newyorker--2020-10-20--Ask Kim Kierkegaardashian: Domestic Jungle Is Where the Heart Is

Ask Kim Kierkegaardashian is an advice column by a mashup of the nineteenth-century existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the reality star and fashion maven Kim Kardashian West .
Are you suffering an existential crisis ?
Vexed about what to wear ?
Send your questions to kimkierkegaard1 @ gmail.com ( or address them to @ kimkierkegaard on Twitter ) .
Questions may be edited for clarity and length .
Is it O.K .
to move away from the U.S. to escape wildfires , COVID-19 , and creeping authoritarianism ?
Stuck inside with the windows shut , trying to manage Zoom school @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kids are driving one another nuts , and the accelerating breakdown of American democracy is making us anxious .
We have the means and job flexibility to move to Europe , where the kids can go to school in person and politics seem more stable .
Should we dig out our passports ?
On the one hand , using our privilege to escape discomfort , danger , and turmoil when so many others can not feels like a bad look .
On the other , like all parents , we want our kids @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s not as if we don ’ t lean on our privilege all the time already .
Who benefits from us feeling guilty about it ?
As I read your question , I ’ m sitting poolside beneath a bombproof , air-purified geodesic dome powered by an artificial sun—it ’ s where I come to think .
And lately I ’ ve been thinking that the multiple crises facing our nation have no recent analogue other than a disastrous Fashion Week show I attended , in 2013 , with a “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the dresses was made out of a dishwasher , and models dangled from the ceiling via a live-boa-constrictor-pulley system . )
It was then that I glanced , for the first—but not the last—time , into the abyss of my soul .
Who wouldn ’ t want to get away from all this ?
Like me , you have the means to fly business class on Air Escape .
So why stay in the wildfire-smoking-section , COVID-19-class seats of United States Airlines 2020 , where you may be thigh to thigh with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pilot is an erratic white supremacist who has already killed more than two hundred and fifteen thousand passengers ?
Because ( you say ) the exercise of your privilege is unfair to those who don ’ t have the means to leave .
Maybe so .
But what I ’ m getting from your question , Euro Vision , is that it may also be unfair to you .
Although it ’ s nice to have a life of safety and ease—I certainly enjoy mine—it ’ s just as important to lead a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ simple for people as wealthy as us to put distance between America ’ s ills and our own asses .
But , although you can run from wildfires , COVID-19 , and racist violence , you , Euro Vision , can ’ t run from the void in your soul .
What you are searching for is meaning , and moving to a place where you have few ties and little personal investment may offer only a frictionless path to a pleasantly meaningless life .
On your government-subsidized European deathbed , will you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feel that it was all just a little empty ?
What ’ s your purpose here on earth , Euro Vision ?
What does it mean for you to live in a place , to be a member of a community , to be a citizen ?
What values do you want your kids to learn ?
What is your life for ?
Perhaps , in answering these questions , you ’ ll conclude that it ’ s more fulfilling to live in a country choking on wildfire smoke , saddled with incompetent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and overrun with a deadly virus—because these are our problems , these are our neighbors , and , if you stay here , you might play a part in making things better .
After all , the philosophy of “ every diva for herself ” is part of what got us into this mess to begin with .
If safety and ease were all that we needed from life , I would stay in my geodesic dome indefinitely , fly only in private planes , and restrict my interactions to A-list celebrities , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve undergone rigorous health screenings and agreed never to make eye contact .
To be honest , I do do all these things , so I can tell you firsthand that it doesn ’ t make life spiritually easier .
I can ’ t judge you if you choose to jet , but I will suggest that you pay less attention to where on the map you should move and more to the movements of your soul .
Remember , you still have to die if you move to Europe , Euro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time when you must face your conscience .
And you are just as likely to have lived a life of despair in a place with cute sidewalk cafés and socialism as in our own troubled land—or in a geodesic dome .

Ask Kim Kierkegaardashian is an advice column by a mashup of the nineteenth-century existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the reality star and fashion maven Kim Kardashian West. Are you suffering an existential crisis? Vexed about what to wear? Send your questions to kimkierkegaard1@gmail.com (or address them to @kimkierkegaard on Twitter). Questions may be edited for clarity and length.
Dear Kim Kierkegaardashian,
Is it O.K. to move away from the U.S. to escape wildfires, COVID-19, and creeping authoritarianism? Stuck inside with the windows shut, trying to manage Zoom school, my partner and I and our kids are driving one another nuts, and the accelerating breakdown of American democracy is making us anxious. We have the means and job flexibility to move to Europe, where the kids can go to school in person and politics seem more stable. Should we dig out our passports?
On the one hand, using our privilege to escape discomfort, danger, and turmoil when so many others cannot feels like a bad look. On the other, like all parents, we want our kids to be safe and happy, and it’s not as if we don’t lean on our privilege all the time already. Who benefits from us feeling guilty about it?
Signed,
Euro Vision
Dear Euro Vision,
As I read your question, I’m sitting poolside beneath a bombproof, air-purified geodesic dome powered by an artificial sun—it’s where I come to think. And lately I’ve been thinking that the multiple crises facing our nation have no recent analogue other than a disastrous Fashion Week show I attended, in 2013, with a “domestic jungle” theme. (One of the dresses was made out of a dishwasher, and models dangled from the ceiling via a live-boa-constrictor-pulley system.) It was then that I glanced, for the first—but not the last—time, into the abyss of my soul.
Who wouldn’t want to get away from all this? Like me, you have the means to fly business class on Air Escape. So why stay in the wildfire-smoking-section, COVID-19-class seats of United States Airlines 2020, where you may be thigh to thigh with anti-maskers and climate-change deniers, and the pilot is an erratic white supremacist who has already killed more than two hundred and fifteen thousand passengers?
Because (you say) the exercise of your privilege is unfair to those who don’t have the means to leave. Maybe so. But what I’m getting from your question, Euro Vision, is that it may also be unfair to you.
Although it’s nice to have a life of safety and ease—I certainly enjoy mine—it’s just as important to lead a meaningful life. It’s so simple for people as wealthy as us to put distance between America’s ills and our own asses. But, although you can run from wildfires, COVID-19, and racist violence, you, Euro Vision, can’t run from the void in your soul.
What you are searching for is meaning, and moving to a place where you have few ties and little personal investment may offer only a frictionless path to a pleasantly meaningless life. On your government-subsidized European deathbed, will you look back on your expatriate existence and feel that it was all just a little empty?
What’s your purpose here on earth, Euro Vision? What does it mean for you to live in a place, to be a member of a community, to be a citizen? What values do you want your kids to learn? What is your life for?
Perhaps, in answering these questions, you’ll conclude that it’s more fulfilling to live in a country choking on wildfire smoke, saddled with incompetent governance, riven by social division, and overrun with a deadly virus—because these are our problems, these are our neighbors, and, if you stay here, you might play a part in making things better. After all, the philosophy of “every diva for herself” is part of what got us into this mess to begin with.
If safety and ease were all that we needed from life, I would stay in my geodesic dome indefinitely, fly only in private planes, and restrict my interactions to A-list celebrities, tenured philosophers, and personal staff who’ve undergone rigorous health screenings and agreed never to make eye contact. To be honest, I do do all these things, so I can tell you firsthand that it doesn’t make life spiritually easier.
I can’t judge you if you choose to jet, but I will suggest that you pay less attention to where on the map you should move and more to the movements of your soul. Remember, you still have to die if you move to Europe, Euro Vision. There will still come a time when you must face your conscience. And you are just as likely to have lived a life of despair in a place with cute sidewalk cafés and socialism as in our own troubled land—or in a geodesic dome.
XOXO
Kim Kierkegaardashian


newyorker--2020-10-20--Trump Collides with the World of Basebal

It ’ s hard these days to be a sports fan and not get embroiled in questions of politics .
Ricketts ’ s spin in Trump ’ s orbit has already faced pushback in Chicago .
After a Trump fund-raiser last summer , where Ricketts invited big donors to Wrigley Field for a game against the St. Louis Cardinals , Eric Zorn , a columnist at the Chicago Tribune , explained why he had renounced his support for the team , writing , “ I 'm not mentally gymnastic enough to believe I can support the Cubs but not the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who was hired by the Cubs to create a photo book on the history of Wrigley Field , told me he ’ s boycotting the team .
“ If you support the Cubs at this point , ” he said .
“ You ’ re putting money in the Rickettses ’ pockets which they ’ re using to help get Trump reëlected.
” And this past June , the Chicago Sun-Times , in an editorial titled “ A Cubs Fan ’ s Dilemma , ” wrote , “ What are you to do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Chicago Cubs but the team ’ s owners include a guy who ’ s leading the effort to reëlect the most divisive , destructive and incompetent president in modern American history ?
We ’ d say there ’ s always the White Sox.
” On the national stage , Ricketts , who ’ s fifty-one , avoids the limelight .
After some deliberation , he declined to talk with me .
His public-relations person—whom Ricketts hired shortly after I reached out for an interview—told me that he ’ s not “ an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so far under the radar that when I called a major Republican donor and told him what I was working on , he said , “ Todd Ricketts ?
Who ’ s that ?
” It took him a minute to place the name .
Indeed , since taking his role as Trump ’ s chief fund-raiser , he ’ s made only one public appearance that I could find : on local radio—and part of that event was to talk about the Cubs .
One person described his role “ like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make headlines it ’ s a bad thing.
” By then , Pete , the eldest sibling , had moved back to Nebraska , where , as a conservative Republican , he won election as governor .
Two years later , he would win a second term , and soon stepped down from his position on the board of the Cubs .
Laura , the lone sister , is an outlier in the family ; she ’ s a major Democratic donor and contributed to Hillary Clinton ’ s campaign .
