newyorker--2020-09-14--An American Writer for an Age of Division

A year after Donald Trump assumed office , Ayad Akhtar was at the American Academy in Rome , contemplating populism , the degradation of democracy , and ruinous civil strife .
He had been mulling over the idea of a play about the brothers Gracchus , plebeian politicians in the century before Caesar whose defiance of the senatorial élite and championship of the poor led to an unhappy end .
Akhtar wasn ’ t alone in consulting Roman history to gain perspective on the present .
From his window , he could look out at the residence of the U.S @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Callista Gingrich , whose husband , Newt , was studying Augustus , rumor had it , for pointers on how to counsel a President who fancied himself an emperor .
Akhtar , who is forty-nine , is an obsessive autodidact , with a mind like a grappling hook for any subject that attracts his interest .
There are many .
As a kid growing up in the Milwaukee suburbs , he studied the Quran with a rigor that flummoxed his secular Pakistani parents .
As a theatre major at Brown , he taught @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a year to direct his own translations of Genet and Bernard-Marie Koltès .
When he was in his twenties , working in New York as an assistant to the director Andre Gregory , he spent his free time analyzing the prosody of Spenser ’ s “ The Faerie Queene ” and poring over Freud , which led to a years-long study of Jung , then Lacan , then Winnicott .
Although he lost his faith in his teens , religion of all kinds continues to fascinate him .
“ He ’ s the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Meister Eckhart , ” the German writer Daniel Kehlmann , a good friend of Akhtar ’ s , told me , referring to the medieval Christian theologian and mystic .
Success arrived late , but Akhtar has made up for lost time .
His first novel , “ American Dervish , ” about the coming of age of an innocent Pakistani-American boy , was published in January , 2012 , when he was forty-one , the same month that his first play , “ Disgraced , ” about the unravelling of a jaded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
After a buzzy run at Lincoln Center , where tickets were scalped for fifteen hundred dollars apiece , “ Disgraced ” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama , then moved to a sold-out run in London , and to the Lyceum Theatre , on Broadway .
In short order , Akhtar had three more plays première , including “ The Invisible Hand , ” a thriller about an American hostage in Pakistan who , to pay his ransom , teaches his fundamentalist captors how to manipulate financial markets , and “ Junk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transformed the dry subject of high-yield bonds in the nineteen-eighties into unexpectedly riveting drama .
“ Ayad ’ s particular brilliance is that he makes systems kinetic , ” Josh Stern , a producer who is working with Akhtar to develop a television show , told me .
“ He ’ s able to take this huge , complicated infrastructure and distill it down to visceral character drama in a way that is unique.
” As arcane as his intellectual tastes can be , Akhtar is determined to appeal to a broad public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is how he described his work to me when I met him , earlier this summer .
In Rome , Akhtar devoted himself to the classics that lined the Academy ’ s library : Livy , Tacitus , Machiavelli .
One afternoon , he opened Giacomo Leopardi ’ s “ Canti , ” from 1835 , and read the book ’ s first poem , “ To Italy ” : An idea hit .
Why not write to his own country—to the whole spliced-together nation , as it seemed on the verge of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Throw off the veil of metaphor and speak directly .
The result is Akhtar ’ s second novel , “ Homeland Elegies , ” published this month .
The book opens with a letter addressed “ To America ” —an “ overture , ” Akhtar calls it .
In a crescendo of grievance reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg ’ s “ Howl , ” the narrator , who shares Akhtar ’ s name , denounces the nation ’ s recent sins and failures , citing the decline of peers and family members who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pay , suicide , and overdose , “ medicated for despair , anxiety , lack of affect , insomnia , sexual dysfunction ; and the premature cancers brought on by the chemical shortcuts for everything from the food moving through our irritable bowels to the lotions applied to our sun-poisoned skins.
” He rails against the country ’ s cult of greed , its prostitution of private life for public attention , its allegiance to devices that “ filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sacred memory of Walt Whitman , to give his own account of the riven nation .
I visited Akhtar in late June at the modest Greek Revival house in Kinderhook , New York , that he bought last year with his fiancée , Annika Boras , an actor and director .
Ongoing renovations had left the façade , with its portico of Doric columns , looking as if it had survived a small cyclone , though the interior was intact and comfortable , furnished with Boras ’ s baby-grand piano and the largest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The couple had decamped to the country in early March from their rental apartment on the Upper West Side .
Since childhood , Akhtar has had vivid dreams that he interprets as premonitions .
One came to him just before September 11th , and another this February , in which he tried to escape an evil fog that was smothering the world .
When the first cases of the coronavirus were reported in the city , he and Boras left immediately .
Akhtar starts every morning by reading one of Shakespeare ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he likes to jot scenes and themes on index cards , which he tapes above his desk to arrange and reorder .
Lately , he had been working around the clock to complete the pilot for his television series , but , concerned that early disclosure of its subject could prove disastrous , he had removed all evidence , leaving a single card on which he had written , in Latin , “ Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit.
” “ It means , ‘ Bidden or not bidden , God is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It was a quote that Jung had up in his tower in Bollingen .
It felt appropriate to what I ’ d like to think—that the mystery is present whether or not I ’ m aware of it.
” Akhtar , who is bald and youthful , wore elegantly ripped jeans and round , blue-rimmed glasses ; when he took them off , in moments of distraction or excitement , his eyes looked unguarded and dreamy .
He is gentler in person than he is on the page , friendly and fluid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ precise idea , the right phrase .
He exudes a confidence that might border on showmanship were he not so intent on poking at his vulnerabilities .
Sitting far apart , we ate ham sandwiches .
“ High-octane pretension , ” he said , when I asked him about his decision to speak , in “ Homeland Elegies , ” to America writ large .
But that was customary self-deprecation , protective and perfunctory .
Akhtar is serious about his work to a point that can delight collaborators , or drive them mad @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was cast in an early reading of “ Junk ” ; they decided not to work together again .
“ I get really nervous when I have a show going up , ” he said .

