newyorker--2020-07-07--Steven Prince, an Early Scorsese Star, “Was the Guy with the Gun”

At a pivotal point in Martin Scorsese ’ s “ Taxi Driver , ” from 1976 , the budding vigilante Travis Bickle steps into a Manhattan hotel room with Easy Andy , a fast-talking “ travelling salesman ” whose sample cases are full of firearms .
As Travis tests out the merchandise by drawing beads on imaginary targets through the window , Andy lays down some seductive patter about the stopping power of the .44-calibre Magnum and the versatility of the .38-calibre snub-nosed .
( “ Look at that .
That ’ s a beautiful little gun.
” ) In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t actually necessary ; Travis just wants enough guns to blow a hole in the world .
He listens calmly , then asks , “ How much for everything ?
” Andy , recognizing an opportunity , upsells Travis on “ a beautiful handmade holster I had made in Mexico ” for forty dollars , then asks if he needs grass , hash , coke , mescaline , downers , Nembutal , amphetamines , or “ a brand-new Cadillac with the pink slip , for two grand.
” Andy is played by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s whose background included a stint as Neil Diamond ’ s road manager and years of hard-drug use .
In the ensuing years , as Scorsese struggled with personal and professional turmoil while making his troubled musical “ New York , New York ” and the concert film “ The Last Waltz , ” Prince would become one of his closest confidants , occupying a space somewhere between personal assistant , emotional-support dog , and chief of security in the director ’ s increasingly nocturnal and chaotic world .
In Peter Biskind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bulls : How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’ n ’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood , ” the producer Jonathan Taplin describes Prince acting as a “ bodyguard ” and “ doorkeeper ” for Scorsese , adding , “ Sometimes—like that Dirk Bogarde movie , The Servant—you had the feeling that he could appeal to Marty ’ s paranoia in such a way that he could make Marty do things .
In that sense he had quite a bit of power.
” The screenwriter Mardik Martin , who co-wrote “ Mean Streets ” with Scorsese , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the guy with the gun.
” Prince was also an irresistible raconteur , and , in 1977 , Scorsese interviewed him for hours at the Los Angeles home of a mutual friend , the “ Mean Streets ” actor George Memmoli .
This footage became the documentary “ American Boy : A Profile of Steven Prince , ” which opened at the New York Film Festival in 1978 .
Animated yet sepulchral in a pink disco shirt , holding court for an audience that includes Memmoli , the actress Kathi McGinnis , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tells a series of increasingly hair-raising stories of his life in show business and the drug underworld , including an anecdote about reviving a fellow-user , after an overdose , with an adrenaline shot to the heart , which Quentin Tarantino lifted more or less wholesale for his film “ Pulp Fiction.
” The scenes unfold without much context , punctuated by home-movie footage of Prince ’ s seemingly happy childhood , set to Neil Young ’ s “ Time Fades Away , ” a raucous heroin song with a cautionary chorus explicitly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : “ Son , don ’ t wait / Until the break of day / Because you know / How time fades away.
” The song points to the question of how the kid in the home movies became the guy in George Memmoli ’ s living room ; the film never quite gives us an answer , but the impact of the journey is in Prince ’ s eyes in every shot .
Introducing a showing of “ American Boy ” on Turner Classic Movies , some years ago , Scorsese—who declined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of “ Portrait of Jason , ” the director Shirley Clarke ’ s painfully intimate film , from 1967 , about a street hustler and cabaret performer named Jason Holliday .
The documentary is notable for Clarke ’ s decision to include her off-camera prompting of her subject in the final cut .
In “ American Boy , ” Scorsese is a deliberately obtrusive authorial presence from the very first shot , in which director and subject share a hot tub .
( They were living together at that point , in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Band ’ s Robbie Robertson as a semipermanent guest . )
He ’ s on camera throughout , conferring with Memmoli and the cinematographer Michael Chapman , guiding the narrative , openly performing the manipulations that nonfiction filmmaking often conceals .
When Prince skirts the painful parts of a story about a conversation with his ailing father , Scorsese requests a second take , then a third : “ When you told it to me on the plane , there was a little more sincerity to it.
” In calling attention to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it anticipates Scorsese ’ s “ Rolling Thunder Revue : A Bob Dylan Story , ” in which Dylan himself supplies the narratorial unreliability .
“ American Boy ” hints at Scorsese ’ s future trajectory in other ways : Prince ’ s storytelling anticipates self-indicting Scorsese narrators from “ Goodfellas ” ’ s Henry Hill to “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” ’ s Jordan Belfort .
In the movie , Prince talks about his drug use in the past tense ; in reality , he ’ d merely switched @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he has the unearthly radiance of someone who will likely be dead in a year .
He disappears from Biskind ’ s book after the summer of 1978—when Scorsese collapses , owing to years of hard living , and Prince drives him to New York Hospital—and he didn ’ t resurface until 2001 , when he popped up in Richard Linklater ’ s “ Waking Life ” to retell an “ American Boy ” story about shooting a would-be robber while working at a gas station .
By then , “ American Boy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ object .
It was reissued on LaserDisc in 1990 , packaged with a documentary short that Scorsese had made about his parents , “ Italianamerican , ” and his student film “ The Big Shave , ” from 1967 ; a subsequent DVD has been out of print for years .
As with many other “ lost ” films in the YouTube era , it ’ s become easier to see it for free online than to pay for it .
But now “ American Boy ” is back in official circulation , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Criterion Collection Blu-ray and DVD package , “ Scorsese Shorts.
” Despite having starred in two biographical documentaries— “ American Boy ” and also “ American Prince , ” a quasi-sequel , from 2009 , by the director and animator Tommy Pallotta , who worked on “ Waking Life ” —Prince has never quite told the story of how he wound up in front of Scorsese ’ s camera in the first place .
In March , days before California went into lockdown , I drove to Ojai , where Prince , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ filmmaker Nadia Szold , the mother of his twenty-month-old son , Sydney .
Szold has directed two narrative features and recently finished a documentary about the 1983 Presidential campaign of the Hustler founder Larry Flynt , which was set to screen at the Tribeca Film Festival and Hot Docs , in Toronto , before the pandemic hit .
Szold and Prince have been together for about nine years ; they met when Szold invited Prince to a screening of her first film , “ Joy de V , ” the lead actor of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ young con artist on Prince in “ American Boy.
” I came to visit on a Wednesday ; they ’ d got married that Monday , in a civil ceremony at the courthouse in Santa Barbara .
“ Nadia said , ‘ I bet when he comes up here he ’ s going to expect to find you in a little hovel with drugs on the table and guns , ’ ” Prince said .
Their home was actually a comfortable , light-filled post-and-beam house .
We talked there for a few hours—first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ every so often , Sydney would appear at my elbow like a tiny butler , proffering some small wooden toy , and then over lunch at the dining-room table , where Sydney takes his meals in a high chair directly opposite a “ Taxi Driver ” lobby card of Harvey Keitel , in pimp hat and undershirt , jabbing a finger at Robert De Niro ’ s Bickle .