Tom , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ politics and runs the day-to-day operations of the Cubs as the club ’ s chairman .
Todd , the youngest , has at times felt overlooked .
Shortly after the Rickettses bought the team , Todd e-mailed his father and older brother Pete complaining that Tom seemed to be getting all the credit .
Deadspin published the missive : “ My kids live in the same neighborhood and go to the same school as Tom ’ s kids , and I don ’ t want them to have to constantly [ be ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they are told that their uncle owns the Cubs .
The reason I am so sensitive to this is that even today I feel as though my input and ideas are disregarded among our family , just as they were when we were kids.
” As if to underscore his relative anonymity , a year later , Todd starred in an episode of “ Undercover Boss , ” growing a beard and taking odd jobs at Wrigley Field .
No employees recognized him .
Todd Ricketts became deeply involved in Republican politics by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ staked out a position as a big conservative donor .
( One of Todd Ricketts ’ s friends told me that Todd wanted to talk politics so much that it became difficult to spend time with him . )
In 2013 , Todd became the C.E.O .
of one of the nation ’ s wealthiest political-action committees , Ending Spending , which his father founded and whose mission is to take on what it deems wasteful government funding .
He and his father were , in many ways , a smaller version of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reportedly called “ great heroes.
” In 2013 , Ricketts made a political decision that suggested the kind of compromises he was willing to make .
That year , the PAC Ending Spending spent four hundred thousand dollars on ads for the Virginia gubernatorial campaign of Ken Cuccinelli , who would ultimately lose to Terry McAuliffe , a Democrat .
Cucinnelli , who is now the acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security , spoke to Ricketts ’ s belief in limited government—especially his opposition to the Affordable Care Act—but he also adamantly opposed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against nature and harmful to society.
” For Ricketts , whose sister is gay and active in L.G.B.T .
advocacy—and whose uncle was gay and died of AIDS—Cuccinelli seemed like an odd political bedfellow .
Moreover , that same year , Ricketts personally lobbied four key Republican state legislators to vote to legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois .
“ Todd is not a ‘ single-issue ’ voter , ” Danny Diaz , Ricketts ’ s spokesperson , told me in an e-mail .
“ Todd obviously does not agree with Cuccinelli ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Ricketts ’ s calls him “ a principled pragmatist.
” Scott Walker , the former Wisconsin governor , is close to Ricketts .
They bonded at an event at the American Enterprise Institute shortly after Walker signed Act 10 in Wisconsin , which reduced collective-bargaining rights for most state and municipal workers , including all teachers .
Ricketts told Walker he admired what he was doing in Wisconsin—and so , when Walker faced a recall , Ricketts and his parents came to Walker ’ s aid .
Ricketts held a fund-raiser , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home in a suburb north of Chicago .
“ We get wonky , geeky , about policy , ” Walker told me .
Ricketts and Walker , it turned out , also shared a love for baseball and for Harley-Davidsons .
Walker described Ricketts as “ low-key , ” someone with a modest demeanor .
He recalled a time during his short-lived Presidential campaign , in 2016 , when Ricketts , who was co-chair of Walker ’ s fund-raising efforts , joined Walker in the campaign ’ s Winnebago , electioneering in Iowa @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to a rally at a minor-league baseball park , Ricketts got out to take photographs of a river .
When they arrived at the stadium , a staffer realized that they ’ d left Ricketts behind .
“ Instead of being ticked off about it , Todd thought it was just hilarious , ” Walker told me .
He also remembered hearing Ricketts had invested in bikes .
“ I ’ m thinking , O.K.
, did he buy a manufacturing company ?
” Walker recalled .
And then he laughed .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ owned a pizza parlor , had bought a local bike shop .
After Walker ended his run for the Republican nomination , Ricketts reportedly helped raise money for a political-action committee called Our Principles , which was established with the singular purpose of derailing Trump ’ s nomination .
Ricketts ’ s parents contributed $ 5.5 million to the PAC , which ran a particularly scathing ad ; it featured women reading sexist comments uttered by Trump .
( “ Look at that face .
Would anyone vote for that ?
” ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , you dropping to your knees.
” ) Trump , as he ’ s apt to do , fired back in a tweet : “ I hear the Rickets [ sic ] family , who own the Chicago Cubs , are secretly spending $ ’ s against me .
They better be careful , they have a lot to hide !
” But , as with many who opposed Trump ’ s nomination , the Rickettses came around .
Walker told me that he and Ricketts are thrilled with what Trump has delivered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appointments , and pushing for deregulation .
“ This is precisely where Todd ’ s heart is at , ” Walker , who also ended up supporting Trump , told me .
“ I may not always agree with what he says or tweets but , hey , the guy ’ s done things he said he ’ d do.
” Walker also pointedly warned that the upcoming election is a stark choice between free enterprise and socialism .
“ Todd and I have talked about this , ” he said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bread lines there .
We ’ ve talked about how these socialist policies failed.
” Jimmy Kemp , who runs the Jack Kemp Foundation , which is named after his father , the late congressman and Housing and Urban Development Secretary , told me , “ One of the top things Todd agrees with the President about is the belief in the free-enterprise system—as opposed to socialism.
” A friend of Ricketts ’ s told me that he has praised Augusto Pinochet , who in 1973 overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me that Ricketts was dismissive of Pinochet ’ s ruthlessness .
“ People die every day , ” Ricketts had told the friend .
Ricketts appears to share some of Trump ’ s rough-edged sensibilities .
He ’ s gone on long rants with friends about Barack Obama being a socialist .
He recently appeared maskless at Trump ’ s indoor rally in Henderson , Nevada .
And , earlier this month , the Associated Press reported that Ricketts , along with Vice-President Mike Pence , had been scheduled to attend a fund-raiser @ @ @ @ @ @ @ QAnon-conspiracy supporters .
“ Todd was not scheduled to attend that event , ” Diaz , Ricketts ’ s spokesperson , told me .
“ The finance chairman ’ s name has been listed on every single invite issued by the R.N.C .
or Trump Victory since he was named to those positions , regardless of whether he plans to attend.
” Diaz declined to convey Ricketts ’ s feelings about QAnon .
Last year , the online publication Splinter published e-mails from Joe Ricketts to his children .
In one , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trafficker and sex worker .
Another e-mail read , “ I think Islam is a cult and not a religion .
Christianity and Judaism are based on love whereas Islam is based on ‘ kill the infidel ’ a thing of evil.
” At a press conference , Todd ’ s brother Tom said , “ Honestly , I was surprised by those e-mails .
Those are not the values our family was raised with.
” Joe Ricketts later apologized for his e-mails .
Despite his father ’ s experience , Todd Ricketts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on his Facebook page , Todd referred to COVID-19 as the “ the kung flu ” —weeks before Trump used the demeaning phrase at a rally in Tulsa .
In a post of a video in which New York Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to call the city if they witnessed large gatherings of people , Ricketts commented , “ All snitches will be given priority when applying for jobs as security guards at the concentration camps that will be opening later this year.
” Trump , of course , has regularly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2017 , he called any athlete who takes a knee to protest racial inequity a “ son of a bitch.
” Nearly a third of baseball players are foreign-born—though most have remained silent on matters of public concern .
An official at the Major League Baseball Players Association told me that many foreign-born players , given the times , fear that if they speak out , immigration authorities will come after their families .
The league has fallen woefully short in hiring Black managers and front-office executives .
Black players make up only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the lowest numbers in twenty-nine years ; the Cubs , who lost in the first round of the playoffs this year , had four African-American players on their playoff roster .
Ricketts ’ s spokesperson periodically sent me clippings about all that the Cubs were doing for social justice , including a photo the team tweeted out of players in Black Lives Matters T-shirts .
The President , of course , has called Black Lives Matter “ a symbol of hate.
” I asked where Ricketts stood on the Black Lives Matter movement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ I support the Cubs players and the things they ’ re doing to promote unity—and that includes supporting their efforts on Opening Day to bring people together.
” When I received this statement , I was reminded of what Doug Glanville , a former Cubs outfielder who regularly comments on the intersection of politics and culture , had written in an essay for the New York Times : “ Ambiguity has always been a friend to racism.
” As for the Cubs , their spokesman , in an effort to presumably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political activities , simply said , “ Tom [ Todd ’ s brother ] is the executive chairman.
” Maze Jackson , who hosted a talk show on Chicago ’ s WVON , a radio station with a predominantly Black audience , met Ricketts two years ago , at a reception at a Wrigley Field skybox .
As Jackson tells it , he and Ricketts immediately connected .
“ Todd is pretty direct , ” Jackson told me .
“ He ’ s a down-to-earth guy , not a lot of pretense—and pretty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One of the things we agree on is that there needs to be a different path to revive the Black community.
” Ricketts is a big booster of Opportunity Zones , which have been championed by Kemp and which Trump included in his tax cuts ; they offer financial incentives in the form of tax breaks for people willing to invest in certain distressed neighborhoods .
“ The challenge in our conversations , ” Jackson told me , “ is how do you address the systemic racism .
Sometimes Todd would say , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t just .
.
.
?
’ and I ’ d explain we haven ’ t had the opportunities.
” Recently , the players on the W.N.B.A.
’ s Atlanta Dream have pointedly taken on one of the team ’ s owners , Senator Kelly Loeffler , who chided the team for honoring the Black Lives Matter movement .
No one expects that to happen here in Chicago , especially because , unlike Loeffler , Ricketts has avoided public appearances , let alone public confrontations .
Even if Ricketts doesn ’ t face @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forever be associated with a President who by most measures has set aside any sense of decency and has insistently kicked at the very legs of our democracy .