The religious fervor soon burned off. “Early on, I recognized—I won’t put it generously—the abject stupidity of thinking that I must know something that other people don’t, and that I must be right because I was born into something,” Akhtar said. (These days, he and Boras practice meditation.) His quest for the sublime found a new outlet when he saw “The Empire Strikes Back”—the Dagobah swamp blew his mind—and, later, in high school, when a teacher introduced him to European modernist literature. He decided that he wanted to be a writer, and the conviction deepened when he studied with the Americanist Mary Cappello at the University of Rochester, where he matriculated before transferring to Brown for his sophomore year. (Cappello, who appears in the novel as a beloved professor named Mary Moroni, told me that she still sends Akhtar detailed critiques of his work.)
Akhtar found early success in a creative-writing class in Rochester, with a short story about a burial gone awry in Pakistan. Impressed, the professor offered to connect him with literary editors at various illustrious magazines. Akhtar was elated, then frozen by doubt. What if the story was a fluke? He fell into a crushing depression. It was years before he showed his fiction to anyone else.
In July, Akhtar spent the better part of a week at the sound director Robert Kessler’s studio in Katonah, recording the audiobook of “Homeland Elegies.” On the afternoon that I visited, he was preparing to read a chapter called “On Pottersville,” which begins with a charged conversation the narrator has with a Black libertarian friend who is explaining why he votes Republican. Kessler, who has shoulder-length white hair and an aspect of relaxed competence, adjusted his blue medical mask and settled himself at the soundboard as Akhtar shut himself into a booth in an adjacent room.
“Let me know when you’re rolling, dude,” Akhtar said. Kessler gave him the O.K., and Akhtar launched into an epigraph from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which opens the section: “Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this rabble you’re talking about—they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”
Breaking for breath, he said, “I know it sounded nothing like Jimmy Stewart.”
“That’s a good thing,” Kessler said.
Akhtar feels that his books find their truest form in his performance of them. He takes special pleasure in rendering his parents’ accents: his mother’s lightly wheedling tone; his father’s comical bombast. As he read, he shaped the air with his hands, marking rhythm. “Fuck me,” he muttered as he stumbled on a word. “Robert was telling me that people swallow a lot of air when they’re doing this, so that’s why I’m burping a lot.”
“I keep telling him he doesn’t have to be so polite about it, to just let it out,” Kessler said.
Akhtar discovered acting at Rochester, and transferred to Brown to pursue it. The program was like a conservatory: he was in acting class two hours a day, four days a week, and otherwise translating, directing, producing, and performing. At the end of Akhtar’s senior year, Andre Gregory gave a talk on campus. “I basically accosted him,” Akhtar recalled. “I said, ‘I’m a big fan of your work, especially the spiritual dimension of what you’re doing. I know you’re good friends with Jerzy Grotowski,’ ” the avant-garde Polish director. Akhtar had become infatuated with Grotowski’s spiritual predecessor, George Gurdjieff, the early-twentieth-century Armenian mystic who encouraged his followers to awaken a higher consciousness through music and dance. “Gurdjieff is dead,” he told Gregory. “So I want to work with Grotowski.”
Two weeks later, Akhtar skipped graduation and flew to Grotowski’s institute in Tuscany. “His whole thing was about trying to find ways to gain access to a kind of animal state, what he would call an ‘organicity,’ ” Akhtar said. Grotowski led his acolytes through sixteen-hour days that began in the middle of the afternoon and went past dawn, exhausting them to the point of breakthrough, or breakdown. “He and maybe one other person in my life have set a certain bar of what’s possible, intellectually, creatively,” Akhtar told me. Still, there was something cultish about a cloistered environment devoted to a theatrical genius who had stopped making theatre. When the actors performed, they faced an empty chair.
Some people spent a decade or more at the institute. Akhtar lasted a year. He and his girlfriend, a Frenchwoman whom he had met while studying abroad, and later married, moved to New York, where they lived in a studio apartment on Second Avenue. He began working as Gregory’s assistant, helping to rehearse Gregory’s production of “Uncle Vanya” with Julianne Moore and Wallace Shawn in the spectacularly dilapidated old Amsterdam Theatre. Louis Malle turned the production into the movie “Vanya on Forty-second Street.” (You can catch a glimpse of Akhtar, still with hair.) He taught acting workshops and tried to start his own company, but his approach was at odds with commercially minded New York. “I did a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ that I rehearsed with three actors for eight months,” he said. “We never did any performances, we just continued to rehearse.” Akhtar prided himself on his artistic purity: “If you’d told me back then that I would become a Broadway playwright, I would have said, ‘Put a bullet in me now.’ ”
“He was very much opposed to films,” the director Oren Moverman, Akhtar’s best friend from those years, told me. “We had a lot of fun conversations about why film is no good, where I was there to defend the love I have for the craft.”
A dream led Akhtar to reconsider his resistance to what he had previously rejected as a debased medium. He started watching movies at a clip of six a day; within three months, he had seen three hundred and fifty, working his way through Hollywood from the thirties on up before pivoting to Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, and Ingmar Bergman. (Though his marriage managed to survive this hermetic boot camp, the couple split up a few years later.) In the fall of 1997, Akhtar enrolled at the Columbia film school. In his first semester, he directed twelve shorts, one film a week, a breakneck pace. “I just needed to learn the language,” he said.
After graduating, he and two classmates wrote “The War Within,” a thriller about a radicalized Pakistani whose plot to attack New York puts him in conflict with a friend who has embraced life in the United States. The movie’s exploration of alienation and allegiance previews similar themes in “Homeland Elegies.” Akhtar starred as the terrorist.
“I figured it was time to get a pet of my own.” Cartoon by Akeem Roberts Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
In a pivotal scene in “Homeland Elegies,” Akhtar’s car breaks down in Pennsylvania. The state trooper who comes to his assistance is helpful and friendly, until he asks about Akhtar’s name. After 9/11, Akhtar tells us, he had started wearing a cross around his neck, to ward off suspicion; he tries to dodge the question, but once the trooper realizes that Akhtar is Muslim his attitude changes, and Akhtar’s subsequent humiliation jostles something loose. “I was going to stop pretending that I felt American,” he vows, deciding to change the focus of his writing accordingly. “Paradoxically, these were the works that would lead to me finally finding my way as a writer in my American homeland and to the success that would earn me enough money to settle my debts and start making the monthly ends meet.”
In his twenties, Akhtar spent years laboring on a thousand-page novel about a poet who worked the graveyard shift entering data at Goldman Sachs. “I was reading too much Fernando Pessoa,” he said. The realization that his oblique, high-modernist project had failed coincided with the discovery that he had a knack for writing things that people actually liked. After film school, he supported himself writing scripts such as “Trash Man,” featuring a mobster placed in witness protection in Kansas who recruits high-school football players to help him run a racket. The popular register felt right. As a teen-ager, he’d loved soap operas. “There was something about campy melodrama that felt real to me,” he told me. “The melodrama of a Punjabi household is much closer to that than it is to post-Jacobian naturalism.”
He decided to write a novel that would be quickly paced but thought-provoking, set in a world he knew intimately. Still, seven agents passed before he found one who would represent him; eventually, Judy Clain, at Little, Brown, bought the book for a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance. “There are so many people who are white who I’ve known who’ve worked so hard, who have not gotten any breaks,” Akhtar said. “So to impute the difficulties I’ve had solely to race, I think, would probably be less than accurate, although that’s of course been part of it.”
If skeptical publishers had been concerned that “American Dervish” wouldn’t appeal to white readers, they were proved wrong. Critics responded warmly. When I went to Audible to listen to Akhtar’s performance of the book, I found hundreds of five-star reviews from listeners who, as one wrote, found the milieu it described to be “both completely foreign and painfully familiar.”
But making his community accessible to others was not Akhtar’s only goal. When he was growing up, he had been subjected to the double vision common among first-generation kids. “It was an awareness that there were two ways of seeing the world and they were both probably wrong,” he said. “But they were both right. American society was pretty homogeneous where I grew up. And wonderful. I mean, the kids were great. The parents were welcoming. We played baseball and had crushes on girls. There were some cultural issues navigating that, but I never felt myself to be coming from the outside. And then there was this very, very different world view within the Pakistani community in Milwaukee, which was that this society was illegitimate.”
To tell the truth about where he was from, Akhtar felt that he had to press on those fault lines. The Milwaukee Pakistanis whom Akhtar depicts in “American Dervish” are hardly model minorities. The plot deals with the lasting effects of the domestic and legal repression of women in the Muslim world, and builds to an ugly eruption of anti-Semitism.
“American Dervish” rapped on a door that Akhtar had long wanted to open; “Disgraced” tore its hinges off. The play’s protagonist, Amir, is a Pakistani-born American who has jumped through every hoop. He is married to a beautiful, accomplished white woman, lives in a luxurious apartment on the Upper East Side, and is on the partner track at his corporate-law firm. In the course of the play’s single, ninety-minute act, everything is stripped from him. Akhtar was thinking of “Othello” when he wrote “Disgraced,” but the play also owes a debt to the American literature of racial passing, in which characters who have managed to escape their origins fear that some unwelcome revelation will cast them out of the white world they have given everything to enter. In “Disgraced,” though, it is Amir who exposes himself:


newyorker--2020-09-14--“Switzerland,” by Nicole Krauss

“Switzerland,” by Nicole Krauss

I ’ d never been so happy or so free .
It wasn ’ t only the difficult and anxious atmosphere of my family that I ’ d got away from but also my miserable school back home , with its petty , hormonal girls , Olympic in their cruelty .
I was too young for a driver ’ s license , so there was never any means of escape except through books or walks in the woods behind our house .
Now I spent the hours after school wandering the city of Geneva .
I often ended up by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tourist cruises come and go , or invented stories about the people I saw , especially the ones who came to make out on the benches .
Sometimes I tried on clothes at H & M , or wandered around the Old City , where I was drawn back to the imposing monument to the Reformation , to the inscrutable faces of towering stone Protestants of whose names I can recall only John Calvin ’ s .
I hadn ’ t yet heard of Borges , and yet at no other time in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Argentine writer , who had died in Geneva the year before , and who , in a letter explaining his wish to be buried in his adopted city , wrote that there he had always felt “ mysteriously happy.
” Years later , a friend gave me Borges ’ s “ Atlas , ” and I was startled to see a huge photo of those sombre giants I used to visit , anti-Semites all , who believed in predestination and the absolute sovereignty of God .
In it John Calvin leans slightly forward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , seated on a stone ledge holding his cane , chin tilted upward .
Between John Calvin and Borges , the photo seemed to say , there was a great attunement .
There was no attunement between John Calvin and me , but I , too , had sat on that ledge looking up at him .
Sometimes in my wanderings a man would stare at me without letting up , or come on to me in French .
These brief encounters embarrassed me and left me with a feeling of shame .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ sparkling white smiles , but one time , as I stood looking into the window of a chocolate shop , a European man in a beautiful suit came up behind me .
He leaned in , his face touching my hair , and in faintly accented English whispered , “ I could break you in two with one hand.
” Then he continued on his way , very calmly , as if he were a boat sailing on still water .
I ran all the way to the tram stop , where I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrived and squeaked mercifully to a stop .
We were expected at the dinner table at six-thirty sharp .
The wall behind Mrs. Elderfield ’ s seat was hung with small oil paintings of alpine scenes , and even now an image of a chalet , or cows with bells , or some Heidi gathering berries in her checked apron brings back the aroma of fish and boiled potatoes .
Very little was said during those dinners .
Or maybe it only seemed so in comparison with how much was said in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had met her mother in Bangkok while he was a G.I.
, and had brought her to America , where he set her up with a Cadillac Seville and a ranch house in Silver Spring , Maryland .
When they divorced , her mother returned to Thailand , her father moved to Boston , and for the next ten years Marie was tossed and tugged between them .
For the past few years she had lived exclusively with her mother in Bangkok , where she had a boyfriend with whom she was madly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out with him all night , dancing in clubs , drunk or high .
When Marie ’ s mother , at her wit ’ s end and busy with her own boyfriend , told Marie ’ s father about the situation , he yanked her out of Thailand and deposited her in Switzerland , known for its “ finishing ” schools that polished the wild and the dark out of girls and contained them into well-mannered women .
Ecolint was not such a school , but Marie , it turned out , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ school .
She was , in the estimation of those schools , already finished .
And not in the good way .
So , instead , Marie was sent to do an extra year of high school at Ecolint .
Along with Mrs. Elderfield ’ s house rules , there were strict instructions from Marie ’ s father about her curfew , and after Marie got into Mrs. Elderfield ’ s cooking wine those stringent regulations were tightened even further .
Because of this , on the weekends that I did not take @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parents , Marie and I were often home together while Soraya was out .
Unlike Marie , Soraya didn ’ t radiate trouble .
At least not the sort of trouble that comes of recklessness , of a desire to cross whatever boundaries or limits others have set for you , without consideration of the consequences .
If anything , Soraya radiated a sense of authority , exquisite because it derived from an inner source .
Her outward appearance was neat and composed .
She was small , no taller than I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cut in what she called a Chanel bob .
Her eyes were winged with eyeliner , and she had a downy mustache that she made no effort to conceal , because she must have known that it added to her allure .
She always spoke in a low voice , as if she trafficked in secrets , a habit she may have formed during her childhood in revolutionary Iran , or in her adolescence , when her appetite for boys , and then men , quickly outgrew what was considered acceptable by her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wasn ’ t much to do , the three of us would spend the day closed up in the back bedroom listening to cassettes and , in that low-slung voice further deepened by smoking , descriptions of the men Soraya had been with and the things she ’ d done with them .
If these accounts didn ’ t shock me , it was partly because I didn ’ t yet have a solid enough sense of sex , let alone the erotic , to really know what to expect from it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ coolness with which Soraya told her stories .
She had about her a kind of unassailability .
And yet I suppose she felt the need to test whatever it was at her core that had come to her , like all natural gifts , without effort , and what might happen if it failed her .
The sex she described seemed to have little to do with pleasure .
On the contrary , it was as if she were submitting herself to a trial .
Only when Tehran was woven into her discursive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that city was her sense of pleasure truly palpable .
November , after the arrival of the snow : it must have been November already when the businessman showed up in our conversations .
Dutch , more than twice Soraya ’ s age , he lived in a house with no curtains on an Amsterdam canal , but every couple of weeks he came to Geneva on business .
A banker , as I recall .
The lack of curtains I remember because he told Soraya that he only fucked his wife with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that people across the Herengracht could see her .
He stayed at the Hôtel Royal , and it was in the restaurant of that hotel , where her uncle had taken her for tea , that Soraya first met him .
He was sitting a few tables away , and , while her uncle droned on in Farsi about all the money his children spent , Soraya watched the banker delicately debone his fish .
Wielding his utensils with precision , a look of absolute calm on his face , the man extracted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ operation perfectly , slowly , with no sign of hunger .
Not once , as he proceeded to devour the fish , did he stop to remove a small bone from his mouth , the way everyone does .
He ate his fish without choking , without even making a passing grimace of displeasure at being speared in the throat by a tiny , errant bone .
It takes a certain kind of man to turn what is essentially an act of violence into elegance .
While Soraya ’ s uncle was in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ man called for his check , paid in cash , and rose to leave , buttoning his sports jacket .
But , instead of going straight out the doors that led to the lobby , he detoured past Soraya ’ s table , on which he dropped a five-hundred-franc note .
His room number was written in blue ink next to Albrecht von Haller ’ s face , as if it were Albrecht von Haller who was affording her this bit of precious information .
Later , while she was kneeling on his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gusting in through the open terrace doors , the banker told her that he always got a room overlooking the lake because the powerful stream of its fountain , which shot up hundreds of feet into the air , aroused him .
As she repeated this to us , lying flat on the floor with her feet up on the twin bed of Mrs. Elderfield ’ s son , she laughed and couldn ’ t stop .
And yet , despite the laughter , an arrangement had been made .
From then on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soraya know of his impending arrival he would call Mrs. Elderfield ’ s house and pretend to be her uncle .
The five-hundred-franc note Soraya put away in the drawer of her night table .

