rewarding , members who threaten to take the law into their own hands .
( Yogi Adityanath , a Hindu cleric who regularly delivers hate-filled speeches and whose supporters burned a train in 2007 , is now a B.J.P .
chief minister of Uttar Pradesh , India ’ s most populous state . )
The government can claim that the gangs seeking out protesters and Muslims have acted of their own volition , outside the Party ’ s control .
But the B.J.P.
’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , calling opponents “ traitors ” —not only incites mob savagery but also gives attackers the confidence that they ’ ll never be prosecuted .
( Vigilantes who , while insisting that the cow is sacred to Hindus , have been lynching Muslims and lower-caste Hindus on the suspicion of smuggling cows or owning beef are operating out of a similar sense of security . )
When the state knows that its right-wing affiliates will carry out the kind of violence that it can not and should not pursue , then all it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slyness of this tactic is not without precedent .
In 2002 , when Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat , a weeks-long pogrom against Muslims left as many as two thousand people dead .
Then , too , the police assisted the mobs of Hindu nationalists—or , at best , did little to stop their rampage .
Two witnesses later recalled that Modi had instructed the police to stand down while the brutality unfolded .
One of those witnesses was found dead in his car the following year , while the other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last June , in a decades-old murder case that was suddenly resurrected .
Modi was cleared of complicity in the 2002 riots by an investigative team appointed by the Supreme Court .
But he is known to hold the reins of power so tightly , and to govern so absolutely , that it ’ s difficult to believe that Gujarat or Delhi could burn under his gaze without his sanction .
This arm ’ s-length orchestration of anarchy has , in the past few days , made for some surreal scenes .
Television @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helmets , for safety ; videos showed Muslim slums on fire ; and the death toll climbed .
Yet Ajit Doval , India ’ s national-security adviser , visited northeast Delhi on Wednesday and said , “ Everything is normal .
People of all communities are living in peace and love.
” In the Delhi High Court , on Wednesday , the deputy commissioner of police claimed that he had not seen any footage of Mishra ’ s incendiary speech , even though it had been the spark applied to the tinder .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ charge of law and order , made no statements .
Modi himself restricted his comments to just two tweets ; in fact , he stayed away from the customary joint press conference at the end of Trump ’ s visit , leaving the American President to field questions about the turmoil .
“ He wants people to have religious freedom , and very strongly , ” Trump said , of Modi .
On Thursday , Modi ’ s Solicitor General told the High Court that it was “ not conducive ” to investigate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his government has kept a few key Kashmiri politicians under house arrest for more than six months , arguing that they ’ re liable to stir unrest .
On Thursday , after paramilitary troops were deployed , and after northeast Delhi had somewhat quieted , the B.J.P .
blamed opposition parties for instigating the violence .
In 2002 , a Reuters photo became emblematic of the riots , showing a Muslim tailor , his shirt flecked with blood , imploring security forces with folded hands to rescue him from a mob that was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another Reuters image emerged , of a Muslim man on all fours , bloodied and bowed , trying to shield his head from the dozen or so men encircling him and beating him with staves .
His manner is abject , desperate .
There are no police in sight .
The photo stands for what now seems to be the fate of India ’ s minorities , as designed by the B.J.P .
: to find being heavily outnumbered a matter of life and death ; to cower in perpetual fear ; and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no relief , because it ’ s the state that ’ s choreographing the fear in the first place .

Two things happened in Delhi on Tuesday, and the gulf between them illustrated India’s wild, alarming swerve from normalcy. At the Presidential palace, Donald Trump concluded a two-day visit by attending a ceremonial dinner: an evening of gold-leaf-crusted mandarin oranges, wild Himalayan morels, and gifts of Kashmiri silk carpets. Half a dozen miles away, northeast Delhi was convulsed with violence. Since Sunday, mobs had been destroying the shops and homes of Muslims, vandalizing mosques, and assaulting Muslims on the streets. In their chants of “Jai Shri Ram,” praising a Hindu deity, their loyalties were clear. The attackers were Hindu nationalists, part of a right wing that has been empowered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government; many of them were even members of his party. The Delhi police, who are supervised by Modi’s home minister, seemed to side with the mobs; one video caught cops smashing CCTV cameras, while another showed them helping men gather stones to throw. Several reports said that policemen stood by while the attackers went about their business. In a few spurts, Muslims retaliated, and the streets witnessed periods of full-scale clashes. A policeman was killed, and an intelligence officer was murdered and dumped in a drain. At least thirty-eight people have died: shot, beaten, burned. At the Trump banquet, the Navy band played “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.”
The mayhem came after a winter of protest. Since early December, millions of Indians have assembled across the country to object to a new law that promises fast-tracked Indian citizenship to Pakistani, Afghan, and Bangladeshi refugees of every major South Asian faith except Islam. The law is limited in its scope but momentous in how overtly it separates Indianness from Islam. It’s a move characteristic of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) and its allied groups, who regard India’s two hundred million Muslims as an undesirable part of an ideal Hindu nation. The protesters against the law have, in nearly every case, been peaceful, but their sit-ins and marches have been met with force by the government: tear gas, house raids, arbitrary detentions, police brutality, Internet shutdowns. In speeches, Modi’s colleagues have suggested that dissenters should be shot.
The B.J.P.’s top leaders—the Prime Minister included—seem to excel at creating conditions in which violence can unfold. On Sunday, in Delhi, a local B.J.P. politician named Kapil Mishra gave an ultimatum to the police: clear the roads of protesters or allow his followers to do so. His speech was inflammatory, but he faced no trouble from his party; the B.J.P. has a record of tolerating, and even rewarding, members who threaten to take the law into their own hands. (Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu cleric who regularly delivers hate-filled speeches and whose supporters burned a train in 2007, is now a B.J.P. chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.) The government can claim that the gangs seeking out protesters and Muslims have acted of their own volition, outside the Party’s control. But the B.J.P.’s habitual rhetoric—stirring up hatred, advocating force, calling opponents “traitors”—not only incites mob savagery but also gives attackers the confidence that they’ll never be prosecuted. (Vigilantes who, while insisting that the cow is sacred to Hindus, have been lynching Muslims and lower-caste Hindus on the suspicion of smuggling cows or owning beef are operating out of a similar sense of security.) When the state knows that its right-wing affiliates will carry out the kind of violence that it cannot and should not pursue, then all it has to do is nothing.
The slyness of this tactic is not without precedent. In 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat, a weeks-long pogrom against Muslims left as many as two thousand people dead. Then, too, the police assisted the mobs of Hindu nationalists—or, at best, did little to stop their rampage. Two witnesses later recalled that Modi had instructed the police to stand down while the brutality unfolded. One of those witnesses was found dead in his car the following year, while the other was sentenced to life in prison, last June, in a decades-old murder case that was suddenly resurrected. Modi was cleared of complicity in the 2002 riots by an investigative team appointed by the Supreme Court. But he is known to hold the reins of power so tightly, and to govern so absolutely, that it’s difficult to believe that Gujarat or Delhi could burn under his gaze without his sanction.
This arm’s-length orchestration of anarchy has, in the past few days, made for some surreal scenes. Television journalists went out to work wearing cricket helmets, for safety; videos showed Muslim slums on fire; and the death toll climbed. Yet Ajit Doval, India’s national-security adviser, visited northeast Delhi on Wednesday and said, “Everything is normal. People of all communities are living in peace and love.” In the Delhi High Court, on Wednesday, the deputy commissioner of police claimed that he had not seen any footage of Mishra’s incendiary speech, even though it had been the spark applied to the tinder. Modi’s home minister, in charge of law and order, made no statements. Modi himself restricted his comments to just two tweets; in fact, he stayed away from the customary joint press conference at the end of Trump’s visit, leaving the American President to field questions about the turmoil. “He wants people to have religious freedom, and very strongly,” Trump said, of Modi. On Thursday, Modi’s Solicitor General told the High Court that it was “not conducive” to investigate B.J.P. politicians for hate speech—even though his government has kept a few key Kashmiri politicians under house arrest for more than six months, arguing that they’re liable to stir unrest. On Thursday, after paramilitary troops were deployed, and after northeast Delhi had somewhat quieted, the B.J.P. blamed opposition parties for instigating the violence.
People supporting the new citizenship law beat a Muslim man during a clash with those opposing the law in New Delhi, India. Photograph by Danish Siddiqui / Reuters
In 2002, a Reuters photo became emblematic of the riots, showing a Muslim tailor, his shirt flecked with blood, imploring security forces with folded hands to rescue him from a mob that was surrounding his house. This week, another Reuters image emerged, of a Muslim man on all fours, bloodied and bowed, trying to shield his head from the dozen or so men encircling him and beating him with staves. His manner is abject, desperate. There are no police in sight. The photo stands for what now seems to be the fate of India’s minorities, as designed by the B.J.P.: to find being heavily outnumbered a matter of life and death; to cower in perpetual fear; and to know that the state will bring no relief, because it’s the state that’s choreographing the fear in the first place.