( When asked whether he agrees with Trump ’ s assertion that if he loses , the election was rigged , Ricketts declined to respond . )
“ If you ’ re publically on the record for Trump , you can not walk that back , ” Joe Walsh , a former Republican congressman who is regretful about initially embracing Trump , told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accountable .
Forever.
” Last summer , Ricketts appeared on Jackson ’ s radio show , shortly before he hosted a big fund-raiser for Trump .
Jackson pressed him on his embrace of the President .
“ A lot of people get hung up on the rhetoric and twitter and things , ” Ricketts told Jackson .
“ But when you drill down on the policy he ’ s executing on , you know , most of the people in this country feel like we need to reform our immigration process , most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reform our trade agreements , most of the people are in favor of rethinking how we do our tax policy.
” It ’ s as if Ricketts is asking us not to listen to the words of our President .
Earlier this summer , Ricketts had much to feel good about .
Trump raised a hundred and sixty-five million dollars in July , about twenty-five million dollars more than Biden and the Democrats .
It ’ s difficult to know what role Ricketts played in this haul , but in an e-mail Ronna @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called him “ a fantastic fundraising partner.
” Recent weeks have brought some undoubtedly sobering news .
In August and September , the Biden campaign posted back-to-back record-breaking fund-raising totals , outraising Trump by nearly three hundred million dollars .
And in a front-page story last month , the Times reported that the Trump campaign had spent so much money in the first half of the year that they had little left to spend on television advertisements .
There are also reports that some big donors who had contributed to Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out or giving less .
One big-monied donor , Thomas Peterffy , told me he worries Trump has become “ concerned more about his success and achievements than he is about the country .
”

If you live outside of Chicago, you probably haven’t heard of Todd Ricketts. But we in the city know him well. He’s a member of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs; he and two siblings make up the board. He also happens to be the finance chair of the Trump Victory Committee, a joint effort of the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, which makes him the chief fund-raiser for Donald Trump’s reëlection. At one point while reporting this story, I reached out to a friend of the Ricketts family, who chided me in an e-mail. “No one wants to say anything good about the Rickettses,” he wrote. “They are rich and republican. Is there a combination that more connotes evil in the imagination of progressive news readers?” But this is not about being rich or a Republican—though those are part of who Ricketts is. It’s an effort to understand an owner of a major-league baseball team who has chosen to work for the reëlection of a President who refuses to condemn white supremacists, and routinely stokes animus toward Black people and immigrants. It feels antithetical to everything the sport is—or, at least, what it aspires to be.
It’s hard these days to be a sports fan and not get embroiled in questions of politics. Ricketts’s spin in Trump’s orbit has already faced pushback in Chicago. After a Trump fund-raiser last summer, where Ricketts invited big donors to Wrigley Field for a game against the St. Louis Cardinals, Eric Zorn, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, explained why he had renounced his support for the team, writing, “I'm not mentally gymnastic enough to believe I can support the Cubs but not the Ricketts family agenda.” Mark Jacob, who was hired by the Cubs to create a photo book on the history of Wrigley Field, told me he’s boycotting the team. “If you support the Cubs at this point,” he said. “You’re putting money in the Rickettses’ pockets which they’re using to help get Trump reëlected.” And this past June, the Chicago Sun-Times, in an editorial titled “A Cubs Fan’s Dilemma,” wrote, “What are you to do if you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs but the team’s owners include a guy who’s leading the effort to reëlect the most divisive, destructive and incompetent president in modern American history? We’d say there’s always the White Sox.”
On the national stage, Ricketts, who’s fifty-one, avoids the limelight. After some deliberation, he declined to talk with me. His public-relations person—whom Ricketts hired shortly after I reached out for an interview—told me that he’s not “an outward person.” He’s flown so far under the radar that when I called a major Republican donor and told him what I was working on, he said, “Todd Ricketts? Who’s that?” It took him a minute to place the name. Indeed, since taking his role as Trump’s chief fund-raiser, he’s made only one public appearance that I could find: on local radio—and part of that event was to talk about the Cubs. One person described his role “like the professional insider”: “If you make headlines it’s a bad thing.”
Ricketts grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, in a family of modest means. According to a memoir written by his father, Joe, they didn’t have money for extended vacations—once, when Todd asked for sixty-nine cents to get a hamburger at Burger King with his friends, his father told him that they needed to eat what they had at home. The family’s economic fortunes changed, though, when their father founded what would become Ameritrade, an early entrant in the field of companies that allowed everyday investors to buy and sell stocks. He ultimately took the company public, in 1997, and became a billionaire. In 2009, Ricketts and his three siblings purchased the Chicago Cubs, for roughly nine hundred million dollars, with money they received from their father. Seven years later, when the Cubs won their first World Series in a hundred and eight years, an estimated five million revellers celebrated in downtown Chicago, the seventh-largest human gathering in world history. The Ricketts were local heroes.
By then, Pete, the eldest sibling, had moved back to Nebraska, where, as a conservative Republican, he won election as governor. Two years later, he would win a second term, and soon stepped down from his position on the board of the Cubs. Laura, the lone sister, is an outlier in the family; she’s a major Democratic donor and contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Tom, the second-oldest, has remained out of politics and runs the day-to-day operations of the Cubs as the club’s chairman. Todd, the youngest, has at times felt overlooked. Shortly after the Rickettses bought the team, Todd e-mailed his father and older brother Pete complaining that Tom seemed to be getting all the credit. Deadspin published the missive: “My kids live in the same neighborhood and go to the same school as Tom’s kids, and I don’t want them to have to constantly [be] explaining that there are equal owners when they are told that their uncle owns the Cubs. The reason I am so sensitive to this is that even today I feel as though my input and ideas are disregarded among our family, just as they were when we were kids.” As if to underscore his relative anonymity, a year later, Todd starred in an episode of “Undercover Boss,” growing a beard and taking odd jobs at Wrigley Field. No employees recognized him.
Todd Ricketts became deeply involved in Republican politics by working alongside his dad, who had staked out a position as a big conservative donor. (One of Todd Ricketts’s friends told me that Todd wanted to talk politics so much that it became difficult to spend time with him.) In 2013, Todd became the C.E.O. of one of the nation’s wealthiest political-action committees, Ending Spending, which his father founded and whose mission is to take on what it deems wasteful government funding. He and his father were, in many ways, a smaller version of the Koch brothers, whom Joe once reportedly called “great heroes.”
In 2013, Ricketts made a political decision that suggested the kind of compromises he was willing to make. That year, the PAC Ending Spending spent four hundred thousand dollars on ads for the Virginia gubernatorial campaign of Ken Cuccinelli, who would ultimately lose to Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat. Cucinnelli, who is now the acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, spoke to Ricketts’s belief in limited government—especially his opposition to the Affordable Care Act—but he also adamantly opposed same-sex marriage and said homosexuality was “against nature and harmful to society.” For Ricketts, whose sister is gay and active in L.G.B.T. advocacy—and whose uncle was gay and died of AIDS—Cuccinelli seemed like an odd political bedfellow. Moreover, that same year, Ricketts personally lobbied four key Republican state legislators to vote to legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois. “Todd is not a ‘single-issue’ voter,” Danny Diaz, Ricketts’s spokesperson, told me in an e-mail. “Todd obviously does not agree with Cuccinelli’s position on same-sex marriage.” One friend of Ricketts’s calls him “a principled pragmatist.”
Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, is close to Ricketts. They bonded at an event at the American Enterprise Institute shortly after Walker signed Act 10 in Wisconsin, which reduced collective-bargaining rights for most state and municipal workers, including all teachers. Ricketts told Walker he admired what he was doing in Wisconsin—and so, when Walker faced a recall, Ricketts and his parents came to Walker’s aid. Ricketts held a fund-raiser, serving Wisconsin beer and bratwurst at his home in a suburb north of Chicago. “We get wonky, geeky, about policy,” Walker told me.
Ricketts and Walker, it turned out, also shared a love for baseball and for Harley-Davidsons. Walker described Ricketts as “low-key,” someone with a modest demeanor. He recalled a time during his short-lived Presidential campaign, in 2016, when Ricketts, who was co-chair of Walker’s fund-raising efforts, joined Walker in the campaign’s Winnebago, electioneering in Iowa. At one point, on the way to a rally at a minor-league baseball park, Ricketts got out to take photographs of a river. When they arrived at the stadium, a staffer realized that they’d left Ricketts behind. “Instead of being ticked off about it, Todd thought it was just hilarious,” Walker told me. He also remembered hearing Ricketts had invested in bikes. “I’m thinking, O.K., did he buy a manufacturing company?” Walker recalled. And then he laughed. He discovered that Ricketts, who already owned a pizza parlor, had bought a local bike shop.
After Walker ended his run for the Republican nomination, Ricketts reportedly helped raise money for a political-action committee called Our Principles, which was established with the singular purpose of derailing Trump’s nomination. Ricketts’s parents contributed $5.5 million to the PAC, which ran a particularly scathing ad; it featured women reading sexist comments uttered by Trump. (“Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”; “That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”) Trump, as he’s apt to do, fired back in a tweet: “I hear the Rickets [sic] family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!” But, as with many who opposed Trump’s nomination, the Rickettses came around.
During Trump’s campaign, Todd Ricketts spearheaded fund-raising for the super PAC Future 45 and for a like-minded nonprofit, 45Committee, which together raised $73.6 million and which produced ads, not without irony, attacking Hillary Clinton for betraying women. Politico reported that 45Committee targeted donors who felt uncomfortable supporting Trump publicly. “Ricketts’ pitch to these donors,” according to the story, “focuses on the fact that one of the pro-Trump groups he’s fronting can accept unlimited checks while keeping its donors’ names secret.” Early in his term, Trump rewarded Ricketts for his support, nominating him to become the Deputy Secretary of Commerce, but Ricketts, unable to disentangle his financial interests to satisfy ethics rules, withdrew his name from consideration.