Unlike Marie, Soraya didn’t radiate trouble. At least not the sort of trouble that comes of recklessness, of a desire to cross whatever boundaries or limits others have set for you, without consideration of the consequences. If anything, Soraya radiated a sense of authority, exquisite because it derived from an inner source. Her outward appearance was neat and composed. She was small, no taller than I was, and wore her dark straight hair cut in what she called a Chanel bob. Her eyes were winged with eyeliner, and she had a downy mustache that she made no effort to conceal, because she must have known that it added to her allure. She always spoke in a low voice, as if she trafficked in secrets, a habit she may have formed during her childhood in revolutionary Iran, or in her adolescence, when her appetite for boys, and then men, quickly outgrew what was considered acceptable by her family. On Sundays, when there wasn’t much to do, the three of us would spend the day closed up in the back bedroom listening to cassettes and, in that low-slung voice further deepened by smoking, descriptions of the men Soraya had been with and the things she’d done with them. If these accounts didn’t shock me, it was partly because I didn’t yet have a solid enough sense of sex, let alone the erotic, to really know what to expect from it. But it was also because of the coolness with which Soraya told her stories. She had about her a kind of unassailability. And yet I suppose she felt the need to test whatever it was at her core that had come to her, like all natural gifts, without effort, and what might happen if it failed her. The sex she described seemed to have little to do with pleasure. On the contrary, it was as if she were submitting herself to a trial. Only when Tehran was woven into her discursive stories and she recounted her memories of that city was her sense of pleasure truly palpable.
November, after the arrival of the snow: it must have been November already when the businessman showed up in our conversations. Dutch, more than twice Soraya’s age, he lived in a house with no curtains on an Amsterdam canal, but every couple of weeks he came to Geneva on business. A banker, as I recall. The lack of curtains I remember because he told Soraya that he only fucked his wife with the lights on when he was sure that people across the Herengracht could see her. He stayed at the Hôtel Royal, and it was in the restaurant of that hotel, where her uncle had taken her for tea, that Soraya first met him. He was sitting a few tables away, and, while her uncle droned on in Farsi about all the money his children spent, Soraya watched the banker delicately debone his fish. Wielding his utensils with precision, a look of absolute calm on his face, the man extracted the skeleton whole. He performed the operation perfectly, slowly, with no sign of hunger. Not once, as he proceeded to devour the fish, did he stop to remove a small bone from his mouth, the way everyone does. He ate his fish without choking, without even making a passing grimace of displeasure at being speared in the throat by a tiny, errant bone. It takes a certain kind of man to turn what is essentially an act of violence into elegance. While Soraya’s uncle was in the men’s room, the man called for his check, paid in cash, and rose to leave, buttoning his sports jacket. But, instead of going straight out the doors that led to the lobby, he detoured past Soraya’s table, on which he dropped a five-hundred-franc note. His room number was written in blue ink next to Albrecht von Haller’s face, as if it were Albrecht von Haller who was affording her this bit of precious information. Later, while she was kneeling on his hotel bed, freezing in the cold gusting in through the open terrace doors, the banker told her that he always got a room overlooking the lake because the powerful stream of its fountain, which shot up hundreds of feet into the air, aroused him. As she repeated this to us, lying flat on the floor with her feet up on the twin bed of Mrs. Elderfield’s son, she laughed and couldn’t stop. And yet, despite the laughter, an arrangement had been made. From then on, if the banker wished to let Soraya know of his impending arrival he would call Mrs. Elderfield’s house and pretend to be her uncle. The five-hundred-franc note Soraya put away in the drawer of her night table.
At the time, Soraya was seeing other men. There was a boy her age, the son of a diplomat, who came to pick her up in his father’s sports car, the transmission of which he destroyed on a drive they took to Montreux. And there was an Algerian in his early twenties who worked as a waiter at a restaurant near the school. She slept with the diplomat’s son, whereas the Algerian, who was genuinely in love with her, she only allowed to kiss her. Because he had grown up poor like Camus, she projected onto him a fantasy. But, when he had nothing to say about the sun he was raised under, she began to lose feeling for him. It sounds cold, but later I experienced this myself: the sudden dissociation that comes with the fear of realizing how intimate you have been with someone who is not at all what you imagined but something other, entirely unknown. So when the banker demanded that Soraya drop both the diplomat’s son and the Algerian, it was not difficult for her to comply. It excused her of responsibility for the Algerian’s pain.
“Wow, it’s only eleven—that still leaves time for me to ruin tomorrow by staying up doing nothing on the Internet.” Cartoon by Brendan Loper Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
That morning before we left for school, the telephone rang. When she cut things off with each of these lovers, the banker instructed, she was to wear a skirt with nothing underneath. She told us this as we crossed the frozen field on our way to the bus stop, and we laughed. But then Soraya stopped and cupped her lighter from the wind. In the brightness of the flame I caught her eyes, and for the first time I felt afraid for her. Or afraid of her, maybe. Afraid of what she lacked, or of what she possessed, that drove her beyond the place where others would draw the line.
Soraya had to call the banker from the pay phone at school at certain times of the day, even if it meant excusing herself in the middle of class. When she arrived at the Hôtel Royal for one of their meetings, an envelope would be waiting for her at the front desk, containing elaborate instructions for what she was to do when she entered the room. I don’t know what happened if she failed to follow the banker’s rules, or follow them to his exacting standards. It didn’t occur to me that she might allow herself to be punished. Barely out of childhood, I think what I understood then, however simply, was that she was engaged in a game. A game that at any moment she could have refused to go on playing. That she, of all people, knew how easily rules could be broken, but that she elected, in this instance, to follow them—what could I have understood then about that? I don’t know. Just as thirty years later I don’t know if what I saw in her eyes when the flame illuminated them was perversity or recklessness or fear, or its opposite: the unyielding nature of her will.
During the Christmas break, Marie flew to Boston, I went to stay with my family in Basel, and Soraya went home to Paris. When we returned two weeks later, something had changed in Soraya. She seemed withdrawn, closed up in herself, and she spent her time in bed listening to her Walkman, reading books in French, or smoking out the window. Whenever the phone rang, she jumped up to answer it, and when it was for her she shut the door and sometimes didn’t come out for hours. Marie came to my room more and more often, because, she said, being around Soraya gave her the creeps. As we lay together in my narrow bed, Marie would tell me stories about Bangkok, and, however full of drama they were, she could still laugh at herself and make me laugh. Looking back, I think that she taught me something that, however many times I have forgotten and remembered it since then, has never really left me: something about the absurdity, and also the truth, of the dramas we need to feel fully alive.
From January, then, until April, what I mostly remember are the things that were happening to me. Kate, the American girl I became close with, who lived in a large house in the neighborhood of Champel, and showed me her father’s collection of Playboy. The young daughter of Mrs. Elderfield’s neighbor whom I sometimes babysat, and who one night sat up in bed screaming when she saw a praying mantis on the wall, lit by the headlights of a car. My long walks after school. The weekends in Basel, where I would entertain my little sister with games to distract her from my parents’ arguments. And Shareef, a boy in my class with an easy smile, with whom I walked to the lake one afternoon and made out on a bench. It was the first time I’d kissed a boy, and when he pushed his tongue into my mouth the feeling it ignited was both tender and violent. I dug my nails into his back, and he kissed me harder; we writhed together on the bench like the couples I’d sometimes watched from afar. On the tram ride home, I could smell him on my skin, and a feeling of horror took hold of me at the thought of having to see him again in school the next day. When I did, I looked past him as if he didn’t exist, but with my gaze softly focussed, so that I could still see the blur of his hurt in the corner of my eye.
Of that time I remember, too, how once I came home from school and found Soraya in the bathroom, doing her makeup in front of the mirror. Her eyes were shining, and she seemed happy and light again, as she hadn’t been for weeks. She called me in and wanted to brush and braid my hair. Her cassette player was balanced on the edge of the bathtub, and, while her fingers worked through my hair, she sang along. And then, when she turned to reach for a hairpin behind her, I saw the purple bruise on her throat.
And yet I never really doubted her strength. Never doubted that she was in control and doing what she wanted. Playing a game according to rules she had agreed to, if not invented. Only looking back do I realize how much I wanted to see her that way: strong-willed and free, invulnerable and under her own command. From my walks alone in Geneva, I already understood that the power to attract men, when it comes, arrives with a terrifying vulnerability. But I wanted to believe that the balance of power could be tipped in one’s favor by strength or fearlessness or something I couldn’t name. Soraya told us that soon after things began with the banker his wife had called on the hotel phone, and he’d instructed Soraya to go into the bathroom, but she’d refused and instead lay listening on the bed. The naked banker turned his back but had no choice other than to go on talking to his wife, whose call he hadn’t expected. He spoke to her in Dutch, Soraya said, but in the same tone that the men in her own family spoke to their mothers: gravely, with a touch of fear. And, as she listened, she knew something had been exposed that he had not wished to expose, and which shifted the balance between them. I preferred that story to trying to understand the bruise on Soraya’s neck.
It was the first week of May when she didn’t return home. Mrs. Elderfield woke us at dawn, demanding that we tell her whatever we knew about Soraya’s whereabouts. Marie shrugged and looked at her chipped nail polish, and I tried to follow her cue until Mrs. Elderfield said that she was going to call both Soraya’s parents and the police, and that if something had happened to her, if she was in danger and we were withholding any information, we wouldn’t be forgiven or be able to forgive ourselves. Marie looked scared, and, seeing her face, I began to cry. A few hours later, the police arrived. Alone with the detective and his partner in the kitchen, I told them everything I knew, which, I realized as I spoke—losing the thread, confusing myself—was not so much. Once they had interrogated Marie, they went to the back bedroom and combed through Soraya’s things. Afterward, it looked as if the bedroom had been ransacked: everything, even her underwear, strewn across the floor and her bed with an air of violation.
That night, the second one that Soraya was missing, there was a huge storm. Marie and I lay awake in my bed, neither one of us speaking of the things we feared. In the morning, the crunch of gravel under the wheels of a car woke us, and we jumped out of bed to look out the window. But, when the door of the taxi opened, it was a man who emerged, his lips drawn tight below his heavy black mustache. In the familiar features of Soraya’s father, some truth about her origins was revealed, exposing the illusion of her autonomy.
Mrs. Elderfield made us repeat to Mr. Sassani the things we’d already told the police. He was a tall and intimidating man, his face knotted in anger, and I think she wasn’t brave enough to do it herself. In the end, Marie—emboldened by her new authority and the sensational quality of the news she had to deliver—did most of the talking. Mr. Sassani listened in silence, and it was impossible to say whether what he felt was fear or fury. Both, it must have been. He turned toward the door. He wanted to go to the Hôtel Royal immediately. Mrs. Elderfield tried to calm him. She repeated what was already known: that the banker had checked out two days before, the room had been searched, nothing had turned up. The police were doing everything they could. The banker had rented a car that they were working to track down. The only thing to do was stay here and wait until there was some news.
In the hours that followed, Mr. Sassani paced grimly in front of the windows of the living room. As the royal engineer to the Shah, he must have insured against all kinds of collapse. But then the Shah himself had fallen, and the vast and intricate structure of Mr. Sassani’s life had crumbled, making a mockery of the physics of safety. He’d sent his daughter to Switzerland because of its promise to restore order and safety, but even Switzerland hadn’t kept Soraya safe, and this betrayal appeared to be too much for him. At any moment, it seemed he might shout or cry out.
In the end, Soraya came home on her own. On her own—just as she had gotten into it on her own, of her own choosing. Crossing the newly green field that evening, arriving at the door dishevelled but whole. Her eyes were bloodshot and the makeup around them was smeared, but she was calm. She didn’t even express surprise at the sight of her father, only winced when he shouted her name, the last syllable muffled by a gasp or sob. He lunged for her, and for a moment it seemed that he was going to yell or raise his hand to her, but she didn’t flinch, and instead he pulled her to him and embraced her, his eyes filled with tears. He spoke to her urgently, angrily, in Farsi, but she said little back. She was tired, she said in English, she needed to sleep. In a voice unnaturally high, Mrs. Elderfield asked if she wanted anything to eat. Soraya shook her head, as if there were nothing anymore that any of us could offer that she needed, and turned toward the long corridor that led to the back bedroom. As she passed me, she stopped, reached out her hand, and touched my hair. And then, very slowly, she continued on her way.
The next day her father took her back to Paris. I don’t remember if we said goodbye. I think we thought, Marie and I, that she would come back, that she would return to finish the school year and tell us everything. But she never did. She left it to us to decide for ourselves what had happened to her, and in my mind I saw her in that moment when she’d touched my hair with a sad smile, and believed that what I’d seen was a kind of grace: the grace that comes of having pushed oneself to the brink, of having confronted some darkness or fear and won.
At the end of June, my father finished his fellowship and, expert in trauma, moved us back to New York. The mean girls took an interest in me when I returned to school in September, and wanted to befriend me. At a party, one of them turned a circle around me while I stood calmly, very still. She marvelled at how I’d changed, and at my clothes bought abroad. I had gone out into the world and come back, and though I wasn’t saying anything, they sensed that I knew things. For a while, Marie sent me cassettes on which she’d recorded herself talking to me, telling me all that was happening in her life. But eventually they stopped arriving, and we lost touch, too. And that was the end of Switzerland for me.
In my mind, that was also the end of Soraya. As I said, I never saw her again, and tried to look for her only once, the summer I was nineteen and living in Paris. Even then, I barely tried—calling two Sassani families who were listed in the phone book and then giving up. And yet if it hadn’t been for her I don’t know that I would have got on the motorcycle of the young man who washed dishes at the restaurant across the street from my apartment on the Rue de Chevreuse, and ridden back with him to his apartment on the outskirts of the city, or gone to a bar with the older man who lived on the floor below me, who went on about the job I knew he would never get for me at the night club he managed, and then, when we got back to our building, lunged at me on the landing in front of his door, tackling me in an embrace. I watched a movie on the dishwasher’s sofa, and afterward he told me it was dangerous to go home with men I didn’t know, and drove me back to my apartment in silence. And somehow I broke free of the night-club manager and raced up another floor to the safety of my own apartment, though for the rest of the summer I was terrified of running into him, and listened for his comings and goings before I worked up the courage to open my door and bolt down the stairs. I told myself that I did these things because I was in Paris to practice my French and had resolved to speak to anyone who would speak to me. But all summer I was aware that Soraya might be near, somewhere in that city, that I was close to her and close to something in myself that drew me and frightened me a little, as she had. She had gone further than anyone I knew in a game that was never only a game, one that was about power and fear, about the refusal to comply with the vulnerabilities one is born into.