At a pivotal point in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” from 1976, the budding vigilante Travis Bickle steps into a Manhattan hotel room with Easy Andy, a fast-talking “travelling salesman” whose sample cases are full of firearms. As Travis tests out the merchandise by drawing beads on imaginary targets through the window, Andy lays down some seductive patter about the stopping power of the .44-calibre Magnum and the versatility of the .38-calibre snub-nosed. (“Look at that. That’s a beautiful little gun.”) In this case, the sales pitch isn’t actually necessary; Travis just wants enough guns to blow a hole in the world. He listens calmly, then asks, “How much for everything?” Andy, recognizing an opportunity, upsells Travis on “a beautiful handmade holster I had made in Mexico” for forty dollars, then asks if he needs grass, hash, coke, mescaline, downers, Nembutal, amphetamines, or “a brand-new Cadillac with the pink slip, for two grand.”
Andy is played by Steven Prince, a friend of Scorsese’s whose background included a stint as Neil Diamond’s road manager and years of hard-drug use. In the ensuing years, as Scorsese struggled with personal and professional turmoil while making his troubled musical “New York, New York” and the concert film “The Last Waltz,” Prince would become one of his closest confidants, occupying a space somewhere between personal assistant, emotional-support dog, and chief of security in the director’s increasingly nocturnal and chaotic world. In Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood,” the producer Jonathan Taplin describes Prince acting as a “bodyguard” and “doorkeeper” for Scorsese, adding, “Sometimes—like that Dirk Bogarde movie, The Servant—you had the feeling that he could appeal to Marty’s paranoia in such a way that he could make Marty do things. In that sense he had quite a bit of power.” The screenwriter Mardik Martin, who co-wrote “Mean Streets” with Scorsese, puts it more simply: “He was the guy with the gun.”
Prince was also an irresistible raconteur, and, in 1977, Scorsese interviewed him for hours at the Los Angeles home of a mutual friend, the “Mean Streets” actor George Memmoli. This footage became the documentary “American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince,” which opened at the New York Film Festival in 1978. Animated yet sepulchral in a pink disco shirt, holding court for an audience that includes Memmoli, the actress Kathi McGinnis, and the writer Julia Cameron, Prince tells a series of increasingly hair-raising stories of his life in show business and the drug underworld, including an anecdote about reviving a fellow-user, after an overdose, with an adrenaline shot to the heart, which Quentin Tarantino lifted more or less wholesale for his film “Pulp Fiction.” The scenes unfold without much context, punctuated by home-movie footage of Prince’s seemingly happy childhood, set to Neil Young’s “Time Fades Away,” a raucous heroin song with a cautionary chorus explicitly sung by a father to a child: “Son, don’t wait / Until the break of day / Because you know / How time fades away.” The song points to the question of how the kid in the home movies became the guy in George Memmoli’s living room; the film never quite gives us an answer, but the impact of the journey is in Prince’s eyes in every shot.
Introducing a showing of “American Boy” on Turner Classic Movies, some years ago, Scorsese—who declined to be interviewed for this story—spoke admiringly of “Portrait of Jason,” the director Shirley Clarke’s painfully intimate film, from 1967, about a street hustler and cabaret performer named Jason Holliday. The documentary is notable for Clarke’s decision to include her off-camera prompting of her subject in the final cut. In “American Boy,” Scorsese is a deliberately obtrusive authorial presence from the very first shot, in which director and subject share a hot tub. (They were living together at that point, in a house on Mulholland Drive, with the Band’s Robbie Robertson as a semipermanent guest.) He’s on camera throughout, conferring with Memmoli and the cinematographer Michael Chapman, guiding the narrative, openly performing the manipulations that nonfiction filmmaking often conceals. When Prince skirts the painful parts of a story about a conversation with his ailing father, Scorsese requests a second take, then a third: “When you told it to me on the plane, there was a little more sincerity to it.” In calling attention to the director’s thumb on the scale, it anticipates Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” in which Dylan himself supplies the narratorial unreliability. “American Boy” hints at Scorsese’s future trajectory in other ways: Prince’s storytelling anticipates self-indicting Scorsese narrators from “Goodfellas” ’s Henry Hill to “The Wolf of Wall Street” ’s Jordan Belfort.
In the movie, Prince talks about his drug use in the past tense; in reality, he’d merely switched from heroin to cocaine, and onscreen he has the unearthly radiance of someone who will likely be dead in a year. He disappears from Biskind’s book after the summer of 1978—when Scorsese collapses, owing to years of hard living, and Prince drives him to New York Hospital—and he didn’t resurface until 2001, when he popped up in Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” to retell an “American Boy” story about shooting a would-be robber while working at a gas station. By then, “American Boy” had become a kind of cult object. It was reissued on LaserDisc in 1990, packaged with a documentary short that Scorsese had made about his parents, “Italianamerican,” and his student film “The Big Shave,” from 1967; a subsequent DVD has been out of print for years. As with many other “lost” films in the YouTube era, it’s become easier to see it for free online than to pay for it. But now “American Boy” is back in official circulation, as one of five films included in a Criterion Collection Blu-ray and DVD package, “Scorsese Shorts.”
Despite having starred in two biographical documentaries—“American Boy” and also “American Prince,” a quasi-sequel, from 2009, by the director and animator Tommy Pallotta, who worked on “Waking Life”—Prince has never quite told the story of how he wound up in front of Scorsese’s camera in the first place. In March, days before California went into lockdown, I drove to Ojai, where Prince, who is seventy-two, lives with the filmmaker Nadia Szold, the mother of his twenty-month-old son, Sydney. Szold has directed two narrative features and recently finished a documentary about the 1983 Presidential campaign of the Hustler founder Larry Flynt, which was set to screen at the Tribeca Film Festival and Hot Docs, in Toronto, before the pandemic hit. Szold and Prince have been together for about nine years; they met when Szold invited Prince to a screening of her first film, “Joy de V,” the lead actor of which had based his performance as a young con artist on Prince in “American Boy.” I came to visit on a Wednesday; they’d got married that Monday, in a civil ceremony at the courthouse in Santa Barbara.
“Nadia said, ‘I bet when he comes up here he’s going to expect to find you in a little hovel with drugs on the table and guns,’ ” Prince said. Their home was actually a comfortable, light-filled post-and-beam house. We talked there for a few hours—first in the living room, where, every so often, Sydney would appear at my elbow like a tiny butler, proffering some small wooden toy, and then over lunch at the dining-room table, where Sydney takes his meals in a high chair directly opposite a “Taxi Driver” lobby card of Harvey Keitel, in pimp hat and undershirt, jabbing a finger at Robert De Niro’s Bickle.
“Sydney’s constantly pointing to it,” Szold said, “and I go, ‘Harvey . . . Bobby . . . Harvey . . . Bobby . . .”
Szold moved in and out of the room throughout the afternoon, occasionally nudging Prince about some detail or other that he’d omitted from an anecdote. She’s heard them all before; she likes to joke that Prince’s autobiography should either be called “The Eight and a Half Lives of Steven Prince” or “Not Only Do I Know Where the Bodies Are Buried—I Buried Them.”
The rough outline of the story that book might tell: Prince is born in 1948, and, although “Taxi Driver” will one day immortalize him as a classic New York street hustler, he’s actually a son of considerable privilege, a descendant of show-business royalty. His great-uncle, Abe Lastfogel, got his start in 1912 as an office boy working for a vaudeville agent named William Morris; twenty years later, Lastfogel became the chairman of the William Morris Agency. In high school, Prince manages the theatre department and impresses some visiting performers from the New York Shakespeare Festival; Joe Papp’s partner Bernie Gersten offers him a job. He ends up working at the Delacorte Theater for two summers, learning lighting design. During his first year of college, he works at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he gets shot up with methamphetamine for the first time, after asking a boundlessly energetic carpenter what his secret is.
Through his brother Ron Prince, a member of a Marx Brothers-style comedy team called the Pickle Brothers, Steven gets to know the impresario Fred Weintraub; works in various capacities at Weintraub’s Bleecker Street coffeehouse, the Bitter End, and its upstairs restaurant, Tin Angel; and winds up being recruited by one of Weintraub’s management clients, Neil Diamond, who wants someone to backstop his road manager for a few weeks on tour. A few weeks becomes a year and a half, during which time Diamond becomes a huge star: “I mean, giant,” Prince said. “We started out with station wagons and U-Hauls for the instruments, driving from place to place, and working practically every day. Ended up we would work every other weekend, just the weekend. We’d take private Learjets out of Santa Monica Airport on Friday, do three shows, and come back Sunday night. We had two planes—backup singers, backup players, everything. It was fun.”


newyorker--2020-07-07--Rediscovering “The Happy Ending,” a Movie About the Dreams and Delusions of Marriage (and the Movies

Rediscovering “The Happy Ending,” a Movie About the Dreams and Delusions of Marriage (and the Movies)

