newyorker--2020-06-04--The Late-Night Revelations in “The Shapeless Unease,” a Memoir of Insomnia

There is no cure for insomnia .
Like rain , or luck , or mercy , it comes and goes at will .
There is “ sleep hygiene , ” the very wording of which seems to chide the insomniac for dirty habits , and which , more insultingly still , doesn ’ t help .
Watching Samantha Harvey obliterate the advice that ’ s so often and so smugly offered to the exhausted— “ Have you thought about a blackout blind ?
” “ Why don ’ t you spray some lavender on your pillow ?
” —is one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Shapeless Unease , ” Harvey ’ s new memoir about a year spent chasing a basic human need .
“ Have I thought about earplugs ?
” Harvey says at one point , echoing a friend .
“ Maybe that ’ s my problem , that I don ’ t think enough about earplugs.
” But , when night falls , Harvey grows desperate ; she ’ ll try anything once , twice , a hundred times .
She brews tea .
She works on jigsaw puzzles .
She smiles , to signal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and she attempts to practice “ nocturnal forgiveness , ” the temporary “ letting go of all wrongs and all guilt or blame.
” Insomnia turns Harvey into a haggler , she writes , and then into a beggar .
“ Maybe I can smuggle sleep in , ” she fantasizes , flipping onto her stomach .
“ Maybe the night won ’ t notice me.
” The book is a harrowing portrait of an intolerable problem—although there ’ s solace , too , in reading about somebody else ’ s abject @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ever looks at the clock .
“ I usually know the time , ” she writes , horrifyingly , by “ the texture of my thoughts as the night abrades them.
” ) Harvey , whose first novel , “ The Wilderness , ” addressed the ravages of Alzheimer ’ s disease , is a traverser of mental wastelands—those familiar , incommunicable terrains in which you feel , somehow , both more and less like yourself .
This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed .
As Harvey documents her emotional extremes ( at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wolf ) , the language itself unravels ; associations spiral , voices blur .
The narrator , told to cultivate a “ yes ” mind-set , lies in bed repeating the word until its letters melt into a row of “ eyes.
” “ Closeyoureyescloseyoureyes .
.
.
, ” she commands .
“ Close you ’ re yes .
Close you are , yes.
” Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes .
Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shreds of a fictional piece that Harvey is drafting about a man who loses his wedding ring while robbing an A.T.M .
A conversation with a friend is presented as screenplay dialogue .
Harvey recounts the onset of her sleep disorder in a faux-scientific case study ; a few pages later , her telling of the death , by neglect , of her childhood dog has the bewitched sparseness of a fable .
Such writing seems to mirror the logic of the sleep-starved brain : casting about , circling , trying things out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s despair and frustration , an overpowering perfume—holds the parts together .
Poetry provides some consolation .
( The narrator , seeking a détente with consciousness , adopts a phrase from Philip Larkin : “ the million-petalled flower of being here.
” ) Doctors are useless , mostly , except for when they prescribe sedatives , which achieve the desired aim for two glorious weeks and then stop working .
Harvey attributes her sleeplessness to a roulette of stresses , including Brexit .
But it becomes clear that the root problem is her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cousin to epilepsy , she types him up a letter about what he can expect as he starts to decompose .
“ A dash of vanishing-dust , a choral song of death , a transformation , and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo , lo-and-behold , the fingers that had not long been blue begin a creeping shift to something blacker .
.
.
.
” This is deranged .
One feels deranged , reading it , and part of the book ’ s disturbia may derive from its refusal to stay confined between its own covers .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ must die ?
What ’ s to stop our defenses from crumbling , our rest from evaporating ?
The shapeless unease , it turns out , is contagious .
We are living through an epoch of sleep , interrupted .
In an online speech to students at Harvard ’ s school of public health , Donn Posner , a Stanford associate professor and the president of Sleepwell Consultants , explained that the coronavirus pandemic has conjured a “ perfect storm of sleep problems.
” Normally , between thirty and thirty-five per cent of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Posner suggested , are likely increasing , thanks to the rhythmlessness , loneliness , and heightened anxiety of quarantine .
Unrest has a miasmic quality , like a viral cloud .
“ Think of sleep problems as infection , ” Posner said .
“ We want to jump on it quickly .
.
.
lest it spread.
” Yet even this metaphor proves hard to contain .
If insomnia behaves like a transmittable illness , it also reproduces the sensations of a “ cure ” for that transmission : self-isolation .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same waves of panic .
“ The night is itself without narrative , ” Harvey observes .
During bouts of little to no shut-eye , she reports , time moves “ less like a stream flowing somewhere and more like water swilling in a shallow pool.
” People lucky enough to be sheltering at home may recognize that feeling .
With its double binds and reversals , life in a pandemic feels beholden to dream logic , to the unreason of lying awake in the dark .
Harvey ’ s stuckness , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she locates in the distinction between anxiety and fear .
Anxiety responds to hypothetical danger ( the idea of a tiger ) , whereas fear signals present danger ( a tiger in the flesh ) .
Harvey contends that the peculiar madness of sleep deprivation stems from the way anxiety about not sleeping summons the inability to sleep , at which point fear of not sleeping becomes rational—but also irrational , because more vigilance intensifies the threat .
( If that makes little sense to you now , try figuring it out when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hours . )
For all the formlessness of Harvey ’ s unease , then , her insomnia does , in the end , have a shape : “ a vicious circle of Euclidean perfection.
” A sleepless night is thus a breeding ground for paradox—and Harvey , who studied philosophy as a postgraduate , makes a mighty , poignant attempt at intellectual rigor , as if the insanity of her ailment were best glimpsed through weaves of deduction .
“ I try to find a key to release me from it , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ solve the logic problem that is now my life.
” One can almost diagram her efforts : If the narrator ’ s inability to nod off ( x ) has something to do with uncertainty ( y ) , which has to do with loss ( z ) —of her cousin , her country—and if that loss ( z ) stands in for death ( d ) , then .
.
.
Such anxious games clarify the contradictions of insomnia .
A fear of deprivation can steal everything away , and a terror @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one craves temporary nonexistence , simply to relieve it .
But understanding these paradoxes doesn ’ t help Harvey sleep .
The book seems at least as interested in the limits of reason as it is in reason itself—at one point , Harvey describes “ a complex but specific compression of .
.
.
futility , despair , tenacity , ” which is as good an evocation as any of how it might feel to continually deploy logic against illogic .
Surrender , Harvey realizes , can ’ t be willed or forced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through insomnia .
But you might try to reconcile yourself to “ this constant crackling and sparking and exploding of mind ” —to view your awareness as a pure and abundant resource .
Harvey , like a dragon on a treasure pile , begins to guard her mountain of sentience , striving for the relaxation that might , in time , embolden a thief to take it .
“ I am alive , ” she thinks .
As consolations go , it is the sort of limp sentiment one associates with “ sleep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in it starts to stir .
“ I can feel my life being on.
” One night , a year or so into her insomnia , Harvey falls effortlessly asleep .
The next night , it happens again .
The narrator compares the end of her bedroom vigils to walking out from under the arc of an enormous wave .
Writing , Harvey reflects , was her ally on the journey to dry land .
“ I am sane when I write , ” she explains .
“ I proceed from some open @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me ’ , definable only by being nothing and nowhere , just the silence in which shapes move.
” The silence in which shapes move .
To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases ; she ’ s an author you want to encounter with pencil in hand .
But this lovely description of the creative process also made me laugh .
Harvey , that “ open .
.
.
formlessness , ” herself emerges as the shapeless unease .
This is the evasive “ cure for insomnia , ” she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fixed.
” For Harvey , self-expression gives rise to a form of self-reconciliation .
Reading her book , I thought of a trick that sometimes helps when the world ’ s ills seem to throng at my bedside .
“ Relax , ” I ’ ll tell my brain , as kindly as I can .
“ It ’ s just me .
”