newyorker--2020-02-27--Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein and the Lies that Powerful Men Tell

This week , the former film producer Harvey Weinstein was convicted on two counts of sexual assault in a New @ @ @ @ @ who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than ninety women , has become @ @ @ @ @ Hollywood , and of the systems that protect wealthy and powerful men from the consequences @ @ @ @ @ Solnit joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss whether the Weinstein verdict is a turning point in @ @ @ @ @ and what it takes to expose the lies of those in power in business and @ @

Photograph by John Taggart / Redux
This week, the former film producer Harvey Weinstein was convicted on two counts of sexual assault in a New York court. Weinstein, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than ninety women, has become an emblem of misogyny in Hollywood, and of the systems that protect wealthy and powerful men from the consequences of criminal misconduct. Rebecca Solnit joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss whether the Weinstein verdict is a turning point in the #MeToo movement, and what it takes to expose the lies of those in power in business and politics.


newyorker--2020-02-27--What to Do in N.Y.C. This Weekend: February 28th-March 1st

These are our top picks for the weekend of February 28th-March 1st .
For more event listings and reviews , check out Goings On About Town .
The timeliest as well as the rudest painting show of this winter happens to be the first-ever New York museum survey of Peter Saul , at the New Museum .
Recognition so delayed bemuses almost as much as a reminder of the artist ’ s current age : eighty-five , which seems impossible .
Saul ’ s cartoony style—raucously grotesque , often with contorted figures engaged in ( and quite enjoying ) intricate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Trump , and cheeky travesties of classic paintings by Rembrandt , Picasso , and de Kooning—suggests the gall of an adolescent allowed to run amok .
His effrontery has long driven fastidious souls , including me years ago , from galleries .
Now I see him as part of a story of art and culture that has been unspooling since the nineteen-fifties ; one in which Saul , formerly a pariah , seems ever more a paladin.—Peter Schjeldahl For more art reviews , click here .
Last November , Celine Dion released @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of her four-decade career .
Though the record proves her longevity and her fixed position as one of the great power balladeers of her generation , it also marks new beginnings : the songs , written after the death of her husband , are more upbeat , dance-oriented collaborations with contemporary artists such as Sia , Lauv , and Sam Smith .
The album also led to her first U.S. tour in a decade , which stops by the Barclays Center , February 28th to 29th , but her sixteen-year-long Vegas residency has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For more night-life listings , click here .
The answer to the question of what you should order at Le Crocodile , a new French restaurant in Williamsburg , is hiding in plain sight .
On the postcard that comes with your check and on the books of matches and toothpicks by the host stand , a series of charmingly naïf illustrations depict a chicken , standing alone or disappearing into the toothy , gaping jaw of a somewhat gleeful-looking reptile .
At Le Crocodile , you are the crocodile—get ready to toss @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Half of a roasted one comes dripping with jus and sprinkled with chopped parsley , its crisp skin the same shade of golden as the bistro-style French fries piled high beside it.—Hannah Goldfield For more restaurant reviews , click here .
The young British playwright Alice Birch has acknowledged Caryl Churchill as an influence on her work ; this is evident in Birch ’ s new play , “ Anatomy of a Suicide ” ( at Atlantic Theatre Company ) , a rare case in which form and content are inextricably linked , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hinder feeling .
The stories of three generations of women unfurl simultaneously onstage , as if on a split screen .
Carol ( Carla Gugino ) wants to end her life , but tries to keep going for the sake of her daughter , Anna ( Celeste Arias ) , who ends up just as tormented as her mother .
This tragic legacy weighs heavily on Anna ’ s daughter , Bonnie ( Gabby Beans ) , who denies herself emotional commitments in an attempt to break the cycle .
The director Lileana @ @ @ @ @ @ @ challenging setup , suggesting desperately interlocked narratives that , miraculously , never feel morbid.—Elisabeth Vincentelli For more theatre reviews , click here .
This weekend ’ s entries in Metrograph ’ s two-month series “ Climate Crisis Parables ” —featuring classics of world cinema that highlight human destruction of the environment—include Michelangelo Antonioni ’ s 1964 drama “ Red Desert , ” starring Monica Vitti as a housewife in a devastated industrial region whose emotional breakdown mirrors the alienating technology that surrounds her—even at home .
It ’ s the first film that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ makes extravagant use of its powers ; his garish palette seems to turn pipes and smokestacks into the organs of a living monster.—Richard Brody For more movie reviews , click here .
Ricky Ian Gordon ’ s operas return again and again to American subject matter .
He drifted on the open plains in “ The Grapes of Wrath , ” ran with the Texas wind in “ A Coffin in Egypt , ” and conjured the literary expatriate Gertrude Stein holding court in Parisian salons in “ 27.
” Now , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ E. Newhouse this weekend , Gordon sets early-twentieth-century Manhattan to music with his adaptation of Lynn Nottage ’ s play “ Intimate Apparel.
” Kearstin Piper Brown takes the role of Esther—for which Viola Davis won a Drama Desk Award , in 2004 , during the play ’ s Off Broadway run—an African-American seamstress with a gift for constructing tantalizing undergarments .
Bartlett Sher directs , and Steven Osgood conducts.—Oussama Zahr For more classical-music listings , click here .
As fail-safe vehicles of spiritual uplift , not many works of the past two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dance that Ronald K. Brown made for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in 1999 .
It ’ s not that the piece is blind to struggle—the lyrics of the Duke Ellington spiritual in its sound score plead for the Lord to come down and “ see my people through.
” Yet the path toward salvation is clear , and so , especially , is the groove , irresistibly expressed in Brown ’ s African-inspired moves .
That ’ s also true of his piece “ High Life , ” from 2000 , even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a slave auction .
Brown ’ s “ Mercy , ” created last year , is different .
Set to a hazy score by Meshell Ndegeocello , it ’ s much foggier , gloomier , attuned to the bleak , disorienting present .
When Brown ’ s company , Evidence , performs all three of these works during its thirty-fifth-anniversary programs at the Joyce Theatre , tonight through March 1st , audiences can acknowledge the darkness and be reminded of the light.—Brian Seibert For more dance listings , click here .

