newyorker--2020-02-10--“With the Beatles,” by Haruki Murakami

“With the Beatles,” by Haruki Murakami

What I find strange about growing old isn ’ t that I ’ ve got older .
Not that the youthful me from the past has , without my realizing it , aged .
What catches me off guard is , rather , how people from the same generation as me have become elderly , how all the pretty , vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids .
It ’ s a little disconcerting—sad , even .
Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit , all over again , that my youthful dreams are gone forever .
The death of a dream can be , in a way , sadder than that of a living being .
There ’ s one girl—a woman who used to be a girl , I mean—whom I remember well .
I don ’ t know her name , though .
And , naturally , I don ’ t know where she is now or what she ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about her is that she went to the same high school as I did , and was in the same year ( since the badge on her shirt was the same color as mine ) , and that she really liked the Beatles .
This was in 1964 , at the height of Beatlemania .
It was early autumn .
The new school semester had begun and things were starting to fall into a routine again .
She was hurrying down the long , dim hallway of the old school building , her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other person there .
She was clutching an LP to her chest as if it were something precious .
The LP “ With the Beatles.
” The one with the striking black-and-white photograph of the four Beatles in half shadow .
For some reason , I ’ m not sure why , I have a clear memory that it was the original , British version of the album , not the American or the Japanese version .
She was a beautiful girl .
At least , to me then , she looked gorgeous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but she had long black hair , slim legs , and a lovely fragrance .
( That could be a false memory , I don ’ t know .
Maybe she didn ’ t give off any scent at all .
But that ’ s what I remember , as if , when she passed , an enchanting , alluring fragrance wafted in my direction . )
She had me under her spell—that beautiful , nameless girl clutching “ With the Beatles ” to her chest .
My heart started to pound , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was as if all sound had ceased , as if I ’ d sunk to the bottom of a pool .
All I could hear was a bell ringing faintly , deep in my ears .
As if someone were desperately trying to send me a vital message .
All this took only ten or fifteen seconds .
It was over before I knew it , and the critical message contained there , like the core of all dreams , disappeared .
A dimly lit hallway in a high school , a beautiful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ swirling , “ With the Beatles.
” That was the only time I saw that girl .
In the two years between then and my graduation , we never once crossed paths again .
Which is pretty strange if you think about it .
The high school I attended was a fairly large public school at the top of a hill in Kobe , with about six hundred and fifty students in each grade .
( We were the so-called baby-boomer generation , so there were a lot of us . )
Not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I didn ’ t know the names or recognize the vast majority of the kids in the school .
But , still , since I went to school almost every day , and often used that hallway , it struck me as almost outrageous that I never once saw that beautiful girl again .
I looked for her every time I used that hallway .
Had she vanished , like smoke ?
Or , on that early-autumn afternoon , had I seen not a real person but a vision of some kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my mind at the instant that we passed each other , to the point where even if I actually saw her again I wouldn ’ t recognize her ?
( I think the last possibility is the most likely . )
Later , I got to know a few women , and went out with them .
And every time I met a new woman it felt as though I were unconsciously longing to relive that dazzling moment I ’ d experienced in a dim school hallway back in the fall of 1964 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my heart , the breathless feeling in my chest , the bell ringing gently in my ears .
Sometimes I was able to recapture this feeling , at other times not .
And other times I managed to grab hold of it , only to let it slip through my fingers .
In any event , the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning .
When I couldn ’ t get that sensation in the real world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of those feelings awaken inside me .
In this way , memory became one of my most valued emotional tools , a means of survival , even .
Like a warm kitten , softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket , fast asleep .
On to the Beatles .
A year before I saw that girl was when the Beatles first became wildly popular .
By April of 1964 , they ’ d captured the top five spots on the American singles charts .
Pop music had never seen anything like it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( 1 ) “ Can ’ t Buy Me Love ” ; ( 2 ) “ Twist and Shout ” ; ( 3 ) “ She Loves You ” ; ( 4 ) “ I Want to Hold Your Hand ” ; ( 5 ) “ Please Please Me.
” The single “ Can ’ t Buy Me Love ” alone had more than two million preorders , making it double platinum before the actual record went on sale .
The Beatles were , of course , also hugely popular in Japan .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ d hear one of their songs .
I liked their songs myself and knew all their hits .
Ask me to sing them and I could .
At home when I was studying ( or pretending to study ) , most of the time I had the radio blasting away .
But , truth be told , I was never a fervent Beatles fan .
I never actively sought out their songs .
For me , it was passive listening , pop music flowing out of the tiny speakers of my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and out the other , barely registering .
Background music for my adolescence .
Musical wallpaper .
In high school and in college , I didn ’ t buy a single Beatles record .
I was much more into jazz and classical music , and that was what I listened to when I wanted to focus on music .
I saved up to buy jazz records , requested tunes by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk at jazz bars , and went to classical-music concerts .
This might seem strange , but it wasn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mid-thirties that I sat down and listened to “ With the Beatles ” from beginning to end .
Despite the fact that the image of the girl carrying that LP in the hallway of our high school had never left me , for the longest time I didn ’ t feel like actually giving it a listen .
I wasn ’ t particularly interested in knowing what sort of music was etched into the grooves of the vinyl disk she had clutched so tightly to her chest .