There is no cure for insomnia. Like rain, or luck, or mercy, it comes and goes at will. There is “sleep hygiene,” the very wording of which seems to chide the insomniac for dirty habits, and which, more insultingly still, doesn’t help. Watching Samantha Harvey obliterate the advice that’s so often and so smugly offered to the exhausted—“Have you thought about a blackout blind?” “Why don’t you spray some lavender on your pillow?”—is one of the grim pleasures of “The Shapeless Unease,” Harvey’s new memoir about a year spent chasing a basic human need. “Have I thought about earplugs?” Harvey says at one point, echoing a friend. “Maybe that’s my problem, that I don’t think enough about earplugs.”
But, when night falls, Harvey grows desperate; she’ll try anything once, twice, a hundred times. She brews tea. She works on jigsaw puzzles. She smiles, to signal to her brain that she is content, and she attempts to practice “nocturnal forgiveness,” the temporary “letting go of all wrongs and all guilt or blame.” Insomnia turns Harvey into a haggler, she writes, and then into a beggar. “Maybe I can smuggle sleep in,” she fantasizes, flipping onto her stomach. “Maybe the night won’t notice me.” The book is a harrowing portrait of an intolerable problem—although there’s solace, too, in reading about somebody else’s abject 3 a.m.s. (Not that Harvey ever looks at the clock. “I usually know the time,” she writes, horrifyingly, by “the texture of my thoughts as the night abrades them.”)
Harvey, whose first novel, “The Wilderness,” addressed the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, is a traverser of mental wastelands—those familiar, incommunicable terrains in which you feel, somehow, both more and less like yourself. This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed. As Harvey documents her emotional extremes (at one point, she howls like a wolf), the language itself unravels; associations spiral, voices blur. The narrator, told to cultivate a “yes” mind-set, lies in bed repeating the word until its letters melt into a row of “eyes.” “Closeyoureyescloseyoureyes . . . ,” she commands. “Close you’re yes. Close you are, yes.”
Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories. There are shreds of a fictional piece that Harvey is drafting about a man who loses his wedding ring while robbing an A.T.M. A conversation with a friend is presented as screenplay dialogue. Harvey recounts the onset of her sleep disorder in a faux-scientific case study; a few pages later, her telling of the death, by neglect, of her childhood dog has the bewitched sparseness of a fable. Such writing seems to mirror the logic of the sleep-starved brain: casting about, circling, trying things out and then dropping them. Atmosphere—Harvey’s despair and frustration, an overpowering perfume—holds the parts together.
Poetry provides some consolation. (The narrator, seeking a détente with consciousness, adopts a phrase from Philip Larkin: “the million-petalled flower of being here.”) Doctors are useless, mostly, except for when they prescribe sedatives, which achieve the desired aim for two glorious weeks and then stop working. Harvey attributes her sleeplessness to a roulette of stresses, including Brexit. But it becomes clear that the root problem is her terror of death. After losing a cousin to epilepsy, she types him up a letter about what he can expect as he starts to decompose. “A dash of vanishing-dust, a choral song of death, a transformation, and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, lo-and-behold, the fingers that had not long been blue begin a creeping shift to something blacker. . . .” This is deranged. One feels deranged, reading it, and part of the book’s disturbia may derive from its refusal to stay confined between its own covers. Is it not true that we all must die? What’s to stop our defenses from crumbling, our rest from evaporating? The shapeless unease, it turns out, is contagious.
We are living through an epoch of sleep, interrupted. In an online speech to students at Harvard’s school of public health, Donn Posner, a Stanford associate professor and the president of Sleepwell Consultants, explained that the coronavirus pandemic has conjured a “perfect storm of sleep problems.” Normally, between thirty and thirty-five per cent of Americans experience short-term insomnia; those numbers, Posner suggested, are likely increasing, thanks to the rhythmlessness, loneliness, and heightened anxiety of quarantine.
Unrest has a miasmic quality, like a viral cloud. “Think of sleep problems as infection,” Posner said. “We want to jump on it quickly . . . lest it spread.” Yet even this metaphor proves hard to contain. If insomnia behaves like a transmittable illness, it also reproduces the sensations of a “cure” for that transmission: self-isolation. There are the same borderless hours, the same waves of panic. “The night is itself without narrative,” Harvey observes. During bouts of little to no shut-eye, she reports, time moves “less like a stream flowing somewhere and more like water swilling in a shallow pool.” People lucky enough to be sheltering at home may recognize that feeling. With its double binds and reversals, life in a pandemic feels beholden to dream logic, to the unreason of lying awake in the dark.
Harvey’s stuckness, though, has a particular source, which she locates in the distinction between anxiety and fear. Anxiety responds to hypothetical danger (the idea of a tiger), whereas fear signals present danger (a tiger in the flesh). Harvey contends that the peculiar madness of sleep deprivation stems from the way anxiety about not sleeping summons the inability to sleep, at which point fear of not sleeping becomes rational—but also irrational, because more vigilance intensifies the threat. (If that makes little sense to you now, try figuring it out when you’ve been awake for forty hours.) For all the formlessness of Harvey’s unease, then, her insomnia does, in the end, have a shape: “a vicious circle of Euclidean perfection.”
A sleepless night is thus a breeding ground for paradox—and Harvey, who studied philosophy as a postgraduate, makes a mighty, poignant attempt at intellectual rigor, as if the insanity of her ailment were best glimpsed through weaves of deduction. “I try to find a key to release me from it,” Harvey writes. “I try to solve the logic problem that is now my life.” One can almost diagram her efforts: If the narrator’s inability to nod off (x) has something to do with uncertainty (y), which has to do with loss (z)—of her cousin, her country—and if that loss (z) stands in for death (d), then . . . Such anxious games clarify the contradictions of insomnia. A fear of deprivation can steal everything away, and a terror of nonexistence can prove so acute that one craves temporary nonexistence, simply to relieve it.
But understanding these paradoxes doesn’t help Harvey sleep. The book seems at least as interested in the limits of reason as it is in reason itself—at one point, Harvey describes “a complex but specific compression of . . . futility, despair, tenacity,” which is as good an evocation as any of how it might feel to continually deploy logic against illogic. Surrender, Harvey realizes, can’t be willed or forced: you can’t think yourself through insomnia. But you might try to reconcile yourself to “this constant crackling and sparking and exploding of mind”—to view your awareness as a pure and abundant resource. Harvey, like a dragon on a treasure pile, begins to guard her mountain of sentience, striving for the relaxation that might, in time, embolden a thief to take it. “I am alive,” she thinks. As consolations go, it is the sort of limp sentiment one associates with “sleep hygiene,” until the petrified grace in it starts to stir. “I can feel my life being on.”
One night, a year or so into her insomnia, Harvey falls effortlessly asleep. The next night, it happens again. The narrator compares the end of her bedroom vigils to walking out from under the arc of an enormous wave. Writing, Harvey reflects, was her ally on the journey to dry land. “I am sane when I write,” she explains. “I proceed from some open and elusive subconscious formlessness roughly called ‘me’, definable only by being nothing and nowhere, just the silence in which shapes move.” The silence in which shapes move. To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases; she’s an author you want to encounter with pencil in hand. But this lovely description of the creative process also made me laugh. Harvey, that “open . . . formlessness,” herself emerges as the shapeless unease. This is the evasive “cure for insomnia,” she writes: that “no things are fixed.” For Harvey, self-expression gives rise to a form of self-reconciliation. Reading her book, I thought of a trick that sometimes helps when the world’s ills seem to throng at my bedside. “Relax,” I’ll tell my brain, as kindly as I can. “It’s just me.”


newyorker--2020-06-04--“Shirley,” Reviewed: Josephine Decker’s Furious Melodrama of Shirley Jackson’s Life and Art

Josephine Decker ’ s films are often misguidedly referred to as “ experimental.
” That word should be reserved for movies made by scientists in their laboratories ; a better word for certain unusual movies is “ non-narrative , ” but it doesn ’ t fit here—Decker ’ s films all have clear , coherent stories .
On the other hand , Decker ’ s new film , “ Shirley , ” her fourth feature ( which opens Friday , online ) , a refracted bio-pic of Shirley Jackson , is indeed experimental—it ’ s an audacious director ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ successful one .
It ’ s Decker ’ s first feature made with major stars , her first one produced within the industry , her first with a script that she didn ’ t write—her first contact with the norms and demands of the industry .
Yet it ’ s also a movie of scathing inward turbulence that , if it doesn ’ t quite match Decker ’ s other films in comprehensive originality , nonetheless expands the commercial cinema with new tones , moods , and styles of a sort that few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a script by Sarah Gubbins ( which , in turn , is based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell ) , “ Shirley ” stars Elisabeth Moss as Shirley Jackson , in a narrowly focussed biographical episode that ’ s centered on the composition of her 1951 novel “ Hangsaman , ” the story of the disappearance of a female college student .
Jackson based it loosely on the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden , a student at Bennington College , where Jackson ’ s husband , the critic Stanley Edgar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ co-stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Hyman , and it dramatizes the emotional , artistic , and sexual fury that binds the couple even as it threatens to rupture their bond .
The drama is built around another character , though , a fictional one : Rose Nemser ( Odessa Young ) , a young woman who arrives at Bennington with her husband , Fred Nemser ( Logan Lerman ) .
A newly minted Ph.D. , Fred has been recruited by Stanley as a postgraduate fellow , and Rose will be a student at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she ’ s pregnant . )
Instead , through Stanley ’ s manipulations , Rose becomes something of a housekeeper in the Jackson-Hyman household , as well as Shirley ’ s unofficial research assistant , her friend , her confidante , her object of desire—and her living model for the protagonist of “ Hangsaman ” —as the Nemsers get drawn into the family ’ s vortex of emotional chaos and their marriage begins to fray .
( Despite the hint of “ Who ’ s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?
, ” “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ artist ’ s inner life . )
“ Shirley ” is a peculiar sort of romantic melodrama .
It captures the authentic high-energy bond between Shirley and Stanley ( speaking , of course , of the characters ) , the volatile convergence and codependence of two prodigious creators—but also the two women ’ s ferocious bond—including the consciousness-raising that Rose gets from Shirley , a free-thinking and free-speaking woman with a major independent career who is nonetheless a trapped and desperate wife .
When the Nemsers arrive at the Jackson house—an old , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ near the Bennington campus—they find it in a state of artificial exuberance .
Stanley is hosting a party on the porch , dancing gleefully , and greeting the Nemsers with a florid grandeur ( his default public manner ) that belies the truth of the situation .
Shirley is parked inside on a sofa , enduring agoraphobic anxiety , forced to endure a swarm of guests while unable to even set foot out the door and onto the porch , and unable to write , even as her sudden fame , from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year of her story “ The Lottery , ” is mounting .
As befits a movie about a great writer and a great critic , Gubbins ’ s script is sharply , aphoristically literary—it ’ s among the few movies about writers that offers writers ’ dialogue that ’ s persuasively imaginative .
Decker , in turn , elicits impulsive , even reckless performances from Moss and Stuhlbarg that capture the dangerous power of thought in action ( as well as its sophisticated and lacerating humor ) .
Much of that danger is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pugnacious impact that the older couple have on the naïve and innocent Nemsers , who get targeted , separately and together , by Shirley , from the moment of their arrival , in a sort of emotional hazing .
Stanley takes himself to be something of Shirley ’ s coach , trainer , and editor .
He ’ s also a master manipulator , who takes advantage of Fred ’ s dependence on him for career advancement to get Rose to put her studies aside and do the housework—cooking , cleaning , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he can help get Shirley back into writing shape .
Instead , while the two men are on campus all day , Rose is alone at the house with Shirley—and the writer ’ s idea for the book emerges as a kind of spontaneous inspiration , on the sight of Rose , that ’ s also a sort of telepathic mind-meld .
Stanley himself has a hand in the shock treatment the Nemsers receive .
Forcing Shirley to the dinner table for first meal that Rose prepares , he tells her , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ behave at the table.
” Shirley doesn ’ t behave ; she stirs up trouble between the Nemsers and drives them away from the table—and then , alone with Stanley , discloses her plans for the novel , which instantly becomes a source of contention between them , bound up with Stanley ’ s own infidelities .
( The movie hints that they have an open marriage , mainly as a one-way street for Stanley ’ s affairs . )
Yet , as Shirley becomes both increasingly inspired and enabled by Rose ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from his usual role as her writing coach and editor—she is , in effect , breaking free at an enormous price , testing and even imperilling her already conflict-torn marriage to discover and develop a new creative power .
Yet Shirley also owes a crucial part of that new power to Rose , who both offers a crucial insight into the disappearance of Paula and becomes Shirley ’ s model for the novel ’ s protagonist ( who is also played by Young in the writer ’ s fantasy sequences ) .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to maintain her place in Shirley ’ s life ( leading to a more complex and troubled view of two women ’ s artist-model relationship than the one in “ Portrait of a Lady on Fire ” ) .
Decker ’ s work with “ Shirley ” invites comparison to another filmmaker whose career expanded upon contact with grand-scale melodrama : Douglas Sirk , whose first major commercial success came with the 1954 film “ Magnificent Obsession.
” It was based on a script that was handed to Sirk by a studio producer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” its power came less from the sharpness of the writing than from what he did with it .
Sirk said ( in interviews with Jon Halliday published as “ Sirk on Sirk ” ) , “ One of the foremost things of picture-making , I think , is to bend your material to your style and your purpose .
A director is really a story-bender .
.
.
.
You have to write with the camera.
” In “ Shirley , ” Decker writes with the camera .
The cinematographer Sturla @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , darting , intensely active camera work creates a kind of fluid substance of time that , rather than merely depicting or even inflecting the drama , becomes the drama—the oceanic current of passion on which the action surfaces .
“ Shirley ” is the third of Decker ’ s features ( the others are “ Butter on the Latch ” and “ Madeline ’ s Madeline ” ) that involve female artists , and “ Shirley ” similarly relies on a repertory of methods—hallucinatory images , disjunctive editing ( by David Barker @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( by Tamar-kali , along with archival recordings ) , sound effects , and voices leave drama behind to suggest states of mind , fantasy and dream sequences , and performances of an eruptive emotional violence—that fuse the struggle of creation and the struggles of life , bitter external practicalities and raging internal clamor ( including the terror and the destructive force of mental illness ) .