Walker told me that he and Ricketts are thrilled with what Trump has delivered: cutting taxes, making conservative judicial appointments, and pushing for deregulation. “This is precisely where Todd’s heart is at,” Walker, who also ended up supporting Trump, told me. “I may not always agree with what he says or tweets but, hey, the guy’s done things he said he’d do.” Walker also pointedly warned that the upcoming election is a stark choice between free enterprise and socialism. “Todd and I have talked about this,” he said. “Look at Venezuela. Look at the bread lines there. We’ve talked about how these socialist policies failed.” Jimmy Kemp, who runs the Jack Kemp Foundation, which is named after his father, the late congressman and Housing and Urban Development Secretary, told me, “One of the top things Todd agrees with the President about is the belief in the free-enterprise system—as opposed to socialism.” A friend of Ricketts’s told me that he has praised Augusto Pinochet, who in 1973 overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, in Chile. The friend told me that Ricketts was dismissive of Pinochet’s ruthlessness. “People die every day,” Ricketts had told the friend.
Ricketts appears to share some of Trump’s rough-edged sensibilities. He’s gone on long rants with friends about Barack Obama being a socialist. He recently appeared maskless at Trump’s indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada. And, earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that Ricketts, along with Vice-President Mike Pence, had been scheduled to attend a fund-raiser in Montana at the home of two QAnon-conspiracy supporters. “Todd was not scheduled to attend that event,” Diaz, Ricketts’s spokesperson, told me. “The finance chairman’s name has been listed on every single invite issued by the R.N.C. or Trump Victory since he was named to those positions, regardless of whether he plans to attend.” Diaz declined to convey Ricketts’s feelings about QAnon.
Last year, the online publication Splinter published e-mails from Joe Ricketts to his children. In one, he suggested that President Obama was a drug trafficker and sex worker. Another e-mail read, “I think Islam is a cult and not a religion. Christianity and Judaism are based on love whereas Islam is based on ‘kill the infidel’ a thing of evil.” At a press conference, Todd’s brother Tom said, “Honestly, I was surprised by those e-mails. Those are not the values our family was raised with.” Joe Ricketts later apologized for his e-mails.
Despite his father’s experience, Todd Ricketts can be surprisingly unfiltered. In comments on his Facebook page, Todd referred to COVID-19 as the “the kung flu”—weeks before Trump used the demeaning phrase at a rally in Tulsa. In a post of a video in which New York Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to call the city if they witnessed large gatherings of people, Ricketts commented, “All snitches will be given priority when applying for jobs as security guards at the concentration camps that will be opening later this year.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a hundred and fifty current and former Black baseball players formed the Players Alliance, in large part to address the lack of racial diversity in the sport. When I reached out to players associated with the alliance about Ricketts, no one would talk. A spokesperson told me that they declined my calls because the players want to maintain good relations with the owners. On opening night, players for the Washington Nationals and the New York Yankees took a knee, this in a sport that unlike, say, basketball, has remained pointedly apolitical. The Cubs, as an organization, has shown support for the alliance’s goals. The club’s president, Theo Epstein, has publicly acknowledged the need to hire more Black people in front-office and coaching positions, and, on the marquee outside the stadium, the club displayed the plea “End Racism.”
Trump, of course, has regularly denigrated immigrants and Black people. In 2017, he called any athlete who takes a knee to protest racial inequity a “son of a bitch.” Nearly a third of baseball players are foreign-born—though most have remained silent on matters of public concern. An official at the Major League Baseball Players Association told me that many foreign-born players, given the times, fear that if they speak out, immigration authorities will come after their families. The league has fallen woefully short in hiring Black managers and front-office executives. Black players make up only 7.5 per cent of major-league rosters, the lowest numbers in twenty-nine years; the Cubs, who lost in the first round of the playoffs this year, had four African-American players on their playoff roster.
Ricketts’s spokesperson periodically sent me clippings about all that the Cubs were doing for social justice, including a photo the team tweeted out of players in Black Lives Matters T-shirts. The President, of course, has called Black Lives Matter “a symbol of hate.” I asked where Ricketts stood on the Black Lives Matter movement. Through his spokesman, Ricketts said, “I support the Cubs players and the things they’re doing to promote unity—and that includes supporting their efforts on Opening Day to bring people together.” When I received this statement, I was reminded of what Doug Glanville, a former Cubs outfielder who regularly comments on the intersection of politics and culture, had written in an essay for the New York Times: “Ambiguity has always been a friend to racism.” As for the Cubs, their spokesman, in an effort to presumably distance the team from Ricketts’s political activities, simply said, “Tom [Todd’s brother] is the executive chairman.”
Maze Jackson, who hosted a talk show on Chicago’s WVON, a radio station with a predominantly Black audience, met Ricketts two years ago, at a reception at a Wrigley Field skybox. As Jackson tells it, he and Ricketts immediately connected. “Todd is pretty direct,” Jackson told me. “He’s a down-to-earth guy, not a lot of pretense—and pretty open to listening. . . . One of the things we agree on is that there needs to be a different path to revive the Black community.” Ricketts is a big booster of Opportunity Zones, which have been championed by Kemp and which Trump included in his tax cuts; they offer financial incentives in the form of tax breaks for people willing to invest in certain distressed neighborhoods. “The challenge in our conversations,” Jackson told me, “is how do you address the systemic racism. Sometimes Todd would say, ‘How come you guys can’t just . . .?’ and I’d explain we haven’t had the opportunities.”
Recently, the players on the W.N.B.A.’s Atlanta Dream have pointedly taken on one of the team’s owners, Senator Kelly Loeffler, who chided the team for honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. No one expects that to happen here in Chicago, especially because, unlike Loeffler, Ricketts has avoided public appearances, let alone public confrontations. Even if Ricketts doesn’t face that kind of reckoning, he will forever be associated with a President who by most measures has set aside any sense of decency and has insistently kicked at the very legs of our democracy. (When asked whether he agrees with Trump’s assertion that if he loses, the election was rigged, Ricketts declined to respond.) “If you’re publicly on the record for Trump, you cannot walk that back,” Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who is regretful about initially embracing Trump, told me. “You need to be held accountable. Forever.”


newyorker--2020-10-21--What’s the State of the Presidential Race Two Weeks Out?

I asked Teixeira , who is the co-author of the influential book “ The Emerging Democratic Majority , ” from 2002 , about the national polls , which show Biden with a big lead : on Tuesday morning , he was ahead by 8.6 percentage points in the Real Clear Politics poll average , and by 10.3 points in the FiveThirtyEight poll average .
In breaking down this lead , there are many factors to consider .
Back in June , I pointed out that , as the coronavirus continued to spread , Trump was losing older voters , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2016 .
The latest polling confirms this trend .
In a New York Times/Siena College poll that was released on Tuesday , likely voters aged sixty-five and up favor Biden over Trump by ten points : fifty-one per cent to forty-one per cent .
Teixeira has been closely following the racial and educational demographics .
From this perspective , he said , the biggest difference this year , compared with 2016 , is that Trump appears to have lost a good deal of support among white voters , a group he carried by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to exit polls .
“ It ’ s very clear what ’ s going on , ” Teixeira said .
“ On the one hand , based on current trends it appears Biden is probably going to do about as well as [ Hillary ] Clinton did among Hispanics and Black voters—Asians are a little harder to get ahold of because they are such a small group .
The big shift is among white voters , who ’ ve gone from the big margin they gave Trump in 2016 to being almost closely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s ridiculous for a Republican .
You can ’ t win that way.
” The polls indicate that a good deal of Trump ’ s shrinking lead among white voters is a result of his alienating college-educated whites , particularly college-educated white women .
Teixeira readily conceded that ’ s an important development , but he also pointed to a less ballyhooed development : Trump ’ s declining support among non-college-educated white voters—the group usually thought of as his base .
In 2016 , according to the exit polls , Trump carried non-college-educated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In the latest national poll from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College , his lead over Biden in this group was only eleven percentage points .
Other surveys exhibit a similar shrinkage .
Teixeira shared with me some results from the latest Nationscape survey , an ongoing large-scale study of the electorate that researchers at U.C.L.A .
and the Democracy Fund , a charitable foundation .
Taken last week , the survey estimated Trump ’ s lead among white non-college-educated voters at fifteen per cent .
That ’ s a fall of eighteen points compared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ November , 2016 .
Some polls don ’ t show such a dramatic drop .
For example , the new Times/Siena College survey puts Trump ’ s lead among white respondents without a college degree at twenty-three points , but even that represents a substantial drop from 2016 .
The reason these declines are so important , Teixeira said , is that the white non-college-educated demographic is so large : according to his estimates , it will constitute about forty-one per cent of the 2020 electorate .
The share of white voters with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : thirty-one per cent .
Moreover , as many college-educated suburban voters have abandoned Trump , he has become ever more reliant on his working-class base .
“ This is potentially the death knell for him , ” Teixeira said .
“ It was always true that unless he did as well or better among these voters , he was very likely going to lose the election .
He isn ’ t doing well .
He ’ s doing worse , and he ’ s doing worse by large margins.
” Ultimately , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decided in the Electoral College .
Four years ago , Trump overcame a roughly two-point deficit in the popular vote by gaining narrow majorities in Michigan , Pennsylvania , and Wisconsin .
That enabled him to win three hundred and four votes in the Electoral College , and his best chance of getting reëlected lies in following a similar path .
To pull off a repeat , he would need to turn around polling deficits in a number of Sun Belt states that he won in 2016 , including Arizona , Florida , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at least one of the three Rust Belt states .
If he carries two of the Rust Belt states , he could conceivably afford to lose Arizona or North Carolina .