The shudderingly impassioned , history-jangled , cinema-centric drama “ The Happy Ending , ” from 1969 , reflects vast changes in Hollywood and in American society , and even nudges them ahead .
What ’ s more , it does so aesthetically , with startlingly expressive images and performances that fuse with the action to reflect on—and advance—the state of movies themselves .
Written and directed by Richard Brooks , the film ( which is streaming on Amazon Prime and YouTube ) tells the story of a miserable marriage and stars Jean Simmons , to whom Brooks was married at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coup of casting ( and not the only one ) that stokes the movie ’ s emotional temperature past the boiling point , even when the onscreen behavior appears deceptively chilled .
The very title of “ The Happy Ending ” boldly declares that the subject of the movie is the world of movies—specifically , it ’ s about a woman who ardently watches them and a society that believes their fictions .
The story spans sixteen years in the life of a couple , beginning with the courtship of Mary Spencer ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Forsythe ) , in 1953 .
They go on a date at a drive-in movie , and she ’ s swept away in the romanticism of its happy ending .
Mary drops out of college and they quickly get married ; at their wedding , she ’ s lost in fantasies of images from romantic Hollywood movies .
The action then leaps ahead to the morning of January 22 , 1969 .
The television is broadcasting news of Richard Nixon ’ s first days in the White House , while Fred and Mary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kathy Fields ) , are finalizing plans for their sixteenth-anniversary party that night .
The drama soon reveals the planned festivities to be a cruel sham and the marriage to be a fragile façade .
Those revelations come largely in the form of an intricate series of flashbacks—some of nearly subliminal brevity , others of teeming and extended drama , centered on their blowout celebration the previous year , in the company of business acquaintances , where the couple ’ s conflicts surged bitterly to the surface .
Mary has long been drinking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bottle in a boot and sneaking off to a bar where the friendly bartender lies to Fred about not having seen her in months .
Her increasingly self-destructive behavior has led to several near-catastrophes , yet Fred still won ’ t allow her to see a psychiatrist .
On a visit to a hair salon , to prepare for the sixteenth-anniversary party , Mary takes impulsive and drastic action : in the middle of the day , she heads for the Denver airport and flies to Nassau , where a series of chance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her life .
With the movie ’ s elaborate time structure , Brooks burrows deeply into Mary ’ s harrowing experience of marriage .
It ’ s a perspective that ’ s informed—or , rather , deformed—by the media messaging and the propagandizing , in public and in private , that she has endured throughout her life .
Brooks fills the movie with the ephemera of media : the workout show that Mary watches on her kitchen TV ; news reports of war , sports , and protests ; actual commercials that aired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their slogans woven into the dialogue ) ; and actual magazines ( including the February 17 , 1968 , issue of The New Yorker ) .
The action is anchored in a particular moment of history : a moment when the verities of bourgeois respectability that were long perpetuated in mass media and enforced in public life were beginning to shatter under the force of the “ new freedoms , ” and when the norms of Hollywood itself—the Hays Code and its ironclad strictures—were being burst ( as , indeed , they are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) .
Brooks , who ’ s best known for “ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ” and “ In Cold Blood , ” launched his career as a writer and director in the mid-nineteen-forties , during Hollywood ’ s classic age .
The studio system was perhaps the era ’ s most powerful source of archetypes , fantasies , and illusions , and , as Brooks shows , their collective effect was to groom women to defer to men , to please men , to submit to men .
One recurring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ involves the beauty industry : the salons and the spas , the cosmetics and the fashions , even the plastic surgery .
( Mary had a face-lift . )
Moreover , women ’ s inculcated notions of what they must do to their faces and bodies to attract and keep a man are linked to another of the film ’ s key themes : the economic dependence of women on men .
Upper-middle-class women who don ’ t work use their days to primp , shop , and work out , while being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and of stimulation beyond one another ’ s mutually reinforcing desperation .
The control of money is central to Fred and Mary ’ s ongoing battle , and the movie ’ s acerbic , lacerating dialogue includes a brilliant riff—delivered by a big-time businessman—about the essential role played by marriage and the mythology of romance in the modern economy .
Though “ The Happy Ending ” includes clips from “ Casablanca ” and other romantic movies , the crucial embodiment of classic Hollywood that Brooks embeds in his movie is its remarkable cast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mary ’ s unmarried college friend Flo ) , Lloyd Bridges ( as Flo ’ s married lover ) , Teresa Wright ( as Mary ’ s mother ) , Nanette Fabray ( as Agnes , Mary ’ s devoted housekeeper ) , Dick Shawn ( as George ’ s friendly dissolute client ) , and Tina Louise ( as the client ’ s friendly , miserable wife ) , as well as a latter-day star , Bobby Darin ( as a candidate for a Latin lover ) .
What these actors from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the action , beside the sheer force of their personalities and the aura of their presence , is stillness : the hieratic poise and sculptural power of their fixed gazes and precise gestures , which are the key behavioral traits of acting in studio-system Hollywood .
In Brooks ’ s view , these rigid manners—and the rigid mores and romantic archetypes of the Hollywood movies that they embody and embellish—come off as obsolete vestiges of times that , though recent , are already on the far side of a historical divide .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ these deeply internalized formalities nonetheless silently shriek with long-stifled frustration and emotion .
Moreover , the movie ’ s extraordinary wide-screen cinematography ( by Conrad L. Hall ) does more than just display the actors and their powerful performances—it goes further into monumental stillness and composed precision , heightening the media-mad unreality of modern life with a sense of highly inflected yet frozen artifice .
Inner and outer life converge in these images—and the décor , the locations , the characters ’ hair styling and makeup , and their clothing all play crucial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appearance .
So , for that matter , does light itself , and its absence .
Hall submerges the characters in sepulchral shadows torn by streaks of light , bathes them in an uncanny brightness of relentless exposure and homogenizing uniformity .
Many of the movie ’ s distinctive shots render Mary ’ s sense of desperate solitude as intensely dramatic—even simple scenes of walking and sitting are transformed into passages of grand moment .
In this regard , the strongest influence on Brooks ’ s directorial strategies appears to be the films @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the mind control exerted by media and public life over all , and who devised a style of images and acting to convey it .
It ’ s an influence that Brooks wears lightly ; avoiding homage , he crafts a style that conveys a sense of immediate experience and personal observation .
“ The Happy Ending , ” though written and directed by a member of the studio system ’ s old guard , is both part and proof of the rise of the New Hollywood ; Brooks here pushes studio @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most of its younger luminaries .
I won ’ t spoil the delicious irony that Brooks folds into the events that inspire Mary to take action and change her life .
It involves a deft resolution of conflicting desires and dreams , an imagining of new possibilities that don ’ t entirely reject her former illusions .
Like Brooks , Mary doesn ’ t exactly spurn grand cinematic romanticism ; rather , she questions it and refashions it to serve her purposes .

The shudderingly impassioned, history-jangled, cinema-centric drama “The Happy Ending,” from 1969, reflects vast changes in Hollywood and in American society, and even nudges them ahead. What’s more, it does so aesthetically, with startlingly expressive images and performances that fuse with the action to reflect on—and advance—the state of movies themselves. Written and directed by Richard Brooks, the film (which is streaming on Amazon Prime and YouTube) tells the story of a miserable marriage and stars Jean Simmons, to whom Brooks was married at the time. It’s a coup of casting (and not the only one) that stokes the movie’s emotional temperature past the boiling point, even when the onscreen behavior appears deceptively chilled.
The very title of “The Happy Ending” boldly declares that the subject of the movie is the world of movies—specifically, it’s about a woman who ardently watches them and a society that believes their fictions. The story spans sixteen years in the life of a couple, beginning with the courtship of Mary Spencer (Simmons) and Fred Wilson (John Forsythe), in 1953. They go on a date at a drive-in movie, and she’s swept away in the romanticism of its happy ending. Mary drops out of college and they quickly get married; at their wedding, she’s lost in fantasies of images from romantic Hollywood movies.
The action then leaps ahead to the morning of January 22, 1969. The television is broadcasting news of Richard Nixon’s first days in the White House, while Fred and Mary, who have a teen-age daughter (Kathy Fields), are finalizing plans for their sixteenth-anniversary party that night. The drama soon reveals the planned festivities to be a cruel sham and the marriage to be a fragile façade. Those revelations come largely in the form of an intricate series of flashbacks—some of nearly subliminal brevity, others of teeming and extended drama, centered on their blowout celebration the previous year, in the company of business acquaintances, where the couple’s conflicts surged bitterly to the surface. Mary has long been drinking heavily and clandestinely, hiding a vodka bottle in a boot and sneaking off to a bar where the friendly bartender lies to Fred about not having seen her in months. Her increasingly self-destructive behavior has led to several near-catastrophes, yet Fred still won’t allow her to see a psychiatrist. On a visit to a hair salon, to prepare for the sixteenth-anniversary party, Mary takes impulsive and drastic action: in the middle of the day, she heads for the Denver airport and flies to Nassau, where a series of chance encounters prompts her to retake control of her life.
With the movie’s elaborate time structure, Brooks burrows deeply into Mary’s harrowing experience of marriage. It’s a perspective that’s informed—or, rather, deformed—by the media messaging and the propagandizing, in public and in private, that she has endured throughout her life. Brooks fills the movie with the ephemera of media: the workout show that Mary watches on her kitchen TV; news reports of war, sports, and protests; actual commercials that aired then (their soundtracks are heard and their slogans woven into the dialogue); and actual magazines (including the February 17, 1968, issue of The New Yorker). The action is anchored in a particular moment of history: a moment when the verities of bourgeois respectability that were long perpetuated in mass media and enforced in public life were beginning to shatter under the force of the “new freedoms,” and when the norms of Hollywood itself—the Hays Code and its ironclad strictures—were being burst (as, indeed, they are in the course of this very movie).
Brooks, who’s best known for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “In Cold Blood,” launched his career as a writer and director in the mid-nineteen-forties, during Hollywood’s classic age. The studio system was perhaps the era’s most powerful source of archetypes, fantasies, and illusions, and, as Brooks shows, their collective effect was to groom women to defer to men, to please men, to submit to men. One recurring trope of “The Happy Ending” involves the beauty industry: the salons and the spas, the cosmetics and the fashions, even the plastic surgery. (Mary had a face-lift.) Moreover, women’s inculcated notions of what they must do to their faces and bodies to attract and keep a man are linked to another of the film’s key themes: the economic dependence of women on men. Upper-middle-class women who don’t work use their days to primp, shop, and work out, while being deprived of professional activity and achievements, and of stimulation beyond one another’s mutually reinforcing desperation. The control of money is central to Fred and Mary’s ongoing battle, and the movie’s acerbic, lacerating dialogue includes a brilliant riff—delivered by a big-time businessman—about the essential role played by marriage and the mythology of romance in the modern economy.
Though “The Happy Ending” includes clips from “Casablanca” and other romantic movies, the crucial embodiment of classic Hollywood that Brooks embeds in his movie is its remarkable cast. It includes Shirley Jones (as Mary’s unmarried college friend Flo), Lloyd Bridges (as Flo’s married lover), Teresa Wright (as Mary’s mother), Nanette Fabray (as Agnes, Mary’s devoted housekeeper), Dick Shawn (as Fred’s friendly dissolute client), and Tina Louise (as the client’s friendly, miserable wife), as well as a latter-day star, Bobby Darin (as a candidate for a Latin lover). What these actors from Hollywood’s age of brass bring to the action, beside the sheer force of their personalities and the aura of their presence, is stillness: the hieratic poise and sculptural power of their fixed gazes and precise gestures, which are the key behavioral traits of acting in studio-system Hollywood.
In Brooks’s view, these rigid manners—and the rigid mores and romantic archetypes of the Hollywood movies that they embody and embellish—come off as obsolete vestiges of times that, though recent, are already on the far side of a historical divide. In “The Happy Ending,” these deeply internalized formalities nonetheless silently shriek with long-stifled frustration and emotion. Moreover, the movie’s extraordinary wide-screen cinematography (by Conrad L. Hall) does more than just display the actors and their powerful performances—it goes further into monumental stillness and composed precision, heightening the media-mad unreality of modern life with a sense of highly inflected yet frozen artifice. Inner and outer life converge in these images—and the décor, the locations, the characters’ hair styling and makeup, and their clothing all play crucial parts in this fusion of action and appearance.
So, for that matter, does light itself, and its absence. Hall submerges the characters in sepulchral shadows torn by streaks of light, bathes them in an uncanny brightness of relentless exposure and homogenizing uniformity. Many of the movie’s distinctive shots render Mary’s sense of desperate solitude as intensely dramatic—even simple scenes of walking and sitting are transformed into passages of grand moment. In this regard, the strongest influence on Brooks’s directorial strategies appears to be the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose career-long theme was the mind control exerted by media and public life over all, and who devised a style of images and acting to convey it. It’s an influence that Brooks wears lightly; avoiding homage, he crafts a style that conveys a sense of immediate experience and personal observation.
“The Happy Ending,” though written and directed by a member of the studio system’s old guard, is both part and proof of the rise of the New Hollywood; Brooks here pushes studio filmmaking into a modernity far ahead of most of its younger luminaries. I won’t spoil the delicious irony that Brooks folds into the events that inspire Mary to take action and change her life. It involves a deft resolution of conflicting desires and dreams, an imagining of new possibilities that don’t entirely reject her former illusions. Like Brooks, Mary doesn’t exactly spurn grand cinematic romanticism; rather, she questions it and refashions it to serve her purposes.