What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve got older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting—sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.
I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.
There’s one girl—a woman who used to be a girl, I mean—whom I remember well. I don’t know her name, though. And, naturally, I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing. What I do know about her is that she went to the same high school as I did, and was in the same year (since the badge on her shirt was the same color as mine), and that she really liked the Beatles.
This was in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania. It was early autumn. The new school semester had begun and things were starting to fall into a routine again. She was hurrying down the long, dim hallway of the old school building, her skirt fluttering. I was the only other person there. She was clutching an LP to her chest as if it were something precious. The LP “With the Beatles.” The one with the striking black-and-white photograph of the four Beatles in half shadow. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I have a clear memory that it was the original, British version of the album, not the American or the Japanese version.
She was a beautiful girl. At least, to me then, she looked gorgeous. She wasn’t tall, but she had long black hair, slim legs, and a lovely fragrance. (That could be a false memory, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t give off any scent at all. But that’s what I remember, as if, when she passed, an enchanting, alluring fragrance wafted in my direction.) She had me under her spell—that beautiful, nameless girl clutching “With the Beatles” to her chest.
My heart started to pound, I gasped for breath, and it was as if all sound had ceased, as if I’d sunk to the bottom of a pool. All I could hear was a bell ringing faintly, deep in my ears. As if someone were desperately trying to send me a vital message. All this took only ten or fifteen seconds. It was over before I knew it, and the critical message contained there, like the core of all dreams, disappeared.
A dimly lit hallway in a high school, a beautiful girl, the hem of her skirt swirling, “With the Beatles.”
That was the only time I saw that girl. In the two years between then and my graduation, we never once crossed paths again. Which is pretty strange if you think about it. The high school I attended was a fairly large public school at the top of a hill in Kobe, with about six hundred and fifty students in each grade. (We were the so-called baby-boomer generation, so there were a lot of us.) Not everyone knew one another. In fact, I didn’t know the names or recognize the vast majority of the kids in the school. But, still, since I went to school almost every day, and often used that hallway, it struck me as almost outrageous that I never once saw that beautiful girl again. I looked for her every time I used that hallway.
Had she vanished, like smoke? Or, on that early-autumn afternoon, had I seen not a real person but a vision of some kind? Perhaps I had idealized her in my mind at the instant that we passed each other, to the point where even if I actually saw her again I wouldn’t recognize her? (I think the last possibility is the most likely.)
Later, I got to know a few women, and went out with them. And every time I met a new woman it felt as though I were unconsciously longing to relive that dazzling moment I’d experienced in a dim school hallway back in the fall of 1964. That silent, insistent thrill in my heart, the breathless feeling in my chest, the bell ringing gently in my ears.
Sometimes I was able to recapture this feeling, at other times not. And other times I managed to grab hold of it, only to let it slip through my fingers. In any event, the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning.
When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even. Like a warm kitten, softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket, fast asleep.
On to the Beatles.
A year before I saw that girl was when the Beatles first became wildly popular. By April of 1964, they’d captured the top five spots on the American singles charts. Pop music had never seen anything like it. These were the five hit songs: (1) “Can’t Buy Me Love”; (2) “Twist and Shout”; (3) “She Loves You”; (4) “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; (5) “Please Please Me.” The single “Can’t Buy Me Love” alone had more than two million preorders, making it double platinum before the actual record went on sale.
The Beatles were, of course, also hugely popular in Japan. Turn on the radio and chances were you’d hear one of their songs. I liked their songs myself and knew all their hits. Ask me to sing them and I could. At home when I was studying (or pretending to study), most of the time I had the radio blasting away. But, truth be told, I was never a fervent Beatles fan. I never actively sought out their songs. For me, it was passive listening, pop music flowing out of the tiny speakers of my Panasonic transistor radio, in one ear and out the other, barely registering. Background music for my adolescence. Musical wallpaper.
In high school and in college, I didn’t buy a single Beatles record. I was much more into jazz and classical music, and that was what I listened to when I wanted to focus on music. I saved up to buy jazz records, requested tunes by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk at jazz bars, and went to classical-music concerts.
This might seem strange, but it wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that I sat down and listened to “With the Beatles” from beginning to end. Despite the fact that the image of the girl carrying that LP in the hallway of our high school had never left me, for the longest time I didn’t feel like actually giving it a listen. I wasn’t particularly interested in knowing what sort of music was etched into the grooves of the vinyl disk she had clutched so tightly to her chest.
When I was in my mid-thirties, well past childhood and adolescence, my first impression of the album was that it wasn’t that great, or at least not the kind of music to take your breath away. Of the fourteen tracks on the album, six were covers of other artists’ works. The covers of the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” were well done, and impress me even when I listen to them now, but, still, they were cover versions. And of the eight original songs, apart from Paul’s “All My Loving,” none were amazing. There were no hit singles, and to my ears the Beatles’ first album, “Please Please Me,” recorded basically in one take, was far more vibrant and compelling. Even so, likely thanks to Beatles fans’ unquenchable desire for new songs, this second album débuted in the No. 1 spot in the U.K., a position it held for twenty-one weeks. (In the U.S., the title of the album was changed to “Meet the Beatles,” and included some different tracks, though the cover design stayed almost the same.)
What pulled me in was the vision of that girl clutching the album as if it were something priceless. Take away the photograph on the album cover and the scene might not have bewitched me as it did. There was the music, for sure. But there was something else, something far bigger. And, in an instant, that tableau was etched in my heart—a kind of spiritual landscape that could be found only there, at a set age, in a set place, and at a set moment in time.
For me, the major event of the following year, 1965, wasn’t President Johnson ordering the bombing of North Vietnam and the escalation of the war, or the discovery of a new species of wildcat on the island of Iriomote, but the fact that I acquired a girlfriend. She had been in the same class as me in freshman year, but it wasn’t until sophomore year that we started going out.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m not good-looking and was never a star athlete, and my grades in school were less than stellar. My singing left something to be desired, too, and I didn’t have a way with words. When I was in school, and in the years after that, I never once had girls flocking around me. That’s one of the few things I can say with certainty in this uncertain life. Still, there always seemed to be a girl around who was, for whatever reason, attracted to me. I have no clue why, but I was able to enjoy some pleasant, intimate times with those girls. I got to be good friends with some of them, and occasionally took it to the next level. The girl I’m talking about here was one of these—the first girl I had a really close relationship with.
This first girlfriend of mine was petite and charming. That summer, I went on dates with her once a week. One afternoon I kissed her small yet full lips and touched her breasts through her bra. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress and her hair had a citrusy shampoo scent.
She had almost no interest in the Beatles. She wasn’t into jazz, either. What she liked to listen to was more mellow music, what you might call middle-class music—the Mantovani Orchestra, Percy Faith, Roger Williams, Andy Williams, Nat King Cole, and the like. (At the time, “middle class” wasn’t a derogatory term at all.) There were piles of such records at her house—what nowadays is classified as easy listening.
That afternoon, she put a record on the turntable in her living room—her family had a large, impressive stereo system—and we sat on the big, comfy sofa and kissed. Her family had gone out somewhere and it was just the two of us. Truthfully, in a situation like that I didn’t really care what sort of music was playing.
What I remember about the summer of 1965 was her white dress, the citrusy scent of her shampoo, the formidable feel of her wire bra (a bra back then was more like a fortress than like an item of underwear), and the elegant performance of Max Steiner’s “Theme from ‘A Summer Place’ ” by the Percy Faith Orchestra. Even now, whenever I hear “Theme from ‘A Summer Place,’ ” that sofa comes to mind.
Incidentally, several years later—1968, as I recall, around the same time that Robert Kennedy was assassinated—the man who had been our homeroom teacher when we were in the same class hanged himself from the lintel in his house. He’d taught social studies. An ideological impasse was said to be the cause of his suicide.


newyorker--2020-02-10--Oscars 2020: The Best Picture Win for “Parasite” Can’t Redeem the Academy’s Failings

It ’ s worth starting at the end : the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho ’ s film “ Parasite ” won the Oscar for Best Picture—marking the first time since the Academy Awards were established , in 1929 , that an international film has won the top prize .
It ’ s about time .
This happened a year later than I expected—I ’ d figured that Alfonso Cuarón ’ s “ Roma ” would win Best Picture last year—and it took me by surprise .
I predicted that “ 1917 ” would win , and , inasmuch as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ movie , I ’ m glad to have been wrong .
In a way , its victory attempts to right nearly a century of neglect .
( Ingmar Bergman ’ s film “ Cries and Whispers ” was one of the five nominees in 1973 , and lost to , of all things , “ The Sting.
” ) This year , the Oscars were political from the very start .
Some of the presenters and the winners offered noteworthy political remarks , though the one that struck me as most piercing wasn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the one that opened the broadcast : Janelle Monáe , enacting Fred Rogers ’ s routine of changing into his character ’ s costume on set , sang the “ Mister Rogers ” theme song , with its refrain , “ Won ’ t you be my neighbor ?
, ” to the overwhelmingly white audience and , by extension , to viewers at home .
The question , in Monáe ’ s voice , powerfully invoked the unchallenged and unredressed racism that extends far beyond the Oscar nominations and Hollywood ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As Steve Martin and Chris Rock noted , in a bantering presentation immediately following Monáe ’ s introduction , the acting nominations included only one black performer ( Cynthia Erivo , for “ Harriet ” ) , and no female directors were nominated at all .
The omissions in the year ’ s roster of nominees were as conspicuous , from the start , as its notable inclusions—such as the nomination of Antonio Banderas , for Best Actor , the nomination of the animated short film “ Hair Love , ” and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ The Irishman.
” Political anger is justly in the air at a time of gross misrule , unleashed hatred , abuse of power , and plutocratic plunder , and with this year ’ s Oscars—both in the particulars of the ceremony and the results that it delivered—Academy members faced up to their own symbolic part in the dire state of the nation .
Brad Pitt , accepting the award for Best Supporting Actor , noted that he had forty-five seconds to speak—forty-five seconds more , he added , than John Bolton had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trial last week .
The great filmmaker Julia Reichert , whose “ American Factory ” won a well-deserved award for Best Documentary Feature , said that the lives of workers can improve only when “ workers of the world unite.
” Taika Waititi , the director of “ Jojo Rabbit , ” acknowledged the indigenous nations on whose homeland the Dolby Theatre is situated ; Gal Gadot , Sigourney Weaver , and Brie Larson , introducing the nominees for Best Original Score , spoke jokingly but passionately about the obstacles that women confront @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political moments arose when Joaquin Phoenix , who won the Best Actor award for “ Joker ” —a movie considered , by its defenders , to be some sort of substantive statement about inequality , stifled class rage , mental illness , and the health-care system—started to speak about racism , sexism , and humankind ’ s unwarranted plunder of nature .
I expected this last point to lead him to remarks about climate change—but , instead , Phoenix veered off into a pathos-laden , graphically detailed discussion of the oppression of dairy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left behind the inhumanities of racial prejudice , misogyny , and abuse of power which plague his own industry and the country at large .
The victory of “ Parasite ” is a paradox .
I consider it a much better film than what I ’ d feared were the front-runners ( “ 1917 , ” “ Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood , ” and “ Jojo Rabbit ” ) , and a worse one than the best of the bunch ( “ The Irishman , ” “ Little Women , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
At the time of its theatrical release , last fall , it struck me not only for its extraordinarily clever dramatic twist , which is realized with a familiar and conventional aesthetic , but also for its potent , simple sociopolitical symbolism .
Its bold and confrontational display of the absurd contrasts between the lives of the rich and the poor has an impact that ’ s far more powerful than the methods by which it ’ s realized .
The film is utterly sincere , even passionately insistent , and this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too perfectly , with a message that critics were apt to receive with enthusiasm .
The Academy agrees .
It ’ s not the first time in recent years that the industry and its critics have found themselves generally in agreement ; the same thing happened three years ago , with the victory of “ Moonlight.
” I wonder whether “ Moonlight ” could have won today—whether the very fact of its complexity , of its unresolved intricacy , would have counted against it .
What ’ s clear is that , this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helped bar the way of the great : “ The Irishman ” had ten nominations and came away empty-handed .
Martin Scorsese did receive a generous tribute in Bong ’ s acceptance speech for Best Director , and Scorsese , as a result , received a standing ovation from the audience .
Scorsese ’ s “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” also had a raft of Oscar nominations ( five ) and no wins .
It seems as if the director has , in his own time , passed into a special @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would willingly acclaim as great , peerlessly great , but far fewer would willingly read .
I ’ d contend that “ The Irishman ” is a more radical political film than “ Parasite.
” I hope that the victory of Bong ’ s film opens the floodgates to the recognition of a wide range of international movies , rather than the exception that symbolically breaks the rule—the better to offer cover for other omissions by the Academy , now and later .
It ’ s worth noting , for instance , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group of female characters , “ Little Women ” and “ Bombshell , ” came away only with awards for Costume Design and Makeup and Hairstyling , respectively .
It ’ s as if the Academy were tacitly , even unconsciously , telling the world what it thought such movies were good for .
That ’ s why my satisfaction in the triumph of a good movie is balanced by concern—that its win may remain a gesture , rather than an acknowledgment of profound and desperately needed change .