Over this past weekend , Jen O ’ Malley Dillon , Biden ’ s campaign manager , warned Democrats not to be complacent .
In the battleground states , she said , the “ race is far closer than some of the punditry we ’ re seeing on Twitter and on TV would suggest.
” That is certainly true .
On Tuesday @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the battleground states indicated that the contests in Arizona , Florida , and North Carolina were all within three points or so .
Biden ’ s lead in Pennsylvania was 3.8 points .
In Wisconsin , it was 6.2 points .
Charles Franklin runs the Marquette Law School poll , which has shown Biden leading among likely Wisconsin voters by four to six points since May .
The most recent Marquette poll , which was carried out after the first Presidential debate , showed Trump trailing by five points .
When I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to , he pointed to the “ overwhelming polarization ” that Wisconsin experienced during the Obama years , and which “ only got stronger in the Trump years.
” In the Marquette poll , Trump ’ s approval rating has hardly ever fallen below eighty-five to ninety per cent among self-described Republicans , while among Democrats it has rarely reached ten per cent .
With most Wisconsin residents already holding strong opinions , there are fewer potential swing voters .
So the polls don ’ t move around as much as they once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ say there hasn ’ t been any movement .
Compared with 2016 , Franklin said , two groups in particular have moved away from Trump : white women without a college degree and white men with a college degree .
“ Interestingly , those were also the two groups that in 2018 shifted to pretty strong support for the Democratic candidate for governor , and more so for the Democratic candidate for the Senate , ” Franklin said .
“ If we are looking for where swing voters are these days , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that get so much attention ” —white men without college degrees and white women with college degrees— “ it ’ s these two groups in the middle.
” The Marquette polling provides a more granular picture of the shift away from Trump among non-college-educated voters that Teixeira highlighted .
In Wisconsin , at least , this seems to be overwhelmingly a female phenomenon .
Franklin said his data indicate that white men without college degrees are still supporting Trump by more than thirty points .
But white women without college degrees are now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Marquette poll didn ’ t show a big shift in the senior vote after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic , or during the past month and a half , when the state has experienced a big spike in COVID-19 cases .
Franklin said the likely reason is that many elderly Wisconsin residents had already turned against Trump .
“ You get a lot of commentary attributing Trump ’ s loss of support among seniors to COVID , ” he said .
“ That ’ s not the case with us .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ our data.
” Among other voting groups , though , Trump ’ s handling of the pandemic may well be hurting his standing .
Franklin uses a statistical model to gauge the impact that various factors are having on voter choices .
He said the model indicates that partisanship and Trump ’ s over-all approval rating have had the biggest effects , but his handling of the coronavirus is the third-most significant factor—ahead of his handling of the economy and his response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations .
“ The statistical model @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a small but significant effect on voter preferences , ” Franklin said .
One of the reasons I was interested in speaking with Franklin is that the Marquette poll , although well-respected in political circles , is one of the state surveys that showed Clinton running well ahead of Trump in Wisconsin on the eve of the 2016 election .
( The margin was six points .
Trump ended up winning the state , albeit by fewer than twenty-three thousand votes . )
This year , the Trump campaign insists that the pollsters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conceded that this possibility can ’ t be ruled out , but he also pointed to a number of steps that he and his colleagues have taken to minimize the chances of another shocker .
“ Having gone through an experience like that , you certainly don ’ t take things for granted or be cavalier about it , ” he said .
Unlike some polls , the Marquette survey has weighted its samples by education level since 2012—which eliminates one big potential source of error .
To account for the possibility of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Trump campaign is relying on , the Marquette poll includes people who aren ’ t currently registered but say that they intend to register by the election .
( Wisconsin allows same-day registration at the polls . )
In another effort to pick up hidden Trump support , Franklin compares the intentions of previously registered voters with new registrants , and checks if they are more pro-Trump .
( At the moment , they aren ’ t , he said . )
Also , he and his colleagues eliminate some people as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Right now , though , this group actually leans more to Biden—nine points—than the over-all electorate does , Franklin said .

With just fourteen days left until Election Day, the opinion polls indicate that Joe Biden has a substantial lead over Donald Trump, and some of them are pointing to a blowout. But with memories of Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 still painfully fresh, many Democrats won’t believe he has been defeated until they see Marine One ferrying him from the South Lawn for the final time. In these circumstances, making predictions is a game best left to those hardy enough to make a profession of it. But if the polls can’t be entirely relied upon, they do provide us with the most complete snapshot available of the electorate. To get a read on what the latest polling data are telling us, I spoke on Monday with two veteran polling experts, Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Charles Franklin, a professor at Marquette University Law School.
I asked Teixeira, who is the co-author of the influential book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” from 2002, about the national polls, which show Biden with a big lead: on Tuesday morning, he was ahead by 8.6 percentage points in the Real Clear Politics poll average, and by 10.3 points in the FiveThirtyEight poll average. In breaking down this lead, there are many factors to consider. Back in June, I pointed out that, as the coronavirus continued to spread, Trump was losing older voters, a key demographic that he carried handily in 2016. The latest polling confirms this trend. In a New York Times/Siena College poll that was released on Tuesday, likely voters aged sixty-five and up favor Biden over Trump by ten points: fifty-one per cent to forty-one per cent.
Teixeira has been closely following the racial and educational demographics. From this perspective, he said, the biggest difference this year, compared with 2016, is that Trump appears to have lost a good deal of support among white voters, a group he carried by twenty points four years ago, according to exit polls. “It’s very clear what’s going on,” Teixeira said. “On the one hand, based on current trends it appears Biden is probably going to do about as well as [Hillary] Clinton did among Hispanics and Black voters—Asians are a little harder to get ahold of because they are such a small group. The big shift is among white voters, who’ve gone from the big margin they gave Trump in 2016 to being almost closely contested in some polls. That’s ridiculous for a Republican. You can’t win that way.”
The polls indicate that a good deal of Trump’s shrinking lead among white voters is a result of his alienating college-educated whites, particularly college-educated white women. Teixeira readily conceded that’s an important development, but he also pointed to a less ballyhooed development: Trump’s declining support among non-college-educated white voters—the group usually thought of as his base. In 2016, according to the exit polls, Trump carried non-college-educated whites by a whopping thirty-seven percentage points. In the latest national poll from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College, his lead over Biden in this group was only eleven percentage points. Other surveys exhibit a similar shrinkage. Teixeira shared with me some results from the latest Nationscape survey, an ongoing large-scale study of the electorate by researchers at U.C.L.A. and the Democracy Fund, a charitable foundation. Taken last week, the survey estimated Trump’s lead among white non-college-educated voters at fifteen per cent.
Some polls don’t show such a dramatic drop. For example, the new Times/Siena College survey puts Trump’s lead among white respondents without a college degree at twenty-three points, but even that represents a substantial drop from 2016. The reason these declines are so important, Teixeira said, is that the white non-college-educated demographic is so large: according to his estimates, it will constitute about forty-one per cent of the 2020 electorate. The share of white voters with a college degree will be considerably smaller: thirty-one per cent. Moreover, as many college-educated suburban voters have abandoned Trump, he has become ever more reliant on his working-class base. “This is potentially the death knell for him,” Teixeira said. “It was always true that unless he did as well or better among these voters, he was very likely going to lose the election. He isn’t doing well. He’s doing worse, and he’s doing worse by large margins.”
Ultimately, of course, the election will be decided in the Electoral College. Four years ago, Trump overcame a roughly two-point deficit in the popular vote by gaining narrow majorities in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. That enabled him to win three hundred and four votes in the Electoral College, and his best chance of getting reëlected lies in following a similar path. To pull off a repeat, he would need to turn around polling deficits in a number of Sun Belt states that he won in 2016, including Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, and then win at least one of the three Rust Belt states. If he carries two of the Rust Belt states, he could conceivably afford to lose Arizona or North Carolina.
Over this past weekend, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, warned Democrats not to be complacent. In the battleground states, she said, the “race is far closer than some of the punditry we’re seeing on Twitter and on TV would suggest.” That is certainly true. On Tuesday morning, the R.C.P. poll averages from the battleground states indicated that the contests in Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina were all within three points or so. Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania was 3.8 points. In Wisconsin, it was 6.2 points.
Charles Franklin runs the Marquette Law School poll, which has shown Biden leading among likely Wisconsin voters by four to six points since May. The most recent Marquette poll, which was carried out after the first Presidential debate, showed Trump trailing by five points. When I asked Franklin what he attributed this stability to, he pointed to the “overwhelming polarization” that Wisconsin experienced during the Obama years, which “only got stronger in the Trump years.” In the Marquette poll, Trump’s approval rating has hardly ever fallen below eighty-five to ninety per cent among self-described Republicans, while among Democrats it has rarely reached ten per cent. With most Wisconsin residents already holding strong opinions, there are fewer potential swing voters. So the polls don’t move around as much as they once did.
That isn’t to say there hasn’t been any movement. Compared with 2016, Franklin said, two groups in particular have moved away from Trump: white women without a college degree and white men with a college degree. “Interestingly, those were also the two groups that in 2018 shifted to pretty strong support for the Democratic candidate for governor, and more so for the Democratic candidate for the Senate,” Franklin said. “If we are looking for where swing voters are these days, it’s not the two polar opposites that get so much attention”—white men without college degrees and white women with college degrees—“it’s these two groups in the middle.” The Marquette polling provides a more granular picture of the shift away from Trump among non-college-educated voters that Teixeira highlighted. In Wisconsin, at least, this seems to be overwhelmingly a female phenomenon. Franklin said his data indicate that white men without college degrees are still supporting Trump by more than thirty points. But white women without college degrees are now leaning slightly toward Biden.