These are our top picks for the weekend of March 6th-8th. For more event listings and reviews, check out Goings On About Town.
Art work by José Clemente Orozco / Courtesy ARS / SOMAAP / MOMA
The Whitney’s thumpingly great show “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1924-1945” picks an overdue art-historical fight. The usual story of those two decades revolves around young aesthetes striving to absorb European modernism. What to do with the mighty legacy of the era’s big three Mexican painters, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros? As little as possible has seemed the rule, despite the seminal influence of Orozco and Siqueiros on the young Jackson Pollock. With some two hundred works by sixty artists and abundant documentary material, the curator Barbara Haskell reweaves the sense and sensations of the era to bring it alive.—Peter Schjeldahl
For more art reviews, click here.
For our Spring Art Preview, click here.
Photograph by Hanna-Katrina Jedrosz
The glamorously intelligent post-punk that was incubated in English art colleges forty years ago is reconstituted with panache in Dry Cleaning: it’s almost shocking to hear lyrics referencing not Margaret Thatcher but Meghan Markle. This young London quartet is effortlessly magnetic and impossibly British, with an ace card in Florence Shaw—a vocalist who rarely deigns to sing but, rather, presents her lyrics as if engaged in an apathetic phone conversation. After making its American début at Saint Vitus, on Friday, the band plays Union Pool the following night.—Jay Ruttenberg
For more night-life listings, click here.
For our Spring Night-Life Preview, click here.
Photograph by Heami Lee for The New Yorker
There has never been a better time to eat a meatless hamburger. The current surge of interest in plant-based diets has sparked an arms race of sorts. Since 2008, the chef Amanda Cohen has been the force behind Dirt Candy, the first vegetarian restaurant to hold its own in New York’s fine-dining landscape. Cohen had never served a veggie burger before Andrea Kerzner, a South African philanthropist looking for ways to fight climate change, cold-called her to propose that they collaborate on a restaurant built around one, but she was game to try. Last November, they opened Lekka Burger, in Tribeca.—Hannah Goldfield
For more restaurant reviews, click here.
Photograph by Sara Krulwich / NYT / Redux
In 1997, a woman named Dana Higginbotham was abducted by an ex-convict and member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He dragged her from motel to motel around the South for five months, abusing her physically and mentally. Higginbotham happens to be the mother of the playwright Lucas Hnath, who turned the story into a play. And not just any play—“Dana H.” (at the Vineyard) is a channelling, an exorcism, and a tribute. The brilliant concept is that the actress Deirdre O’Connell, alone onstage, lip-synchs—with virtuosic precision—to edited segments of interviews with the actual Dana H. Directed by Les Waters with chilling precision and his usual skill for creating an eerie atmosphere, this production is as stunning as it is harrowing.—Elisabeth Vincentelli
For more theatre reviews, click here.
For our Spring Theatre Preview, click here.
Photograph from Universal Pictures / Album / Alamy
Alfred Hitchcock depended greatly on the art and the acumen of female collaborators, including his wife, Alma Reville, a screenwriter and editor, and Joan Harrison, a writer and producer. Their work is brought into the fore in Film Forum’s series “The Women Behind Hitchcock,” which also includes movies by other directors, including Robert Siodmak, a film-noir specialist whose harsh and cynical vision of wartime New York, “Phantom Lady,” from 1944, was produced by Harrison. It screens on Saturday and four more times before the series ends, on March 19th.—Richard Brody
For more movie reviews, click here.
For our Spring Movies Preview, click here.
Photograph by Alexander Polzin
The Talea Ensemble performs the U.S. première of Toshio Hosokawa’s “Futari Shizuka,” a chamber opera based on a Noh play about a spirit that enters a woman’s body. It uses Western- and Noh-style singing to differentiate between the two characters, and it appears on a double bill with another chamber opera about possession: George Benjamin’s “Into the Little Hill,” a striking, minimalist setting of the Pied Piper legend in which two singers assume all the roles. On Saturday evening, James Baker conducts the cast and ensemble in a semi-staged concert at the 92nd Street Y.—Oussama Zahr
For more classical-music listings, click here.
For our Spring Classical-Music Preview, click here.
Photograph by Rahi Rezvani
Nederlands Dans Theatre, based in The Hague, is one of the most prestigious contemporary-dance ensembles in Europe, if not the world. Its reputation is rooted, in part, in the long artistic residency of the choreographer Jiří Kylián. The current program doesn’t include any Kylián, but the four choreographers on it are in many ways his heirs. Gabriela Carrizo, from Argentina, has created a fragmented Bergmanesque narrative, “The Missing Door,” revolving around a death and set in a bleak, hotel-like space. “Walk the Demon” is one of Marco Goecke’s twitchy, insect-like essays in movement. And, from the two in-house choreographers, Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, we get “Shut Eye,” a fantasy made of light and shadow.—Marina Harss
For more dance listings, click here.
For our Spring Dance Preview, click here.


newyorker--2020-02-27--Nothing Compares to Yuzu

Nothing Compares to Yuzu

I suffer terribly from what you might call a paralysis of wonder .
When I become the custodian of something truly marvellous , notably beautiful , or a little bit rare , I worry so much about using it for a sufficiently special purpose that , more often than not , I fail ever to use it at all .
My kitchen , in particular , is a graveyard of reverent neglect : a golden bottle of sunflower oil , pressed by monks in an ancient Georgian monastery , long past rancid ; a little jar of barbecue sauce folded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grizzled pitmaster in Tennessee ; a desiccated hunk of white truffle tucked in molding white rice ; bags of international potato chips hanging on far beyond their sell-by dates .
Not long ago , a package arrived at my apartment , in Brooklyn , from a friend in the Bay Area , containing a new priceless gift : a dozen fresh yuzu fruits , plucked a day earlier from a tree in her mother ’ s yard .
The moment I opened the box , two things happened simultaneously .
One , my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intense , floral aroma .
And , two , I vowed that I wouldn ’ t let these treasures go to waste .
“ Treasure ” is not much of an overstatement when it comes to yuzu .
The knobbly-skinned Japanese fruits are among the most exquisite members of the citrus family : more floral than an orange and nearly as tart as a lime , with a scent that is dense and disarming , the Froot-Loops-y honey of a lemon blossom wrapped around an astringent armature of industrial floor cleaner ( which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tenfold , then mailed to the moon .
“ The yuzu fragrance is entirely its own , ” Shizuo Tsuji , a titan of Japanese gastronomy , wrote .
It “ resembles no citrus familiar to the West.
” The fruit is also a treasure in a more material sense .
Yuzu trees dot California , an arboreal legacy of Japanese immigrants from the late nineteenth century , but their commercial growth there is limited , and the U.S.D.A .
has a ban on the import of fresh yuzu from abroad—the fruit and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aficionados living outside the farmers ’ -market radius of the California coast , processed , pre-prepared yuzu products are pretty much all we ’ ve had .
In the rare instances when I ’ ve seen fresh yuzu for sale in the tri-state area , almost always at a Japanese specialty grocery , they ’ ve been staggeringly expensive , running fifteen to twenty dollars a pound .
( In contrast , lemons are generally a dollar or two per pound . )
I ’ m told that , among New York chefs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in fresh yuzu smuggled from Japan .
The fruit ’ s honeyed tartness is clear and lovely in all its packaged , processed forms—perfuming vinegars and hot sauces , infused into vodka and shoyu , tarting up yogurt and cheesecakes .
If you were yuzu-obsessed , you could soften your lips with yuzu balm , garland your meals with yuzu salt , soothe your throat with yuzu tea , and dress your buttered toast with yuzu marmalade .
But—as with all citrus—even the brightest processed-yuzu product is a tinny AM radio compared with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fresh fruit .
A ripe yuzu is rough-skinned and yellow-orange , almost spherical , flattened slightly at the stem and the flower ends .
Its skin is pitted and pockmarked , and often hangs loosely around its flesh .
The fruit ’ s scant juice is puckeringly sour , but its rind is gently sweet , and rich in aromatic oils .
Yuzu is thought to have originated in China , but the fruit is most closely identified with Japan , where it is one of the nation ’ s essential aromas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ key ingredient in ponzu sauce , the tangy blend of yuzu juice and soy sauce that often accompanies cold noodles or fried pork cutlets .
It also lends zing to highballs , seasons potato chips , and is a favorite flavor for candy .
On the winter solstice , bathtubs and onsen throughout Japan teem with whole yuzu , bobbling in the hot water to give bathers ( including capybaras ) a bracing soak .
My apartment ’ s bathtub is pitifully shallow , so a yuzu bath was out .
The fruits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pith and massive seeds—so squeezing out my entire stash , just for a couple of hasty at-home cocktails , seemed tactically misguided .
I considered my bounty , wavering on the edge of catastrophic inaction , and arrived at a plan : the best part of a yuzu is what Tsuji described , in his book “ Japanese Cooking : A Simple Art , ” as its “ marvelous aromatic rind , ” so I decided to zest the fruits , using a fine-tooth grater to scrape off only the colorful and aromatic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would use it to make yuzu kosho , a fiery-hot condiment of chiles , zest , and salt—it ’ s simple to make , keeps practically forever , and shows off all that ’ s wonderful about this exhilarating fruit .
As with many of the best condiments , yuzu kosho ’ s rich , complex flavor comes from a brief period of fermentation .
The mixture is allowed to rest for a few days , giving the zingy freshness of the hot peppers time to relax into something deeper , as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drawn out by the salinity .
The end result is a rough paste , glittering with salt and vividly green , suffused with the sharp , sour , sweet intoxication of yuzu .
It ’ s intensely salty and blazingly hot ; as such , it ’ s best portioned out in dots and dabs—a tiny pearl of yuzu kosho on top of a seared scallop or a meaty grilled mushroom , a tiny scoop blended into a vinaigrette or mashed into an avocado , or a pea-size dollop stirred , at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of ramen .
If you don ’ t live in California—or you aren ’ t fortunate enough to have a friend who does , and is willing to send you yuzu care packages—you can buy yuzu kosho pre-made .
( My favorite comes in a set of two jars , one made with green peppers and the other with red . )
Or you can make it using another member of the citrus family : kosho of grapefruit ( beautifully bitter ) , Meyer lemon ( mellow and tart ) , tangerine ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mix a slew of citrus zests together , in an attempt to replicate yuzu ’ s elusive , ineffable fragrance .
I ’ ve tried , and it ’ s not quite right .
Yuzu is yuzu ; there ’ s nothing else quite like it .
A confession : I zested only three of my yuzus before a familiar doubt made my hand pause on the Microplane .
Was this really the yuzu ’ s highest calling ?
Shouldn ’ t I save the rest of my bounty for some better purpose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came out to a tidy half cup , enough to punch up my meals for a month or two .
The rest of my lumpen , pitted , squish-faced , beautiful fruits went into the crisper drawer—they ’ d last longer in there , which would buy me time to commit to using them .
But fresh yuzu are so rare , so wonderful , so miraculous , that it took weeks to work up the courage .
Don ’ t ask me what I saw when I finally opened the crisper drawer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tell you .
20 grams citrus zest , from any whole , clean citrus fruits 80 grams stemmed and seeded fresh hot green chiles , like bird ’ s eye or jalapeño , finely chopped 10 grams sea salt or kosher salt 1 .
Combine the zest , chiles , and salt in the bowl of a small food processor and blend until a smooth , almost uniform texture forms .
Alternatively , grind the mixture to a paste using a mortar and pestle or a suribachi .
2 .
Spoon the mixture @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lid .
Let the kosho ferment in the refrigerator for five to ten days .
Once it ’ s fermented , the kosho will keep in the refrigerator for up to six weeks .