It’s worth starting at the end: the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s film “Parasite” won the Oscar for Best Picture—marking the first time since the Academy Awards were established, in 1929, that an international film has won the top prize. It’s about time. This happened a year later than I expected—I’d figured that Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” would win Best Picture last year—and it took me by surprise. I predicted that “1917” would win, and, inasmuch as “Parasite” is a far better movie, I’m glad to have been wrong. In a way, its victory attempts to right nearly a century of neglect. (Ingmar Bergman’s film “Cries and Whispers” was one of the five nominees in 1973, and lost to, of all things, “The Sting.”)
This year, the Oscars were political from the very start. Some of the presenters and the winners offered noteworthy political remarks, though the one that struck me as most piercing wasn’t a speech but a song, the one that opened the broadcast: Janelle Monáe, enacting Fred Rogers’s routine of changing into his character’s costume on set, sang the “Mister Rogers” theme song, with its refrain, “Won’t you be my neighbor?,” to the overwhelmingly white audience and, by extension, to viewers at home. The question, in Monáe’s voice, powerfully invoked the unchallenged and unredressed racism that extends far beyond the Oscar nominations and Hollywood’s notables into society at large.
As Steve Martin and Chris Rock noted, in a bantering presentation immediately following Monáe’s introduction, the acting nominations included only one black performer (Cynthia Erivo, for “Harriet”), and no female directors were nominated at all. The omissions in the year’s roster of nominees were as conspicuous, from the start, as its notable inclusions—such as the nomination of Antonio Banderas, for Best Actor, the nomination of the animated short film “Hair Love,” and the ten nominations for Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.” Political anger is justly in the air at a time of gross misrule, unleashed hatred, abuse of power, and plutocratic plunder, and with this year’s Oscars—both in the particulars of the ceremony and in the results that it delivered—Academy members faced up to their own symbolic part in the dire state of the nation.
Brad Pitt, accepting the award for Best Supporting Actor, noted that he had forty-five seconds to speak—forty-five seconds more, he added, than John Bolton had at Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial last week. The great filmmaker Julia Reichert, whose “American Factory” won a well-deserved award for Best Documentary Feature, said that the lives of workers can improve only when “workers of the world unite.” Taika Waititi, the director of “Jojo Rabbit,” acknowledged the indigenous nations on whose homeland the Dolby Theatre is situated; Gal Gadot, Sigourney Weaver, and Brie Larson, introducing the nominees for Best Original Score, spoke jokingly but passionately about the obstacles that women confront in Hollywood. The strangest of the political moments arose when Joaquin Phoenix, who won the Best Actor award for “Joker”—a movie considered, by its defenders, to be some sort of substantive statement about inequality, stifled class rage, mental illness, and the health-care system—started to speak about racism, sexism, and humankind’s unwarranted plunder of nature. I expected this last point to lead him to remarks about climate change—but, instead, Phoenix veered off into a pathos-laden, graphically detailed discussion of the oppression of dairy cows, in a pro-vegan discourse that left behind the inhumanities of racial prejudice, misogyny, and abuse of power which plague his own industry and the country at large.
The victory of “Parasite” is a paradox. I consider it a much better film than what I’d feared were the front-runners (“1917,” “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and “Jojo Rabbit”), and a worse one than the best of the bunch (“The Irishman,” “Little Women,” and “Marriage Story”). At the time of its theatrical release, last fall, it struck me not only for its extraordinarily clever dramatic twist, which is realized with a familiar and conventional aesthetic, but also for its potent, simple sociopolitical symbolism. Its bold and confrontational display of the absurd contrasts between the lives of the rich and the poor has an impact that’s far more powerful than the methods by which it’s realized. The film is utterly sincere, even passionately insistent, and this quality seemed to mesh perfectly, perhaps too perfectly, with a message that critics were apt to receive with enthusiasm.
The Academy agrees. It’s not the first time in recent years that the industry and its critics have found themselves generally in agreement; the same thing happened three years ago, with the victory of “Moonlight.” I wonder whether “Moonlight” could have won today—whether the very fact of its complexity, of its unresolved intricacy, would have counted against it. What’s clear is that, this year, the virtues of the good helped bar the way of the great: “The Irishman” had ten nominations and came away empty-handed. Martin Scorsese did receive a generous tribute in Bong’s acceptance speech for Best Director, and Scorsese, as a result, received a standing ovation from the audience.
Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” also had a raft of Oscar nominations (five) and no wins. It seems as if the director has, in his own time, passed into a special realm of classics—like Shakespeare, whom everyone would willingly acclaim as great, peerlessly great, but far fewer would willingly read. I’d contend that “The Irishman” is a more radical political film than “Parasite.” I hope that the victory of Bong’s film opens the floodgates to the recognition of a wide range of international movies, rather than the exception that symbolically breaks the rule—the better to offer cover for other omissions by the Academy, now and later. It’s worth noting, for instance, that the two dramatic features centered on a group of female characters, “Little Women” and “Bombshell,” came away only with awards for Costume Design and Makeup and Hairstyling, respectively. It’s as if the Academy were tacitly, even unconsciously, telling the world what it thought such movies were good for. That’s why my satisfaction in the triumph of a good movie is balanced by concern—that its win may remain a gesture, rather than an acknowledgment of profound and desperately needed change.


newyorker--2020-02-12--Are Novels Trapped by the Present?

Are Novels Trapped by the Present?