Surprisingly, the Marquette poll didn’t show a big shift in the senior vote after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, or during the past month and a half, when the state has experienced a big spike in COVID-19 cases. Franklin said the likely reason is that many elderly Wisconsin residents had already turned against Trump. “You get a lot of commentary attributing Trump’s loss of support among seniors to COVID,” he said. “That’s not the case with us. That loss of support predated COVID in our data.” Among other voting groups, though, Trump’s handling of the pandemic may well be hurting his standing. Franklin uses a statistical model to gauge the impact that various factors are having on voter choices. He said the model indicates that partisanship and Trump’s over-all approval rating have had the biggest effects, but his handling of the coronavirus is the third-most significant factor—ahead of his handling of the economy and his response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The statistical model suggests that the coronavirus may be having a small but significant effect on voter preferences,” Franklin said.


newyorker--2020-10-21--“Martin Eden,” Reviewed: A Slick and Hollow Adaptation of Jack London’s Novel

The movie ’ s script ( written by Marcello and Maurizio Braucci ) retains the basics of the book ’ s story : Martin Eden ( Luca Marinelli ) , a poor laborer and fervent autodidact , falls in love with a wealthy young woman ( here , named Elena and played by Jessica Cressy ) , whose brother he has rescued from a street fight .
The two plan to marry , but , yearning to become a writer , Martin endures years of poverty , which the rich Elena looks on dubiously , and then gets involved with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t stand .
Then Martin succeeds ; he becomes a rich , famous , and arrogant writer , whose ideology—actually anti-socialist , essentially libertarian—drives him away from both the rich and the poor and leaves him unmoored , isolated , and desperate .
Marcello moves the action from Oakland to Naples and updates it to a vague modern time of fashionable nostalgia—something sixties-to-seventies-ish .
He nods as passingly to this era and its fashions ( clothing , cars , typewriters , furniture ) as to a library glimpsed from a foggy window .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ignores it altogether . )
Along with that shift to a floating time , the movie is ludicrously deprived of physicality , of process , of dramatic development .
A scene of Martin dictating epigrams into a tape recorder seethes with delight in the small reel-to-reel device , with its handheld microphone , that a props person found in a thrift shop or a corporate archive ; the device , not Marinelli or anything he ’ s saying , is the star of the scene .
“ Martin Eden ” is a movie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presents them with no sense of cinematic style—there isn ’ t an image in the film that displays any imaginative or aestheticized composition , and its dramatic conception is similarly literal and lumpish .
To show that Martin is a manual laborer , Marcello offers a quick shot of him in a boat ’ s engine room ; to show that Martin is an aspiring intellectual , Marcello supplies a quick shot of him scribbling .
Elena suggests that Martin get an education ; poof—he ’ s sitting for an exam in Roman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the “ poof ” experience : quick moments that flit from one to the next , stating facts visually with no sense of process , of development , of effort .
Nobody goes from one place to the other with any sense of duration or contemplation , because Marcello gives the impression of being unable to imagine what the characters might do , might say—and , above all , might think—in the interstices of events .
No character has any discernible personality or mind ; they appear onscreen only as if to exemplify @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a fact .
( Even run-of-the-mill studio comedies and action films display more of a sense of dramatic construction and physical connection . )
The characters have no inner life ( and , for that matter , attenuated outer lives ) because Marcello endows them with no creative capacity , no sense of power or potential .
Marcello ’ s thin , earnest cinematic imagination—the absurdity of its index-card-like display of information about Martin Eden that fills the movie with literary names , with books seen but hardly heard , writings filling volumes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and passion that are merely signified—sacrifices the emotional climate of the novel , its overheated sense of first-person urgency and drive .
The tangled intensity of London ’ s quasi-autobiographical bildungsroman is straightened out , slicked down , and scrubbed away .
The only distinctive aspect of Marcello ’ s filmmaking is his reliance on sepia-toned archival footage , cut to snippets as mere evocations of a distant political history that comes in for no examination .
Heavy industry , seafaring , strikes , postwar destruction : the film merely acknowledges the turbulence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prior to the ones in which “ Martin Eden ” appears to be set and altogether ignores the political conflicts and ideological stakes of the time in which it ostensibly takes place .
Where the novel seems made amid the center of unstable and tumultuous times , with a sense of politically engaged , intellectually ardent necessity , the movie merely decorates the underlying heap of history like an artificially colored and sweetened cherry .
The one noteworthy idea in the movie concerns Martin ’ s politics—which , as in the novel , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Herbert Spencer , a sort of scientificized Nietzscheanism or proto-Ayn-Randian individualism .
Martin yields to such a philosophy with the same vanity and sense of heroism that afflicts many other presumptively or presumptuously self-made men .
Despite Martin ’ s deep sympathy for the poor , the oppressed , the laboring—the class from which he comes—he spews contempt both at the corporatist protectionism of the bourgeoisie and at the trade unionism of workers .
Yet here , too , the film ’ s lack of history is glaring .
In the nineteen-sixties @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Italy was the Communist Party , and its causes went far beyond trade unionism , which was a given .
There is a significant scene that asserts ( but never characterizes ) Martin ’ s involvement with a revolutionary group , but it isn ’ t clear whether that group is the Red Brigades or another one , because the scene comes out of the blue—Marcello offers no notion of Martin ’ s contacts with the group or his conversations with its leaders .
For that matter , Marcello pays less attention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between its two characters than to the revolutionary agent ’ s Volkswagen Beetle .
( Does that make the group the Baader-Meinhof gang ?
Who knows ? )
Martin , in his hostility to unions and to socialism , proves to be wrong—not only in ignoring the economic , social , and political power that unions provide but in the personal sense of detaching himself from his own class while also repudiating the bourgeois and upper-class society to which his success and fame admits him .
Rather than listening to workers explain what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decrees what ’ s best for them .
The very subject of the movie is a failure to listen—and the price that the uneducated person pays by being vulnerable to flashy-sounding but flimsy ideologies .
The story is a warning to intellectuals ; the lesson learned is that Martin would do well to listen—not only for the good of those who have something to say or of society at large but , especially , for his own benefit .
Yet even the tragedy to which Martin ’ s blowhard vanity inevitably leads is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adaptation , with a picture-postcard pettiness .

The new film “Martin Eden”—an adaptation of Jack London’s 1908-09 novel, from the director Pietro Marcello—is an iteration of an old fallacy: the notion that, if a movie’s subject involves intellectual matters, the movie will be intellectually substantial. What ideas “Martin Eden” has are borrowed straight from the novel; what substance the novel has the movie removes, leaving its one big, notable idea emblazoned on it like a sticker on the bumper of a car being sold in a commercial—the selling of the vehicle is the point, and the message is a matter of decorative vanity.
The movie’s script (written by Marcello and Maurizio Braucci) retains the basics of the book’s story: Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli), a poor laborer and fervent autodidact, falls in love with a wealthy young woman (here, named Elena and played by Jessica Cressy), whose brother he has rescued from a street fight. The two plan to marry, but, yearning to become a writer, Martin endures years of poverty, which the rich Elena looks on dubiously, and then gets involved with socialist politics, which she can’t stand. Then Martin succeeds; he becomes a rich, famous, and arrogant writer, whose ideology—actually anti-socialist, essentially libertarian—drives him away from both the rich and the poor and leaves him unmoored, isolated, and desperate.
Marcello moves the action from Oakland to Naples and updates it to a vague modern time of fashionable nostalgia—something sixties-to-seventies-ish. He nods as passingly to this era and its fashions (clothing, cars, typewriters, furniture) as to a library glimpsed from a foggy window. (As for its history, he ignores it altogether.) Along with that shift to a floating time, the movie is ludicrously deprived of physicality, of process, of dramatic development. A scene of Martin dictating epigrams into a tape recorder seethes with delight in the small reel-to-reel device, with its handheld microphone, that a props person found in a thrift shop or a corporate archive; the device, not Marinelli or anything he’s saying, is the star of the scene. “Martin Eden” is a movie that trades on stylish fetish objects but presents them with no sense of cinematic style—there isn’t an image in the film that displays any imaginative or aestheticized composition, and its dramatic conception is similarly literal and lumpish.
To show that Martin is a manual laborer, Marcello offers a quick shot of him in a boat’s engine room; to show that Martin is an aspiring intellectual, Marcello supplies a quick shot of him scribbling. Elena suggests that Martin get an education; poof—he’s sitting for an exam in Roman history. The movie is full of the “poof” experience: quick moments that flit from one to the next, stating facts visually with no sense of process, of development, of effort. Nobody goes from one place to the other with any sense of duration or contemplation, because Marcello gives the impression of being unable to imagine what the characters might do, might say—and, above all, might think—in the interstices of events. No character has any discernible personality or mind; they appear onscreen only as if to exemplify a line in a screenplay that states a fact. (Even run-of-the-mill studio comedies and action films display more of a sense of dramatic construction and physical connection.) The characters have no inner life (and, for that matter, attenuated outer lives) because Marcello endows them with no creative capacity, no sense of power or potential. Marcello’s thin, earnest cinematic imagination—the absurdity of its index-card-like display of information about Martin Eden that fills the movie with literary names, with books seen but hardly heard, writings filling volumes, which go unopened, with energy and passion that are merely signified—sacrifices the emotional climate of the novel, its overheated sense of first-person urgency and drive. The tangled intensity of London’s quasi-autobiographical bildungsroman is straightened out, slicked down, and scrubbed away.
The only distinctive aspect of Marcello’s filmmaking is his reliance on sepia-toned archival footage, cut to snippets as mere evocations of a distant political history that comes in for no examination. Heavy industry, seafaring, strikes, postwar destruction: the film merely acknowledges the turbulence of twentieth-century Italian history in the decades prior to the ones in which “Martin Eden” appears to be set and altogether ignores the political conflicts and ideological stakes of the time in which it ostensibly takes place. Where the novel seems made amid the center of unstable and tumultuous times, with a sense of politically engaged, intellectually ardent necessity, the movie merely decorates the underlying heap of history like an artificially colored and sweetened cherry.