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Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit your caption here, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To read the complete rules, click here.
Lars Kenseth Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop


newyorker--2020-09-14--In a Cloud of Wildfire Smoke, the Pacific Northwest Breathes Uneasily

Now we can ’ t even go outside .
Here , in the first region of the U.S. hit by the coronavirus pandemic—where we ’ ve been told to avoid human touch longer than anywhere else , to contain ourselves within six-foot bubbles when outside—we can no longer venture from our homes at all .
Thanks to the wildfires raging in California , Oregon , and Washington , stepping outdoors , according to health officials , may be harmful .
In the past few days , Portland , by one measure , has ranked No .
1 for the worst @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ranked No .
2 .
The claustrophobia is matched only by the dizzying sight of the smoke itself .
It ’ s everywhere .
Smoke hovers right outside the living-room window , creeps low along the sidewalk , curls up the trunks of maple trees that line the streets and clings to their branches .
Smoke droops through downtown Seattle and blots out the tops of skyscrapers .
It crawls up the inclined avenues and consumes the handful of blocks formerly known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest .
It floats above Elliott @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sound , the islands seemingly disappearing in puffs , like in a magician ’ s trick .
Down Interstate 5 , the smoke swallows Tacoma and Olympia and grows thicker the farther south you drive .
It envelops Portland , where the sky glows orange .
Or is it yellow ?
All over , the colors are off .
Shadows don ’ t behave according to any familiar law of physics .
It ’ s noon , but it looks like dusk .
If the sun peeks through , it ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the naked eye .
You go woozy with the implication .
When the confinement becomes too much to bear , we open our front doors , just a crack .
We taste the smoke .
It pinches the backs of our throats .
It ’ s the smell of campfire , but divorced from memories of marshmallows or falling stars .
In place of nostalgia is the knowledge that at least thirty-three people are dead .
Hundreds of homes are destroyed .
Entire towns are ash .
In Oregon , some five @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cent of the state ’ s population , were ordered either to evacuate or to prepare to receive an order .
More than three million acres have burned in California , as have a million-plus in Oregon and half a million more in Washington .
The mind boggles at that mass just disappearing , until you realize where it went .
We ’ re breathing much of it in .
Winds from the south pushed the massive , cyclone-like smoke cloud—the cumulation of fires in all three West Coast states—as far north as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the coronavirus earlier this year , the smoke brought with it new terminology that has entered our local vocabulary : air-quality index , or A.Q.I .
; particulate matter ; red ( “ unhealthy ” ) , purple ( “ very unhealthy ” ) , maroon ( “ hazardous ” ) .
Obsessively checking the daily A.Q.I .
color is the new obsessively checking daily COVID-19 cases .
It ’ s cliché at this point to grouse about what an epically awful year 2020 has been : the virus , lost jobs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black men and women at the hands of police , civil unrest , uncertainty about the upcoming Presidential election .
I hope you ’ ll forgive me when I say that , in the Pacific Northwest , it feels as if some of these traumas have come with extra bite .
As the first U.S. epicenter of the pandemic , we were reluctant trailblazers , watching dozens of our seniors wheeled off to what then seemed a novel death .
Our store windows were the first to be replaced with plywood , our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when we demonstrated for Black lives , we were among the first to be characterized as terrorists by the President and his allies—and shown , again and again , that when we do protest we ’ ll most certainly be doused and choked with pepper spray .
Now we choke on a new particulate .
The reasons for the scale of these wildfires matter—climate change , generations of faulty forest-management policies—but this moment , for now , is about survival .
In Oregon , the director of the state ’ s Office @ @ @ @ @ @ @ looking at a “ mass-fatality event.
” Dozens of Oregonians remain missing .
In Washington , Governor Jay Inslee described scenes around the state as “ apocalyptic.
” The advice to stay indoors is sound .
The truth is , though , there ’ s no escape .
Even with the windows closed , the eyes still burn .
The throat catches .
Somehow , the wildfire smoke seeps in .
Every cough issues like a clue : Is it the smoke or do I have the virus ?
And that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confined to a house or apartment .
There are thousands of people experiencing homelessness in Pacific Northwest cities , stuck out in the haze , not to mention all those who are displaced or injured by the fires , or both .
Over the weekend came a sliver of hope .
The National Weather Service predicted that colder temperatures and rain showers would arrive from the coast on Sunday night or early Monday morning , enough to wipe out much of the smoke .
After days inside , we thought , we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jog could happen .
Some of the longest TV binges of our lives would mercifully cease .
But , on Monday , N.W.S .
announced that the forecast didn ’ t pan out .
“ At this point , ” the service informed us in a statement , “ it doesn ’ t appear there will be much improvement today.
” For the rest of the week , conditions will likely remain “ very unhealthy , ” even “ hazardous ” in some areas .
Maybe for much longer .
Through a virus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gas , or the now ever-present yellow miasma of wildfire smoke , in the Pacific Northwest , it will be a while before we breathe easy .