Among New York chefs, there is, reportedly, a thriving black market in fresh yuzu smuggled from Japan. Photograph from World Discovery / Alamy
I suffer terribly from what you might call a paralysis of wonder. When I become the custodian of something truly marvellous, notably beautiful, or a little bit rare, I worry so much about using it for a sufficiently special purpose that, more often than not, I fail ever to use it at all. My kitchen, in particular, is a graveyard of reverent neglect: a golden bottle of sunflower oil, pressed by monks in an ancient Georgian monastery, long past rancid; a little jar of barbecue sauce folded into my palms years ago by a grizzled pitmaster in Tennessee; a desiccated hunk of white truffle tucked in molding white rice; bags of international potato chips hanging on far beyond their sell-by dates.
Not long ago, a package arrived at my apartment, in Brooklyn, from a friend in the Bay Area, containing a new priceless gift: a dozen fresh yuzu fruits, plucked a day earlier from a tree in her mother’s yard. The moment I opened the box, two things happened simultaneously. One, my kitchen was suffused with the fruits’ intense, floral aroma. And, two, I vowed that I wouldn’t let these treasures go to waste.
“Treasure” is not much of an overstatement when it comes to yuzu. The knobbly-skinned Japanese fruits are among the most exquisite members of the citrus family: more floral than an orange and nearly as tart as a lime, with a scent that is dense and disarming, the Froot-Loops-y honey of a lemon blossom wrapped around an astringent armature of industrial floor cleaner (which is somehow exquisite), then magnified tenfold, then mailed to the moon. “The yuzu fragrance is entirely its own,” Shizuo Tsuji, a titan of Japanese gastronomy, wrote. It “resembles no citrus familiar to the West.”
The fruit is also a treasure in a more material sense. Yuzu trees dot California, an arboreal legacy of Japanese immigrants from the late nineteenth century, but their commercial growth there is limited, and the U.S.D.A. has a ban on the import of fresh yuzu from abroad—the fruit and the trees. So, for citrus aficionados living outside the farmers’-market radius of the California coast, processed, pre-prepared yuzu products are pretty much all we’ve had. In the rare instances when I’ve seen fresh yuzu for sale in the tri-state area, almost always at a Japanese specialty grocery, they’ve been staggeringly expensive, running fifteen to twenty dollars a pound. (In contrast, lemons are generally a dollar or two per pound.) I’m told that, among New York chefs, there is a thriving black market in fresh yuzu smuggled from Japan.
The fruit’s honeyed tartness is clear and lovely in all its packaged, processed forms—perfuming vinegars and hot sauces, infused into vodka and shoyu, tarting up yogurt and cheesecakes. If you were yuzu-obsessed, you could soften your lips with yuzu balm, garland your meals with yuzu salt, soothe your throat with yuzu tea, and dress your buttered toast with yuzu marmalade. But—as with all citrus—even the brightest processed-yuzu product is a tinny AM radio compared with the full, lush surround sound of the fresh fruit. A ripe yuzu is rough-skinned and yellow-orange, almost spherical, flattened slightly at the stem and the flower ends. Its skin is pitted and pockmarked, and often hangs loosely around its flesh. The fruit’s scant juice is puckeringly sour, but its rind is gently sweet, and rich in aromatic oils.
Yuzu is thought to have originated in China, but the fruit is most closely identified with Japan, where it is one of the nation’s essential aromas and flavors. It’s a key ingredient in ponzu sauce, the tangy blend of yuzu juice and soy sauce that often accompanies cold noodles or fried pork cutlets. It also lends zing to highballs, seasons potato chips, and is a favorite flavor for candy. On the winter solstice, bathtubs and onsen throughout Japan teem with whole yuzu, bobbling in the hot water to give bathers (including capybaras) a bracing soak.
My apartment’s bathtub is pitifully shallow, so a yuzu bath was out. The fruits have very little juice—they’re mostly pith and massive seeds—so squeezing out my entire stash, just for a couple of hasty at-home cocktails, seemed tactically misguided. I considered my bounty, wavering on the edge of catastrophic inaction, and arrived at a plan: the best part of a yuzu is what Tsuji described, in his book “Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art,” as its “marvelous aromatic rind,” so I decided to zest the fruits, using a fine-tooth grater to scrape off only the colorful and aromatic outer layer of the skin. I would use it to make yuzu kosho, a fiery-hot condiment of chiles, zest, and salt—it’s simple to make, keeps practically forever, and shows off all that’s wonderful about this exhilarating fruit.
As with many of the best condiments, yuzu kosho’s rich, complex flavor comes from a brief period of fermentation. The mixture is allowed to rest for a few days, giving the zingy freshness of the hot peppers time to relax into something deeper, as the floral notes of the citrus oils are drawn out by the salinity. The end result is a rough paste, glittering with salt and vividly green, suffused with the sharp, sour, sweet intoxication of yuzu. It’s intensely salty and blazingly hot; as such, it’s best portioned out in dots and dabs—a tiny pearl of yuzu kosho on top of a seared scallop or a meaty grilled mushroom, a tiny scoop blended into a vinaigrette or mashed into an avocado, or a pea-size dollop stirred, at the very last moment, into a bowl of ramen. If you don’t live in California—or you aren’t fortunate enough to have a friend who does, and is willing to send you yuzu care packages—you can buy yuzu kosho pre-made. (My favorite comes in a set of two jars, one made with green peppers and the other with red.) Or you can make it using another member of the citrus family: kosho of grapefruit (beautifully bitter), Meyer lemon (mellow and tart), tangerine (funky and sweet). Some people mix a slew of citrus zests together, in an attempt to replicate yuzu’s elusive, ineffable fragrance. I’ve tried, and it’s not quite right. Yuzu is yuzu; there’s nothing else quite like it.
A confession: I zested only three of my yuzus before a familiar doubt made my hand pause on the Microplane. Was this really the yuzu’s highest calling? Shouldn’t I save the rest of my bounty for some better purpose, yet unknown? My three-yuzu kosho came out to a tidy half cup, enough to punch up my meals for a month or two. The rest of my lumpen, pitted, squish-faced, beautiful fruits went into the crisper drawer—they’d last longer in there, which would buy me time to commit to using them. But fresh yuzu are so rare, so wonderful, so miraculous, that it took weeks to work up the courage. Don’t ask me what I saw when I finally opened the crisper drawer; I can’t bear to tell you.
Citrus kosho
Ingredients
20 grams citrus zest, from any whole, clean citrus fruits
80 grams stemmed and seeded fresh hot green chiles, like bird’s eye or jalapeño, finely chopped
10 grams sea salt or kosher salt
Directions
1. Combine the zest, chiles, and salt in the bowl of a small food processor and blend until a smooth, almost uniform texture forms. Alternatively, grind the mixture to a paste using a mortar and pestle or a suribachi.
2. Spoon the mixture into a glass jar and seal the lid. Let the kosho ferment in the refrigerator for five to ten days. Once it’s fermented, the kosho will keep in the refrigerator for up to six weeks.