Josephine Decker’s films are often misguidedly referred to as “experimental.” That word should be reserved for movies made by scientists in their laboratories; a better word for certain unusual movies is “non-narrative,” but it doesn’t fit here—Decker’s films all have clear, coherent stories. On the other hand, Decker’s new film, “Shirley,” her fourth feature (which opens Friday, online), a refracted bio-pic of Shirley Jackson, is indeed experimental—it’s an audacious director’s experiment in commercial filmmaking, and a successful one. It’s Decker’s first feature made with major stars, her first one produced within the industry, her first with a script that she didn’t write—her first contact with the norms and demands of the industry. Yet it’s also a movie of scathing inward turbulence that, if it doesn’t quite match Decker’s other films in comprehensive originality, nonetheless expands the commercial cinema with new tones, moods, and styles of a sort that few other filmmakers have brought.
Working with a script by Sarah Gubbins (which, in turn, is based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell), “Shirley” stars Elisabeth Moss as Shirley Jackson, in a narrowly focussed biographical episode that’s centered on the composition of her 1951 novel “Hangsaman,” the story of the disappearance of a female college student. The film suggests that Jackson based it loosely on the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, a student at Bennington College, where Jackson’s husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, taught. “Shirley” co-stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Hyman, and it dramatizes the emotional, artistic, and sexual fury that binds the couple even as it threatens to rupture their bond.
The drama is built around another character, though, a fictional one: Rose Nemser (Odessa Young), a young woman who arrives at Bennington with her husband, Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman). A newly minted Ph.D., Fred has been recruited by Stanley as a postgraduate fellow, and Rose will be a student at the college. (Unbeknownst to Fred, she’s pregnant.) Instead, through Stanley’s manipulations, Rose becomes something of a housekeeper in the Jackson-Hyman household, as well as Shirley’s unofficial research assistant, her friend, her confidante, her object of desire—and her living model for the protagonist of “Hangsaman”—as the Nemsers get drawn into the family’s vortex of emotional chaos and their marriage begins to fray. (Despite the hint of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “Shirley” is after something else altogether—the artist’s inner life.)
“Shirley” is a peculiar sort of romantic melodrama. It captures the authentic high-energy bond between Shirley and Stanley (speaking, of course, of the characters), the volatile convergence and codependence of two prodigious creators—but also the two women’s ferocious bond—including the consciousness-raising that Rose gets from Shirley, a free-thinking and free-speaking woman with a major independent career who is nonetheless a trapped and desperate wife. When the Nemsers arrive at the Jackson house—an old, well-appointed, spacious, and ivy-covered one near the Bennington campus—they find it in a state of artificial exuberance. Stanley is hosting a party on the porch, dancing gleefully, and greeting the Nemsers with a florid grandeur (his default public manner) that belies the truth of the situation. Shirley is parked inside on a sofa, enduring agoraphobic anxiety, forced to endure a swarm of guests while unable to even set foot out the door and onto the porch, and unable to write, even as her sudden fame, from the publication in The New Yorker earlier that year of her story “The Lottery,” is mounting.
As befits a movie about a great writer and a great critic, Gubbins’s script is sharply, aphoristically literary—it’s among the few movies about writers that offers writers’ dialogue that’s persuasively imaginative. Decker, in turn, elicits impulsive, even reckless performances from Moss and Stuhlbarg that capture the dangerous power of thought in action (as well as its sophisticated and lacerating humor). Much of that danger is on view from the start, in the pugnacious impact that the older couple have on the naïve and innocent Nemsers, who get targeted, separately and together, by Shirley, from the moment of their arrival, in a sort of emotional hazing.
Stanley takes himself to be something of Shirley’s coach, trainer, and editor. He’s also a master manipulator, who takes advantage of Fred’s dependence on him for career advancement to get Rose to put her studies aside and do the housework—cooking, cleaning, shopping, and waiting on Shirley—so that he can help get Shirley back into writing shape. Instead, while the two men are on campus all day, Rose is alone at the house with Shirley—and the writer’s idea for the book emerges as a kind of spontaneous inspiration, on the sight of Rose, that’s also a sort of telepathic mind-meld.
Stanley himself has a hand in the shock treatment the Nemsers receive. Forcing Shirley to the dinner table for first meal that Rose prepares, he tells her, “I didn’t ask you to behave at the table.” Shirley doesn’t behave; she stirs up trouble between the Nemsers and drives them away from the table—and then, alone with Stanley, discloses her plans for the novel, which instantly becomes a source of contention between them, bound up with Stanley’s own infidelities. (The movie hints that they have an open marriage, mainly as a one-way street for Stanley’s affairs.) Yet, as Shirley becomes both increasingly inspired and enabled by Rose’s presence, she drives Stanley away from his usual role as her writing coach and editor—she is, in effect, breaking free at an enormous price, testing and even imperilling her already conflict-torn marriage to discover and develop a new creative power. Yet Shirley also owes a crucial part of that new power to Rose, who both offers a crucial insight into the disappearance of Paula and becomes Shirley’s model for the novel’s protagonist (who is also played by Young in the writer’s fantasy sequences). In the process, Rose begins to fight to maintain her place in Shirley’s life (leading to a more complex and troubled view of two women’s artist-model relationship than the one in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”).
Decker’s work with “Shirley” invites comparison to another filmmaker whose career expanded upon contact with grand-scale melodrama: Douglas Sirk, whose first major commercial success came with the 1954 film “Magnificent Obsession.” It was based on a script that was handed to Sirk by a studio producer, but, as in “Shirley,” its power came less from the sharpness of the writing than from what he did with it. Sirk said (in interviews with Jon Halliday published as “Sirk on Sirk”), “One of the foremost things of picture-making, I think, is to bend your material to your style and your purpose. A director is really a story-bender. . . . You have to write with the camera.”
In “Shirley,” Decker writes with the camera. The cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s roving, probing, darting, intensely active camera work creates a kind of fluid substance of time that, rather than merely depicting or even inflecting the drama, becomes the drama—the oceanic current of passion on which the action surfaces. “Shirley” is the third of Decker’s features (the others are “Butter on the Latch” and “Madeline’s Madeline”) that involve female artists, and “Shirley” similarly relies on a repertory of methods—hallucinatory images, disjunctive editing (by David Barker), collage-like soundtracks in which music (by Tamar-kali, along with archival recordings), sound effects, and voices leave drama behind to suggest states of mind, fantasy and dream sequences, and performances of an eruptive emotional violence—that fuse the struggle of creation and the struggles of life, bitter external practicalities and raging internal clamor (including the terror and the destructive force of mental illness). The element of emotional, and sometimes physical, danger inherent in the lives of artists—and of women—lends all of Decker's features the aspect of horror films.
Amazingly, “Shirley”—both despite and by means of its expanded mode of production—includes all of these elements and yet makes use of the expectations of the bio-pic genre, namely, the attention to stars and their power to incarnate other stars, as an additional vector of invention. Far from detracting or distracting from the actors, the agile images and intricate soundtrack heighten and magnify the dramatic and emotional details of their performances. Decker’s elaborate audiovisual imagination—which includes voice-overs of Shirley’s first draft of the novel—turns the writing process into a kind of real-time performance akin to those at the center of “Madeline’s Madeline” and to the music and dance at the heart of “Butter on the Latch.”


newyorker--2020-06-04--Is America Becoming a Banana Republic?