Now we can’t even go outside. Here, in the first region of the U.S. hit by the coronavirus pandemic—where we’ve been told to avoid human touch longer than anywhere else, to contain ourselves within six-foot bubbles when outside—we can no longer venture from our homes at all. Thanks to the wildfires raging in California, Oregon, and Washington, stepping outdoors, according to health officials, may be harmful. In the past few days, Portland, by one measure, has ranked No. 1 for the worst air quality on earth. Seattle has ranked No. 2. The claustrophobia is matched only by the dizzying sight of the smoke itself.
It’s everywhere. Smoke hovers right outside the living-room window, creeps low along the sidewalk, curls up the trunks of maple trees that line the streets and clings to their branches. Smoke droops through downtown Seattle and blots out the tops of skyscrapers. It crawls up the inclined avenues and consumes the handful of blocks formerly known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest. It floats above Elliott Bay and the far reaches of Puget Sound, the islands seemingly disappearing in puffs, like in a magician’s trick. Down Interstate 5, the smoke swallows Tacoma and Olympia and grows thicker the farther south you drive. It envelops Portland, where the sky glows orange. Or is it yellow? All over, the colors are off. Shadows don’t behave according to any familiar law of physics. It’s noon, but it looks like dusk. If the sun peeks through, it’s a red dot that you can stare at with the naked eye. You go woozy with the implication.
When the confinement becomes too much to bear, we open our front doors, just a crack. We taste the smoke. It pinches the backs of our throats. It’s the smell of campfire, but divorced from memories of marshmallows or falling stars. In place of nostalgia is the knowledge that at least thirty-three people are dead. Hundreds of homes are destroyed. Entire towns are ash. In Oregon, some five hundred thousand people, or ten per cent of the state’s population, were ordered either to evacuate or to prepare to receive an order.
More than three million acres have burned in California, as have a million-plus in Oregon and half a million more in Washington. The mind boggles at that mass just disappearing, until you realize where it went. We’re breathing much of it in. Winds from the south pushed the massive, cyclone-like smoke cloud—the cumulation of fires in all three West Coast states—as far north as British Columbia. As with the arrival of the coronavirus earlier this year, the smoke brought with it new terminology that has entered our local vocabulary: air-quality index, or A.Q.I.; particulate matter; red (“unhealthy”), purple (“very unhealthy”), maroon (“hazardous”). Obsessively checking the daily A.Q.I. color is the new obsessively checking daily COVID-19 cases.
It’s cliché at this point to grouse about what an epically awful year 2020 has been: the virus, lost jobs, economic ruin, the murder of Black men and women at the hands of police, civil unrest, uncertainty about the upcoming Presidential election. I hope you’ll forgive me when I say that, in the Pacific Northwest, it feels as if some of these traumas have come with extra bite. As the first U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, we were reluctant trailblazers, watching dozens of our seniors wheeled off to what then seemed a novel death. Our store windows were the first to be replaced with plywood, our streets the first to empty. Later, when we demonstrated for Black lives, we were among the first to be characterized as terrorists by the President and his allies—and shown, again and again, that when we do protest we’ll most certainly be doused and choked with pepper spray.
Now we choke on a new particulate. The reasons for the scale of these wildfires matter—climate change, generations of faulty forest-management policies—but this moment, for now, is about survival. In Oregon, the director of the state’s Office of Emergency Management warned that we were looking at a “mass-fatality event.” Dozens of Oregonians remain missing. In Washington, Governor Jay Inslee described scenes around the state as “apocalyptic.”
The advice to stay indoors is sound. The truth is, though, there’s no escape. Even with the windows closed, the eyes still burn. The throat catches. Somehow, the wildfire smoke seeps in. Every cough issues like a clue: Is it the smoke or do I have the virus? And that’s just for those privileged enough to be confined to a house or apartment. There are thousands of people experiencing homelessness in Pacific Northwest cities, stuck out in the haze, not to mention all those who are displaced or injured by the fires, or both. Over the weekend came a sliver of hope. The National Weather Service predicted that colder temperatures and rain showers would arrive from the coast on Sunday night or early Monday morning, enough to wipe out much of the smoke.
After days inside, we thought, we’ll finally venture out. That long-avoided jog could happen. Some of the longest TV binges of our lives would mercifully cease. But, on Monday, N.W.S. announced that the forecast didn’t pan out. “At this point,” the service informed us in a statement, “it doesn’t appear there will be much improvement today.” For the rest of the week, conditions will likely remain “very unhealthy,” even “hazardous” in some areas. Maybe for much longer. Through a virus mask, or a cloud of tear gas, or the now ever-present yellow miasma of wildfire smoke, in the Pacific Northwest, it will be a while before we breathe easy.


newyorker--2020-09-14--What to Stream: “Belarmino,” a Hidden Masterwork Starring a Portuguese Boxer Who Could Have Been a C

What to Stream: “Belarmino,” a Hidden Masterwork Starring a Portuguese Boxer Who Could Have Been a Contender

Belarmino Fragoso walks with a skip and a strut in his step .
He walks a little faster than others do , swings his arms a little more freely , occupies a little more space in the street as he surges through crowds with a wry pursing of his lips and a twinkle in his eye .
On the other hand , Belarmino is the only person in the crowd who knows he ’ s being filmed .
A veteran boxer in Lisbon nearing the end of his career , he ’ s the subject , the protagonist , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a 1964 fusion of fiction and documentary by the Portuguese director Fernando Lopes and one of the hidden masterworks of cinematic modernism .
( It ’ s streaming on YouTube . )
From the start , Lopes makes clear the fusion of style and substance that , no less than the fusion of reportage and reënactment , gives “ Belarmino ” its ( and Belarmino his ) artistic identity .
The boxer—a former national champion in the featherweight division , who ’ s thirty-two and has been fighting for sixteen years—bounces down a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , through a picture window , other athletes , all in striped shirts , are seen energetically working out as if in an angular dance scene choreographed by Jack Cole .
Although others—younger , leaner , looser—spar and swarm , Belarmino , embodying the loneliness of the long-term boxer , punches the heavy bag with a fierce and solitary determination .
It ’ s this very peculiarity—the essentially social and public nature of boxing versus the grimly encasing solitude of the boxer , the boxer ’ s desire for a private life and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dedication that the sport requires—which emerges in Lopes ’ s vision of Belarmino .
The same paradoxes emerge in Belarmino ’ s own casually profound and self-aware account of his life and work—throughout the film , Lopes cuts between the dramatized action and on-camera interviews with the boxer .
These sequences , shot in closeups and extended takes , do more than adorn the action—they ’ re part of it , making the athlete , the family man , and the public figure inseparable from the thinking man , living deep in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and mark him .
The charismatic , voluble , and pensive Belarmino , with his long presence in the public eye , doesn ’ t so much thrive in front of the camera as bare his soul to it .
As a teen-ager , Belarmino—who had only a third-grade education and was working as a shoe-shine boy , facing regular harassment from the police—took up boxing on a whim , as a mere means of subsistence , under the tutelage of a trainer and promoter named Albano Martins .
Belarmino sees himself as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whom he bluntly calls a “ pimp ” of the sport ) .
As an interviewer , Lopes is confrontational .
Far from merely gathering his subject ’ s remarks , the director journalistically presses Belarmino to confront incidents and observations that the boxer would rather avoid—an accusation of fixing a fight , a sordid story of his work as a private bodyguard , his extramarital affairs .
He also interviews the now elderly Martins to hear his side of the story .
Martins believes that Belarmino “ could have been great ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and love of night life .
Belarmino responds that he often didn ’ t have money to eat , but he fought—and won—nevertheless .
And , explaining the practical and financial demands of an international champion ’ s training routine , Belarmino counters that what prevented him from developing his talent was his poverty , along with his desire to have and support a family .
The movie goes into detail about the grim economics of boxing—Belarmino cites the poundings he endured , as a teen , for a pair of used shoes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intrinsic to the sport , which , he says , only the poor and desperate pursue as a means to make a living—and also his current desperate circumstances .
He admits to going days without eating a proper meal ; his side work as a photo colorist—painting color onto black-and-white photos—doesn ’ t bring much income , nor does his wife ’ s job as a domestic worker .
Belarmino knows that his career in the ring is ending—he hasn ’ t won a fight since 1960 and , in his previous bout @ @ @ @ @ @ @ round—and he plans to become a trainer .
( He believes that he ’ ll be a maker of champions . )
The movie ’ s drama builds to the crisis of a fight that may be Belarmino ’ s last .
Lopes shows him in extended training scenes and also interviews him about his approach to boxing , which he discusses with a revelatory clarity .
Belarmino admits that he ’ s afraid when he boxes but avers that everyone is—and he ’ s not afraid of losing , which he considers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Belarmino says , “ I ’ m afraid of making a fool of myself , ” and likens that feeling to the one felt by performing artists .
( He cites singers , including the celebrated Amália Rodrigues , by way of comparison . )
“ We ’ re all afraid—afraid of looking like a fool , ” he says , explaining that boxing is not just a sport but a “ noble art.
” The high-contrast , sharp-edged black-and-white cinematography , by Augusto Cabrita , is transformative , rendering ordinary actions—Belarmino @ @ @ @ @ @ @ washing and dressing for work ; Belarmino striding through an empty locker room , running in an empty stadium , working on his photographs in a café , taking in a movie , joshing with men in a streetside crowd—complex and eventful .
The editing similarly transcends the merely pictorial and factual to evoke the tangled depths of thought , as when it intercuts Belarmino ’ s medical exam for the culminating fight—and its review of his medical history—with his stolidly contemplative presence at an outdoor café .
The fight itself , an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Toni Alonso , is presented with surprising , illuminating views , whether still photographs , closeups of footwork , or bird ’ s-eye shots showing the ring as a graphic abstraction .
The editing of that sequence , too—complete with a remarkable twist of dramatic distancing—is a similar shock of aesthetic imagination .
Lopes weaves the competitive aspect of boxing deeply into his vision of Belarmino ’ s complex , troubled subjectivity and self-awareness .