newyorker--2020-02-27--The Youthful Energy of Bernie Sanders’s Final Days in South Carolina

After his increasingly decisive victories in the first three primaries and caucuses—in Iowa , New Hampshire , and Nevada—Bernie Sanders came into South Carolina having to contend with a rival once presumed to be the front-runner : Joe Biden .
At dusk in Charleston on a mild Tuesday evening , before the Democratic debate at the Gaillard auditorium , horse-drawn carriages took tourists through the historic district ( “ 100 % Donkey Free , ” one ad said ) , and , among the palmetto-tree-lined city squares , Baptist churches , and farm-to-table restaurants , a historic marquee on King @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” ( Steyer is startlingly viable in South Carolina , too . )
Debate-watching parties were being held here and there—I had dinner at a pub that featured a ragtag group of Elizabeth Warren and Sanders enthusiasts—but the TVs in most of the restaurants and bars I walked by were showing a basketball game .
After the debate ’ s chaos and a pugilistic show of strength from Biden , a festive mood prevailed on the streets , among dressed-up luminaries and debate-watchers .
“ Hope you had a good night !
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ governor of Virginia , called out .
Before going to my hotel , I walked a couple of blocks to the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church , beautifully serene against the night sky .
In front of it , a monument was engraved with nine doves , representing the nine victims of the shooting there , in 2015 .
The next morning , Representative Jim Clyburn gave a moving endorsement for Biden .
“ I know Joe .
We know Joe , ” he said .
“ But , most importantly , Joe knows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their frenzy of campaigning .
At the North Charleston convention center , a crowd of eleven hundred people showed up for a Bernie Sanders rally .
A disconcerting array of motorcycle cops ran around in the parking lot , executing a training exercise .
Inside , the crowd was diverse but predominantly white ; polling and conventional wisdom indicated that older African-American voters would go for Biden , and many of the black attendees in the crowd were fairly young .
Looking around , I saw people of Asian , South Asian , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ berets , blue and pink hair ; Birkenstocks , Doc Martens , people in T-shirts with the Black Flag logo modified to say “ Bernie Sanders , ” and a guy in a hat that said “ PEACEFUL.
” At one point , a fashionable woman in striped pants scooted by me on a Jazzy .
Jacob McLeroy , a retired mechanical engineer with a gentle demeanor , lives an hour outside of Charleston .
He wore a “ Bernie ” hat and told me that he hadn ’ t supported Sanders in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He is standing up against everything that has been wrong with this country for such a long time , ” he said .
“ I mean , this doesn ’ t start with Donald Trump .
It started decades ago .
He ’ s really the first politician that ’ s been able to really boldly stand up , not mince words about it.
” About what ?
“ The movement of wealth to a very small number of people and families , corporate control of the government through political donations and hacks.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I ’ m disabled , and I have Medicare , ” he said .
“ For me , it ’ s worked out great.
” But he has relatives in Georgia who have struggled to afford coverage with Obamacare , and one even changed jobs because of it .
Tyler Brown , a twenty-one-year-old from Charleston , would be voting in a Presidential election for the first time .
“ Bernie is my candidate , ” he said .
“ I wasn ’ t really too hip on politics , but I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign for Bernie , and he gave me some really good insight—what Bernie ’ s for , what Bernie ’ s against—and I align with that .
I didn ’ t go to college because I couldn ’ t afford it .
But if he ’ s going to give us free or reduced college , that would be awesome.
” He laughed .
What would he study ?
“ Political science is cool , ” he said , as is journalism .
Onstage , speakers led cheers for veterans , solidarity , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; near me , a toddler with a cochlear implant snuggled up to his mom .
Kyle Bibby , a veteran and an organizer from the group Common Defense , said , “ Veterans like us , we ’ re regular working-class people , just like most of you here today.
” He cited “ the audacity of ‘ us ’ ” : “ We need a candidate with the audacity to slap the table and say , ‘ I don ’ t care what you call radical , I don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ solution to the problems that we have right now.
” He slapped the lectern and the crowd went wild .
Sanders , in a sport coat but no necktie , gave the lectern some engagement , too .
As he spoke , people tucked their “ Bernie ” signs under their arms to applaud .
“ America can not continue having a President who is a racist !
A sexist !
A homophobe !
A xenophobe !
” he yelled .
The crowd roared for each truism .
“ And those are his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , whose “ jokes ” can feel as authentic to him as the memes employed by his Fyre Festival-connected social-media team , or Amy Klobuchar , whose jokes are real but a bit proudly deliberate , Sanders is who he is , jokewise and otherwise .
On one side of me , a young woman with a “ Dreamer ” tattoo took a video of him as he spoke , and on my other side a regal-looking older woman with a beret , pearl earrings , good posture , and a tweed jacket @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Sanders roared through his stump speech , riling up the crowd .
( “ I like unions !
” ; “ If you buy a cah for a few hundred bucks , and it breaks down , you are not shocked , right ?
” ) Presenting a soaring vision of a Sanders-led health-care future , he reached a crescendo .
“ Dental care !
” he yelled , bringing the house down .
“ Hearing aids !
Eyeglasses !
” When he talked about women having the right to control their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the front of the crowd nodded and clapped vigorously .
Sanders closed on a rousing challenge to get involved .
“ The only way change takes place is when millions of people stand up and fight for justice !
” he yelled .
In South Carolina , he said , they ’ d need an extra push , and the people sounded ready to do it .
Afterward , a woman named Terry , who ’ d retired from the school system in a nearby suburb , told me that even in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were having a hard time making ends meet : teachers working more than one job , people living paycheck to paycheck , a neighbor struggling with homelessness .
“ I remember the Great Society , ” she said , looking wistful .
I drove to Sanders ’ s next rally , in Myrtle Beach , two hours away , speeding by groves of trees , signs for Boats N Hoagies , the Gullah Museum , the Rice Museum , a great many subdivisions with the word “ plantation ” in them , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this merged into a coastal vacationers ’ vibe : Captain Crab , golf , Dixie Liquor ( “ KOSHER WINE ” ) , cheapo helicopter rides , a trampoline park .
The Myrtle Beach Convention Center had an aquatic-scene mural on an outer wall , and , in the parking lot , Mercedeses and wide-bodied pickups commingled with hippie vans .
Inside , a merch vender wore his biggest seller : a T-shirt picturing Sanders as Baby Yoda .
Onstage , Sanders , who had somehow got there much faster than I had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; a little kid on his dad ’ s shoulders pumped his fists along with the rest of the crowd .
The audience looked bigger , again diverse but mostly white—long white beards , another beret or two , kids with pink and blue hair .
Sanders delivered the same speech , but , in the climate-change part , citing cities that might be underwater by the end of the century , he included Myrtle Beach .
He also celebrated his shrinking margin behind Biden in South Carolina .
“ We ain ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he yelled , to mass jubilation .