The title of Jenny Offill ’ s celebrated novel “ Dept .
of Speculation , ” from 2014 , refers to an old joke between the book ’ s unnamed protagonist and her husband .
“ They used to send each other letters , ” Offill writes .
“ The return address was always the same : Dept .
of Speculation.
” Years later , they both still have the letters , but the husband has begun sleeping with a young woman from his office , and the joke that once implied young love ’ s cautious optimism has acquired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will stay together is a distressingly live question when the protagonist decides to send her husband another letter from the Dept .
of Speculation— “ She is after all , speculating ” —proposing that they leave New York , move to the country , and , implicitly , save their marriage .
“ Forget the city , ” she writes .
“ There is nothing for us anymore .
The birds are leaving even.
” The couple does stay together , a happy-enough ending that seems fairly incredible in light of Offill ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” which contains no suggestion that the future ’ s uncertainty could be a good or exciting thing—the birds are running out of places to go .
Both books generate their energy from dread , but , where “ Dept .
of Speculation ” concerned the imminent dissolution of the narrator ’ s marriage , “ Weather ” takes place around the 2016 Presidential election , and so concerns the imminent dissolution of everything else .
The most recent in a string of novels that wonder whether we ’ re living in “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is Offill ’ s attempt to “ write atmospherically , ” she told Publishers Weekly .
Rather than zoom in on a single disorienting upheaval in a character ’ s life , the novel endeavors to show how , these days , every aspect of everyone ’ s life feels threatened , and how every decision seems to presage a duel between individual survival and collective action .
A compromise : when the time comes , choose individual survival but feel very bad about it .
This is , at least , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Lizzie , a grad-school dropout living at the frontier of gentrifying Brooklyn .
Lizzie ’ s late-night Internet sessions and teetering finances have taught her to anticipate the many ways in which she—and the world—can fall apart .
The book begins at the library , where Lizzie has a job for which she is admittedly underqualified , helping patrons who seem , like her , to embrace anxiety as a resting state—a “ doomed adjunct , ” a blonde whose nails are “ bitten to the quick.
” When she has some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out patterns , things “ falling and accumulating without notice.
” Offill takes a similar approach .
Like “ Dept .
of Speculation , ” “ Weather ” is written in fragments and with deadpan language ; bits of narrative are “ meant to swirl ” alongside quotations , anecdotes , jokes , and miscellany .
Critics liked to call “ Dept .
of Speculation ” “ slim ” or “ slender ” ; “ Weather ” is about the same length , but much more diffuse .
The fragments allow Offill to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the library alone brings together rising homelessness , the evaporation of the academic job market , the importance of keeping Narcan on hand , Uber ’ s ravaging of local taxi services , vegetarianism , and self-care through dubious spirituality .
( Despite her winning cynicism , Lizzie is eventually convinced to join a meditation group that meets in the basement , but she does not give up her ham sandwich when scolded . )
Lizzie also works as an assistant for her funny former graduate adviser , Sylvia , who hosts a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hell or High Water , ” and who for years has been warning about the problems that now preoccupy Lizzie .
Among Lizzie ’ s responsibilities is to answer listeners ’ questions , which have “ been skewing evangelical lately .
Lots of questions about the Rapture mixed in with the ones about wind turbines and carbon taxes.
” ( These also appear throughout the text . )
At home , too , the end times are an increasingly urgent topic of conversation .
Lizzie ’ s husband , Ben , is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and has a “ complicated relationship to modern things.
” Her brother , Henry , is a former addict who depends on Lizzie for emotional support , particularly once his have-it-all partner , an advertising executive , gets pregnant .
One of Offill ’ s animating questions is whether history can be used to understand the future , and Lizzie ’ s son , Eli , is less a character than a lightning rod for her fears about “ climate departure ” —the point at which a region ’ s average climate ceases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ truly , measurably unprecedented .
During the course of the book , Lizzie becomes what her husband calls a “ crazy doomer.
” She develops a paranoia that begins with Internet-induced hypochondria ( “ knee cancer ” is arthritis ) and grows into an obsession with survivalist hacks , although she realizes that these can only get you so far if you feel winded running to catch the bus .
After Donald Trump is elected , Ben gets in on the “ doomstead ” planning , making it his own by telling Lizzie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prepping too.
” Henry , meanwhile , begins channelling the atmospheric terror inward .
Given that he can ’ t be trusted to keep himself together , and that children ’ s lives seem more imperilled than ever , he begins having visions about killing his baby daughter , has a nervous breakdown from the pressure to keep them a secret , and requires constant supervision from Lizzie , who neglects Ben and Eli .
Henry relapses and ends up divorced , and Lizzie is tempted into an affair by a hot war @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eventually happen in the text are never as momentous as the bad feelings that hang in the air from trying to anticipate them .
( The divorce is for the best ; Lizzie emerges from her flirtation rededicated to her marriage . )
For characters like these , the apocalypse is an appealing fantasy ; when doom is certain , doing nothing is acceptable .
In the real world , though , an individual is still responsible for her actions , and playacting disaster to avoid that responsibility fuels Lizzie ’ s guilt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might channel all of this dread into action , ” she notes .
“ One night Ben and I go to a meeting about justice at the Unitarian church down the street .
Good people all around , making plans , assisting—so why do I feel so embarrassed ?
” Her discordant feelings are dramatized when the family visits the International Spy Museum , in Washington , D.C. , where they are given a script to act out a mission .
Ben grumbles because entrance isn ’ t free , but Lizzie is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the Holocaust Museum—the simulation of stakes and danger is preferable to a reminder of actual stakes and danger .
She also likes the image of humanity on display , of spies as moral actors sacrificing themselves for their cause .
“ The best thing is an ordinary looking pair of glasses , ” she notes of the exhibitions .
“ Cyanide tipped .
To be used if you are caught by the enemy so you don ’ t betray anyone.
” The question of how to understand the future through the past @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” in so many different forms , that it seems less like a motif than a fixation .
An island of narrative interest—will Henry ’ s breakdown resemble his last , when he “ was drowning ” and Lizzie “ dove in right after him ” ?
—is swallowed in a rising tide of worries , both global and trivial .
Will apocalypse prep be futile , as it has been before ?
Will pest control be futile , as it has been before ?
“ We don ’ t know if it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ old mouse , ” Offill writes of a rodent in her apartment .
“ This is the fatal flaw of the have-a-heart-trap .
”