Belarmino Fragoso walks with a skip and a strut in his step. He walks a little faster than others do, swings his arms a little more freely, occupies a little more space in the street as he surges through crowds with a wry pursing of his lips and a twinkle in his eye. On the other hand, Belarmino is the only person in the crowd who knows he’s being filmed. A veteran boxer in Lisbon nearing the end of his career, he’s the subject, the protagonist, and the star of “Belarmino,” a 1964 fusion of fiction and documentary by the Portuguese director Fernando Lopes and one of the hidden masterworks of cinematic modernism. (It’s streaming on YouTube.)
From the start, Lopes makes clear the fusion of style and substance that, no less than the fusion of reportage and reënactment, gives “Belarmino” its (and Belarmino his) artistic identity. The boxer—a former national champion in the featherweight division, who’s thirty-two and has been fighting for sixteen years—bounces down a long corridor to a training gym where, through a picture window, other athletes, all in striped shirts, are seen energetically working out as if in an angular dance scene choreographed by Jack Cole. Although others—younger, leaner, looser—spar and swarm, Belarmino, embodying the loneliness of the long-term boxer, punches the heavy bag with a fierce and solitary determination. It’s this very peculiarity—the essentially social and public nature of boxing versus the grimly encasing solitude of the boxer, the boxer’s desire for a private life and a social life versus the ferociously isolating dedication that the sport requires—which emerges in Lopes’s vision of Belarmino.
The same paradoxes emerge in Belarmino’s own casually profound and self-aware account of his life and work—throughout the film, Lopes cuts between the dramatized action and on-camera interviews with the boxer. These sequences, shot in closeups and extended takes, do more than adorn the action—they’re part of it, making the athlete, the family man, and the public figure inseparable from the thinking man, living deep in the harsh memories and hard circumstances that motivate and mark him. The charismatic, voluble, and pensive Belarmino, with his long presence in the public eye, doesn’t so much thrive in front of the camera as bare his soul to it.
As a teen-ager, Belarmino—who had only a third-grade education and was working as a shoe-shine boy, facing regular harassment from the police—took up boxing on a whim, as a mere means of subsistence, under the tutelage of a trainer and promoter named Albano Martins. Belarmino sees himself as having been grievously exploited by Martins (whom he bluntly calls a “pimp” of the sport). As an interviewer, Lopes is confrontational. Far from merely gathering his subject’s remarks, the director journalistically presses Belarmino to confront incidents and observations that the boxer would rather avoid—an accusation of fixing a fight, a sordid story of his work as a private bodyguard, his extramarital affairs. He also interviews the now elderly Martins to hear his side of the story.
Martins believes that Belarmino “could have been great” but let his talent slide through indiscipline and love of night life. Belarmino responds that he often didn’t have money to eat, but he fought—and won—nevertheless. And, explaining the practical and financial demands of an international champion’s training routine, Belarmino counters that what prevented him from developing his talent was his poverty, along with his desire to have and support a family. The movie goes into detail about the grim economics of boxing—Belarmino cites the poundings he endured, as a teen, for a pair of used shoes and a raincoat, the class division intrinsic to the sport, which, he says, only the poor and desperate pursue as a means to make a living—and also his current desperate circumstances. He admits to going days without eating a proper meal; his side work as a photo colorist—painting color onto black-and-white photos—doesn’t bring much income, nor does his wife’s job as a domestic worker.
Belarmino knows that his career in the ring is ending—he hasn’t won a fight since 1960 and, in his previous bout, was knocked out in the first round—and he plans to become a trainer. (He believes that he’ll be a maker of champions.) The movie’s drama builds to the crisis of a fight that may be Belarmino’s last. Lopes shows him in extended training scenes and also interviews him about his approach to boxing, which he discusses with a revelatory clarity. Belarmino admits that he’s afraid when he boxes but avers that everyone is—and he’s not afraid of losing, which he considers a part of the sport. Rather, Belarmino says, “I’m afraid of making a fool of myself,” and likens that feeling to the one felt by performing artists. (He cites singers, including the celebrated Amália Rodrigues, by way of comparison.) “We’re all afraid—afraid of looking like a fool,” he says, explaining that boxing is not just a sport but a “noble art.”
The high-contrast, sharp-edged black-and-white cinematography, by Augusto Cabrita, is transformative, rendering ordinary actions—Belarmino and his wife, Maria Amélia, washing and dressing for work; Belarmino striding through an empty locker room, running in an empty stadium, working on his photographs in a café, taking in a movie, joshing with men in a streetside crowd—complex and eventful. The editing similarly transcends the merely pictorial and factual to evoke the tangled depths of thought, as when it intercuts Belarmino’s medical exam for the culminating fight—and its review of his medical history—with his stolidly contemplative presence at an outdoor café. The fight itself, an eight-round bout against a Spanish boxer, Toni Alonso, is presented with surprising, illuminating views, whether still photographs, closeups of footwork, or bird’s-eye shots showing the ring as a graphic abstraction. The editing of that sequence, too—complete with a remarkable twist of dramatic distancing—is a similar shock of aesthetic imagination. Lopes weaves the competitive aspect of boxing deeply into his vision of Belarmino’s complex, troubled subjectivity and self-awareness.


newyorker--2020-09-14--A Political Philosopher on Why Democrats Should Think Differently About Merit

Looming above America ’ s present struggles over injustice and inequality is the sense that certain self-mythologies are beginning to evaporate .
When Barack Obama was in the White House , he often studded his speeches with a favorite pop lyric , “ You can make it if you try.
” He mentioned it more than a hundred and forty times , even though the facts of declining social mobility rendered that image less and less convincing .
In various studies , no more than eight per cent of Americans who are born into the bottom fifth of U.S. households @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reach the top fifth ; more than a third stay at the bottom .
That analysis of Obama ’ s language is just one of the startling facts in the latest book by the political philosopher Michael Sandel , who has spent decades scrutinizing the tenets of Western liberalism , including beliefs about justice , markets , and , now , meritocracy .
In “ The Tyranny of Merit : What ’ s Become of the Common Good ?
, ” Sandel examines how the notion of “ meritocracy , ” a word @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a left-leaning British sociologist , was torqued into an American shibboleth .
Over time , Sandel argues , it fed a “ toxic brew of hubris and resentment.
” He writes , “ It flattered the winners and insulted the losers .
By 2016 , its time was up .
The arrival of Brexit and Trump , and the rise of hyper-nationalist , anti-immigrant parties in Europe , announced the failure of the project.
” In the final months of Sandel ’ s writing , he found that the pandemic underscored the political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ question now is what an alternative political project might look like , ” he wrote .
Among his prescriptions , he favors some popular liberal proposals , such as introducing a tax on financial transactions , but also some provocative suggestions , such as creating a lottery system for élite college admissions .
I recently spoke by phone with Sandel , who is Harvard ’ s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government .
He was at home in Brookline , Massachusetts .
During our conversation , which has been edited @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American notions of success and failure , how they have contributed to inequality and division , and what Joe Biden might say to stake out a more inspiring , and more dignifying , realm of Democratic values .
You write that America was “ morally ” unprepared for the pandemic .
Was there ever a point in this crisis when you thought , Perhaps this will galvanize us ?
In the early days of the pandemic , we often heard the reassuring slogan “ We are all in this together.
” We heard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The slogan was all around us .
It was inspiring in a way because it reminded us of our shared vulnerability in the face of the virus .
But I think many people felt that the slogan rang hollow , even in the early weeks , because we knew , and felt , and sensed that we were not truly all in this together .
It soon became clear that some of us would ride out the pandemic working from home , relatively removed from the risks , while others—including those whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work from home—had little choice but to expose themselves to the risks that come from working in stores , and in warehouses , and delivering goods .
So it quickly became clear that we were not all in this together .
At the heart of your project is that unravelling of social bonds , a process that you describe as unfolding over many decades .
You were obviously working on this book long before the pandemic .
So , what was the origin moment that led you to look at the common good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our lives ?
The theme of the common good , and our difficulty bringing it to bear in our public life , has been a concern of mine for a very long time , going back to my previous book [ “ What Money Can ’ t Buy : The Moral Limits of Markets ” ( 2012 ) ] , where I worried that we had shifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society , in which everything was up for sale .
Going back even further , I worried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the individual detached from community , and that this was leading to a politics that failed to engage with our shared identities and with shared moral purposes .
So our uneasy relation to the common good has been something that ’ s concerned me for a long time .
I was prompted to write this book , “ The Tyranny of Merit , ” by trying to make sense of 2016 .
First with Brexit in Britain , then with the election of Trump in the United States , 2016 was a moment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
That was the question .
It seemed to me that there was more to this backlash than simply the loss of jobs , and the wage stagnation that resulted from globalization .
There was more to it also than the ugly sentiments of xenophobia , misogyny , and racism that Trump fomented and appealed to .
It seemed to me that entangled with these ugly sentiments were some legitimate grievances that the mainstream parties had missed and had failed to address .
Central to those grievances was anger and resentment against professional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be looking down on those less fortunate , less credentialled than themselves .
In your books , there ’ s this pattern , it seems to me , in which you have sensed at various moments these comforting ideas— “ morally satisfying , ” I think is a term that you ’ ve used—that are either underdeveloped , or overdeveloped , or exploited in some way .
You ’ ve challenged some of these presumptions that we have about how a good society is organized .
How do you see the theme that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that you ’ ve made over the years ?
A central theme has been questioning the widely held assumption that the way a pluralist society should contend with its moral and civic disagreements is to aspire to a neutrality that , I believe , can never be achieved .
So , for example , in the previous book , “ What Money Can ’ t Buy , ” I tried to show that part of the deeper appeal of the market faith , which took hold from the nineteen-eighties through the early two-thousands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a neutral instrument for defining the public good .
We could somehow avoid messy , contentious debates about the meaning of a just society , and how to achieve the common good , by outsourcing our moral disagreements to markets .
The effect has been to create an empty , hollow , unsatisfying public discourse , which frustrates democratic citizens , I think , in many parts of the world .
Certainly in this country , citizens want public life to be about big questions that matter , including questions of values , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only led to the embrace of the market faith , but it also has led our politics to embrace a technocratic space—the idea that experts and technocrats can tell us what the common good consists in—and this technocratic faith is very closely connected to the idea that the meritorious , the well credentialled , should govern .
It ’ s an interesting scenario that here you are at Harvard , surrounded by students who have risen to the top of the meritocratic system , faculty members who have risen to the top , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that , through rigorous training , you can build not just the opportunity but almost a moral position to lead the country .
When you talk about the flaws of meritocratic hubris , how does that go over at Harvard ?