newyorker--2020-07-07--Putin Admits Taking SATs for Trump

Putin Admits Taking SATs for Trump

MOSCOW ( The Borowitz Report ) —The firestorm of controversy swirling around the upcoming tell-all book by the President ’ s niece exploded on Tuesday , after Vladimir Putin revealed that he took the SATs for Donald J. Trump .
Putin said that he had hoped to keep his role in Trump ’ s college admission a secret , but , with the impending publication of Mary Trump ’ s book , “ it was only a matter of time before the truth came out.
” The Russian President said that , when young Donald Trump was applying to college @ @ @ @ @ @ @ making “ a few extra rubles ” by offering his services as a test-taker to wealthy but academically hopeless American high-school students .
“ I recall the day that I took Trump ’ s SATs as clearly as if it were yesterday , ” Putin said .
“ I totally aced them.
” As the years rolled by , Putin followed with intense interest the career of the man whose SATs he took .
“ I often asked myself , ‘ How will Donald Trump ever repay me for putting him on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said , with a devilish smile .
“ As it turned out , I found a way.
” At the White House , the press secretary , Kayleigh McEnany , refused to address the Putin bombshell and instead questioned the authenticity of Mary Trump ’ s memoir .
“ No one named Trump has ever actually written a book , ” McEnany said .

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—The firestorm of controversy swirling around the upcoming tell-all book by the President’s niece exploded on Tuesday, after Vladimir Putin revealed that he took the SATs for Donald J. Trump.
Putin said that he had hoped to keep his role in Trump’s college admission a secret, but, with the impending publication of Mary Trump’s book, “it was only a matter of time before the truth came out.”
The Russian President said that, when young Donald Trump was applying to college, in the nineteen-sixties, Putin was making “a few extra rubles” by offering his services as a test-taker to wealthy but academically hopeless American high-school students.
“I recall the day that I took Trump’s SATs as clearly as if it were yesterday,” Putin said. “I totally aced them.”
As the years rolled by, Putin followed with intense interest the career of the man whose SATs he took.
“I often asked myself, ‘How will Donald Trump ever repay me for putting him on the path to Wharton?’ ” Putin said, with a devilish smile. “As it turned out, I found a way.”
At the White House, the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, refused to address the Putin bombshell and instead questioned the authenticity of Mary Trump’s memoir. “No one named Trump has ever actually written a book,” McEnany said.


newyorker--2020-07-07--The Unexpected Sunlight of Waxahatchee’s “Saint Cloud”

Katie Crutchfield , who records music under the name Waxahatchee , released “ Saint Cloud , ” her fifth solo album , in late March , just as the country went under coronavirus lockdown .
In the long months since , the album has become a talisman of the self-isolation era .
On the cover , Crutchfield is barefoot , wearing a sky-blue dress , sitting atop a pickup truck the color of butterscotch ice cream , its bed wreathed with red roses .
Rooted and easy , the eleven songs , which have earned Crutchfield comparisons to Lucinda Williams @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hard-won sunlight and unexpected peace .
Crutchfield recorded her solo début , “ American Weekend , ” in 2012 , in a single snowed-in week at her parents ’ home , in Alabama ; Waxahatchee is a reference to a nearby creek .
But this is her first album that explicitly evokes the music she grew up with .
The D.I.Y .
fuzz that pervades the previous Waxahatchee albums—and the lo-fi punk records she made with her twin sister , Allison , under the name P.S .
Eliot—has given way to the unadorned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The album ’ s first track , “ Oxbow , ” begins with a crisp , decisive drumbeat and a synth that sounds like a tape rewinding .
When the first , deep chord kicks in and Crutchfield starts singing , it feels as if you ’ ve stumbled through thick woods to find a sudden clearing , a place where you can stay as long as you like .
Crutchfield is thirty-one , and she ’ s been a front woman for more than half of her life .
As a ninth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sang and played guitar in the Ackleys , a pop-rock band and Birmingham favorite that got booked on the 2006 Warped Tour ; after P.S .
Eliot , she and Allison also recorded music as Bad Banana .
All of these projects were anchored by Crutchfield ’ s bold sense of melodic color , her offhandedly piercing lyrics , and the prickly restlessness in her delivery .
Over the past decade , she has become an informal mentor and “ fairy godmother ” to other young women in the indie-music scene , urging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves in the midst of the gruelling and often misogynistic worlds of touring and recording .
( “ Witches , ” a track on “ Saint Cloud , ” name-checks a few of Crutchfield ’ s fellow-travellers in the project of navigating music-industry vagaries and expectations , including her sister , her friend and collaborator Marlee Grace , and Lindsey Jordan , of Snail Mail . )
While touring in support of her last album , in 2018 , Crutchfield decided to get sober .
She was in Barcelona , at the music @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s careful to note that it was a high bottom , she still experienced the transition with cinematic intensity .
“ There were a lot of firsts , ” she told me recently , over the phone , from the house in Kansas City that she shares with her boyfriend , the musician Kevin Morby .
“ I had been avoiding looking at my substance issues in a direct way for a long time.
” She spent six months trying to recalibrate—roaming the country , considering a move back to Alabama , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She settled in Kansas City and pushed herself to render the story she wanted to tell into lyrics .
She felt protective of her freshly sober experience , aware of surfacing personal weaknesses .
But she was also finding breakthroughs .
As she sang along to songs by Fiona Apple and SZA , she realized that she wanted to put her voice front and center , cleanly , for the first time .
Her longtime favorite album , Williams ’ s “ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road , ” was speaking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new .
She began thinking of “ Saint Cloud ” as an album that would relate a long , elliptical , autobiographical story .
Its penultimate track , “ Ruby Falls , ” tells of a friend who died after overdosing , and its final track , the titular one , calls back to her father ’ s home town , in Florida , and to lonely rides on the M train in New York City .
But the album had to begin in Barcelona , in the frustration and clarity of early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Oxbow.
” “ It felt like the beginning of the story , ” she said .
“ Like I was looking at things honestly for the first time.
” The chorus of that track is just Crutchfield singing “ I want it all , ” over and over , as fresh colors break and deepen around her , the chords looping into a state of tenuous reassurance .
Getting ready to tour the album , Crutchfield felt newly proud and deliberate .
In a recent interview , she told the musician Jess Williamson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she had thought of herself as a songwriter more than a performer—she would “ just stumble out on stage and kind of mumble my songs into the microphone and then stumble off and go out with my friends.
” Through making “ Saint Cloud , ” she realized how much self-respect she had been denying herself : she needed to “ love myself enough to go out and hone some power for a second and put it out into the world.
” At the beginning of March , she gathered her touring band @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weekend of rehearsal in Michigan .
A week and a half after that , everything shut down .
She has been trying to give herself permission to feel shitty about the situation , she told me—about not getting to bring the story she tells on the album full circle , on tour , not getting to experience it in the presence of other people .
“ It ’ s so natural right now for everyone to just immediately put a positive spin on whatever they ’ re going through .
I ’ ll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ interrupt myself , saying , ‘ It ’ s O.K .
; I ’ m so blessed.
’ ” But “ Saint Cloud ” has taken on new resonances in quarantine .
Crutchfield ’ s lyrics , more precise than they ’ ve ever been , articulate moments of uncertainty and self-recrimination : “ We will coalesce our heaven and hell / My eyes roll around like dice on the felt / My mind turns to something useless and trite / My uneasiness , materialized , ” she sings , on “ Can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crack open a sense of acceptance , of time stretching and perspectives changing and everyday continuity threading things along .
On the track “ Fire , ” she sings : For me , the album is a potent reminder of the world we will eventually return to—a life of ordinary motion , in which we negotiate each day alongside other people , witness one another ’ s fluctuations and longings face to face .
The unshowy guitar patterns recur and iterate like road signs on a highway ; the plucked-out instrumental accents feel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the steering wheel .