After his increasingly decisive victories in the first three primaries and caucuses—in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—Bernie Sanders came into South Carolina having to contend with a rival once presumed to be the front-runner: Joe Biden. At dusk in Charleston on a mild Tuesday evening, before the Democratic debate at the Gaillard auditorium, horse-drawn carriages took tourists through the historic district (“100% Donkey Free,” one ad said), and, among the palmetto-tree-lined city squares, Baptist churches, and farm-to-table restaurants, a historic marquee on King Street read “TOM STEYER FOR PRESIDENT.” (Steyer is startlingly viable in South Carolina, too.) Debate-watching parties were being held here and there—I had dinner at a pub that featured a ragtag group of Elizabeth Warren and Sanders enthusiasts—but the TVs in most of the restaurants and bars I walked by were showing a basketball game. After the debate’s chaos and a pugilistic show of strength from Biden, a festive mood prevailed on the streets, among dressed-up luminaries and debate-watchers. “Hope you had a good night!” a waving Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia, called out. Before going to my hotel, I walked a couple of blocks to the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church, beautifully serene against the night sky. In front of it, a monument was engraved with nine doves, representing the nine victims of the shooting there, in 2015. The next morning, Representative Jim Clyburn gave a moving endorsement for Biden. “I know Joe. We know Joe,” he said. “But, most importantly, Joe knows us.”
Meanwhile, the candidates continued their frenzy of campaigning. At the North Charleston convention center, a crowd of eleven hundred people showed up for a Bernie Sanders rally. A disconcerting array of motorcycle cops ran around in the parking lot, executing a training exercise. Inside, the crowd was diverse but predominantly white; polling and conventional wisdom indicated that older African-American voters would go for Biden, and many of the black attendees in the crowd were fairly young. Looking around, I saw people of Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern descent; headscarves, berets, blue and pink hair; Birkenstocks, Doc Martens, people in T-shirts with the Black Flag logo modified to say “Bernie Sanders,” and a guy in a hat that said “PEACEFUL.” At one point, a fashionable woman in striped pants scooted by me on a Jazzy.
Jacob McLeroy, a retired mechanical engineer with a gentle demeanor, lives an hour outside of Charleston. He wore a “Bernie” hat and told me that he hadn’t supported Sanders in 2016 but supported him now. “He is standing up against everything that has been wrong with this country for such a long time,” he said. “I mean, this doesn’t start with Donald Trump. It started decades ago. He’s really the first politician that’s been able to really boldly stand up, not mince words about it.” About what? “The movement of wealth to a very small number of people and families, corporate control of the government through political donations and hacks.” Health care, of course. “I’m disabled, and I have Medicare,” he said. “For me, it’s worked out great.” But he has relatives in Georgia who have struggled to afford coverage with Obamacare, and one even changed jobs because of it.
Tyler Brown, a twenty-one-year-old from Charleston, would be voting in a Presidential election for the first time. “Bernie is my candidate,” he said. “I wasn’t really too hip on politics, but I have a friend who works on the campaign for Bernie, and he gave me some really good insight—what Bernie’s for, what Bernie’s against—and I align with that. I didn’t go to college because I couldn’t afford it. But if he’s going to give us free or reduced college, that would be awesome.” He laughed. What would he study? “Political science is cool,” he said, as is journalism. Onstage, speakers led cheers for veterans, solidarity, eliminating student debt, and creating unions; near me, a toddler with a cochlear implant snuggled up to his mom. Kyle Bibby, a veteran and an organizer from the group Common Defense, said, “Veterans like us, we’re regular working-class people, just like most of you here today.” He cited “the audacity of ‘us’ ”: “We need a candidate with the audacity to slap the table and say, ‘I don’t care what you call radical, I don’t care what you call far-left—we need a solution to the problems that we have right now.” He slapped the lectern and the crowd went wild.
Sanders, in a sport coat but no necktie, gave the lectern some engagement, too. As he spoke, people tucked their “Bernie” signs under their arms to applaud. “America cannot continue having a President who is a racist! A sexist! A homophobe! A xenophobe!” he yelled. The crowd roared for each truism. “And those are his good qualities!” Unlike Michael Bloomberg, whose “jokes” can feel as authentic to him as the memes employed by his Fyre Festival-connected social-media team, or Amy Klobuchar, whose jokes are real but a bit proudly deliberate, Sanders is who he is, jokewise and otherwise. On one side of me, a young woman with a “Dreamer” tattoo took a video of him as he spoke, and on my other side a regal-looking older woman with a beret, pearl earrings, good posture, and a tweed jacket listened to him, just as rapt. Sanders roared through his stump speech, riling up the crowd. (“I like unions!”; “If you buy a cah for a few hundred bucks, and it breaks down, you are not shocked, right?”) Presenting a soaring vision of a Sanders-led health-care future, he reached a crescendo. “Dental care!” he yelled, bringing the house down. “Hearing aids! Eyeglasses!” When he talked about women having the right to control their own bodies, a tiny white-haired woman in the front of the crowd nodded and clapped vigorously.
Sanders closed on a rousing challenge to get involved. “The only way change takes place is when millions of people stand up and fight for justice!” he yelled. In South Carolina, he said, they’d need an extra push, and the people sounded ready to do it. Afterward, a woman named Terry, who’d retired from the school system in a nearby suburb, told me that even in her “more upper-middle-class” town people were having a hard time making ends meet: teachers working more than one job, people living paycheck to paycheck, a neighbor struggling with homelessness. “I remember the Great Society,” she said, looking wistful.
I drove to Sanders’s next rally, in Myrtle Beach, two hours away, speeding by groves of trees, signs for Boats N Hoagies, the Gullah Museum, the Rice Museum, a great many subdivisions with the word “plantation” in them, and little churches. In Myrtle Beach, this merged into a coastal vacationers’ vibe: Captain Crab, golf, Dixie Liquor (“KOSHER WINE”), cheapo helicopter rides, a trampoline park. The Myrtle Beach Convention Center had an aquatic-scene mural on an outer wall, and, in the parking lot, Mercedeses and wide-bodied pickups commingled with hippie vans. Inside, a merch vender wore his biggest seller: a T-shirt picturing Sanders as Baby Yoda. Onstage, Sanders, who had somehow got there much faster than I had, was singing the praises of unions; a little kid on his dad’s shoulders pumped his fists along with the rest of the crowd. The audience looked bigger, again diverse but mostly white—long white beards, another beret or two, kids with pink and blue hair. Sanders delivered the same speech, but, in the climate-change part, citing cities that might be underwater by the end of the century, he included Myrtle Beach. He also celebrated his shrinking margin behind Biden in South Carolina. “We ain’t thirty points behind today!” he yelled, to mass jubilation.
After the speech, three young men next to me chanted, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Our student loans have got to go!” They were high-school students from nearby Myrtle Island, who would all be eighteen by the time of the election and had registered to vote. One, Bobby Kowalski, said that many of his classmates were Republicans. “I see a lot of Trump 2020 and MAGA stickers on computers in class.” One of his issues as a voter, he said, was “the whole equality thing.” He’s gay, and he said, “I want to be treated the same as everyone else.” His friend Pierceson Lee said, “Guns should be our decision, not the N.R.A.’s.”
Elsewhere in the crowd, a married couple, a retired teacher and a retired auto-plant worker, had driven from North Carolina. “Trump is the worst President I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I’m eighty,” the husband said. They were ardent Sanders supporters, and they cared most about unions, the environment, health care, education, rights, and equality. “Churches should not be involved in politics,” the wife said. And private prisons should be abolished. (This point, as in New Hampshire, got some of the biggest cheers of the stump speech.) She was proud of how many older people had attended—“A fourth of the people here today had gray hair!”—but many were quite young, too, and highly motivated. If Sanders won South Carolina, or came close, it seemed likely to be on a wave of their ballots.
Three beaming young people had just come off the risers behind Sanders’s lectern. They had met at Coastal Carolina University, nearby. Jihad Levermore and Ja’Quan Shelton study theatre there; Daniela Cantu dropped out because she couldn’t afford tuition. Cantu, whose mother is from Mexico, said that she cares about immigrant rights. Levermore said that he wanted “everything to change—a lot of people are just unhappy, and it shouldn’t be that way, because we are the people who make up this country.”
“And it was already that way before the last election,” Shelton said. He had a nose ring and wore a “Friends” T-shirt (“I haven’t seen a single episode”) that he’d cropped into a half shirt.
“I feel like we got set back, like, forty years,” Cantu said.
“Definitely,” Shelton said.
“The young people that I know are definitely, like, leaning toward Bernie,” Levermore said. “But the older people I know, especially the older black people, are leaning toward Joe Biden, because of his relationship with Obama. They all still really trust Obama.” On campus, they’d observed a plurality of opinions, mostly pro-Sanders but occasionally leaning toward Warren or Pete Buttigieg. “A gay President would be fabulous, but . . .” Shelton began. He trailed off, seeming to look for a polite way to end the sentence.
“He’s got to be progressive,” Levermore said. “I don’t want a candidate who thinks small. Even if some of Bernie’s plans don’t happen, I want a President with idealism.”
“I guess Bernie could come off as very ambitious,” Shelton said. “But I love that. Because I’m that way.”
Did they have any thoughts to share about South Carolina voters?
“I feel like, in the eyes of the rest of the country, South Carolina is just completely red,” Levermore said. “But there’s a really big Democratic movement here. . . . This state is more blue than people realize.”
“Especially with the younger generation,” Cantu said. “We’re all finally able to vote, too.”