The title of Jenny Offill’s celebrated novel “Dept. of Speculation,” from 2014, refers to an old joke between the book’s unnamed protagonist and her husband. “They used to send each other letters,” Offill writes. “The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.”
Years later, they both still have the letters, but the husband has begun sleeping with a young woman from his office, and the joke that once implied young love’s cautious optimism has acquired a darker cast. Whether the couple will stay together is a distressingly live question when the protagonist decides to send her husband another letter from the Dept. of Speculation—“She is after all, speculating”—proposing that they leave New York, move to the country, and, implicitly, save their marriage. “Forget the city,” she writes. “There is nothing for us anymore. The birds are leaving even.”
The couple does stay together, a happy-enough ending that seems fairly incredible in light of Offill’s new novel, “Weather,” which contains no suggestion that the future’s uncertainty could be a good or exciting thing—the birds are running out of places to go. Both books generate their energy from dread, but, where “Dept. of Speculation” concerned the imminent dissolution of the narrator’s marriage, “Weather” takes place around the 2016 Presidential election, and so concerns the imminent dissolution of everything else. The most recent in a string of novels that wonder whether we’re living in “unprecedented times,” “Weather” is Offill’s attempt to “write atmospherically,” she told Publishers Weekly. Rather than zoom in on a single disorienting upheaval in a character’s life, the novel endeavors to show how, these days, every aspect of everyone’s life feels threatened, and how every decision seems to presage a duel between individual survival and collective action.
A compromise: when the time comes, choose individual survival but feel very bad about it. This is, at least, the perspective of the novel’s narrator, Lizzie, a grad-school dropout living at the frontier of gentrifying Brooklyn. Lizzie’s late-night Internet sessions and teetering finances have taught her to anticipate the many ways in which she—and the world—can fall apart. The book begins at the library, where Lizzie has a job for which she is admittedly underqualified, helping patrons who seem, like her, to embrace anxiety as a resting state—a “doomed adjunct,” a blonde whose nails are “bitten to the quick.” When she has some free time, she likes to pick out patterns, things “falling and accumulating without notice.”
Offill takes a similar approach. Like “Dept. of Speculation,” “Weather” is written in fragments and with deadpan language; bits of narrative are “meant to swirl” alongside quotations, anecdotes, jokes, and miscellany. Critics liked to call “Dept. of Speculation” “slim” or “slender”; “Weather” is about the same length, but much more diffuse. The fragments allow Offill to incorporate headline issues without much maneuvering: the library alone brings together rising homelessness, the evaporation of the academic job market, the importance of keeping Narcan on hand, Uber’s ravaging of local taxi services, vegetarianism, and self-care through dubious spirituality. (Despite her winning cynicism, Lizzie is eventually convinced to join a meditation group that meets in the basement, but she does not give up her ham sandwich when scolded.)
Lizzie also works as an assistant for her funny former graduate adviser, Sylvia, who hosts a popular podcast about climate change called “Hell or High Water,” and who for years has been warning about the problems that now preoccupy Lizzie. Among Lizzie’s responsibilities is to answer listeners’ questions, which have “been skewing evangelical lately. Lots of questions about the Rapture mixed in with the ones about wind turbines and carbon taxes.” (These also appear throughout the text.) At home, too, the end times are an increasingly urgent topic of conversation. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, is a lapsed classicist who designs educational video games and has a “complicated relationship to modern things.” Her brother, Henry, is a former addict who depends on Lizzie for emotional support, particularly once his have-it-all partner, an advertising executive, gets pregnant. One of Offill’s animating questions is whether history can be used to understand the future, and Lizzie’s son, Eli, is less a character than a lightning rod for her fears about “climate departure”—the point at which a region’s average climate ceases to resemble what came before, becoming truly, measurably unprecedented.
During the course of the book, Lizzie becomes what her husband calls a “crazy doomer.” She develops a paranoia that begins with Internet-induced hypochondria (“knee cancer” is arthritis) and grows into an obsession with survivalist hacks, although she realizes that these can only get you so far if you feel winded running to catch the bus. After Donald Trump is elected, Ben gets in on the “doomstead” planning, making it his own by telling Lizzie, “There are ancient ways of prepping too.” Henry, meanwhile, begins channelling the atmospheric terror inward. Given that he can’t be trusted to keep himself together, and that children’s lives seem more imperilled than ever, he begins having visions about killing his baby daughter, has a nervous breakdown from the pressure to keep them a secret, and requires constant supervision from Lizzie, who neglects Ben and Eli.
Henry relapses and ends up divorced, and Lizzie is tempted into an affair by a hot war correspondent. But the bad things that eventually happen in the text are never as momentous as the bad feelings that hang in the air from trying to anticipate them. (The divorce is for the best; Lizzie emerges from her flirtation rededicated to her marriage.) For characters like these, the apocalypse is an appealing fantasy; when doom is certain, doing nothing is acceptable. In the real world, though, an individual is still responsible for her actions, and playacting disaster to avoid that responsibility fuels Lizzie’s guilt. “I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action,” she notes. “One night Ben and I go to a meeting about justice at the Unitarian church down the street. Good people all around, making plans, assisting—so why do I feel so embarrassed?” Her discordant feelings are dramatized when the family visits the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C., where they are given a script to act out a mission. Ben grumbles because entrance isn’t free, but Lizzie is relieved that they didn’t go to the Holocaust Museum—the simulation of stakes and danger is preferable to a reminder of actual stakes and danger. She also likes the image of humanity on display, of spies as moral actors sacrificing themselves for their cause. “The best thing is an ordinary looking pair of glasses,” she notes of the exhibitions. “Cyanide tipped. To be used if you are caught by the enemy so you don’t betray anyone.”
The question of how to understand the future through the past recurs so often in “Weather,” in so many different forms, that it seems less like a motif than a fixation. An island of narrative interest—will Henry’s breakdown resemble his last, when he “was drowning” and Lizzie “dove in right after him”?—is swallowed in a rising tide of worries, both global and trivial. Will apocalypse prep be futile, as it has been before? Will pest control be futile, as it has been before? “We don’t know if it’s a new mouse or the old mouse,” Offill writes of a rodent in her apartment. “This is the fatal flaw of the have-a-heart-trap.”
For novelists hoping to confront the breakneck absurdity of contemporary life, the significance of such questions is not just philosophical but practical. How do you write a novel that doesn’t go stale by the next election? In speculative fiction, the refraction that takes place between this world and the fictional one creates a comfortable distance between the novelist and the news. The realist novelist who wants to acknowledge Trump, climate change, and the rest has to speculate in a different way. She need not present an argument, but she does need to present an interpretation of themes and events that will have been thoroughly picked over by the time she gets to them.
Ideally, this interpretation would invigorate the reader. Yet most realist fiction has addressed modern politics from the same sky-is-falling, center-left vantage as op-ed columnists and hashtag promoters, by which the past is mined for lessons to deal with the seeming impossibility of a future. “Sometimes I think that people today must be the saddest people ever, because we know we ruined everything,” the narrator of Lucy Ellmann’s thousand-page “Ducks, Newburyport,” thinks at one point. Ellmann’s doorstop is the maximalist, stream-of-consciousness foil to Offill’s fragmented domestic. Both novels feature a working wife and mother self-deprecatingly fretting about the news, and both deploy grim trivia—allusions to the Civil War or Greek parables—to evoke the intensity of the present. Elsewhere, Olivia Laing’s “Crudo” imagines its autofictional narrator as the literary radical Kathy Acker, but, instead of skewering pieties and riding a motorcycle, she engages in twenty-first-century bourgeois rites of passage—feeling weird about marriage but doing it anyway, tweeting about the news. The implication is that even the past’s legendary rebels would be like the rest of us today, trapped in front of computers muttering, “The world sure is bad. . . .” And despite its sympathy for the toxically masculine, Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School” charts a narrowing path from the end of history to Trump, a marked shift from his previous novel, “10:04,” which concerned itself with the myriad possibilities of the present, even as that present possessed an “unseasonable warmth.”


newyorker--2020-02-12--Bernie Sanders Leads a Jumbled New Hampshire Primary

The Democratic consultant James Carville spent much of the past week on television , warning , with a Baptist intensity , of what would come if the Democratic Party nominated Bernie Sanders .
“ It ’ ll be the end of days , ” Carville said .
“ I am scared to death .
I really am.
” But in the final rallies and political meetings across New Hampshire , Sanders ’ s rivals barely spoke his name .
In Exeter on Monday , Pete Buttigieg talked of hope ; in a church basement in Gilford , Joe Biden told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had lost his job .
Curious Democrats arrived at Amy Klobuchar ’ s last events , suddenly debating between themselves the merits of Buttigieg , Klobuchar , and Elizabeth Warren .
They didn ’ t settle on one .
The results this evening broadly echoed those in Iowa : Sanders won about twenty-six per cent of the vote , with Buttigieg following close behind him , at nearly twenty-five per cent , and Klobuchar , with twenty , surprisingly still in the race .
Sanders captured New Hampshire .
Had he also captured @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just yet .
By the end of the evening , the race remained as unsettled as it was before .
In 2016 , Sanders won sixty per cent of the vote in New Hampshire ; this time , his totals were less than half that .
Sanders is running a slightly different campaign this time : more focussed in its messaging and more conventional in its preoccupations .
“ Bernie Beats Trump ” is the slogan now , a declaration of electability .
There ’ s a slightly different coalition , too .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ areas of Iowa and New Hampshire .
This time , he lost many of those , to Buttigieg and Klobuchar , but held the six largest cities in the state .
His margins among young voters are vast .
The Democratic Party is , more than ever , an urban one , and Sanders ’ s victories in the midsize cities of Iowa and New Hampshire are a good sign for how he might perform in the country ’ s biggest cities .
If the Party looked like it was headed toward Sanders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heading away from Barack Obama , whose Secretary of State lost the last Presidential election to Donald Trump and whose Vice-President is in danger of losing this one far earlier .
Biden ’ s weakness has been clear since the first contest of the year , if not much longer .
Even so , Obama ’ s longtime spokesman Robert Gibbs said on MSNBC tonight that it ’ s “ stunning to see him in fifth.
” It was maybe not so stunning to Biden , who flew out of New Hampshire early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Carolina .
His hopes hinge now on the enthusiasm of the Southern African-American voters who supported Obama and seemed inclined to support him .
But even in South Carolina the polls have been narrowing , with some of Biden ’ s support abandoning him for the billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer , who together have spent more than three hundred million dollars on television ads , whereas Biden has spent ten million dollars .
Biden is asking a lot of loyalty .
Suddenly , the primary in South Carolina , on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the contests in the Southern states , in general , seem much less certain—and more interesting .
In Iowa , the story turned out to be the undemocratic disarray of the caucuses .
In New Hampshire , it was the roving , often frantic , eye of its voters , who stopped reporters outside rallies to ask what they were seeing on the trail , who switched from Biden to Warren to Buttigieg based on poll and rumor and feel—the idea being to beat Trump , whatever would do the trick .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , was how many voters turned toward Klobuchar , who has neither a signature policy idea nor a novel way of describing the problems facing the country .
However , she did adeptly point out , in Friday ’ s debate , that the progressive plans for remaking the health-care economy might not be realistic and that centrists might be naïve to invest their hopes in the inexperienced Buttigieg .
On the stump this week , she emphasized that she had won in red districts all over Minnesota ( “ including Michele Bachmann @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and , suddenly , she rose from fifth place to third .
On Monday night , Sanders filled an arena in Durham with seventy-five hundred people for a rally headlined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Strokes ( all of them New Yorkers ) .
Klobuchar drew some two hundred people to an American Legion hall in Rochester , where , outside , there were a dozen small signs saying “ Amy for America ” and one huge one saying “ Play Keno.
” It seemed a little strange , given the formidable operations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that Klobuchar could surge to a full fifth of the vote in the last couple of days .
Maybe that is just New Hampshire .
Or maybe the race is that unstable .
The mainstream Democratic candidates collectively have earned about two-thirds of the votes in New Hampshire and Iowa , and the progressives have earned a third .
One plausible theory is that the anti-Sanders faction simply has a coördination problem , and that , once they decide which candidate should speak for the moderate majority , that candidate will sweep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faction ?
This week in New Hampshire , Buttigieg , Klobuchar , and Biden didn ’ t sound like they had all that much in common .
You could drive from a Buttigieg rally , where the vision was of a society spinning eagerly out into the future , to a Biden or Klobuchar one , where the stories were about miners and salesmen and the ethos was of an entrenchment in the past .
In any case , the time for the moderate Democrats to unite may be ending .
Bloomberg , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is already up to third place in some national polls , so the coming contest for the soul of the Democratic Party may be between two figures who , until very recently , were not Democrats at all .
Warren , who long seemed the pivotal figure in the race , the link between the Sanders faction and the rest , conceded early tonight , with vote totals around ten per cent .
Earlier in the afternoon , her campaign had circulated a memo insisting that she had a clear path to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cancelling television ads in South Carolina .
There have been some valedictory notes to Warren ’ s campaign this past week—a crowd stood to applaud her offstage at a rally on Monday afternoon , and then she appeared on the press bus and talked about how far she had come in the past ten years .
Onstage this evening , she sounded more defiant , insisting that she would go on and decrying the divisive tone that she detected in the Buttigieg and Sanders camps .
“ Our campaign is best positioned to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our Party , ” she said .
Then she quoted Jesse Jackson : “ It takes two wings to fly.
” That image suggested how much of the Party she ’ d already granted Sanders .
All of the candidates to her right got one wing .
Sanders got the other .
Follow live election results from the New Hampshire primary .
Ahead of the New Hampshire primary , Trump tries to make trouble for the Democrats .
In New Hampshire , Sanders and Warren promise bold , fundamental change .
But they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that aggressively counters Trump ’ s .
After a disappointing fourth-place finish in Iowa , Joe Biden is struggling in New Hampshire .
He is polling in a tie for third place in the state , ten points behind Pete Buttigieg and nearly twenty points behind the leader , Bernie Sanders .