Is America Becoming a Banana Republic?

In the early nineteen-hundreds , the American writer O. Henry coined the term “ banana republic ” in a series of short stories , most famously in one about the fictional country of Anchuria .
It was based on his experience in Honduras , where he had fled for a few months , to avoid prosecution in Texas , for embezzling money from the bank where he worked .
The term—which originally referred to a politically unstable country run by a dictator and his cronies , with an economy dependent on a single product—took on a life of its own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ banana republic ” has evolved to mean any country ( with or without bananas ) that has a ruthless , corrupt , or just plain loopy leader who relies on the military and destroys state institutions in an egomaniacal quest for prolonged power .
I ’ ve covered plenty of them , including Idi Amin ’ s Uganda , in the nineteen-seventies , Muammar Qaddafi ’ s Libya , in the nineteen-eighties , and Carlos Menem ’ s Argentina , in the nineteen-nineties .
During the heated Presidential campaign of 2016 , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ politics , often glibly .
President Trump invoked it in October , 2016 .
“ This election will determine whether we remain a free country in the truest sense of the word or we become a corrupt banana republic controlled by large donors and foreign governments , ” he told a cheering crowd in Florida .
After the second Presidential debate , in October , Robby Mook , the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton , countered , “ Donald Trump thinks that the Presidency is like some banana republic dictatorship where you can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phrase has become an undercurrent in the national political debate ever since .
Over the past week , however , the President ’ s response to the escalating protests over the killing of George Floyd has deepened the debate about what is happening to America .
The House Speaker , Nancy Pelosi—the third most powerful politician in the the land—described the experience of her daughter , a filmmaker and journalist , when men in fatigues used chemical agents and body armor to force her fellow peaceful protesters aside so Trump could walk to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Monday night , for a fleeting photo op where he waved the Bible .
On Wednesday , Pelosi bluntly asked , on MSNBC ’ s “ Morning Joe , ” “ What is this , a banana republic ?
” The answer is no longer facile .
Later that day , James Mattis , the former Defense Secretary , issued a scathing rebuke of President Trump , his former boss .
Mattis described being “ angry and appalled ” at the use of the U.S. military against the American people and the description @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Pentagon , Mark Esper , as “ battlespace ” to be dominated .
” When I joined the military , some fifty years ago , I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution .
Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief , with military leadership standing alongside , ” he said , in a statement to The Atlantic .
Pictures of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—a site that symbolizes reconciliation and healing after our Civil War—clad in camouflage , flak jackets , and body armor , added to the sense that America is in the midst of a defining national crisis .
Mattis raged at the President personally , accusing him of deliberately trying to divide the country .
“ We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square , ” he said .
He went one big step further , demanding that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a mockery of our Constitution ” must be held accountable .
Scholars and current and former policymakers say that Trump ’ s historical legacy increasingly appears to be the undoing of American democracy .
“ We are far too complacent about the durability of our system , ” Robert Kagan , a historian at the Brookings Institution and the author of “ The Jungle Grows Back : America and Our Imperiled World , ” told me .
“ So much of what makes our system work is the general fidelity to a democratic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Trump has proved that “ our system has within it the capacity to be subverted , ” Kagan said .
The brilliance of America ’ s Founders was designing a constitution with checks and balances to ensure that the instruments of power served the people and the Constitution—and limited the Presidency .
“ The founders hoped that Congress would be jealous of its prerogatives and the independent judiciary would be jealous of its role , and that each actor would have a certain devotion to the republican spirit—little ‘ R ’ —and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President more concerned for his own interests than the rights of the general population , ” Kagan said .
“ The amazing thing is that , throughout our history , that really has sort of been the case.
” No longer , he added .
At the direction of President Trump , the core institutions that once insured the daily functions of the state and the peaceful transition of leadership have been seriously eroded .
At the Department of Justice , Attorney General William Barr overrode his own prosecutors in the sentencing of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He urged that charges against Michael Flynn , Trump ’ s first short-lived national security adviser , be dropped , even though Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I .
In the case of Paul Manafort , Trump ’ s former campaign manager , the President launched a Twitter tirade against Judge Amy Berman Jackson , including the false charge , “ Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT , something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure ?
” Corrections officials , not judges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ held .
“ If they can do that to protect the President ’ s friends , they can also be used against the President ’ s enemies , ” Kagan said .
The White House has been doing that , too .
In just six weeks this spring , the Trump Administration fired four inspectors general , officials who investigate and report to Congress cases of fraud , waste , and abuse of government funds .
At the request of the Secretary of State , Mike Pompeo , Steve Linick was fired while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was bypassing congressional approval to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and whether Pompeo and his wife assigned government personnel to do their personal errands .
Trump removed Michael Atkinson as inspector general for the intelligence community in reprisal for his role in notifying Congress about a C.I.A .
whistle-blower who charged that the President abused his power in trying to coerce Ukraine to take actions that would have benefitted Trump politically .
“ He took a fake report and he brought it to Congress with an emergency , O.K.
?
Not a big @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you , ” the President told reporters , in April .
Trump also ousted Glenn Fine , the inspector general at the Pentagon who was to lead a new watchdog organization to police how the United States spent trillions of dollars in coronavirus relief .
The President also fired Christi Grimm , at the Department of Health and Human Services , after its report outlining “ severe shortages ” of testing supplies , personal protective equipment ( P.P.E . )
, ventilators , and support staff crippled the ability to adequately deal with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ patients at risk.
” On Wednesday , Scott Dahl , the inspector general at the Labor Department , retired—voluntarily , he said .
Earlier this week , Dahl told a House oversight subcommittee about a “ significant amount of fraud ” in unemployment programs during the pandemic .

In the early nineteen-hundreds, the American writer O. Henry coined the term “banana republic” in a series of short stories, most famously in one about the fictional country of Anchuria. It was based on his experience in Honduras, where he had fled for a few months, to avoid prosecution in Texas, for embezzling money from the bank where he worked. The term—which originally referred to a politically unstable country run by a dictator and his cronies, with an economy dependent on a single product—took on a life of its own. Over the past century, “banana republic” has evolved to mean any country (with or without bananas) that has a ruthless, corrupt, or just plain loopy leader who relies on the military and destroys state institutions in an egomaniacal quest for prolonged power. I’ve covered plenty of them, including Idi Amin’s Uganda, in the nineteen-seventies, Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, in the nineteen-eighties, and Carlos Menem’s Argentina, in the nineteen-nineties.
During the heated Presidential campaign of 2016, the term made its way into mainstream American politics, often glibly. President Trump invoked it in October, 2016. “This election will determine whether we remain a free country in the truest sense of the word or we become a corrupt banana republic controlled by large donors and foreign governments,” he told a cheering crowd in Florida. After the second Presidential debate, in October, Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, countered, “Donald Trump thinks that the Presidency is like some banana republic dictatorship where you can lock up your political opponents.” The phrase has become an undercurrent in the national political debate ever since.
Over the past week, however, the President’s response to the escalating protests over the killing of George Floyd has deepened the debate about what is happening to America. The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi—the third most powerful politician in the the land—described the experience of her daughter, a filmmaker and journalist, when men in fatigues used chemical agents and body armor to force her fellow peaceful protesters aside so Trump could walk to St. John’s Church, on Monday night, for a fleeting photo op where he waved the Bible. On Wednesday, Pelosi bluntly asked, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “What is this, a banana republic?”
The answer is no longer facile. Later that day, James Mattis, the former Defense Secretary, issued a scathing rebuke of President Trump, his former boss. Mattis described being “angry and appalled” at the use of the U.S. military against the American people and the description of American cities by his successor at the Pentagon, Mark Esper, as “battlespace” to be dominated. ”When I joined the military, some fifty years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside,” he said, in a statement to The Atlantic.
Pictures of National Guard troops arrayed in tight rows on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—a site that symbolizes reconciliation and healing after our Civil War—clad in camouflage, flak jackets, and body armor, added to the sense that America is in the midst of a defining national crisis. Mattis raged at the President personally, accusing him of deliberately trying to divide the country. “We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square,” he said. He went one big step further, demanding that “those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution” must be held accountable.
Scholars and current and former policymakers say that Trump’s historical legacy increasingly appears to be the undoing of American democracy. “We are far too complacent about the durability of our system,” Robert Kagan, a historian at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World,” told me. “So much of what makes our system work is the general fidelity to a democratic ethos on the part of everybody involved.” Trump has proved that “our system has within it the capacity to be subverted,” Kagan said. The brilliance of America’s Founders was designing a constitution with checks and balances to ensure that the instruments of power served the people and the Constitution—and limited the Presidency. “The founders hoped that Congress would be jealous of its prerogatives and the independent judiciary would be jealous of its role, and that each actor would have a certain devotion to the republican spirit—little ‘R’—and defend it against potential threats from a President more concerned for his own interests than the rights of the general population,” Kagan said. “The amazing thing is that, throughout our history, that really has sort of been the case.” No longer, he added. At the direction of President Trump, the core institutions that once insured the daily functions of the state and the peaceful transition of leadership have been seriously eroded.
At the Department of Justice, Attorney General William Barr overrode his own prosecutors in the sentencing of Roger Stone, a Trump ally. He urged that charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first short-lived national security adviser, be dropped, even though Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. In the case of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, the President launched a Twitter tirade against Judge Amy Berman Jackson, including the false charge, “Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure?” Corrections officials, not judges, determine how and where prisoners are held. “If they can do that to protect the President’s friends, they can also be used against the President’s enemies,” Kagan said.
The White House has been doing that, too. In just six weeks this spring, the Trump Administration fired four inspectors general, officials who investigate and report to Congress cases of fraud, waste, and abuse of government funds. At the request of the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Steve Linick was fired while he was investigating whether the State Department was bypassing congressional approval to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and whether Pompeo and his wife assigned government personnel to do their personal errands. Trump removed Michael Atkinson as inspector general for the intelligence community in reprisal for his role in notifying Congress about a C.I.A. whistle-blower who charged that the President abused his power in trying to coerce Ukraine to take actions that would have benefitted Trump politically. “He took a fake report and he brought it to Congress with an emergency, O.K.? Not a big Trump fan, that I can tell you,” the President told reporters, in April. Trump also ousted Glenn Fine, the inspector general at the Pentagon who was to lead a new watchdog organization to police how the United States spent trillions of dollars in coronavirus relief. The President also fired Christi Grimm, at the Department of Health and Human Services, after its report outlining “severe shortages” of testing supplies, personal protective equipment (P.P.E.), ventilators, and support staff crippled the ability to adequately deal with the pandemic and “put staff and patients at risk.” On Wednesday, Scott Dahl, the inspector general at the Labor Department, retired—voluntarily, he said. Earlier this week, Dahl told a House oversight subcommittee about a “significant amount of fraud” in unemployment programs during the pandemic.
The protests have deepened the institutional crisis—and made it all the more visible and worrisome, even to career military officers long experienced in dealing with instability. The retired lieutenant general Doug Lute, a deputy national-security adviser under both the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations and a former ambassador to NATO, told me that he was worried about the implications of Trump’s use of the military for political purposes. “We’re just coming to grips with two decades of overmilitarization of our foreign policy,” he told me. “It may now be time to be concerned about overmilitarization of our domestic policy.”
Lute was particularly concerned when General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dressed in battle fatigues, walked with Trump from the White House to St. John’s. In six years at the White House, Lute said, he had never seen any senior officer wear a combat uniform to the White House. “That was extraordinary,” he said. Even when senior military officials assembled in the White House Situation Room to watch the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, in 2011, they did not wear combat gear. “Intentionally or unintentionally, Milley signalled support for the President’s statement that we needed to crack down on street protests that were largely peaceful and law-abiding, and that Milley would be in charge,” Lute said. The message of intimidation was magnified by military helicopters flying low over the heads of protesters and military vehicles rumbling across Washington. “That’s not who we are,” Lute added.