newyorker--2020-02-27--Dear Pepper: Broken Dreams and Job Hunting

Dear Pepper is a monthly advice-column comic by Liana Finck .
If you have questions for Pepper about how to @ @ @ @ @ please direct them to dearpepperquestions @ gmail.com .
Questions may be edited for brevity and @ @

Dear Pepper is a monthly advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to dearpepperquestions@gmail.com. Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.


newyorker--2020-02-27--The End of Egyptian Cotton

The End of Egyptian Cotton

In 1994 , Ayman Nassar , an Egyptian-American who grew up in California , briefly abandoned his studies at Colorado University and followed his older brother to Egypt .
“ There were so many opportunities , ” Nassar told me .
The Nassars come from a family of Egyptian industrialists .
They had owned a leather tannery in Alexandria which was nationalized by President Gamal Abdel Nasser , in the sweeping socialist reforms of the nineteen-sixties—an event that precipitated the Nassar family ’ s departure to the U.S. Now Egypt had relaxed many of its socialist policies , reducing subsidies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much of its public sector .
With the help of a grandfather who had remained in the country , the Nassar brothers tried their hand at various industries before building a name for themselves in cotton .
They started by trading in raw cotton , and eventually opened their own spinning and weaving factories .
The fame of Egyptian cotton is much like that of Italian olive oil or French wine , where provenance has become a shortcut for quality .
A quick search on Amazon returns seven thousand results for “ Egyptian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Several are appended with the word “ luxury.
” Cotton is the only commodity for which the adjective “ Egyptian ” adds grandeur , the way “ German ” does for cars and “ French ” does for most things .
“ People still , whether rightfully or not , place a value on Egyptian cotton , ” Rami Helali , a co-founder of Kotn , a clothing company that primarily uses Egyptian cotton , told me .
“ I think they see the name and they think ‘ luxury ’ and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a handful of countries—along with the United States , Israel , and Turkmenistan—that grow a particularly lustrous type of cotton called extra-long-staple cotton , known in the U.S. as Pima cotton .
Extra-long-staple varieties make up three per cent of the world ’ s cotton production .
“ I have seen it , ” Helali told me , of one such variety that grows in Egypt .
“ It is a shocking , shocking thing .
It looks like silk.
” But , as the Nassar brothers were building their business , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Egypt , was in quiet decline .
When the government liberalized the cotton sector , it also stopped subsidizing cotton farmers directly and left private companies to trade in cotton seeds freely .
“ There were no procedures to monitor those companies , ” Mohammed Khedr , the head of the Cotton Arbitration & Testing General Organization ( CATGO ) , told me .
Crop rotation was left to the discretion of farmers , who responded too readily to the whims of the market , eroding the fertility of the Nile Valley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2009 , 2010 , is kind of when I started personally hearing less about Egyptian cotton , ” Steven Birkhold , a former C.E.O .
of Lacoste and Diesel U.S.A. , told me .
“ I used to travel frequently to a lot of our key partners , whether it be the ginning mills or the spinners , and that ’ s kind of when we stopped paying attention—from brands like Diesel , Lacoste , Lee Jeans—to Egyptian cotton.
” On January 25 , 2011 , encouraged by the success of protests in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali , thousands of Egyptians flooded the streets to protest the corruption and aggression of President Hosni Mubarak and his administration .
Very quickly , Mubarak was forced out , and new governments were shuffled at high speed .
In this context , the health of the country ’ s cotton was further ignored .
The best cotton plants are a hybrid of different species selected for particular qualities .
Some farmers began to cut corners , ignoring the “ isolation distance ” required between cotton fields of different @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The Egyptian government , which controls all seed research , has long struggled to come up with new ones .
“ It ’ s like having too small a gene pool , ” James Hayward , the C.E.O .
of Applied DNA Sciences , which makes DNA tags that allow manufacturers to trace products through supply chains , told me .
( Birkhold is currently a consultant for Applied DNA . )
“ If it ’ s inbred , it just gets weaker and weaker faster and faster.
” There are about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , all of which are officially categorized by Egypt ’ s CATGO as long or extra-long .
( Long-staple cotton grown in Upper Egypt is considered by some traders to be not very long , after all . )
Among them are such prized varieties as Giza 86 , considered by traders to be “ the bread and butter ” of Egyptian cottons , and Giza 45 , which has the longest staple .
“ If you don ’ t guard the germ plasm and protect it , the genetics decay , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cottons that stopped being extra-long-staple .
The staple got shorter and shorter and shorter.
” Giza 45 is a hybrid from the nineteen-fifties .
The government had since failed to come up with a similarly exceptional new hybrid .
“ They kept on planting it , and the quality and volume went down , ” Nassar said .
As Giza 45 started to fade , the Nassars anxiously built up their inventory .
“ We would go select and graze it out.
” Though they still believe they have more Giza 45 than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2009 .
After cotton is ginned , it is classified according to fibre length , uniformity , color , and other determinants of quality—results that are later made available to buyers .
By 2013 , the cotton harvest was turning out so poorly that Khedr stopped going to the classing facilities .
“ I wouldn ’ t go down to supervise the agents because , really , we ’ d tell them , ‘ The cotton you see in front of you is not Egyptian cotton , ’ ” he said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ all.
’ ” The Egyptian cotton industry was born from a single American event—the Civil War .
Cotton had been so little known in medieval Europe that it was imagined to be a mixture of plant and animal—a “ vegetable lamb , ” Sven Beckert , a professor of history at Harvard , writes , in “ Empire of Cotton.
” Some people theorized that little sheep grew on plants , bending down at night to drink water ; other myths told of sheep held to the ground by low stems .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ describes a vegetable lamb that grows in Tartary—a term for areas of north , central , and east Asia unknown to European geographers .
Cotton had long thrived in parts of Africa , Asia , and the Americas .
In 70 C.E.
, Pliny the Elder found in Upper Egypt a shrub whose fruit looked like a “ nut with a beard , and containing in the inside a silky substance , the down of which is spun into threads.
” Well into the nineteenth century , the Indian subcontinent had a peerless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Leeds reported that fine Indian cloths must be “ the work of fairies , or insects , rather than men.
” They were so fine they seemed like “ webs of woven wind.
” Cotton-growing and -manufacturing skills moved to southern Europe with the Arab conquests and the spread of Islam .
Most European languages borrowed their words from the Arabic qutun .
( The German baumwolle and the Czech bavlna , which translate roughly to “ tree wool , ” maintain their roots in European legend . )
With the advent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
By the mid-nineteenth century , cotton was driving an industrial revolution in England and slavery in the American South .
Before the Civil War , eighty per cent of the cotton used by British textile mills came from the American South .
As the war escalated , cotton prices increased , and British textile manufacturers started looking for alternatives .