The one noteworthy idea in the movie concerns Martin’s politics—which, as in the novel, involve an obsessive investment in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, a sort of scientificized Nietzscheanism or proto-Ayn-Randian individualism. Martin yields to such a philosophy with the same vanity and sense of heroism that afflicts many other presumptively or presumptuously self-made men. Despite Martin’s deep sympathy for the poor, the oppressed, the laboring—the class from which he comes—he spews contempt both at the corporatist protectionism of the bourgeoisie and at the trade unionism of workers.
Yet here, too, the film’s lack of history is glaring. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the leading political party in Italy was the Communist Party, and its causes went far beyond trade unionism, which was a given. There is a significant scene that asserts (but never characterizes) Martin’s involvement with a revolutionary group, but it isn’t clear whether that group is the Red Brigades or another one, because the scene comes out of the blue—Marcello offers no notion of Martin’s contacts with the group or his conversations with its leaders. For that matter, Marcello pays less attention in this brief scene to the connection between its two characters than to the revolutionary agent’s Volkswagen Beetle. (Does that make the group the Baader-Meinhof gang? Who knows?)
Martin, in his hostility to unions and to socialism, proves to be wrong—not only in ignoring the economic, social, and political power that unions provide but in the personal sense of detaching himself from his own class while also repudiating the bourgeois and upper-class society to which his success and fame admits him. Rather than listening to workers explain what they want and why, he arrogantly decrees what’s best for them. The very subject of the movie is a failure to listen—and the price that the uneducated person pays by being vulnerable to flashy-sounding but flimsy ideologies. The story is a warning to intellectuals; the lesson learned is that Martin would do well to listen—not only for the good of those who have something to say or of society at large but, especially, for his own benefit. Yet even the tragedy to which Martin’s blowhard vanity inevitably leads is filmed, in Marcello’s hollow adaptation, with a picture-postcard pettiness.


newyorker--2020-10-20--David Byrne’s Gray Suits, from “Stop Making Sense” to “American Utopia”

Sometime in the mid-nineteen-seventies , David Byrne bought a cheap gray polyester suit at a discount outlet in downtown Manhattan .
Talking Heads had just started playing regularly at CBGB , and Byrne was having trouble figuring out what his “ look ” should be .
What he wanted , he writes in his book “ How Music Works , ” from 2012 , was to find a way to “ start from scratch , sartorially , ” to strip the band ’ s clothing down to the basics so all that would be left was the sound .
At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he writes , but the garment “ set us apart and branded us as preppies .
.
.
we were accused of being dilettantes , and of not being ‘ serious ’ ( read : authentic or pure ) .
” Then , walking through the city , he realized that most New York businessmen were wearing nondescript suits , and he began to see it as a kind of brutalist anti-fashion statement .
“ This was a kind of uniform that intentionally eliminated ( or at least intended to eliminate ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he writes .
So Byrne decided that he would become a Suit Guy , or what he calls “ Mr .
Man On The Street , ” but the phase did not last long .
He found that the polyester made him sweat profusely onstage ; when he put the suit in the washer-dryer , it shrunk to the point that it became unwearable .
The band went back to wearing polo shirts and button-up oxfords with rolled-up sleeves , items whose Waspy connotations Byrne continued to grapple with throughout his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leather jacket crowd .
“ I soon realized when it comes to clothing , ” he writes , “ it is next to impossible to find something completely neutral .
Every outfit carries some cultural baggage of some kind.
” Byrne has always been intensely interested in the minute details of pop performance .
He saw Talking Heads not so much as a band but as a conceptual performance group .
In 2014 , when discussing “ Stop Making Sense , ” Talking Heads ’ concert film , which was directed by Jonathan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said in Time that the goal was to show that “ a pop concert could be a kind of theatre—not in the pretentious sense , but in the sense that it could be visually and even sort of dramatically sophisticated , and yet you could still dance to it.
” Demme , who died in 2017 , claims that all he had to do to make “ Stop Making Sense ” was show up and roll camera ; Byrne had already planned out each beat to an almost obsessive degree .
It was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ show piece by piece , beginning with him standing alone onstage with a tape player performing “ Psycho Killer , ” then bringing on one band member at a time to show , explicitly , how the musical sausage gets made .
In the film , the band ’ s many roadies are visible and essential : they wheel on drum kits and synthesizers ( all painted black , by the way , to allow the band to stand out from the background ) .
As one emblematic story goes , Byrne was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ singers , the legendary Edna Holt , had changed her hair the day before filming that he paid for her to get a weave .
“ Hair-whipping was a big part of the show , ” he explained .
It was also Byrne ’ s idea to wear the now iconic “ big suit ” in the second half of “ Stop Making Sense.
” While travelling in Japan , he had taken in Kabuki and Noh theatre , and was excited about the hyperbolic proportions of their costumes .
The costume designer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the big suit to the Times as “ more of an architectural project than a clothing project ” —lined the garment with needlepoint canvas to help it remain stiff and angular onstage .
Pauline Kael , the film critic for The New Yorker at the time , devoted an entire section of her review of the film to the big suit ’ s power : “ When he comes on wearing a boxlike ‘ big suit ’ —his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suit of felt that hangs off a wall—it ’ s a perfect psychological fit , ” she writes .
“ He ’ s a handsome , freaky golem .
When he dances , it isn ’ t as if he were moving the suit—the suit seems to move him.
” Byrne , who is sixty-eight—and still both freaky and handsome , albeit now with a cockatoo-like puff of white hair—is less a rock star these days than the ringleader of a Broadway company .
His latest project , “ American Utopia , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Broadway , which ended in February ; the show has been made into its own arresting concert film , this one directed by Spike Lee .
( It was released on HBOMax , on Saturday . )
And not unlike “ Stop Making Sense , ” which Kael wrote was “ like going to an austere orgy , ” “ American Utopia ” is a sumptuous spectacle built from a minimalist aesthetic .
The stage is a stark gray box , adorned only with a chain-link curtain .
The premise is simple @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perform twenty-one songs , many of them from Byrne ’ s 2018 album , which was also titled “ American Utopia.
” The song list also includes a grab bag of greatest hits : “ Once in a Lifetime , ” “ This Must Be the Place ( Naive Melody ) , ” and “ Burning Down the House.
” From out of this stripped-down formula grows a wild rumpus of percussion and modern dance , a slow-building explosion .
Byrne starts out onstage alone , sitting at a small desk , holding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brain like a middle-school science teacher .
He is then joined by the dancer-singers Tendayi Kuumba and Chris Giarmo , who slither onto the stage like grass snakes .
If you have not noticed the costumes before , you do now : all three figures onstage are wearing nearly identical , snug gray suits , with matching collared shirts underneath .
They are also , somewhat incongruously , barefoot .
As more and more band members enter the scene wearing the same uniform , the stage becomes a cacophony of global percussion , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the performers look like a business-casual army , a mildly stormy sea .
On a recent morning , I spoke with Byrne about how he devised the look of “ American Utopia.
” He said that when he made “ Stop Making Sense ” he thought of suits as a way to smuggle radical ideas under a guise of conservatism .
He was inspired by figures like the experimental theatre director Robert Wilson , who presented himself more like a banker than a member of the cultural vanguard .
“ You can kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get taken more seriously , maybe , if you dress like a professional , ” Byrne said .
With “ American Utopia , ” his approach was more pragmatic : suits were merely the easiest way to insure that everyone onstage looked both elegant and alike .
“ We ’ re not going to allow a lot of variety , ” he said .
“ There ’ s not going to be arguments about I want this and I want that.
” For Byrne , creativity is what grows up through the cracks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ performers in “ American Utopia ” all look so similar onstage , each person ’ s small adornments appear for the viewer in a kind of bas-relief .
Your eyes might fixate on Kuumba and Giarmo ’ s sparkly blue eyeshadow and crimson lips , on the drummer Jacqueline Acevedo ’ s bouncy platinum bob , the percussionist Gustavo Di Dalva ’ s duotone mohawk , the guitarist Angie Swan ’ s glittery ear studs .
You might focus on the different ways the performers point their toes and shake their hips , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moves of the choreographer Annie-B Parson .
“ We ’ re all dressed more or less the same , but everybody really maintains their individuality , ” Byrne told me .
One thing about the big suit is that it left Byrne room to maneuver .
Creating twelve tidy suits that the performers of “ American Utopia ” could squat and kick in was something else entirely .
When Byrne was first conceiving the show , in 2018 , he called Humberto Leon , one of the founders of the avant-garde fashion boutique @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regular shopper .
At the time , Leon was also designing for the Parisian house Kenzo , and Byrne had the idea that Kenzo might want to make the performers ’ suits .
Leon jumped at the challenge .
“ I think he ’ s one of the early , early musicians who really used clothing to tell a story , ” Leon told me recently .
He ended up cutting holes underneath the armpits of each costume to provide mobility .
“ We had to build a suit almost as if it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
When Leon left Kenzo , in 2019 , just as “ American Utopia ” was transitioning to the Broadway stage , he recommended as his replacement the longtime Brooklyn tailor Martin Greenfield , who has made suits for Barack Obama , Leonardo DiCaprio in “ The Great Gatsby , ” and Joaquin Phoenix in “ Joker , ” among others .
When Greenfield and his son Tod stepped in for the Broadway run , they kept the gray-suit idea , but chose a stretchier , more breathable wool blend than Leon had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cast member had two custom suits—one to sweat through and another to wear while the first one was at the cleaner ’ s .