The Democratic consultant James Carville spent much of the past week on television, warning, with a Baptist intensity, of what would come if the Democratic Party nominated Bernie Sanders. “It’ll be the end of days,” Carville said. “I am scared to death. I really am.” But in the final rallies and political meetings across New Hampshire, Sanders’s rivals barely spoke his name. In Exeter on Monday, Pete Buttigieg talked of hope; in a church basement in Gilford, Joe Biden told a story about comforting a man who had lost his job. Curious Democrats arrived at Amy Klobuchar’s last events, suddenly debating among themselves the merits of Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren. They didn’t settle on one. The results Tuesday evening broadly echoed those in Iowa: Sanders won about twenty-six per cent of the vote, with Buttigieg following close behind him, at nearly twenty-five per cent, and Klobuchar, with twenty, surprisingly still in the race. Sanders captured New Hampshire. Had he also captured the base of the Party?
Not just yet. By the end of the evening, the race remained as unsettled as it was before. In 2016, Sanders won sixty per cent of the vote in New Hampshire; this time, his totals were less than half that. Sanders is running a slightly different campaign this time: more focussed in its messaging and more conventional in its preoccupations. “Bernie Beats Trump” is the slogan now, a declaration of electability. There’s a slightly different coalition, too. In 2016, he swept the outlying areas of Iowa and New Hampshire. This time, he lost many of those, to Buttigieg and Klobuchar, but held the six largest cities in the state. His margins among young voters are vast. The Democratic Party is, more than ever, an urban one, and Sanders’s victories in the midsize cities of Iowa and New Hampshire are a good sign for how he might perform in the country’s biggest cities.
If the Party looked like it was headed toward Sanders on Tuesday night, it was also heading away from Barack Obama, whose Secretary of State lost the last Presidential election to Donald Trump and whose Vice-President is in danger of losing this one far earlier. Biden’s weakness has been clear since the first contest of the year, if not much longer. Even so, Obama’s longtime spokesman Robert Gibbs said on MSNBC that it’s “stunning to see him in fifth.” It was maybe not so stunning to Biden, who flew out of New Hampshire early tonight, landing in Columbia, South Carolina. His hopes hinge now on the enthusiasm of the Southern African-American voters who supported Obama and seemed inclined to support him. But even in South Carolina the polls have been narrowing, with some of Biden’s support abandoning him for the billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who together have spent more than three hundred million dollars on television ads, whereas Biden has spent ten million dollars. Biden is asking for a lot of loyalty. Suddenly, the primary in South Carolina, on the last day of this month, and the contests in the Southern states, in general, seem much less certain—and more interesting.
In Iowa, the story turned out to be the undemocratic disarray of the caucuses. In New Hampshire, it was the roving, often frantic, eye of its voters, who stopped reporters outside rallies to ask what they were seeing on the trail, who switched from Biden to Warren to Buttigieg based on poll and rumor and feel—the idea being to beat Trump, whatever would do the trick. The surprise, in the past few days, was how many voters turned toward Klobuchar, who has neither a signature policy idea nor a novel way of describing the problems facing the country. However, she did adeptly point out, in Friday’s debate, that the progressive plans for remaking the health-care economy might not be realistic and that centrists might be naïve to invest their hopes in the inexperienced Buttigieg. On the stump this week, she emphasized that she had won in red districts all over Minnesota (“including Michele Bachmann’s district three times”) and, suddenly, she rose from fifth place to third. On Monday night, Sanders filled an arena in Durham with seventy-five hundred people for a rally headlined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Strokes (all of them New Yorkers). Klobuchar drew some two hundred people to an American Legion hall in Rochester, where, outside, there were a dozen small signs saying “Amy for America” and one huge one saying “Play Keno.” It seemed a little strange, given the formidable operations of Warren, Buttigieg, and Sanders, that Klobuchar could surge to a full fifth of the vote in the last couple of days. Maybe that is just New Hampshire. Or maybe the race is that unstable.
The mainstream Democratic candidates collectively have earned about two-thirds of the votes in New Hampshire and Iowa, and the progressives have earned a third. One plausible theory is that the anti-Sanders faction simply has a coördination problem, and that, once it decides which candidate should speak for the moderate majority, that candidate will sweep. But is there really an anti-Sanders faction? This week in New Hampshire, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Biden didn’t sound like they had all that much in common. You could drive from a Buttigieg rally, where the vision was of a society spinning eagerly out into the future, to a Biden or Klobuchar one, where the stories were about miners and salesmen and the ethos was of an entrenchment in the past. In any case, the time for the moderate Democrats to unite may be ending. Bloomberg, with his hundreds of millions to spend, is already up to third place in some national polls, so the coming contest for the soul of the Democratic Party may be between two figures who, until very recently, were not Democrats at all.
Warren, who long seemed the pivotal figure in the race, the link between the Sanders faction and the rest, conceded early tonight, with vote totals around ten per cent. Earlier in the afternoon, her campaign had circulated a memo insisting that she had a clear path to national victory, even as she was cancelling television ads in South Carolina. There have been some valedictory notes to Warren’s campaign this past week—a crowd stood to applaud her offstage at a rally on Monday afternoon, and then she appeared on the press bus and talked about how far she had come in the past ten years. Onstage on Tuesday evening, she sounded more defiant, insisting that she would go on and decrying the divisive tone that she detected in the Buttigieg and Sanders camps. “Our campaign is best positioned to beat Donald Trump because we can unite our Party,” she said. Then she quoted Jesse Jackson: “It takes two wings to fly.” That image suggested how much of the Party she’d already granted Sanders. All of the candidates to her right got one wing. Sanders got the other.
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See the election results from the New Hampshire primary.
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Ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Trump tried to make trouble for the Democrats.
In New Hampshire, Sanders and Warren promise bold, fundamental change. But they struggle to conjure a vision of America that aggressively counters Trump’s.
After a disappointing fourth-place finish in Iowa, Joe Biden is struggling in New Hampshire.


newyorker--2020-02-12--Did Donald Trump Just Get Roger Stone’s Prison Sentence Reduced?