Katie Crutchfield, who records music under the name Waxahatchee, released “Saint Cloud,” her fifth solo album, in late March, just as the country went into coronavirus lockdown. In the long months since, the album has become a talisman of the self-isolation era. On the cover, Crutchfield is barefoot, wearing a sky-blue dress, sitting atop a pickup truck the color of butterscotch ice cream, its bed wreathed with red roses. Rooted and easy, the eleven songs, which have earned Crutchfield comparisons to Lucinda Williams and early Dylan, warm listeners with hard-won sunlight and unexpected peace. Crutchfield recorded her solo début, “American Weekend,” in 2012, in a single snowed-in week at her parents’ home, in Alabama; Waxahatchee is a reference to a nearby creek. But this is her first album that explicitly evokes the music she grew up with. The D.I.Y. fuzz that pervades the previous Waxahatchee albums—and the lo-fi punk records she made with her twin sister, Allison, under the name P.S. Eliot—has given way to the unadorned sound of an older country-blues tradition. The album’s first track, “Oxbow,” begins with a crisp, decisive drumbeat and a synth that sounds like a tape rewinding. When the first, deep chord kicks in and Crutchfield starts singing, it feels as if you’ve stumbled through thick woods to find a sudden clearing, a place where you can stay as long as you like.
Crutchfield is thirty-one, and she’s been a front woman for more than half of her life. As a ninth grader, alongside her sister, she sang and played guitar in the Ackleys, a pop-rock band and Birmingham favorite that got booked on the 2006 Warped Tour; after P.S. Eliot, she and Allison also recorded music as Bad Banana. All of these projects were anchored by Crutchfield’s bold sense of melodic color, her offhandedly piercing lyrics, and the prickly restlessness in her delivery. Over the past decade, she has become an informal mentor and “fairy godmother” to other young women in the indie-music scene, urging them to assert and take care of themselves in the midst of the gruelling and often misogynistic worlds of touring and recording. (“Witches,” a track on “Saint Cloud,” name-checks a few of Crutchfield’s fellow-travellers in the project of navigating music-industry vagaries and expectations, including her sister, her friend and collaborator Marlee Grace, and Lindsey Jordan, of Snail Mail.)
While touring in support of her last album, in 2018, Crutchfield decided to get sober. She was in Barcelona, at the music festival Primavera Sound, and though she’s careful to note that it was a high bottom, she still experienced the transition with cinematic intensity. “There were a lot of firsts,” she told me recently, over the phone, from the house in Kansas City that she shares with her boyfriend, the musician Kevin Morby. “I had been avoiding looking at my substance issues in a direct way for a long time.” She spent six months trying to recalibrate—roaming the country, considering a move back to Alabama, wanting to write but finding herself blocked. She settled in Kansas City and pushed herself to render the story she wanted to tell into lyrics. She felt protective of her freshly sober experience, aware of surfacing personal weaknesses. But she was also finding breakthroughs. As she sang along to songs by Fiona Apple and SZA, she realized that she wanted to put her voice front and center, cleanly, for the first time. Her longtime favorite album, Williams’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” was speaking to her in a way that felt new.
She began thinking of “Saint Cloud” as an album that would relate a long, elliptical, autobiographical story. Its penultimate track, “Ruby Falls,” tells of a friend who died after overdosing, and its final track, the titular one, calls back to her father’s home town, in Florida, and to lonely rides on the M train in New York City. But the album had to begin in Barcelona, in the frustration and clarity of early sobriety, which she captures on “Oxbow.” “It felt like the beginning of the story,” she said. “Like I was looking at things honestly for the first time.” The chorus of that track is just Crutchfield singing “I want it all,” over and over, as fresh colors break and deepen around her, the chords looping into a state of tenuous reassurance.
Getting ready to tour the album, Crutchfield felt newly proud and deliberate. In a recent interview, she told the musician Jess Williamson that, earlier in her career, she had thought of herself as a songwriter more than a performer—she would “just stumble out on stage and kind of mumble my songs into the microphone and then stumble off and go out with my friends.” Through making “Saint Cloud,” she realized how much self-respect she had been denying herself: she needed to “love myself enough to go out and hone some power for a second and put it out into the world.” At the beginning of March, she gathered her touring band for a long and “magical” weekend of rehearsal in Michigan. A week and a half after that, everything shut down. She has been trying to give herself permission to feel shitty about the situation, she told me—about not getting to bring the story she tells on the album full circle, on tour, not getting to experience it in the presence of other people. “It’s so natural right now for everyone to just immediately put a positive spin on whatever they’re going through. I’ll get half a sentence out and then interrupt myself, saying, ‘It’s O.K.; I’m so blessed.’ ”
But “Saint Cloud” has taken on new resonances in quarantine. Crutchfield’s lyrics, more precise than they’ve ever been, articulate moments of uncertainty and self-recrimination: “We will coalesce our heaven and hell / My eyes roll around like dice on the felt / My mind turns to something useless and trite / My uneasiness, materialized,” she sings, on “Can’t Do Much.” They also crack open a sense of acceptance, of time stretching and perspectives changing and everyday continuity threading things along. On the track “Fire,” she sings:
Tomorrow could feel like a hundred years later
I’m wiser and slow and attuned
And I am down on my knees, I’m a bird in the trees
I can learn to see with a partial view.
For me, the album is a potent reminder of the world we will eventually return to—a life of ordinary motion, in which we negotiate each day alongside other people, witness one another’s fluctuations and longings face to face. The unshowy guitar patterns recur and iterate like road signs on a highway; the plucked-out instrumental accents feel like a friend tapping your hand on the steering wheel.
Crutchfield had scheduled weekly digital concerts throughout the month of June, in which she planned to play each of the albums in her catalogue; on June 1st, she announced that she was pushing the shows back a week to “hold space & stand in solidarity with those protesting now during this important moment in the fight against white supremacy & police violence.” A portion of ticket proceeds would be donated to local organizations and chapters of Black Lives Matter. I’ve been dreaming about hearing the album in person—more than any recent album that I’ve heard, “Saint Cloud” evokes a sense of freedom and belonging that has been elusive in this era of constraint and distance. “I know that we’ll tour it,” Crutchfield told me when we spoke. “We just have to live in this weird groundlessness, to accept that there’s no way to know when—to try to be certain that we will get to play these songs, even if it’s two years from now.” In the meantime, quarantine has tested, and possibly changed, her restless nature. That morning, she had woken up early; the rain in the forecast hadn’t materialized; she had made herself a cup of coffee. “It’s been good to see, after moving so much all the time for so long, that I can stay still,” she said. “That I can take joy in simplicity, that I can have these moments. Moments of pure joy.”


newyorker--2020-07-07--Can Our Ballots Be Both Secret and Secure?