In order to keep the suits from smelling between uses on two-show days , Greenfield told me , the wardrobe manager would spray them down with vodka .
Toward the end of Talking Heads ’ two decades together , the band was plagued by rumors of creative tension between Byrne and the other members .
In 1992 , Tina Weymouth , Chris Frantz , and Jerry Harrison told the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ found out that the band was finished after Byrne was quoted in the paper as saying , “ You could say ( we ’ ve ) broken up , or call it whatever you like.
” In “ Stop Making Sense , ” Byrne was prominently placed onstage , an outsized front man in that eye-catching big suit , while the rest of the band often receded into a shadowy blob .
It is striking how the gray suits of “ American Utopia ” accomplish the very opposite , telegraphing a rare kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hierarchy , within the group performance , even if that performance is Byrne ’ s brainchild .
Each member of the company gets a chance to solo , to stand out , to fly separately from the flock .
But then they return , again , to the drum line , a single organism suggesting not just coöperation but a kind of joyful sublimation .
In starting from common ground—a blank stage , a drumbeat , a bolt of Italian wool—the show finds a kind of shared language to build upon , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vision of utopia .

Sometime in the mid-nineteen-seventies, David Byrne bought a cheap gray polyester suit at a discount outlet in downtown Manhattan. Talking Heads had just started playing regularly at CBGB, and Byrne was having trouble figuring out what his “look” should be. What he wanted, he writes in his book “How Music Works,” from 2012, was to find a way to “start from scratch, sartorially,” to strip the band’s clothing down to the basics so all that would be left was the sound. At first, he tried wearing polo shirts, he writes, but the garment “set us apart and branded us as preppies . . . we were accused of being dilettantes, and of not being ‘serious’ (read: authentic or pure).” Then, walking through the city, he realized that most New York businessmen were wearing nondescript suits, and he began to see it as a kind of brutalist anti-fashion statement. “This was a kind of uniform that intentionally eliminated (or at least intended to eliminate) the possibility of clothing as a statement,” he writes. So Byrne decided that he would become a Suit Guy, or what he calls “Mr. Man On The Street,” but the phase did not last long. He found that the polyester made him sweat profusely onstage; when he put the suit in the washer-dryer, it shrunk to the point that it became unwearable. The band went back to wearing polo shirts and button-up oxfords with rolled-up sleeves, items whose Waspy connotations Byrne continued to grapple with throughout his early career performing amongst punks and the leather-jacket crowd. “I soon realized when it comes to clothing,” he writes, “it is next to impossible to find something completely neutral. Every outfit carries some cultural baggage of some kind.”
Byrne has always been intensely interested in the minute details of pop performance. He saw Talking Heads not so much as a band but as a conceptual performance group. In 2014, when discussing “Stop Making Sense,” Talking Heads’ concert film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme and released in 1984, Byrne said in Time that the goal was to show that “a pop concert could be a kind of theatre—not in the pretentious sense, but in the sense that it could be visually and even sort of dramatically sophisticated, and yet you could still dance to it.” Demme, who died in 2017, claims that all he had to do to make “Stop Making Sense” was show up and roll camera; Byrne had already planned out each beat to an almost obsessive degree. It was Byrne’s idea to build the show piece by piece, beginning with him standing alone onstage with a tape player performing “Psycho Killer,” then bringing on one band member at a time to show, explicitly, how the musical sausage gets made. In the film, the band’s many roadies are visible and essential: they wheel on drum kits and synthesizers (all painted black, by the way, to allow the band to stand out from the background). As one emblematic story goes, Byrne was so upset that one of his backup singers, the legendary Edna Holt, had changed her hair the day before filming that he paid for her to get a weave. “Hair-whipping was a big part of the show,” he explained.
It was also Byrne’s idea to wear the now iconic “big suit” in the second half of “Stop Making Sense.” While travelling in Japan, he had taken in Kabuki and Noh theatre, and was excited about the hyperbolic proportions of their costumes. The costume designer Gail Blacker—who, in 1984, described the big suit to the Times as “more of an architectural project than a clothing project”—lined the garment with needlepoint canvas to help it remain stiff and angular onstage. Pauline Kael, the film critic for The New Yorker at the time, devoted an entire section of her review of the film to the big suit’s power: “When he comes on wearing a boxlike ‘big suit’—his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh plays, or like Beuys’ large suit of felt that hangs off a wall—it’s a perfect psychological fit,” she writes. “He’s a handsome, freaky golem. When he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit—the suit seems to move him.”
David Byrne, in the now iconic big suit, in the Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense.” Photograph from TCD / Prod.DB / Alamy
Byrne, who is sixty-eight—and still both freaky and handsome, albeit now with a cockatoo-like puff of white hair—is less a rock star these days than the ringleader of a Broadway company. His latest project, “American Utopia,” most recently played in a limited engagement on Broadway, which ended in February; the show has been made into its own arresting concert film, this one directed by Spike Lee. (It was released on HBOMax, on Saturday.) And not unlike “Stop Making Sense,” which Kael wrote was “like going to an austere orgy,” “American Utopia” is a sumptuous spectacle built from a minimalist aesthetic. The stage is a stark gray box, adorned only with a chain-link curtain. The premise is simple: twelve performers, including Byrne, perform twenty-one songs, many of them from Byrne’s 2018 album, which was also titled “American Utopia.” The song list also includes a grab bag of greatest hits: “Once in a Lifetime,” “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” and “Burning Down the House.” From out of this stripped-down formula grows a wild rumpus of percussion and modern dance, a slow-building explosion. Byrne starts out onstage alone, sitting at a small desk, holding up a pink plastic model of a brain like a middle-school science teacher. He is then joined by the dancer-singers Tendayi Kuumba and Chris Giarmo, who slither onto the stage like grass snakes. If you have not noticed the costumes before, you do now: all three figures onstage are wearing nearly identical, snug gray suits, with matching collared shirts underneath. They are also, somewhat incongruously, barefoot. As more and more band members enter the scene wearing the same uniform, the stage becomes a cacophony of global percussion, keyboards, and electric guitars, and the performers look like a business-casual army, a mildly stormy sea.
On a recent morning, I spoke with Byrne about how he devised the look of “American Utopia.” He said that when he made “Stop Making Sense” he thought of suits as a way to smuggle radical ideas under a guise of conservatism. He was inspired by figures like the experimental theatre director Robert Wilson, who presented himself more like a banker than a member of the cultural vanguard. “You can kind of infiltrate, and you’ll get taken more seriously, maybe, if you dress like a professional,” Byrne said. With “American Utopia,” his approach was more pragmatic: suits were merely the easiest way to insure that everyone onstage looked both elegant and alike. “We’re not going to allow a lot of variety,” he said. “There’s not going to be arguments about I want this and I want that.” For Byrne, creativity is what grows up through the cracks of a controlled environment. Because the performers in “American Utopia” all look so similar onstage, each person’s small adornments appear for the viewer in a kind of bas-relief. Your eyes might fixate on Kuumba and Giarmo’s sparkly blue eyeshadow and crimson lips, on the drummer Jacqueline Acevedo’s bouncy platinum bob, the percussionist Gustavo Di Dalva’s duotone mohawk, the guitarist Angie Swan’s glittery ear studs. You might focus on the different ways the performers point their toes and shake their hips, and the exuberant, sometimes spasmodic dance moves of the choreographer Annie-B Parson. “We’re all dressed more or less the same, but everybody really maintains their individuality,” Byrne told me.
One thing about the big suit is that it left Byrne room to maneuver. Creating twelve tidy suits that the performers of “American Utopia” could squat and kick in was something else entirely. When Byrne was first conceiving the show, in 2018, he called Humberto Leon, one of the founders of the avant-garde fashion boutique Opening Ceremony, where Byrne was a regular shopper. At the time, Leon was also designing for the Parisian house Kenzo, and Byrne had the idea that Kenzo might want to make the performers’ suits. Leon jumped at the challenge. “I think he’s one of the early, early musicians who really used clothing to tell a story,” Leon told me recently. He ended up cutting holes underneath the armpits of each costume to provide mobility. “We had to build a suit almost as if it was performance wear,” he explained. When Leon left Kenzo, in 2019, just as “American Utopia” was transitioning to the Broadway stage, he recommended as his replacement the longtime Brooklyn tailor Martin Greenfield, who has made suits for Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Great Gatsby,” and Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker,” among others. When Greenfield and his son Tod stepped in for the Broadway run, they kept the gray-suit idea, but chose a stretchier, more breathable wool blend than Leon had used for the touring costumes. Each cast member had two custom suits—one to sweat through and another to wear while the first one was at the cleaner’s. In order to keep the suits from smelling between uses on two-show days, Greenfield told me, the wardrobe manager would spray them down with vodka.
Toward the end of Talking Heads’ two decades together, the band was plagued by rumors of creative tension between Byrne and the other members. In 1992, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison told the Los Angeles Times they’d only found out that the band was finished after Byrne was quoted in the paper as saying, “You could say (we’ve) broken up, or call it whatever you like.” In “Stop Making Sense,” Byrne was prominently placed onstage, an outsized front man in that eye-catching big suit, while the rest of the band often receded into a shadowy blob. It is striking how the gray suits of “American Utopia” accomplish the very opposite, telegraphing a rare kind of harmony, and a lack of hierarchy, within the group performance, even if that performance is Byrne’s brainchild. Each member of the company gets a chance to solo, to stand out, to fly separately from the flock. But then they return, again, to the drum line, a single organism suggesting not just coöperation but a kind of joyful sublimation. In starting from common ground—a blank stage, a drumbeat, a bolt of Italian wool—the show finds a kind of shared language to build upon, which perhaps is part of Byrne’s vision of utopia.