newyorker--2020-06-04--Trump’s Bleach Moment Now Seeming Like Career High Point

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Donald J. Trump ’ s widely ridiculed musing about the healing powers of household disinfectants now seems like a career high point , according to prominent historians .
While Trump ’ s suggestion that ingesting bleach could treat the coronavirus appeared , at the time , to be a catastrophic misstep , his actions in recent days have forced many historians to revise that assessment , Davis Logsdon , a Presidential historian , said .
“ This week , we ’ ve seen Trump tear-gas peaceful protesters , offend religious leaders by using a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to use the military against the American people , ” Logsdon said .
“ In retrospect , suggesting that people ingest Clorox and put ultraviolet lights inside their bodies seems like the act of a responsible public servant.
” Logsdon added that , with unrest roiling the nation and unemployment soaring to levels not seen since the Great Depression , “ Trump ’ s best bet may be to remind the American people , ‘ I ’ m the man who told you to drink bleach.
’ ” “ All things considered , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” the historian said .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump’s widely ridiculed musing about the healing powers of household disinfectants now seems like a career high point, according to prominent historians.
While Trump’s suggestion that ingesting bleach could treat the coronavirus appeared, at the time, to be a catastrophic misstep, his actions in recent days have forced many historians to revise that assessment, Davis Logsdon, a Presidential historian, said.
“This week, we’ve seen Trump tear-gas peaceful protesters, offend religious leaders by using a Bible as a prop, and threaten to use the military against the American people,” Logsdon said. “In retrospect, suggesting that people ingest Clorox and put ultraviolet lights inside their bodies seems like the act of a responsible public servant.”
Logsdon added that, with unrest roiling the nation and unemployment soaring to levels not seen since the Great Depression, “Trump’s best bet may be to remind the American people, ‘I’m the man who told you to drink bleach.’ ”
“All things considered, that may be his finest hour,” the historian said.


newyorker--2020-06-04--Will We Actually Get To Vote in November?

I ’ ve kept a copy of Timothy Snyder ’ s book “ On Tyranny ” on my desk since it was published , in 2017 .
It ’ s a small volume—the cover is about the size of an index card .
Most of the time , it ’ s buried under stacks of paper from stories I ’ ve been working on .
Snyder is a historian of the Holocaust and of fascism , at Yale , and this book , subtitled “ Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century , ” is a claxon rung to get our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Snyder seems to be saying to Americans .
“ Tyranny , fascism , authoritarianism could happen here , too.
” The juxtaposition of those two things—Snyder ’ s book , which was published shortly after Donald Trump took office , and my stack of papers , which focus mostly on aspects of American democracy—has not been lost on me .
If it were simply a contest of words , and the contest were confined to my desk , democracy would be winning .
But we know this is not the case .
American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because of Trump and Trumpism but because of an ingrained and widely shared belief that the Founders of this country insulated us from the excesses of government with the power of the ballot .
We heard it the other day from Representative John Lewis , the civil-rights leader and icon .
“ To the rioters here in Atlanta and across the country , ” Lewis said , “ I see you , and I hear you .
I know your pain , your rage , your sense of despair and hopelessness .
Justice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far too long .
Rioting , looting , and burning is not the way .
Organize .
Demonstrate .
Sit in .
Stand up .
Vote .
Be constructive , not destructive.
” These are vital words , earned words , wise words .
But they also come from an abiding trust that , no matter what , the electoral system many of us were born into , and others , like Lewis , had to bleed for , will prevail .
We have now crossed the threshold where we must think about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ November election is subverted .
For the past three and a half years , we ’ ve watched the Trump Administration , along with its enablers in Congress and in the courts , ignore or decimate democratic norms .
Since January 20 , 2017 , we ’ ve seen this play out in ways big and small—the Muslim ban , the children in cages , the demonization of the press as “ fake news , ” to name just a few .
Each outrage has undermined a basic tenet of our democracy : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on religion , asylum seekers will be granted court hearings , and government officials will uphold and respect the freedom of the press .
If we shook our collective head each time there was a new evisceration of a democratic principle , it was always with the understanding that , after four years of cruelty and kleptocracy , the American people would go to the polls and vote Donald Trump and his collaborators out of office .
Even those who expected the Trump campaign to flood the zone with disinformation and find new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to lie , most likely believed that if enough people voted , none of that would matter .
Clearly , Trump and his allies know that their best chance of winning is to suppress turnout .
That is what the Attorney General , William Barr , believes based on his gross exaggeration of the risk of voter fraud .
So , too , many Republican governors and state legislators who are making it increasingly difficult for Americans to vote .
And—let ’ s not forget—Trump himself .
In the 2016 election , one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to convincing people—black folks and young people particularly—not to bother voting .
This was in tandem with the efforts of Republican secretaries of state and other elected officials to enact draconian voter-registration requirements and redraw electoral maps , making it more difficult for people to vote .
Or , if they did manage to cast ballots , to insure that their voices would be drowned out .
These efforts persist , and , in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic , they have escalated , as the Attorney General floats a phony argument @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the Republican National Committee , following the lead of the President , is working to limit voting by mail because it believes mail ballots would extend the franchise to the “ wrong ” people .
Add to this Trump ’ s attacks on the U.S .
Postal Service , which recently saw the installation of one of his ideologues as its head ; as the President knows , a working postal service is necessary to facilitate mailed ballots .
A few weeks ago , when I asked the legal scholar Rick @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that laid out a “ legal ” way for the Trump Administration to bypass elections and keep Trump in power , he said it would lead to rioting in the streets .
That was before there was rioting in the streets , which has given the Trump Administration an opportunity to mobilize U.S. soldiers to police U.S. citizens , and local governments to deploy militarized police forces that have shown little respect for constitutional rights as they fire rubber bullets , deploy tear gas , and charge and beat peaceful protesters .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which horrifies most Americans , appears to energize our self-declared “ law-and-order President.
” Certainly , it gives cover for greater surveillance and the thwarting of dissent .
On Tuesday , as voters went to the polls in eight states and the District of Columbia , with many citizens under curfew orders , we saw a whole new way to keep citizens from voting .
For the past few years , I ’ ve dipped into “ On Tyranny , ” finding it weirdly orienting at those times when I ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and when the vitriol and distrust that now cleave us have made me feel hopeless .
It has been like a map—the more I study its features , the more I understand where we have landed .
Monday night , as a group of white men wielding baseball bats marched down the streets of Philadelphia , apparently with the blessing of local police , I reread Snyder ’ s warning to be wary of paramilitaries .
“ It is impossible to carry out democratic elections , try cases at court , design @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any of the other quiet business of government when agencies beyond the state have access to violence , ” he wrote .
“ For just this reason , people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics.
” In a leaked recording obtained by the Intercept in April , Republican operatives can be heard hatching a plan to send retired Navy SEALs to keep watch on polling places , now that a ban on recruiting soldiers and law-enforcement personnel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ judge in 2018 .
( The ban was in response to earlier efforts by the Republican National Committee to send uniformed poll watchers to intimidate African-American voters . )
But the lesson of Snyder ’ s book that I keep going back to , and the one that seems to acquire more salience the longer Trump remains in office , is the one where he exhorts readers to “ defend institutions , ” because they can not protect themselves .
“ The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced they will do , ” Snyder wrote .
“ Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function , turned into a simulacrum of what they once were.
” I would like to believe that , if we are lucky , we will mail in our ballots or go to the polls in November , and the election will be free and fair .
But , truly , luck will play no part in it .