Near the end of last year , I met Josh Benaloh , a senior cryptographer at Microsoft , in a conference room in Building 99 on the company ’ s sprawling campus , in Redmond , Washington , to talk about a fundamental problem with American elections .
When we vote , we take it on faith that our ballots have been recorded—and recorded correctly .
This is not always the case .
In 2015 , in Shelby County , Tennessee , hundreds of votes that were cast in predominantly African-American precincts disappeared somewhere between the polling place and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and why , remains a mystery , because the ballots were cast on a touch-screen voting machine that did not provide a paper record .
In 2018 , three thousand votes went missing during a Florida recount .
The next year , eight hundred uncounted ballots were found in a storage closet in Midland , Texas , after a hotly contested school-bond vote .
To prevent these types of errors , Benaloh said , “ You could , in theory , sign your name on your ballot and watch it go through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ however , that is precisely what is not supposed to happen .
Our ballots are secret ; after we drop them in the ballot box , they are , literally , out of our hands .
We don ’ t publish everyone ’ s name next to their candidate selections because , Benaloh said , “ if we do that , we ’ ll also be opening up everyone to coercion and vote selling.
” Both were features of American democracy well into the late nineteenth century , as voters revealed their choices @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and festivals—either by voice or by dropping color-coded tickets , printed by each party , into a ballot box .
By 1888 , corruption had become so widespread that states began to abandon the spectacle .
Voters in Massachusetts , following the examples of Australia and Britain , were the first in the U.S. to register their choices in a private space , on uniform ballots printed at public expense .
Since 2018 , as part of a program called Defending Democracy , Benaloh has been working on voting software that attempts to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elections .
At Microsoft , he is both a researcher and an internal consultant , using what he learns in his theoretical investigations to help the company develop secure products .
His election software is based on a mathematical process that he invented called homomorphic encryption .
Standard encryption obscures information behind unintelligible strings of letters and numbers ; homomorphic encryption enables those unintelligible strings to be added together while still remaining behind the veil .
Applied to elections , this technology could allow ballots to be aggregated , tallied , and verified @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decrypted .
If it worked , voters could check that their choices had been accurately counted , without anyone else ever seeing them .
At sixty years old , Benaloh is still boyish , with a stubbly beard and curly hair that is just beginning to gray .
When he began thinking about how encryption might improve voting , as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he had no sense that anything was wrong with the electoral system .
“ I didn ’ t really know a lot about elections @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a geeky kid growing up in New York who loved numbers , and elections were the time when everyone else was looking at numbers all day.
” This was back when his surname was Cohen , before he married his wife , Laurie Blake , who was then a math teacher , and they scrambled the letters of their last names together .
( “ ‘ Ben ’ sort of from the Latin prefix ‘ benefactor , ’ ” he told me , “ and ‘ aloh ’ for the Hawaiian greeting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a class on cryptography , he started to see voting as a powerful way to show that the mathematical tools he was developing could be used to create a ballot that was transparent and private , and that the accuracy of elections could be verified from start to finish .
In 1987 , after successfully defending his doctoral dissertation , titled “ Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections , ” at Yale , Benaloh moved to Toronto , for a three-year postdoc appointment , and then to upstate New York , to teach computer science at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the math for end-to-end verifiable elections .
This included an effort to figure out how to apply his research to voting by mail , which he is still attempting to do , but with more urgency , in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic .
( “ I ’ m getting close , ” he told me recently . )
He also settled on a method that would give voters a simple way to test the integrity of the process : they could “ spoil ” ballots .
Unlike cast ballots , spoiled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could check whether the choices they had made on those ballots were the ones revealed by the decryption .
In 2012 , Benaloh put his ideas into practice , as one of seven researchers tapped by the clerk of Travis County , Texas , to create an actual voting system from the ground up .
“ We were trying to design something that achieved the mathematical needs of end-to-end verifiability in a way that their voters could interact with , ” he said .
But STAR-Vote , as the system was called , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the polling place .
In 2016 , after it became clear that Russian intelligence was probing state election systems , Benaloh took part in an extensive investigation conducted by the National Academies of Sciences , Engineering , and Medicine to determine the best ways to enhance the integrity of American elections .
Its September , 2018 , report , “ Securing the Vote : Protecting American Democracy , ” offered forty-one suggestions for making voting more secure , including adding end-to-end verifiability .
By then , Microsoft had witnessed attacks on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ provided cybersecurity services for both parties ’ conventions in the previous election cycle ; in July , 2016 , during the Democratic National Convention , Microsoft ’ s threat-intelligence team noticed that a nation-state actor , later traced to Russian intelligence , was registering fake Microsoft domain names .
Not long afterward , the team saw the same thing happening during the French and European Union elections .
Fake domains are often the bait for phishing expeditions , and Russian hackers were initially targeting academics and consultants likely to be involved in key @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ ve infiltrated an academic who is going to be an adviser to the Presidential campaign , now it ’ s easier to hack into the Presidential campaign , ” Tom Burt , the company ’ s vice-president for customer security and trust , told me .
“ That person sends an e-mail saying ‘ look at this really cool document , ’ and they click on it and they ’ re infected.
” In 2018 , Microsoft created the Defending Democracy program , which offered political campaigns a service called AccountGuard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ basic cyber hygiene and monitored their accounts for malicious activity .
( AccountGuard is now offered to nonprofits , academics , and political consultants in twenty-nine countries . )
The program reached out to Benaloh to ask about the possibility of using the kinds of mathematical tools he ’ d been developing to create a verifiable voting system .
“ Josh had been thinking about this for a long time , but nobody had made the investment to do it , ” Burt told me .
“ It was going to be expensive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ invest in , and I was willing to take a risk.
” ( Burt , a rugged , silver-haired veteran of corporate law , would only tell me that the cost was “ in the seven-figure range.
” ) Benaloh began to conceive what an end-to-end encrypted ballot-system toolkit would look like .
It would be a piece of software—an add-on to voting machines or scanners , not the hardware itself .
It would also be system-agnostic , able to work alongside most kinds of voting apparatuses , whether digital or analog .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ with an end-to-end verifiable election system , “ voters will have the ability to use their unique tracking codes to look up their encrypted votes and confirm that they are unaltered and correctly counted.
” Election officials , meanwhile , he said , “ will be able to publish C.V.R.S.
” —cast-vote records— “ without releasing sensitive raw election data that can be abused by malicious actors .
”