Looming above America’s present struggles over injustice and inequality is the sense that certain self-mythologies are beginning to evaporate. When Barack Obama was in the White House, he often studded his speeches with a favorite pop lyric, “You can make it if you try.” He mentioned it more than a hundred and forty times, even though the facts of declining social mobility rendered that image less and less convincing. In various studies, no more than eight per cent of Americans who are born into the bottom fifth of U.S. households, as measured by income, ever reach the top fifth; more than a third stay at the bottom.
That analysis of Obama’s language is just one of the startling facts in the latest book by the political philosopher Michael Sandel, who has spent decades scrutinizing the tenets of Western liberalism, including beliefs about justice, markets, and, now, meritocracy. In “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?,” Sandel examines how the notion of “meritocracy,” a word coined in 1958 by Michael Young, a left-leaning British sociologist, was torqued into an American shibboleth. Over time, Sandel argues, it fed a “toxic brew of hubris and resentment.” He writes, “It flattered the winners and insulted the losers. By 2016, its time was up. The arrival of Brexit and Trump, and the rise of hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, announced the failure of the project.” In the final months of Sandel’s writing, he found that the pandemic underscored the political problems he was describing. “The question now is what an alternative political project might look like,” he wrote. Among his prescriptions, he favors some popular liberal proposals, such as introducing a tax on financial transactions, but also some provocative suggestions, such as creating a lottery system for élite college admissions. I recently spoke by phone with Sandel, who is Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government. He was at home in Brookline, Massachusetts. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed American notions of success and failure, how they have contributed to inequality and division, and what Joe Biden might say to stake out a more inspiring, and more dignifying, realm of Democratic values.
You write that America was “morally” unprepared for the pandemic. Was there ever a point in this crisis when you thought, Perhaps this will galvanize us?
In the early days of the pandemic, we often heard the reassuring slogan “We are all in this together.” We heard it from politicians, advertisers, celebrities. The slogan was all around us. It was inspiring in a way because it reminded us of our shared vulnerability in the face of the virus. But I think many people felt that the slogan rang hollow, even in the early weeks, because we knew, and felt, and sensed that we were not truly all in this together. It soon became clear that some of us would ride out the pandemic working from home, relatively removed from the risks, while others—including those whose work enabled the rest of us to work from home—had little choice but to expose themselves to the risks that come from working in stores, and in warehouses, and delivering goods. So it quickly became clear that we were not all in this together.
At the heart of your project is that unravelling of social bonds, a process that you describe as unfolding over many decades. You were obviously working on this book long before the pandemic. So, what was the origin moment that led you to look at the common good, and the role of meritocracy in our lives?
The theme of the common good, and our difficulty bringing it to bear in our public life, has been a concern of mine for a very long time, going back to my previous book [“What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets” (2012)], where I worried that we had shifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society, in which everything was up for sale. Going back even further, I worried that contemporary liberalism focussed too single-mindedly on the individual detached from community, and that this was leading to a politics that failed to engage with our shared identities and with shared moral purposes. So our uneasy relation to the common good has been something that’s concerned me for a long time. I was prompted to write this book, “The Tyranny of Merit,” by trying to make sense of 2016. First with Brexit in Britain, then with the election of Trump in the United States, 2016 was a moment of populist backlash. But against what? That was the question.
It seemed to me that there was more to this backlash than simply the loss of jobs, and the wage stagnation that resulted from globalization. There was more to it also than the ugly sentiments of xenophobia, misogyny, and racism that Trump fomented and appealed to. It seemed to me that entangled with these ugly sentiments were some legitimate grievances that the mainstream parties had missed and had failed to address. Central to those grievances was anger and resentment against professional and meritocratic élites, who seem to be looking down on those less fortunate, less credentialled than themselves.
In your books, there’s this pattern, it seems to me, in which you have sensed at various moments these comforting ideas—“morally satisfying,” I think is a term that you’ve used—that are either underdeveloped, or overdeveloped, or exploited in some way. You’ve challenged some of these presumptions that we have about how a good society is organized. How do you see the theme that ties together some of these big critiques that you’ve made over the years?
A central theme has been questioning the widely held assumption that the way a pluralist society should contend with its moral and civic disagreements is to aspire to a neutrality that, I believe, can never be achieved. So, for example, in the previous book, “What Money Can’t Buy,” I tried to show that part of the deeper appeal of the market faith, which took hold from the nineteen-eighties through the early two-thousands, was the assumption that markets were a neutral instrument for defining the public good. We could somehow avoid messy, contentious debates about the meaning of a just society, and how to achieve the common good, by outsourcing our moral disagreements to markets. The effect has been to create an empty, hollow, unsatisfying public discourse, which frustrates democratic citizens, I think, in many parts of the world. Certainly in this country, citizens want public life to be about big questions that matter, including questions of values, and this reach for neutrality has not only led to the embrace of the market faith, but it also has led our politics to embrace a technocratic space—the idea that experts and technocrats can tell us what the common good consists in—and this technocratic faith is very closely connected to the idea that the meritorious, the well credentialled, should govern.
It’s an interesting scenario that here you are at Harvard, surrounded by students who have risen to the top of the meritocratic system, faculty members who have risen to the top, and a culture embedded with the idea that, through rigorous training, you can build not just the opportunity but almost a moral position to lead the country. When you talk about the flaws of meritocratic hubris, how does that go over at Harvard?
We shall see. [Laughs.] I’m bracing for the reaction. But, all kidding aside, I think that many of my colleagues will recognize, in their experience, many of the problems that I raise. I should first explain what I mean by “meritocratic hubris.” It’s the tendency of those who land on top to believe that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, and, by implication, that those who struggle, those who were left behind, must deserve their fate as well. It’s the tendency to forget our indebtedness to family, teachers, community, country, and the times in which we live as conditions for the success that we enjoy. The more we believe that our success is our own doing, the harder it is to see ourselves in other people’s shoes, the harder it is to feel a sense of mutual responsibility for the fate of our fellow-citizens, including those who aren’t flourishing in the new economy.