I’ve kept a copy of Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny” on my desk since it was published, in 2017. It’s a small volume—the cover is about the size of an index card. Most of the time, it’s buried under stacks of paper from stories I’ve been working on. Snyder is a historian of the Holocaust and of fascism, at Yale, and this book, subtitled “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” is a claxon rung to get our attention. “Listen up,” Snyder seems to be saying to Americans. “Tyranny, fascism, authoritarianism could happen here, too.”
The juxtaposition of those two things—Snyder’s book, which was published shortly after Donald Trump took office, and my stack of papers, which focus mostly on aspects of American democracy—has not been lost on me. If it were simply a contest of words, and the contest were confined to my desk, democracy would be winning. But we know this is not the case. American democracy is imperilled, and not just because of Trump and Trumpism but because of an ingrained and widely shared belief that the Founders of this country insulated us from the excesses of government with the power of the ballot. We heard it the other day from Representative John Lewis, the civil-rights leader and icon. “To the rioters here in Atlanta and across the country,” Lewis said, “I see you, and I hear you. I know your pain, your rage, your sense of despair and hopelessness. Justice has, indeed, been denied for far too long. Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way. Organize. Demonstrate. Sit in. Stand up. Vote. Be constructive, not destructive.” These are vital words, earned words, wise words. But they also come from an abiding trust that, no matter what, the electoral system many of us were born into, and others, like Lewis, had to bleed for, will prevail.
We have now crossed the threshold where we must think about the unthinkable: what happens if the November election is subverted. For the past three and a half years, we’ve watched the Trump Administration, along with its enablers in Congress and in the courts, ignore or decimate democratic norms. Since January 20, 2017, we’ve seen this play out in ways big and small—the Muslim ban, the children in cages, the demonization of the press as “fake news,” to name just a few. Each outrage has undermined a basic tenet of our democracy: the American government will not discriminate based on religion, asylum seekers will be granted court hearings, and government officials will uphold and respect the freedom of the press. If we shook our collective head each time there was a new evisceration of a democratic principle, it was always with the understanding that, after four years of cruelty and kleptocracy, the American people would go to the polls and vote Donald Trump and his collaborators out of office. Even those who expected the Trump campaign to flood the zone with disinformation and find new ways to cheat, and its candidate to lie, most likely believed that if enough people voted, none of that would matter.
Clearly, Trump and his allies know that their best chance of winning is to suppress turnout. That is what the Attorney General, William Barr, believes based on his gross exaggeration of the risk of voter fraud. So, too, many Republican governors and state legislators who are making it increasingly difficult for Americans to vote. And—let’s not forget—Trump himself. In the 2016 election, one arm of the Trump campaign was dedicated to convincing people—black folks and young people particularly—not to bother voting. This was in tandem with the efforts of Republican secretaries of state and other elected officials to enact draconian voter-registration requirements and redraw electoral maps, making it more difficult for people to vote. Or, if they did manage to cast ballots, to insure that their voices would be drowned out. These efforts persist, and, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, they have escalated, as the Attorney General floats a phony argument that foreign governments might manipulate mailed ballots, and the Republican National Committee, following the lead of the President, is working to limit voting by mail because it believes mail ballots would extend the franchise to the “wrong” people. Add to this Trump’s attacks on the U.S. Postal Service, which recently saw the installation of one of his ideologues as its head; as the President knows, a working postal service is necessary to facilitate mailed ballots.
A few weeks ago, when I asked the legal scholar Rick Hasen about a scenario, then circulating, that laid out a “legal” way for the Trump Administration to bypass elections and keep Trump in power, he said it would lead to rioting in the streets. That was before there was rioting in the streets, which has given the Trump Administration an opportunity to mobilize U.S. soldiers to police U.S. citizens, and local governments to deploy militarized police forces that have shown little respect for constitutional rights as they fire rubber bullets, deploy tear gas, and charge and beat peaceful protesters. The spectre of violence in the streets, which horrifies most Americans, appears to energize our self-declared “law-and-order President.” Certainly, it gives cover for greater surveillance and the thwarting of dissent. On Tuesday, as voters went to the polls in eight states and the District of Columbia, with many citizens under curfew orders, we saw a whole new way to keep citizens from voting.
For the past few years, I’ve dipped into “On Tyranny,” finding it weirdly orienting at those times when I’ve barely recognized this country and its government, and when the vitriol and distrust that now cleave us have made me feel hopeless. It has been like a map—the more I study its features, the more I understand where we have landed. Monday night, as a group of white men wielding baseball bats marched down the streets of Philadelphia, apparently with the blessing of local police, I reread Snyder’s warning to be wary of paramilitaries. “It is impossible to carry out democratic elections, try cases at court, design and enforce laws, or indeed manage any of the other quiet business of government when agencies beyond the state have access to violence,” he wrote. “For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics.” In a leaked recording obtained by the Intercept in April, Republican operatives can be heard hatching a plan to send retired Navy SEALs to keep watch on polling places, now that a ban on recruiting soldiers and law-enforcement personnel to oversee voting was lifted by a judge in 2018. (The ban was in response to earlier efforts by the Republican National Committee to send uniformed poll watchers to intimidate African-American voters.)
But the lesson of Snyder’s book that I keep going back to, and the one that seems to acquire more salience the longer Trump remains in office, is the one where he exhorts readers to “defend institutions,” because they cannot protect themselves. “The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced they will do,” Snyder wrote. “Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were.” I would like to believe that, if we are lucky, we will mail in our ballots or go to the polls in November, and the election will be free and fair. But, truly, luck will play no part in it.


newyorker--2020-06-05--New Glitches in the Matrix

New Glitches in the Matrix

While cleaning your dirty clothes , you are haunted by the sensation of having cleaned all these same clothes before—perhaps infinite times .
You finally decide to go running , and jog a gruelling five miles , but MapMyRun only logs half a mile .
Strange !
Your child has reached a new tantrum-frequency rate of one tantrum per minute , yet each tantrum is approximately twenty minutes long .
The math .
.
.
it doesn ’ t add up .
You awake in a cold sweat at 2 A.M. , remembering the time you said “ Owen Wilson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wilfred Owen.
” Before you know it , morning has arrived .
No matter how often you hit the thumbs-down icon , Red Hot Chili Peppers songs keep popping up on your Tina Turner Spotify station .
Having finished peeing , you now have to pee again .
You ’ re still just sitting there on the toilet , staring at your phone .
So that ’ s fine .
It ’ s Wednesday .
But last week ?
Also Wednesday .
You ’ re still washing your hands when it becomes time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ awake in a cold sweat at 2 A.M. , remembering the time you said “ Hieronymus Bosch ” when you meant to say “ Thelonious Monk.
” Boom !
It ’ s morning .
Abruptly , you recall that the former WrestleMania villain and serial golf cheater Donald Trump gets to decide if billions of people live or die .
This feeling is sickening and familiar , as though you ’ ve had the same abrupt realization before , perhaps hundreds of times a day , for years .
Facebook shows you an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ waking up in a cold sweat ?
” mere moments before you think , I want to stop waking up in a cold sweat .
Spooky !
You ’ re almost fully convinced that we are all just Sims in a swimming pool , paddling and paddling , while the sadist who has removed the ladder looks on with glee .
Whenever you hit play on “ Star Wars : The Rise of Skywalker , ” you are mysteriously transported to the following day , face down on your drool-damp sofa .
What @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
You have crafted an excellent tweet about a topic that was fresh this morning but is now , somehow , a year out of date .
Leafing through your melatonin-fuelled dream journal at 2 A.M. , you see a note that you wrote in 2016 : “ What if Jesse Pinkman were a character in ‘ Westworld ’ ?
” Goosebumps emerge on your arms as you realize that this has , in a way , come true .
Now you ’ re staring at other journal entries from years past— “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ space , ” “ murder hornets ” —terrified that they may also merge with reality .
You find that you ’ re ready to eat another food while still engaged in eating the previous food .
“ Let ’ s look at Instagram now !
” your brain screams , interrupting your current activity , which was looking at Instagram .
It ’ s Wednesday .
But tomorrow was also Wednesday .