On Tuesday , four federal prosecutors withdrew from a high-profile case , and one resigned his position , after senior Justice Department officials overruled them and recommended that Roger Stone—a longtime friend and former campaign adviser of President Trump ’ s—receive a lesser prison sentence .
Stone was convicted last November of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness to prevent investigators from learning how the 2016 Trump campaign tried to benefit from stolen Democratic Party e-mails .
The highly unusual intervention raises questions about whether the President , or the Attorney General , William Barr , intervened in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ associate .
( Late on Tuesday , NBC News reported that Barr had decided to “ take control of legal matters of personal interest to Donald Trump.
” ) Last night , Trump tweeted that the seven-to-nine-year sentence prosecutors had recommended for Stone was too harsh .
The group resignation comes less than a month after other prosecutors reduced a sentencing recommendation in the case of another former Trump associate , Michael Flynn .
To talk through the legal and political issues involved , I spoke by phone with Mary McCord , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ twenty years in the District of Columbia .
She also served as the acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security .
She is now a professor at Georgetown Law School .
During our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we discussed Barr ’ s tenure as Attorney General , the steps that D.O.J .
officials who are concerned about the rule of law can and should take , and why there may be no legal recourse for a President who wants to politicize criminal investigations .
How concerned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Department of Justice on Tuesday ?
I think that there are a lot of different things that people should be paying attention to , but most significant is the fact that the Department of Justice—by coming in and reversing or reneging on a sentencing recommendation—is really creating long-lasting damage to its reputation and credibility in front of the courts .
It is D.O.J .
policy , when you have a high-profile case like the Roger Stone case , to have discussions with D.O.J .
leadership—up to and including the Deputy Attorney General @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and that includes sentencing .
So we know , under D.O.J .
policy , that the line prosecutors would have been running this recommendation up the flagpole to department leadership , which means that , unless they went completely rogue and changed their recommendation after all had agreed on what that recommendation would be , it appears that the D.O.J .
is now capitulating to pressure being brought to bear by the President because of his displeasure and dissatisfaction with the sentencing recommendation .
It seems like it sends a message to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right .
It is not just to judges .
I am initially concerned about the department ’ s credibility in front of the court , because this is a criminal matter , and judges ought to be able to rely on the representations made by the Assistant U.S .
Attorneys who appear in front of them , and now it looks like those Assistant U.S .
Attorneys are being overwritten by higher powers for political reasons , which is why I was focussing on that lasting damage .
But it also looks like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or taking litigation positions , based on the President ’ s political wishes , and is willing to adjust its approach to even criminal cases based on whether somebody was a friend to the President—and , in this case , more than a friend to the President and was actively involved in soliciting foreign election interference to favor the President ’ s campaign back in 2016 .
This sends a message that makes it look like the D.O.J .
is overly political .
This was also how I felt when Attorney General Barr @ @ @ @ @ @ @ report , and came out with a supposed summary of the findings that was very misleading .
That was something that seemed very , very political for the D.O.J .
to be engaging in .
How often are line prosecutors overruled , and how often are they overruled in high-profile cases ?
I don ’ t think it is that unusual for line prosecutors and supervisors , or those at the D.O.J.
, to disagree on appropriate charging decisions or an appropriate sentence .
And I would certainly expect , in a case @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lot of conversations and differing views about whether the prosecutor should be asking for a sentence within that guideline range of seven to nine years .
What is unusual here is not that there would be disagreement , and not even that line prosecutors might get overruled—because , in fact , line prosecutors report up a hierarchy , and the higher-level supervisor gets to make a decision if there is a disagreement .
But what is surprising here is that , whatever the state of those discussions were , the line prosecutors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the representation that they made , and I have a hard time thinking they would have done that if they didn ’ t have the authorization , and I have an even harder time thinking that they would have gone rogue and done something they were not authorized to do .
So to then see the D.O.J .
come out and change course , in what at least appears to be in response to the President ’ s tweets , and perhaps other conversations that he might have had with people at D.O.J.—I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I have seen that .
That is highly unusual .
All of the prosecutors removed themselves from this case , and at least one is leaving the D.O.J .
completely .
How rare are resignations over being overruled , assuming that is , in fact , what happened ?
I think that is a fair assumption .
I was in the D.C. office for twenty years .
I don ’ t think I know of another case where somebody resigned in protest .
There are certainly people who sometimes don ’ t like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is going , and they ultimately resign , but it is not a protest based on a decision in one case .
And it is possible that this decision is a culmination of things .
But it is pretty rare—although we did just recently see one of the Assistant U.S Attorneys who was involved in the investigation of Andrew McCabe resign , and another one come off that investigation , which has now gone on for two years and was widely reported to have gone to the grand jury , and either the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or was not actually asked to return an indictment .
But the prosecutor ’ s office has not , to my knowledge , publicly or privately told McCabe whether they are still seeking criminal charges against him .
And I raise that example because here are two times in fairly close succession where it seems like a prosecutor has resigned , at least in part , based on a serious disagreement on the direction of a criminal case in cases where we know the President feels very strongly .
What is the duty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ given orders or overruled for reasons they view as having to do with political interference ?
Well , I think these are things that they should certainly raise with their superiors , and if they feel that there is something they need to blow the whistle on , there are procedures for that .
And I am not saying , one way or another , whether that is something that should be happening in this particular instance , because I don ’ t have the information that those prosecutors have .
And , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ within the authority of the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General or a U.S. Attorney to overrule a line prosecutor who directly reports up that chain , and it is not illegal for the Attorney General to make a recommendation based on what the President wants .
The Attorney General is an executive officer and part of the executive branch .
He is nominated by the President and is expected to implement the President ’ s policies .
But , traditionally , when it comes to the D.O.J.
, the Attorney General @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recognized historically that it is important for the appearance of the D.O.J .
to actually do justice in an impartial way and keep some distance between the department and the White House when it comes to individual cases .
Both the department and the White House have what in my time there were called White House contacts policies , which were policies about not having discussions or contacts between White House personnel and D.O.J .
attorneys with respect to individual cases .
So it ’ s not illegal for them to not follow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But those are there for a reason , so the public feels assured that the D.O.J .
is not just being used by any President of any party for political purposes , to go after his enemies and give pardons or fail to go after the President ’ s friends .
That is important for the appearance of independence and justice and also the doing of justice .
Can you imagine a situation where things got so bad at D.O.J .
that people not involved in the cases being talked about would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ collective action ?
Knowing the culture of the place , can you imagine a situation where that occurs ?
Are you talking about something like writing a letter that a lot of employees would sign ?
Whatever comes to mind .
That ’ s the thing that first comes to my mind .
I think it ’ s possible .
I think it is probably more likely that you would see “ formers ” coming together to write some sort of public statement and speak out , kind of like we saw after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risky proposition for somebody in the D.O.J .
who is not ready to be out on the job market immediately , and maybe has a family and bills to pay , because of how vindictive this President is , and what they would be protesting is leadership doing the bidding of the President .
And the fact that we have now seen firings or removals of other people , such as Lieutenant Colonel Vindman and his brother , who have gone against the President ’ s wishes .
So I think it is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some sort of group protest , but it is not impossible .
Many people have already left the D.O.J.
, which is really unfortunate because it needs that institutional memory , and the reputations that many individual lawyers have built in the courts are really important to the continued credibility of the D.O.J .
in the courts .