In 1994, Ayman Nassar, an Egyptian-American who grew up in California, briefly abandoned his studies at the University of Colorado and followed his older brother to Egypt. “There were so many opportunities,” Nassar told me. The Nassars come from a family of Egyptian industrialists. They had owned a leather tannery in Alexandria which was nationalized by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the sweeping socialist reforms of the nineteen-sixties—an event that precipitated the Nassar family’s departure to the U.S. Now Egypt had relaxed many of its socialist policies, reducing subsidies, loosening price controls, and privatizing much of its public sector. With the help of a grandfather who had remained in the country, the Nassar brothers tried their hand at various industries before building a name for themselves in cotton. They started by trading in raw cotton, and eventually opened their own spinning and weaving factories.
The fame of Egyptian cotton is much like that of Italian olive oil or French wine, where provenance has become a shortcut for quality. A quick search on Amazon returns seven thousand results for “Egyptian cotton” in bedding and sheets alone. Several are appended with the word “luxury.” Cotton is the only commodity for which the adjective “Egyptian” adds grandeur, the way “German” does for cars and “French” does for most things. “People still, whether rightfully or not, place a value on Egyptian cotton,” Rami Helali, a co-founder of Kotn, a clothing company that primarily uses Egyptian cotton, told me. “I think they see the name and they think ‘luxury’ and ‘expensive.’ ” Egypt is one of a handful of countries—along with the United States, Israel, and Turkmenistan—that grow a particularly lustrous type of cotton called extra-long-staple cotton, known in the U.S. as Pima cotton. Extra-long-staple varieties make up three per cent of the world’s cotton production. “I have seen it,” Helali told me, of one such variety that grows in Egypt. “It is a shocking, shocking thing. It looks like silk.”
But, as the Nassar brothers were building their business, Egyptian cotton, much like the rest of Egypt, was in quiet decline. When the government liberalized the cotton sector, it also stopped subsidizing cotton farmers directly and left private companies to trade in cotton seeds freely. “There were no procedures to monitor those companies,” Mohammed Khedr, the head of the Cotton Arbitration & Testing General Organization (CATGO), told me. Crop rotation was left to the discretion of farmers, who responded too readily to the whims of the market, eroding the fertility of the Nile Valley. “I would say in late 2009, 2010, is kind of when I started personally hearing less about Egyptian cotton,” Steven Birkhold, a former C.E.O. of Lacoste and Diesel U.S.A., told me. “I used to travel frequently to a lot of our key partners, whether it be the ginning mills or the spinners, and that’s kind of when we stopped paying attention—from brands like Diesel, Lacoste, Lee Jeans—to Egyptian cotton.”
On January 25, 2011, encouraged by the success of protests in Tunisia that led to the departure of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, thousands of Egyptians flooded the streets to protest the corruption and aggression of President Hosni Mubarak and his administration. Very quickly, Mubarak was forced out, and new governments were shuffled at high speed. In this context, the health of the country’s cotton was further ignored. The best cotton plants are a hybrid of different species selected for particular qualities. Some farmers began to cut corners, ignoring the “isolation distance” required between cotton fields of different varieties. Their seeds became badly cross-pollinated. The Egyptian government, which controls all seed research, has long struggled to come up with new ones. “It’s like having too small a gene pool,” James Hayward, the C.E.O. of Applied DNA Sciences, which makes DNA tags that allow manufacturers to trace products through supply chains, told me. (Birkhold is currently a consultant for Applied DNA.) “If it’s inbred, it just gets weaker and weaker faster and faster.” There are about ten varieties of cotton grown in Egypt, all of which are officially categorized by Egypt’s CATGO as long or extra-long. (Long-staple cotton grown in Upper Egypt is considered by some traders to be not very long, after all.) Among them are such prized varieties as Giza 86, considered by traders to be “the bread and butter” of Egyptian cottons, and Giza 45, which has the longest staple. “If you don’t guard the germ plasm and protect it, the genetics decay,” Hayward said. “There were Egyptian cottons that stopped being extra-long-staple. The staple got shorter and shorter and shorter.” Giza 45 is a hybrid from the nineteen-fifties. The government had since failed to come up with a similarly exceptional new hybrid. “They kept on planting it, and the quality and volume went down,” Nassar said. As Giza 45 started to fade, the Nassars anxiously built up their inventory. “We would go select and graze it out.” Though they still believe they have more Giza 45 than anyone else, they stopped buying it in 2009.
After cotton is ginned, it is classified according to fibre length, uniformity, color, and other determinants of quality—results that are later made available to buyers. By 2013, the cotton harvest was turning out so poorly that Khedr stopped going to the classing facilities. “I wouldn’t go down to supervise the agents because, really, we’d tell them, ‘The cotton you see in front of you is not Egyptian cotton,’ ” he said. “ ‘It’s nothing at all.’ ”
The Egyptian cotton industry was born from a single American event—the Civil War. Cotton had been so little known in medieval Europe that it was imagined to be a mixture of plant and animal—a “vegetable lamb,” Sven Beckert, a professor of history at Harvard, writes, in “Empire of Cotton.” Some people theorized that little sheep grew on plants, bending down at night to drink water; other myths told of sheep held to the ground by low stems. As late as 1728, an encyclopedia entry describes a vegetable lamb that grows in Tartary—a term for areas of north, central, and east Asia unknown to European geographers.
Cotton had long thrived in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In 70 C.E., Pliny the Elder found in Upper Egypt a shrub whose fruit looked like a “nut with a beard, and containing in the inside a silky substance, the down of which is spun into threads.” Well into the nineteenth century, the Indian subcontinent had a peerless cotton operation. A nineteenth-century cotton expert from Leeds reported that fine Indian cloths must be “the work of fairies, or insects, rather than men.” They were so fine they seemed like “webs of woven wind.”
Cotton-growing and -manufacturing skills moved to southern Europe with the Arab conquests and the spread of Islam. Most European languages borrowed their words from the Arabic qutun. (The German baumwolle and the Czech bavlna, which translate roughly to “tree wool,” maintain their roots in European legend.) With the advent of industrialization, cotton attracted opportunists everywhere. By the mid-nineteenth century, cotton was driving an industrial revolution in England and slavery in the American South. Before the Civil War, eighty per cent of the cotton used by British textile mills came from the American South. As the war escalated, cotton prices increased, and British textile manufacturers started looking for alternatives.
Some years before, a Frenchman named Louis Alexis Jumel had come across a neglected cotton plant in a Cairo garden. He marvelled at how well the plant took to the climate, how its long fibres spun easily into soft yarn. He became convinced that large-scale cultivation was possible and persuaded Muhammad Ali Pasha, Egypt’s monarch, of his idea. Grown along the Nile, cotton thrived in Egypt, and Ali steadily turned the country into a cotton plantation. Between 1860 and 1865, Egypt’s farmers increased their cotton production from fifty million pounds to two hundred and fifty million pounds.
Egypt’s production quickly eclipsed that of the U.S., and, by the end of the nineteenth century, Egypt derived ninety-three per cent of its revenue from cotton. It had become “the major source of income for almost every proprietor in the Delta,” Roger Owen writes, in “Cotton and the Egyptian Economy.”
Lawrence Durrell, in “The Alexandria Quartet,” describes the “cotton kings” who lived in early-twentieth-century Alexandria, “the Hellenistic capital of the bankers and cotton-visionaries.” The Alexandria Cotton Exporters Association is adjacent to the Cecil Hotel—a storied Moorish guest house built in 1929, where Durrell’s characters gather to gossip and broker their affairs with the “detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger.” Like the hotel, the association has an unobstructed view of Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor, lined with Venetian-style buildings that curve up to the Citadel of Qaitbay.


newyorker--2020-02-27--Daily Cartoon: Thursday, February 27th

Daily Cartoon: Thursday, February 27th

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