While cleaning your dirty clothes, you are haunted by the sensation of having cleaned all these same clothes before—perhaps infinite times.
You finally decide to go running, and jog a gruelling five miles, but MapMyRun only logs half a mile. Strange!
Your child has reached a new tantrum-frequency rate of one tantrum per minute, yet each tantrum is approximately twenty minutes long. The math . . . it doesn’t add up.
You awake in a cold sweat at 2 A.M., remembering the time you said “Owen Wilson” when you meant to say “Wilfred Owen.” Before you know it, morning has arrived.
No matter how often you hit the thumbs-down icon, Red Hot Chili Peppers songs keep popping up on your Tina Turner Spotify station.
Having finished peeing, you now have to pee again. You’re still just sitting there on the toilet, staring at your phone. So that’s fine.
It’s Wednesday. But last week? Also Wednesday.
You’re still washing your hands when it becomes time to wash your hands again.
You awake in a cold sweat at 2 A.M., remembering the time you said “Hieronymus Bosch” when you meant to say “Thelonious Monk.” Boom! It’s morning.
Abruptly, you recall that the former WrestleMania villain and serial golf cheater Donald Trump gets to decide if billions of people live or die. This feeling is sickening and familiar, as though you’ve had the same abrupt realization before, perhaps hundreds of times a day, for years.
Facebook shows you an ad that reads “Want to stop waking up in a cold sweat?” mere moments before you think, I want to stop waking up in a cold sweat. Spooky!
You’re almost fully convinced that we are all just Sims in a swimming pool, paddling and paddling, while the sadist who has removed the ladder looks on with glee.
Whenever you hit play on “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” you are mysteriously transported to the following day, face down on your drool-damp sofa. What the fuck is going on here?!
You have crafted an excellent tweet about a topic that was fresh this morning but is now, somehow, a year out of date.
Leafing through your melatonin-fuelled dream journal at 2 A.M., you see a note that you wrote in 2016: “What if Jesse Pinkman were a character in ‘Westworld’?” Goosebumps emerge on your arms as you realize that this has, in a way, come true. Now you’re staring at other journal entries from years past—“tennis dogs,” “vampires in space,” “murder hornets”—terrified that they may also merge with reality.
You find that you’re ready to eat another food while still engaged in eating the previous food.
“Let’s look at Instagram now!” your brain screams, interrupting your current activity, which was looking at Instagram.
It’s Wednesday. But tomorrow was also Wednesday.


newyorker--2020-06-05--“Quiet No More” Shows How Grief Can Become Activism

The 2015 mass murder at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church , in Charleston , South Carolina , left a mark on America ’ s psyche .
Images and sounds from the aftermath of the shooting , in which a young white man named Dylann Roof killed nine African-American worshippers at an evening Bible study , became emblems of recent history : Barack Obama departing from his spoken eulogy at the funeral of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney to perform a sonorous section of “ Amazing Grace ” ; Nadine Collier declaring her radical forgiveness of Roof at his bond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mother , Ethel Lee Lance ; the removal of the Confederate flag that had flown over the South Carolina State House .
Beyond those shared memories , and often hidden from public view , are far more personal remembrances .
In Eléonore Hamelin ’ s film “ Quiet No More , ” the Reverend Sharon Risher , Collier ’ s sister , whose mother and two cousins were killed in the attack , describes her loss .
She remembers her mother ’ s personality ( “ formidable ” ) , as well as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shares the details of her mother ’ s adolescence , and the unearthing of a family secret that stunned her—and brought the two of them closer .
Risher recalls the way that her mother used to gather her and her sisters together every Sunday before church and spritz them with perfume , saying , “ God is sweet , just like y ’ all.
” Risher was working as a hospital chaplain in Texas at the time of the attack , and when she saw footage of Roof ’ s bond hearing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I was angry , ” she recalls .
She did not want herself or her family to be rushed through their grief in order to arrive at reconciliation .
“ You never see newspeople ask white people after tragedies , ‘ Do you forgive ?
’ ” she says .
Because of her role as a pastor , Risher knew that people would look to her to set an example of forgiveness .
But she felt that it couldn ’ t be automatic , or immediate .
Facing the camera directly , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ process where whoever has done something wrong to you , you could get to a point where that does not hold power over your life .
And people like me need to have time to come out of the dark space.
” After Risher went through that process , she became an advocate for gun-violence prevention , and the documentary shows her meeting and working with activists around the country , including survivors of the Parkland school shooting .
She calls herself an “ accidental activist.
” This work has helped lift her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ So now I don ’ t really carry that ache in my heart .
.
.
.
I had stuff to do.
” This month marks five years since the attack at Emanuel A.M.E .
Protesters in the streets throughout the U.S. are demanding police reform and many other structural changes that together would move the country closer to racial justice .
During demonstrations , they are invoking the name , especially , of George Floyd .
Risher ’ s story is a reminder of the depth of loss behind the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in an act of racist violence .
She speaks of those from Emanuel A.M.E. with reverence : “ My mother , Ms. Ethel Lee Lance ; and my cousin , Mrs. Susie Jackson , who was eighty-seven years old .
And then my cousin Tywanza , who was the youngest that got killed .
He was twenty-six .
And all the others , Reverend Pinckney and Cynthia Hurd , and the names , and the names .
”

The 2015 mass murder at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, left a mark on America’s psyche. Images and sounds from the aftermath of the shooting, in which a young white man named Dylann Roof killed nine African-American worshippers at an evening Bible study, became emblems of recent history: Barack Obama departing from his spoken eulogy at the funeral of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney to perform a sonorous section of “Amazing Grace”; Nadine Collier declaring her radical forgiveness of Roof at his bond hearing, after he had killed her mother, Ethel Lee Lance; the removal of the Confederate flag that had flown in front of the South Carolina State House.
Beyond those shared memories, and often hidden from public view, are far more personal remembrances. In Eléonore Hamelin’s film “Quiet No More,” the Reverend Sharon Risher, Collier’s sister, whose mother and two cousins were killed in the attack, describes her loss. She remembers her mother’s personality (“formidable”), as well as her cooking and hospitality. She also shares the details of her mother’s adolescence, and the unearthing of a family secret that stunned her—and brought the two of them closer. Risher recalls the way that her mother used to gather her and her sisters together every Sunday before church and spritz them with perfume, saying, “God is sweet, just like y’all.”
Risher was working as a hospital chaplain in Texas at the time of the attack, and when she saw footage of Roof’s bond hearing, forgiveness was far from her mind. “I was angry,” she recalls. She did not want herself or her family to be rushed through their grief in order to arrive at reconciliation. “You never see newspeople ask white people after tragedies, ‘Do you forgive?’ ” she says. Because of her role as a pastor, Risher knew that people would look to her to set an example of forgiveness. But she felt that it couldn’t be automatic, or immediate. Facing the camera directly, she explains, “Forgiveness is a process where whoever has done something wrong to you, you could get to a point where that does not hold power over your life. And people like me need to have time to come out of the dark space.”
After Risher went through that process, she became an advocate for gun-violence prevention, and the documentary shows her meeting and working with activists around the country, including survivors of the Parkland school shooting. She calls herself an “accidental activist.” This work has helped lift her out of her grief, she says. “So now I don’t really carry that ache in my heart. . . . I had stuff to do.”
This month marks five years since the attack at Emanuel A.M.E. Protesters in the streets throughout the U.S. are demanding police reform and many other structural changes that together would move the country closer to racial justice. During demonstrations, they are invoking the name, especially, of George Floyd. Risher’s story is a reminder of the depth of loss behind the name of each person who is killed in an act of racist violence. She speaks of those from Emanuel A.M.E. with reverence: “My mother, Ms. Ethel Lee Lance; and my cousin, Mrs. Susie Jackson, who was eighty-seven years old. And then my cousin Tywanza, who was the youngest that got killed. He was twenty-six. And all the others, Reverend Pinckney and Cynthia Hurd, and the names, and the names.”
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests


newyorker--2020-06-05--Scenes from the George Floyd Memorial in Brooklyn

There is an ongoing debate among photographers , especially urgent in these past weeks , about the ethics of publishing photographs of protesters .
Some two thousand people have been arrested in New York City in connection with the protests ; identifying participants in pictures could cause them to face legal consequences .
“ It ’ s a tough dilemma , ” Clennon said .
“ Faces humanize people .
They humanize the protest ; they humanize the image .
Faces are very , very important.
” At the same time , he added , “ I want to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to publish identifying photos of any protester who seems to be in a volatile situation with law enforcement—even though such photos , too , could serve as an important record later on .
Clennon has found that he often shares moments of connection with peaceful protesters , who look straight at him and into the camera .
One woman at the memorial , wearing her hair in an Afro , caught his eye during Floyd ’ s speech .
“ Our faces were covered , so all we had is eyes , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comforting : she was lending some spirit to me .
”

There is an ongoing debate among photographers, especially urgent in these past weeks, about the ethics of publishing photographs of protesters. Some two thousand people have been arrested in New York City in connection with the protests; identifying participants in pictures could cause them to face legal consequences. “It’s a tough dilemma,” Clennon said. “Faces humanize people. They humanize the protest; they humanize the image. Faces are very, very important.” At the same time, he added, “I want to be mindful.” He’s chosen not to publish identifying photos of any protester who seems to be in a volatile situation with law enforcement—even though such photos, too, could serve as an important record later on.
A man stands in front of an M.T.A. bus.
Clennon has found that he often shares moments of connection with peaceful protesters, who look straight at him and into the camera. One woman at the memorial, wearing her hair in an Afro, caught his eye during Floyd’s speech. “Our faces were covered, so all we had is eyes,” he recalled. “It was very comforting: she was lending some spirit to me.”


newyorker--2020-06-05--A Surprisingly Positive Jobs Report Doesn’t Mean Things Are Getting Back to Normal