On Tuesday, four federal prosecutors withdrew from a high-profile case, and one resigned his position, after senior Justice Department officials overruled them and recommended that Roger Stone—a longtime friend and former campaign adviser of President Trump’s—receive a lesser prison sentence. Stone was convicted last November of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness to prevent investigators from learning how the 2016 Trump campaign tried to benefit from stolen Democratic Party e-mails. The highly unusual intervention raises questions about whether the President, or the Attorney General, William Barr, intervened in a federal criminal case to help an associate. (Late on Tuesday, NBC News reported that Barr had decided to “take control of legal matters of personal interest to Donald Trump.”) Last night, Trump tweeted that the seven-to-nine-year sentence prosecutors had recommended for Stone was too harsh. The group resignation comes less than a month after other prosecutors reduced a sentencing recommendation in the case of another former Trump associate, Michael Flynn.
To talk through the legal and political issues involved, I spoke by phone with Mary McCord, who was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for nearly twenty years in the District of Columbia. She also served as the acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security. She is now a professor at Georgetown Law School. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Barr’s tenure as Attorney General, the steps that D.O.J. officials who are concerned about the rule of law can and should take, and why there may be no legal recourse for a President who wants to politicize criminal investigations.
How concerned should people be by what occurred at the Department of Justice on Tuesday?
I think that there are a lot of different things that people should be paying attention to, but most significant is the fact that the Department of Justice—by coming in and reversing or reneging on a sentencing recommendation—is really creating long-lasting damage to its reputation and credibility in front of the courts. It is D.O.J. policy, when you have a high-profile case like the Roger Stone case, to have discussions with D.O.J. leadership—up to and including the Deputy Attorney General and the Attorney General—before any significant matter, and that includes sentencing. So we know, under D.O.J. policy, that the line prosecutors would have been running this recommendation up the flagpole to department leadership, which means that, unless they went completely rogue and changed their recommendation after all had agreed on what that recommendation would be, it appears that the D.O.J. is now capitulating to pressure being brought to bear by the President because of his displeasure and dissatisfaction with the sentencing recommendation.
It seems like it sends a message to more than judges.
That’s right. It is not just to judges. I am initially concerned about the department’s credibility in front of the court, because this is a criminal matter, and judges ought to be able to rely on the representations made by the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who appear in front of them, and now it looks like those Assistant U.S. Attorneys are being overwritten by higher powers for political reasons, which is why I was focussing on that lasting damage. But it also looks like the D.O.J. is now prioritizing, or taking litigation positions, based on the President’s political wishes, and is willing to adjust its approach to even criminal cases based on whether somebody was a friend to the President—and, in this case, more than a friend to the President and was actively involved in soliciting foreign election interference to favor the President’s campaign back in 2016. This sends a message that makes it look like the D.O.J. is overly political. This was also how I felt when Attorney General Barr stepped out, after Mueller delivered his report, and came out with a supposed summary of the findings that was very misleading. That was something that seemed very, very political for the D.O.J. to be engaging in.
How often are line prosecutors overruled, and how often are they overruled in high-profile cases?
I don’t think it is that unusual for line prosecutors and supervisors, or those at the D.O.J., to disagree on appropriate charging decisions or an appropriate sentence. And I would certainly expect, in a case like this, that there would be a lot of conversations and differing views about whether the prosecutor should be asking for a sentence within that guideline range of seven to nine years. What is unusual here is not that there would be disagreement, and not even that line prosecutors might get overruled—because, in fact, line prosecutors report up a hierarchy, and the higher-level supervisor gets to make a decision if there is a disagreement. But what is surprising here is that, whatever the state of those discussions were, the line prosecutors felt like they were authorized to make the representation that they made, and I have a hard time thinking they would have done that if they didn’t have the authorization, and I have an even harder time thinking that they would have gone rogue and done something they were not authorized to do. So to then see the D.O.J. come out and change course, in what at least appears to be in response to the President’s tweets, and perhaps other conversations that he might have had with people at D.O.J.—I can’t think of another time I have seen that. That is highly unusual.
All of the prosecutors removed themselves from this case, and at least one is leaving the D.O.J. completely. How rare are resignations over being overruled, assuming that is, in fact, what happened?
I think that is a fair assumption. I was in the D.C. office for twenty years. I don’t think I know of another case where somebody resigned in protest. There are certainly people who sometimes don’t like the direction that a new U.S. Attorney is going, and they ultimately resign, but it is not a protest based on a decision in one case. And it is possible that this decision is a culmination of things. But it is pretty rare—although we did just recently see one of the Assistant U.S Attorneys who was involved in the investigation of Andrew McCabe resign, and another one come off that investigation, which has now gone on for two years and was widely reported to have gone to the grand jury, and either the grand jury refused to return an indictment or was not actually asked to return an indictment. But the prosecutor’s office has not, to my knowledge, publicly or privately told McCabe whether they are still seeking criminal charges against him. And I raise that example because here are two times in fairly close succession where it seems like a prosecutor has resigned, at least in part, based on a serious disagreement on the direction of a criminal case in cases where we know the President feels very strongly.
What is the duty of people at D.O.J. who are given orders or overruled for reasons they view as having to do with political interference?
Well, I think these are things that they should certainly raise with their superiors, and if they feel that there is something they need to blow the whistle on, there are procedures for that. And I am not saying, one way or another, whether that is something that should be happening in this particular instance, because I don’t have the information that those prosecutors have. And, to be clear, it is certainly within the authority of the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General or a U.S. Attorney to overrule a line prosecutor who directly reports up that chain, and it is not illegal for the Attorney General to make a recommendation based on what the President wants. The Attorney General is an executive officer and part of the executive branch. He is nominated by the President and is expected to implement the President’s policies.
But, traditionally, when it comes to the D.O.J., the Attorney General and the Office of the President have recognized historically that it is important for the appearance of the D.O.J. to actually do justice in an impartial way and keep some distance between the department and the White House when it comes to individual cases. Both the department and the White House have what in my time there were called White House contacts policies, which were policies about not having discussions or contacts between White House personnel and D.O.J. attorneys with respect to individual cases. So it’s not illegal for them to not follow those policies. Those are internal policies. But those are there for a reason, so the public feels assured that the D.O.J. is not just being used by any President of any party for political purposes, to go after his enemies and give pardons or fail to go after the President’s friends. That is important for the appearance of independence and justice and also the doing of justice.
Can you imagine a situation where things got so bad at D.O.J. that people not involved in the cases being talked about would still have some responsibility to take some collective action? Knowing the culture of the place, can you imagine a situation where that occurs?
Are you talking about something like writing a letter that a lot of employees would sign?
Whatever comes to mind.
That’s the thing that first comes to my mind. I think it’s possible. I think it is probably more likely that you would see “formers” coming together to write some sort of public statement and speak out, kind of like we saw after the Mueller report. It is a risky proposition for somebody in the D.O.J. who is not ready to be out on the job market immediately, and maybe has a family and bills to pay, because of how vindictive this President is, and what they would be protesting is leadership doing the bidding of the President. And the fact that we have now seen firings or removals of other people, such as Lieutenant Colonel Vindman and his brother, who have gone against the President’s wishes. So I think it is less likely that internally you would see some sort of group protest, but it is not impossible. Many people have already left the D.O.J., which is really unfortunate because it needs that institutional memory, and the reputations that many individual lawyers have built in the courts are really important to the continued credibility of the D.O.J. in the courts.
Let’s suppose that we had a President, and an Attorney General, who is not interested in the appearance or doing of justice. And let’s also assume that that President called up the Attorney General and said that his friend was going to get a tough sentence and he really wished that he could get a lesser sentence. And the Attorney General said O.K. What you seem to be saying is that nothing in that chain of events is illegal.
Aside from obstruction of justice, there is not anything that comes to mind that makes that overtly illegal. I think Congress would be interested and want to have some hearings and talk about it. I think for the public it would be very concerning. And it’s possible you could get to a situation where it would appear to be obstruction. But, as we know from the Mueller report, due to an O.L.C. [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion that a sitting President cannot be indicted for a crime, it is not really possible for a President to be charged with obstruction while sitting as President, which is why this has been something handled through the political process, which is an impeachment process, and we saw how that just worked out in a different scenario.
So it seems like what you are saying is that if people at D.O.J. are really upset and feel that there are violations of D.O.J. norms and best practices, and they feel that it is very dangerous for the country to have a D.O.J. that functions in this way, then they could resign, or complain internally, or go public with their complaints. But, short of Congress doing something, or Senate Republicans wanting to take action to constrain Trump via an impeachment conviction, there is an election, but otherwise there is not much else to be done.
There is not a lot of recourse. That’s right.
That’s a depressing note to end this on.
It is. You know how the President says, “I have an Article II” of the Constitution? He seems to think it means “I can essentially do whatever I want.”


newyorker--2020-02-12--Judge Sentences Roger Stone to House Arrest in Susan Collins’s Home

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —In a decision that Donald Trump called “ incredibly unfair , ” Judge Amy @ @ @ @ @ Stone to ten years of house arrest in the home of Senator Susan Collins , @ @ @ @ @ of the sentence , Senator Collins will be required to live under the same roof @ @ @ @ @ , and insure that he is properly fed , clothed , and exercised until 2030 @ @ @ @ @ howls of protest from Stone , who claimed that living with the ceaselessly waffling Collins @ @ @ @ @ the edge.
” “ Judge , can we revisit the whole prison idea ?
” @ @ @ @ @ her part , Collins said that she was unsure whether becoming Stone ’ s jailer @ @ @ @ @ adding that she would “ need more time to think about it.
” Jackson said @ @ @ @ @ arrest will not go into effect until after the 2020 election , at which point @ @ @ @ @ home on a permanent basis .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a decision that Donald Trump called “incredibly unfair,” Judge Amy Berman Jackson has sentenced Roger Stone to ten years of house arrest in the home of Senator Susan Collins, of Maine.
As part of the sentence, Senator Collins will be required to live under the same roof as Stone, in Bangor, and insure that he is properly fed, clothed, and exercised until 2030.
The sentence immediately drew howls of protest from Stone, who claimed that living with the ceaselessly waffling Collins would “send me over the edge.”
“Judge, can we revisit the whole prison idea?” Stone begged Jackson.
For her part, Collins said that she was unsure whether becoming Stone’s jailer was a good idea, adding that she would “need more time to think about it.”
Jackson said that Stone’s house arrest will not go into effect until after the 2020 election, at which point Collins is expected to be home on a permanent basis.