newyorker--2020-09-14--Highlights from a “Princess Bride” Virtual Live Read

“ The Princess Bride , ” being somehow foundational to Gen X , millennial , and Gen Z culture , is , for what seems like an overwhelming majority of people , never really far from mind .
So , perhaps , it was inevitable , in this restless , screen-centric time , that someone would have the very good sense to orchestrate a virtual cast reunion .
On Sunday night , from the relative safety of their individual homes , in who knows where , actors from the 1987 film came together via Webcam for a live-streamed reading of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a fund-raiser for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin ; to gain access to the broadcast , attendees had to donate at least one dollar to the political organization .
I donated twenty-seven dollars . )
Like so many events these days , the three-hour broadcast was a cavalcade of accidentally muted microphones , glitchy video , and other technical difficulties .
It ’ s been thirty-three years since the film ’ s release , and several key members of the cast—Peter Falk , Peter Cook , Mel Smith—have died .
For the occasion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ celebrities , including , as Fezzik , a forcefully earnest Josh Gad , doing his dogged best at the late André the Giant ’ s slow-motion French accent .
Even without the assistance of period costumes , fake swamps , or Mark Knopfler ’ s swoopingly romantic score , the core cast members recaptured much of the weird , over-the-top magic of the film .
Hairlines have receded since the eighties , and faces have wrinkled ( to a point—it ’ s Hollywood , after all ) , but Cary Elwes was still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fairbanks ; Wallace Shawn still a flawlessly spluttering megalomaniac ; Chris Sarandon and Christopher Guest still smarmily evil ; Billy Crystal an ideal fast-talking hedge wizard ; and Carol Kane exquisite as his righteously shrieking wife .
There were some pleasing updates : Crystal ad-libbed a mention of Cel-Ray soda into his famous appreciation of M.L.T.s ; Elwes , when Westley is asked why he wears a mask , delivered his response— “ They ’ re terribly comfortable .
I think everyone will be wearing them in the future ” —with a disposable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
One downside of the stripped-down affair was how starkly it revealed that Princess Buttercup , the film ’ s only significant female role , does little more than be silently beautiful .
Still , Robin Wright committed fully to that emptiness , calling in for her mostly silent role from a computer near a window , in a spare , cream-appointed room somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone , where the slowly lowering evening sun cast shadows across the extraordinary planes of her face .
The last time I rewatched “ The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to me that its core narrative is not the romance between Buttercup and Westley but the revenge quest of Inigo Montoya .
The film is a pastiche , a comic reconfiguration of the clichés of swords and sorcery ( it ’ s based on William Goldman ’ s novel of the same name , from 1973 , which twists the knife of satire even more viciously ) ; consequently , it is almost a matter of necessity that the plot is nonsensical and the characters one note : the princess is beautiful , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are evil .
In Mandy Patinkin ’ s care , however , Montoya stands out—the character has a depth and intensity that seems imported from another movie entirely .
When , at last , he finds the man who murdered his father in front of him , his single-minded dedication to revenge propels him to triumph .
The film ends with its heroes , Buttercup and Westley , sharing a passionate kiss , but it ’ s the scene just before that which really brings the plot to a close : “ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long .
Now that it ’ s over , I don ’ t know what to do with the rest of my life , ” Montoya says to Westley , just before they jump out a window , to ride off on snow-white horses in the direction of happily ever after .
Patinkin , who is sixty-seven , has become something of a social-media celebrity in recent months , thanks to videos in which he and his wife of forty years , the actress and writer Kathryn Grody , putter around their warmly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ singing , often in response to prompts given , off-camera , by their son Gideon , who shoots and posts the videos .
Patinkin has evolved from his early years as a tortured heartthrob into , now , a fascinating blend of tortured heartthrob and futzy Jewish grandpa , and the clips are preposterously charming .
He deletes old e-mails !
He talks through a recipe for tuna burgers !
He and Grody munch on buttered matzo while guessing what “ dabbing ” is and trying to define the word “ meme ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ urged viewers to support the Biden-Harris ticket ( notably , a song-and-dance routine with the Patinkin family ’ s yellow Labrador , Becky ) , and for the “ Princess ” fund-raiser he threw himself into his old role with a passion that seemed to sear the lens of his Webcam .
He roared , he wept , he danced ; he rolled his “ R ” s and sharpened his “ E ” s ; he even came in costume—a white shirt , rakishly unbuttoned to mid-chest .
At the moment of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when Montoya introduces his sword , Patinkin presented—to considerable excitement in my household ( and on Twitter , where my feed was briefly overwhelmed by exclamation marks and the word “ sword ” ) —an actual prop sword from the film itself .
After the table read , there was a Q .
& A. with the cast , plus Rob Reiner , the director , and Norman Lear , who produced the movie .
The comedian Patton Oswalt m.c.
’ d , directing to this or that celebrity questions submitted earlier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the possibility of a sequel , Reiner pooh-poohed the idea , but mentioned that he ’ d always thought “ The Princess Bride ” would make for a great Broadway musical .
Lear , who is ninety-eight years old , added that , because it takes about eight years for a musical to get off the ground , he plans to live to be a hundred and six . )
At one point , Oswalt asked Patinkin who had been the most “ interesting or unexpected ” person to quote Inigo Montoya .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ted Cruz , ” Patinkin replied .
The Texas senator , a Republican and Trump apologist , often cites his love for “ The Princess Bride ” ; he recently tweeted his dismay at the Democratic fund-raiser , with a somewhat labored riff on one of Patinkin ’ s character ’ s lines .
Unfortunately for Cruz , his tweet led to a surge of publicity for Sunday ’ s event , which drew an audience of more than a hundred thousand connected devices—and secured , therefore , more than a hundred thousand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ operations in the battleground state .

“The Princess Bride,” being somehow foundational to Gen X, millennial, and Gen Z culture, is, for what seems like an overwhelming majority of people, never really far from mind. So, perhaps, it was inevitable, in this restless, screen-centric time, that someone would have the very good sense to orchestrate a virtual cast reunion. On Sunday night, from the relative safety of their individual homes, in who knows where, actors from the 1987 film came together via Webcam for a live-streamed reading of the script. (The event was a fund-raiser for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin; to gain access to the broadcast, attendees had to donate at least one dollar to the political organization. I donated twenty-seven dollars.) Like so many events these days, the three-hour broadcast was a cavalcade of accidentally muted microphones, glitchy video, and other technical difficulties. It’s been thirty-three years since the film’s release, and several key members of the cast—Peter Falk, Peter Cook, Mel Smith—have died. For the occasion, their roles were filled by other celebrities, including, as Fezzik, a forcefully earnest Josh Gad, doing his dogged best at the late André the Giant’s slow-motion French accent.
Even without the assistance of period costumes, fake swamps, or Mark Knopfler’s swoopingly romantic score, the core cast members recaptured much of the weird, over-the-top magic of the film. Hairlines have receded since the eighties, and faces have wrinkled (to a point—it’s Hollywood, after all), but Cary Elwes was still a suave and wisecracking skewer of Douglas Fairbanks; Wallace Shawn still a flawlessly spluttering megalomaniac; Chris Sarandon and Christopher Guest still smarmily evil; Billy Crystal an ideal fast-talking hedge wizard; and Carol Kane exquisite as his righteously shrieking wife. There were some pleasing updates: Crystal ad-libbed a mention of Cel-Ray soda into his famous appreciation of M.L.T.s; Elwes, when Westley is asked why he wears a mask, delivered his response—“They’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future”—with a disposable surgical mask over his nose and mouth. One downside of the stripped-down affair was how starkly it revealed that Princess Buttercup, the film’s only significant female role, does little more than be silently beautiful. Still, Robin Wright committed fully to that emptiness, calling in for her mostly silent role from a computer near a window, in a spare, cream-appointed room somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone, where the slowly lowering evening sun cast shadows across the extraordinary planes of her face.
The last time I rewatched “The Princess Bride,” it became obvious to me that its core narrative is not the romance between Buttercup and Westley but the revenge quest of Inigo Montoya. The film is a pastiche, a comic reconfiguration of the clichés of swords and sorcery (it’s based on William Goldman’s novel of the same name, from 1973, which twists the knife of satire even more viciously); consequently, it is almost a matter of necessity that the plot is nonsensical and the characters one note: the princess is beautiful, the hero is dashing, the villains are evil. In Mandy Patinkin’s care, however, Montoya stands out—the character has a depth and intensity that seems imported from another movie entirely. When, at last, he finds the man who murdered his father in front of him, his single-minded dedication to revenge propels him to triumph. The film ends with its heroes, Buttercup and Westley, sharing a passionate kiss, but it’s the scene just before that which really brings the plot to a close: “I have been in the revenge business so long. Now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,” Montoya says to Westley, just before they jump out a window, to ride off on snow-white horses in the direction of happily ever after.
Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Josh Gad, and Mandy Patinkin during the virtual table read.
Patinkin, who is sixty-seven, has become something of a social-media celebrity in recent months, thanks to videos in which he and his wife of forty years, the actress and writer Kathryn Grody, putter around their warmly cluttered home, bickering and flirting and singing, often in response to prompts given, off-camera, by their son Gideon, who shoots and posts the videos. Patinkin has evolved from his early years as a tortured heartthrob into, now, a fascinating blend of tortured heartthrob and futzy Jewish grandpa, and the clips are preposterously charming. He deletes old e-mails! He talks through a recipe for tuna burgers! He and Grody munch on buttered matzo while guessing what “dabbing” is and trying to define the word “meme”! Many of his recent posts have urged viewers to support the Biden-Harris ticket (notably, a song-and-dance routine with the Patinkin family’s yellow Labrador, Becky), and for the “Princess” fund-raiser he threw himself into his old role with a passion that seemed to sear the lens of his Webcam. He roared, he wept, he danced; he rolled his “R”s and sharpened his “E”s; he even came in costume—a white shirt, rakishly unbuttoned to mid-chest. At the moment of the story’s first marvellous duel, when Montoya introduces his sword, Patinkin presented—to considerable excitement in my household (and on Twitter, where my feed was briefly overwhelmed by exclamation marks and the word “sword”)—an actual prop sword from the film itself.
After the table read, there was a Q. & A. with the cast, plus Rob Reiner, the director, and Norman Lear, who produced the movie. The comedian Patton Oswalt m.c.’d, directing to this or that celebrity questions submitted earlier by the audience. (Asked about the possibility of a sequel, Reiner pooh-poohed the idea, but mentioned that he’d always thought “The Princess Bride” would make for a great Broadway musical. Lear, who is ninety-eight years old, added that, because it takes about eight years for a musical to get off the ground, he plans to live to be a hundred and six.) At one point, Oswalt asked Patinkin who had been the most “interesting or unexpected” person to quote Inigo Montoya. “I would have to say Senator Ted Cruz,” Patinkin replied. The Texas senator, a Republican and Trump apologist, often cites his love for “The Princess Bride”; he recently tweeted his dismay at the Democratic fund-raiser, with a somewhat labored riff on one of Patinkin’s character’s lines. Unfortunately for Cruz, his tweet led to a surge of publicity for Sunday’s event, which drew an audience of more than a hundred thousand connected devices—and secured, therefore, more than a hundred thousand donations for the Biden-Harris campaign’s operations in the battleground state.