Near the end of last year, I met Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft, in a conference room in Building 99 on the company’s sprawling campus, in Redmond, Washington, to talk about a fundamental problem with American elections. When we vote, we take it on faith that our ballots have been recorded—and recorded correctly. This is not always the case. In 2015, in Shelby County, Tennessee, hundreds of votes that were cast in predominantly African-American precincts disappeared somewhere between the polling place and the final tally. Where they had gone, and why, remains a mystery, because the ballots were cast on a touch-screen voting machine that did not provide a paper record. In 2018, three thousand votes went missing during a Florida recount. The next year, eight hundred uncounted ballots were found in a storage closet in Midland, Texas, after a hotly contested school-bond vote. To prevent these types of errors, Benaloh said, “You could, in theory, sign your name on your ballot and watch it go through the system.” In actual elections, however, that is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Our ballots are secret; after we drop them in the ballot box, they are, literally, out of our hands.
We don’t publish everyone’s name next to their candidate selections because, Benaloh said, “if we do that, we’ll also be opening up everyone to coercion and vote selling.” Both were features of American democracy well into the late nineteenth century, as voters revealed their choices in public—polling often took place during carnivals and festivals—either by voice or by dropping color-coded tickets, printed by each party, into a ballot box. By 1888, corruption had become so widespread that states began to abandon the spectacle. Voters in Massachusetts, following the examples of Australia and Britain, were the first in the U.S. to register their choices in a private space, on uniform ballots printed at public expense.
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Since 2018, as part of a program called Defending Democracy, Benaloh has been working on voting software that attempts to solve the problem of trust in secret-ballot elections. At Microsoft, he is both a researcher and an internal consultant, using what he learns in his theoretical investigations to help the company develop secure products. His election software is based on a mathematical process that he invented called homomorphic encryption. Standard encryption obscures information behind unintelligible strings of letters and numbers; homomorphic encryption enables those unintelligible strings to be added together while still remaining behind the veil. Applied to elections, this technology could allow ballots to be aggregated, tallied, and verified without the individual votes having to be decrypted. If it worked, voters could check that their choices had been accurately counted, without anyone else ever seeing them.
At sixty years old, Benaloh is still boyish, with a stubbly beard and curly hair that is just beginning to gray. When he began thinking about how encryption might improve voting, as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had no sense that anything was wrong with the electoral system. “I didn’t really know a lot about elections,” Benaloh said. “I was a geeky kid growing up in New York who loved numbers, and elections were the time when everyone else was looking at numbers all day.” This was back when his surname was Cohen, before he married his wife, Laurie Blake, who was then a math teacher, and they scrambled the letters of their last names together. (“ ‘Ben’ sort of from the Latin prefix ‘benefactor,’ ” he told me, “and ‘aloh’ for the Hawaiian greeting ‘aloha.’ ”) While taking a class on cryptography, he started to see voting as a powerful way to show that the mathematical tools he was developing could be used to create a ballot that was transparent and private, and that the accuracy of elections could be verified from start to finish.
In 1987, after successfully defending his doctoral dissertation, titled “Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections,” at Yale, Benaloh moved to Toronto, for a three-year postdoc appointment, and then to upstate New York, to teach computer science at Clarkson University. He continued to refine the math for end-to-end verifiable elections. This included an effort to figure out how to apply his research to voting by mail, which he is still attempting to do, but with more urgency, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. (“I’m getting close,” he told me recently.) He also settled on a method that would give voters a simple way to test the integrity of the process: they could “spoil” ballots. Unlike cast ballots, spoiled ballots would be decrypted, and anyone could check whether the choices they had made on those ballots were the ones revealed by the decryption. In 2012, Benaloh put his ideas into practice, as one of seven researchers tapped by the clerk of Travis County, Texas, to create an actual voting system from the ground up. “We were trying to design something that achieved the mathematical needs of end-to-end verifiability in a way that their voters could interact with,” he said. But STAR-Vote, as the system was called, never made it off the page and into the polling place.
In 2016, after it became clear that Russian intelligence was probing state election systems, Benaloh took part in an extensive investigation conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to determine the best ways to enhance the integrity of American elections. Its September, 2018, report, “Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy,” offered forty-one suggestions for making voting more secure, including adding end-to-end verifiability. By then, Microsoft had witnessed attacks on the electoral system firsthand. The company had provided cybersecurity services for both parties’ conventions in the previous election cycle; in July, 2016, during the Democratic National Convention, Microsoft’s threat-intelligence team noticed that a nation-state actor, later traced to Russian intelligence, was registering fake Microsoft domain names. Not long afterward, the team saw the same thing happening during the French and European Union elections. Fake domains are often the bait for phishing expeditions, and Russian hackers were initially targeting academics and consultants likely to be involved in key issues of a campaign. “If you’ve infiltrated an academic who is going to be an adviser to the Presidential campaign, now it’s easier to hack into the Presidential campaign,” Tom Burt, the company’s vice-president for customer security and trust, told me. “That person sends an e-mail saying ‘look at this really cool document,’ and they click on it and they’re infected.”
In 2018, Microsoft created the Defending Democracy program, which offered political campaigns a service called AccountGuard. The company trained campaign staff on basic cyber hygiene and monitored their accounts for malicious activity. (AccountGuard is now offered to nonprofits, academics, and political consultants in twenty-nine countries.) The program reached out to Benaloh to ask about the possibility of using the kinds of mathematical tools he’d been developing to create a verifiable voting system. “Josh had been thinking about this for a long time, but nobody had made the investment to do it,” Burt told me. “It was going to be expensive, but it was something we could invest in, and I was willing to take a risk.” (Burt, a rugged, silver-haired veteran of corporate law, would only tell me that the cost was “in the seven-figure range.”)
Benaloh began to conceive what an end-to-end encrypted ballot-system toolkit would look like. It would be a piece of software—an add-on to voting machines or scanners, not the hardware itself. It would also be system-agnostic, able to work alongside most kinds of voting apparatuses, whether digital or analog. As Benaloh told Congress last June, with an end-to-end verifiable election system, “voters will have the ability to use their unique tracking codes to look up their encrypted votes and confirm that they are unaltered and correctly counted.” Election officials, meanwhile, he said, “will be able to publish C.V.R.S.”—cast-vote records—“without releasing sensitive raw election data that can be abused by malicious actors.”
By the time we spoke at Microsoft’s headquarters, the voting software Benaloh had helped develop, which is called ElectionGuard, was nearly finished, and a test run was being coördinated with election officials in Wisconsin. If all went according to plan, in February of this year a few hundred voters in a local primary election would participate in what promised to be the most secure and accurate election in the history of American democracy. Benaloh saw it as a step toward preserving the franchise itself. “There are a lot of valuable things that can’t be done if we don’t have democracy,” he told me. “It’s at the core of being able to advance society and science. It all starts with fair and trustworthy elections.”
“You could, in theory, sign your name on your ballot and watch it go through the system. If we do that, we’ll also be opening up everyone to coercion and vote selling.” Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft
A voting system has many parts: voter-registration databases, poll books, ballots, optical scanners, voting machines, tabulators, and lots of rules. In a rational system, national elections would be a uniform process overseen by a federal commission. But a quirk of history—a single line in the Constitution that cedes control to the states—has saddled American democracy with an idiosyncratic, fractured way of voting. There are more than nine thousand election jurisdictions in the country, each with its own way of upholding the franchise. Some require ballots to be printed with the candidates’ names in capital letters, and others mandate that the roster of candidates, no matter how long, appears on a single ballot page. There are jurisdictions that encourage same-day registration and allow any voter to obtain an absentee ballot, whereas others impose extreme voter-identification laws and severely limit polling hours and locations. To a large extent, the procedural differences in the way we vote—state to state, municipality to municipality—are functions of both the distinct culture of each locality and the requirements placed on them by state legislatures and secretaries of state. Those requirements are variable, sometimes onerous, and subject to the vagaries of politics.
Similarly, there is no uniformity to the way that Americans cast ballots. Some jurisdictions rely on hand-marked paper ballots that are counted manually or recorded by optical scanners, others handle voting with digital devices that mark the ballot for the voter, and still others use machines that do not provide voters with a paper backup of their choices. When machines are involved, they must be configured to adhere to local, state, and federal specifications—which means that there are numerous iterations across the country of the same model machine. But almost all of them have been manufactured by just three for-profit election venders—Hart InterCivic, Dominion Voting Systems, and Election Systems & Software—each owned by a different private-equity company that is under no obligation to the voting public to reveal its directors, profits, supply chains, or the algorithms powering its software. Although some jurisdictions require that companies pay to have their machines tested and certified by labs, not all places mandate this.
Private companies have long manufactured the equipment that Americans use to vote, but, starting in the nineteen-sixties, the machines have become increasingly computerized. After that transition began, companies were not just making the hardware—they were writing the code that registered and tabulated votes. A jurisdiction could buy or lease the equipment, but the vender owned the software, which was typically arcane and proprietary. In 1988, the investigative reporter Ronnie Dugger, writing in The New Yorker, observed that voting-machine companies “have long contended, in and out of court, that they own the source codes and must keep them secret from everyone, including the local officials who conduct elections.” This remains the case.
Dugger’s article was largely based on a report issued that same year by the National Bureau of Standards, written by a computer scientist named Roy Saltman. For more than a decade, Saltman had been identifying problems with electronic voting machines that continue to dog elections today: tallies that can’t be audited because the voting machines do not provide a paper trail, software and hardware glitches, security vulnerabilities, poor connections between voting machines and central tabulating computers, conflicts of interest among venders of computerized systems, and election officials who lack computer expertise. He also made an early case for encrypting votes. “If encryption is not used in the teleprocessing of vote data,” he wrote in a 1978 report, “there is a possibility that a sophisticated disrupter could delete correct data or replace correct data with false data,” which would result in the reporting of erroneous results.


newyorker--2020-07-07--Willa Cather’s Quietly Shattering War Novel

“ One of Ours , ” Willa Cather ’ s novel of youth , the prairie , influenza , and war , was one of the author ’ s greatest successes , winning her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 .
It also elicited some of the most scathing criticism of her career .
Edmund Wilson called the novel a “ pretty flat failure.
” H. L. Mencken said that its scenes of the First World War were “ fought out , not in France , but on a Hollywood movie-lot.
” Ernest Hemingway wrote , to Wilson , “ Wasn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lines wonderful ?
Do you know where it came from ?
The battle scene in Birth of a Nation .
I identified episode after episode , Catherized .
Poor woman she had to get her war experience somewhere.
” Hemingway ’ s familiarity with D. W. Griffith ’ s infamously racist film perhaps says more about him than it does about Cather , who rarely went to the movies .
Professional resentments aside , “ One of Ours ” remains a subject of debate , and is far less widely read than such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and “ My Ántonia.
” The author herself wondered whether she had fallen short in the culminating battlefield scenes , in which a naïve young Nebraskan named Claude Wheeler goes to his death .
“ I expect the last part runs pretty thin , ” she wrote to her friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher .
“ I tried just awfully hard .
But that ’ s the fascinating thing about art , anyhow ; that good intentions and praiseworthy industry don ’ t count a damn.
” To Mencken , she wrote , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Modern readers may be more forgiving .
When I revisited “ One of Ours ” in recent weeks , I found it as haunting as anything I ’ ve read in this bewildering year .
What seized my attention , not unexpectedly , was the section devoted to the flu pandemic of 1918 .
The virus strikes a boatload of American soldiers on their way to the European battlefields .
Cather , who fought off the flu , makes the striking decision to elide pandemic and war into a general season of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American is woefully unprepared .
What may have irritated Cather ’ s contemporaries was not the inaccuracy of her military scenes—and there are a few howlers to be found—but the way that she demotes the war experience in favor of a longer view .
From the outset of the book , she tracks the spread of a male disease of pride and fear .
“ One of Ours , ” like so much of Cather ’ s work , is based on people she knew .
Claude Wheeler is modelled on her cousin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the Battle of Cantigny , in May , 1918 , in one of the first major engagements by the American Expeditionary Forces .
G. P. ’ s father , George , Cather ’ s uncle , was the first of the wider Cather family to settle in Nebraska ; he arrived in 1873 , and Willa came west with her family a decade later , having spent her early childhood in Virginia .
The George Cather home still stands , and is associated with the National Willa Cather Center , in Red @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the property is to get a palpable sense of the isolated farm life that Cather describes so vividly in her books .
The early chapters of “ One of Ours ” revisit the familiar territory of lives on the prairie , with the significant difference that we have moved forward in time from the hardscrabble late-nineteenth-century setting of “ O Pioneers !
” and “ My Ántonia.
” Claude ’ s father is a prosperous landowner who no longer needs to work much for a living .
His son has grand ambitions and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He glimpses a loftier existence when , during a spell in college , he befriends a cultured German family , the Erlichs , whose home life is considerably warmer and livelier than his own .
He then has the misfortune to fall in love with a woman whose aloofness dims his hopes .
Volunteering for the Army gives him an escape and a purpose .
The entire first part of the book is an idyll that goes incrementally sour .
Modernization , mechanization , and commercialization have altered the tempo and tone of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ First World War creates divisions between newer and older immigrant families .
When the United States declares war , in 1917 , hysteria grips the community .
A hardworking farmer named Yoeder is dragged into court on suspicion of making pro-German remarks , and responds , “ I have nothing to say .
The charges are true .
I thought this was a country where a man could speak his mind.
” Claude , as he completes his military training , takes satisfaction in the admiring glances that his new uniform wins him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on a group of boys who torment an old German woman .
“ See here , ” he says to one , “ aren ’ t you ashamed of yourself ?
” The boy answers , “ Oh , I don ’ t know about that !
” Woodrow Wilson ’ s crusade to make the world “ safe for democracy ” is in question even before Claude sets sail for Europe .
Celebrated antiwar novels by the likes of Hemingway , John Dos Passos , Ford Madox Ford , and Erich Maria @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brutality of the war and the duplicity of its rhetoric .
Cather was more reserved , to the point that many readers thought she still believed in the “ Great Crusade.
” During the war , she had indeed been caught up in the chauvinist wave , describing her cousin as one of “ God ’ s soldiers.
” Although she set those ideas aside , she gave Claude no epiphany about the horror of it all .
Instead , he dies in the grip of his illusions .
“ This one boy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she explained to Mencken .
The underlying reality is clear enough in the potent tableau that she creates as Claude ’ s troop ship passes the Statue of Liberty : “ That howling swarm of brown arms and hats and faces looked like nothing but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere .
But the scene was ageless ; youths were sailing away to die for an idea , a sentiment , for the mere sound of a phrase .
.
.
and on their departure they were making @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sea.
” The ellipsis is Cather ’ s own—a pause that covers a well of thought .
The ship is called the Anchises , after Aeneas ’ s father , who , in some tellings , is blinded or lamed by the gods after his union with Aphrodite .
The section devoted to the Anchises ’ s voyage is a strange , hallucinatory , altogether remarkable piece of writing , and it is closely based on the diary of a doctor who made such a voyage himself .
In 1919 , that doctor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she persuaded him to let her use his diary .
At the beginning , the neophyte soldiers are in boisterous high spirits , singing , cavorting , boasting .
Then they begin to fall sick and die , their minds assaulted by delirious episodes that seem all too familiar in the COVID-19 era .
Cather shows how the ship ’ s close quarters make it a perfect breeding ground for contagion .
“ The boys lay in heaps on the deck , ” she writes , “ trying to keep warm by hugging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of misery Cather adds a fine layer of irony .
One of the soldiers is a big German-American named Fritz Tannhauser , who , when fever takes over , starts babbling in his native language .
“ His congested eyeballs were rolled back in his head and only the yellowish whites were visible .
His mouth was open and his tongue hung out the side.
” Another soldier , known mainly as the Virginian , experiences a violent nosebleed and is dead not long after .
The names are chosen carefully .
Tannhäuser @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that experienced mass popularity in America before the First World War .
“ The Virginian ” was Owen Wister ’ s best-selling Western novel , from 1902—a founding text of cowboy iconography , and the work of an outspoken racist .
Cather casts her subsidiary characters in the mold of heroes , but the flu lays waste to their bodies before they even catch sight of the battlefield .

Willa Cather’s “One of Ours” merges pandemic and war into a general season of death. Photograph from NYT / Getty
“One of Ours,” Willa Cather’s novel of youth, the prairie, influenza, and war, was one of the author’s greatest successes, winning her the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. It also elicited some of the most scathing criticism of her career. Edmund Wilson called the novel a “pretty flat failure.” H. L. Mencken said that its scenes of the First World War were “fought out, not in France, but on a Hollywood movie-lot.” Ernest Hemingway wrote, to Wilson, “Wasn’t that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman she had to get her war experience somewhere.” Hemingway’s familiarity with D. W. Griffith’s infamously racist film perhaps says more about him than it does about Cather, who rarely went to the movies.
Professional resentments aside, “One of Ours” remains a subject of debate, and is far less widely read than such Cather classics as “O Pioneers!” and “My Ántonia.” The author herself wondered whether she had fallen short in the culminating battlefield scenes, in which a naïve young Nebraskan named Claude Wheeler goes to his death. “I expect the last part runs pretty thin,” she wrote to her friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher. “I tried just awfully hard. But that’s the fascinating thing about art, anyhow; that good intentions and praiseworthy industry don’t count a damn.” To Mencken, she wrote, “It may be a complete mistake.”
Modern readers may be more forgiving. When I revisited “One of Ours” in recent weeks, I found it as haunting as anything I’ve read in this bewildering year. What seized my attention, not unexpectedly, was the section devoted to the flu pandemic of 1918. The virus strikes a boatload of American soldiers on their way to the European battlefields. Cather, who fought off the flu, makes the striking decision to elide pandemic and war into a general season of death, one for which her young American is woefully unprepared. What may have irritated Cather’s contemporaries was not the inaccuracy of her military scenes—and there are a few howlers to be found—but the way that she demotes the war experience in favor of a longer view. From the outset of the book, she tracks the spread of a male disease of pride and fear.
“One of Ours,” like so much of Cather’s work, is based on people she knew. Claude Wheeler is modelled on her cousin G. P. Cather, who was killed at the Battle of Cantigny, in May, 1918, in one of the first major engagements by the American Expeditionary Forces. G. P.’s father, George, Cather’s uncle, was the first of the wider Cather family to settle in Nebraska; he arrived in 1873, and Willa came west with her family a decade later, having spent her early childhood in Virginia. The George Cather home still stands, and is associated with the National Willa Cather Center, in Red Cloud, Nebraska. To walk through the property is to get a palpable sense of the isolated farm life that Cather describes so vividly in her books.
The early chapters of “One of Ours” revisit the familiar territory of lives on the prairie, with the significant difference that we have moved forward in time from the hardscrabble late-nineteenth-century setting of “O Pioneers!” and “My Ántonia.” Claude’s father is a prosperous landowner who no longer needs to work much for a living. His son has grand ambitions and romantic longings but no particular talents. He glimpses a loftier existence when, during a spell in college, he befriends a cultured German family, the Erlichs, whose home life is considerably warmer and livelier than his own. He then has the misfortune to fall in love with a woman whose aloofness dims his hopes. Volunteering for the Army gives him an escape and a purpose.
The entire first part of the book is an idyll that goes incrementally sour. Modernization, mechanization, and commercialization have altered the tempo and tone of small-town life. The onset of the First World War creates divisions between newer and older immigrant families. When the United States declares war, in 1917, hysteria grips the community. A hardworking farmer named Yoeder is dragged into court on suspicion of making pro-German remarks, and responds, “I have nothing to say. The charges are true. I thought this was a country where a man could speak his mind.” Claude, as he completes his military training, takes satisfaction in the admiring glances that his new uniform wins him, and tries to exercise his authority on a group of boys who torment an old German woman. “See here,” he says to one, “aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” The boy answers, “Oh, I don’t know about that!” Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to make the world “safe for democracy” is in question even before Claude sets sail for Europe.
Celebrated antiwar novels by the likes of Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, and Erich Maria Remarque were unambiguously blunt in showing the brutality of the war and the duplicity of its rhetoric. Cather was more reserved, to the point that many readers thought she still believed in the “Great Crusade.” During the war, she had indeed been caught up in the chauvinist wave, describing her cousin as one of “God’s soldiers.” Although she set those ideas aside, she gave Claude no epiphany about the horror of it all. Instead, he dies in the grip of his illusions. “This one boy’s feeling is true,” she explained to Mencken. The underlying reality is clear enough in the potent tableau that she creates as Claude’s troop ship passes the Statue of Liberty: “That howling swarm of brown arms and hats and faces looked like nothing but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase . . . and on their departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea.” The ellipsis is Cather’s own—a pause that covers a well of thought.
The ship is called the Anchises, after Aeneas’s father, who, in some tellings, is blinded or lamed by the gods after his union with Aphrodite. The section devoted to the Anchises’s voyage is a strange, hallucinatory, altogether remarkable piece of writing, and it is closely based on the diary of a doctor who made such a voyage himself. In 1919, that doctor treated Cather for the flu, and she persuaded him to let her use his diary. At the beginning, the neophyte soldiers are in boisterous high spirits, singing, cavorting, boasting. Then they begin to fall sick and die, their minds assaulted by delirious episodes that seem all too familiar in the COVID-19 era. Cather shows how the ship’s close quarters make it a perfect breeding ground for contagion. “The boys lay in heaps on the deck,” she writes, “trying to keep warm by hugging each other close.”
To the spectacle of misery Cather adds a fine layer of irony. One of the soldiers is a big German-American named Fritz Tannhauser, who, when fever takes over, starts babbling in his native language. “His congested eyeballs were rolled back in his head and only the yellowish whites were visible. His mouth was open and his tongue hung out the side.” Another soldier, known mainly as the Virginian, experiences a violent nosebleed and is dead not long after. The names are chosen carefully. Tannhäuser is the hero of a Wagner opera that experienced mass popularity in America before the First World War. “The Virginian” was Owen Wister’s best-selling Western novel, from 1902—a founding text of cowboy iconography, and the work of an outspoken racist. Cather casts her subsidiary characters in the mold of heroes, but the flu lays waste to their bodies before they even catch sight of the battlefield.