On Thursday , Wall Street economists put out their predictions for May ’ s employment report , which the Department of Labor released on Friday morning .
In April , as the coronavirus shutdowns led to mass layoffs and furloughs , over-all payrolls fell by 20.6 million .
The consensus among the economists was that the May jobs figure would be down another eight million or so , and that the unemployment rate , which jumped to 14.7 per cent in April , would reach about twenty per cent—its highest level since the Great Depression .
The forecasts turned out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The jobs report showed payrolls increasing by 2.5 million last month , and the unemployment rate declining to 13.3 per cent .
That jobless figure is still well above the peak rate seen during the last recession .
But the positive jobs number indicates that hiring is rebounding more rapidly than virtually anybody expected .
John Authors , a columnist for Bloomberg , said it was “ the single most surprising economic figure ever , ” and he may be right .
In retrospect , we perhaps shouldn ’ t have been so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many states started reopening their economies in late April and early May , which was earlier than most economists had predicted , and a lot of businesses called their furloughed employees back to work .
The jobs report is based on two government surveys , one of employers and the other of workers .
Both of them showed big gains in the number of people employed .
The figure of 2.5 million came from the survey of employers .
The survey of households showed an even bigger gain : 3.8 million .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were distributed throughout the economy .
The number of people working in construction rose by 464,000 , and the number working in manufacturing rose by 225,000 .
In the vast services sector , retail payrolls increased by 368,000 , with clothing stores and auto dealers making substantial contributions .
The health industry also saw a big rebound , as dentists and doctors ’ offices reopened .
But the biggest employment gains of all were recorded in restaurants and “ drinking places , ” where the number of people employed rose by close to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consistent with many states flicking the “ on ” switch at the start of last month , and businesses responding .
As other states , like New York and Massachusetts , relax some of their restrictions this month , there will be further gains in employment .
That may explain why investors continued to bid up stock prices on Wall Street , where the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by more than eight hundred points on Friday .
Remarkably , the major stock averages are now down only a few percentage points relative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ February .
But one positive employment report doesn ’ t mean that the coronavirus recession is over , or that things will soon be back to normal .
A jobless rate of close to fourteen per cent is alarmingly high , and the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggested that the actual rate is probably 16.4 per cent , because of a misclassification of people who aren ’ t working but are nevertheless counted as employed .
Even going by the raw figures , almost twenty-one million Americans are still out of work , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time because they can ’ t find full-time jobs .
In the past couple of months , many major corporations , such as Boeing and Hertz , have announced large-scale permanent layoffs , and many smaller firms have gone out of business , laying off all their employees .
Many of these jobs may never return .
And some of the workers whom restaurants and stores have called back to work could end up getting laid off again if business doesn ’ t return to the levels seen prior to the pandemic .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ months to know how much wreckage there is in the economy , ” Jason Furman , a former head of the Council of Economic Advisers , said on CNBC .
“ This is the easy part.
” Looking ahead , a big danger is that the jobs report could strengthen the hand of Republicans who are arguing against further economic-support packages .
“ There ’ s no reason to have a major spending bill , ” Stephen Moore , a conservative economic commentator who is close to the White House , said on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ urgent crisis is very greatly dissipated by the report.
” In at least two ways , that is a mistaken argument .
With so many Americans still out of work , there is an urgent need for Congress to extend the higher unemployment benefits it introduced as part of the CARES Act .
State and local governments also need more financial support as they grapple with the virus and its impact on their budgets .
The jobs report showed they reduced their payrolls by nearly six hundred thousand last month .
Without federal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ layoffs of government workers in the months ahead .
And , of course , there is the question of how the virus-infection rate will evolve as states continue to reopen their economies .
So far , there hasn ’ t been a big second wave , but , earlier this week , Florida , which was one of the first states to relax its restrictions , reported the largest daily increase in cases that it has seen .
That may be in part because of an increase in testing , but it is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a tally by the Times , the number of new cases is rising in nineteen states .
Even after an encouraging jobs report , the economy remains hostage to the pandemic .
• The coronavirus vaccine is on track to be the fastest ever developed .
• What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine .
• Recommendations for maintaining social distancing as the U.S. reopens , from socializing and using public bathrooms to wearing masks .
• Why remote work is so hard—and how it can be fixed .
• Seattle leaders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the coronavirus .
New York leaders did not .
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people .
• What to read , watch , cook , and listen to under quarantine .

On Thursday, Wall Street economists put out their predictions for May’s employment report, which the Department of Labor released on Friday morning. In April, as the coronavirus shutdowns led to mass layoffs and furloughs, over-all payrolls fell by 20.6 million. The consensus among the economists was that the May jobs figure would be down another eight million or so, and that the unemployment rate, which jumped to 14.7 per cent in April, would reach about twenty per cent—its highest level since the Great Depression.
The forecasts turned out to be way off the mark. The jobs report showed payrolls increasing by 2.5 million last month, and the unemployment rate declining to 13.3 per cent. That jobless figure is still well above the peak rate seen during the last recession. But the positive jobs number indicates that hiring is rebounding more rapidly than virtually anybody expected. John Authors, a columnist for Bloomberg, said it was “the single most surprising economic figure ever,” and he may be right.
In retrospect, we perhaps shouldn’t have been so shocked. Outside of the Northeast, many states started reopening their economies in late April and early May, which was earlier than most economists had predicted, and a lot of businesses called their furloughed employees back to work. The jobs report is based on two government surveys, one of employers and the other of workers. Both of them showed big gains in the number of people employed. The figure of 2.5 million came from the survey of employers. The survey of households showed an even bigger gain: 3.8 million.
The report also showed that the job gains were distributed throughout the economy. The number of people working in construction rose by 464,000, and the number working in manufacturing rose by 225,000. In the vast services sector, retail payrolls increased by 368,000, with clothing stores and auto dealers making substantial contributions. The health industry also saw a big rebound, as dentists and doctors’ offices reopened. But the biggest employment gains of all were recorded in restaurants and “drinking places,” where the number of people employed rose by close to 1.4 million.
All of this is consistent with many states flicking the “on” switch at the start of last month, and businesses responding. As other states, like New York and Massachusetts, relax some of their restrictions this month, there will be further gains in employment. That may explain why investors continued to bid up stock prices on Wall Street, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by more than eight hundred points on Friday. Remarkably, the major stock averages are now down only a few percentage points relative to the all-time peaks they hit in February.
But one positive employment report doesn’t mean that the coronavirus recession is over, or that things will soon be back to normal. A jobless rate of close to fourteen per cent is alarmingly high, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggested that the actual rate is probably 16.4 per cent, because of a misclassification of people who aren’t working but are nevertheless counted as employed. Even going by the raw figures, almost twenty-one million Americans are still out of work, and another ten million are working part time because they can’t find full-time jobs. In the past couple of months, many major corporations, such as Boeing and Hertz, have announced large-scale permanent layoffs, and many smaller firms have gone out of business, laying off all their employees. Many of these jobs may never return. And some of the workers whom restaurants and stores have called back to work could end up getting laid off again if business doesn’t return to the levels seen prior to the pandemic. “It will take a couple of months to know how much wreckage there is in the economy,” Jason Furman, a former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said on CNBC. “This is the easy part.”
Looking ahead, a big danger is that the jobs report could strengthen the hand of Republicans who are arguing against further economic-support packages. “There’s no reason to have a major spending bill,” Stephen Moore, a conservative economic commentator who is close to the White House, said on Friday morning. “The sense of urgent crisis is very greatly dissipated by the report.” In at least two ways, that is a mistaken argument. With so many Americans still out of work, there is an urgent need for Congress to extend the higher unemployment benefits it introduced as part of the CARES Act. State and local governments also need more financial support as they grapple with the virus and its impact on their budgets. The jobs report showed they reduced their payrolls by nearly six hundred thousand last month. Without federal aid, there will be many more layoffs of government workers in the months ahead.
And, of course, there is the question of how the virus-infection rate will evolve as states continue to reopen their economies. So far, there hasn’t been a big second wave, but, earlier this week, Florida, which was one of the first states to relax its restrictions, reported the largest daily increase in cases that it has seen. That may be in part because of an increase in testing, but it is hardly an encouraging sign. According to a tally by the Times, the number of new cases is rising in nineteen states. Even after an encouraging jobs report, the economy remains hostage to the pandemic.
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-06-05--Can Police Violence Be Curbed?

Can Police Violence Be Curbed?

“ To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep , ” James Baldwin wrote , in 1978 .
This week , the staff writer Jelani Cobb speaks with a Minneapolis activist who ’ s been calling to defund the city ’ s police department , and with a former police chief who agrees that an institution rooted in racial repression can not easily be reformed .
Plus , Masha Gessen warns that the protests and the coronavirus pandemic may create a sense of chaos that a would-be autocrat can exploit .
And the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work of Josephine Decker .
A Former D.O.J .
Official on How to Fix Policing Ron Davis was a police officer for nearly thirty years before working at the Department of Justice .
He knows firsthand how hard it is to reform an institution with a history of racial repression .
What Does It Mean to Defund the Police ?
A Minneapolis activist group says that the police department , whose history is rooted in racial repression , can not simply be reformed ; it has to be defunded .
Donald Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shows a troubling resemblance to how despotic strongmen have responded to challenges .
The film critic Richard Brody talks with Decker , one of his favorite directors of this era , about her unique approach to filmmaking and her Shirley Jackson bio-pic .

Illustration by Golden Cosmos
“To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep,” James Baldwin wrote, in 1978. This week, the staff writer Jelani Cobb speaks with a Minneapolis activist who’s been calling to defund the city’s police department, and with a former police chief who agrees that an institution rooted in racial repression cannot easily be reformed. Plus, Masha Gessen warns that the protests and the coronavirus pandemic may create a sense of chaos that a would-be autocrat can exploit. And the film critic Richard Brody looks at the work of Josephine Decker.
A Former D.O.J. Official on How to Fix Policing
Ron Davis was a police officer for nearly thirty years before working at the Department of Justice. He knows firsthand how hard it is to reform an institution with a history of racial repression.
What Does It Mean to Defund the Police?
A Minneapolis activist group says that the police department, whose history is rooted in racial repression, cannot simply be reformed; it has to be defunded.
Masha Gessen on Recognizing an Autocrat
Donald Trump’s response to protests against police violence shows a troubling resemblance to how despotic strongmen have responded to challenges.
Josephine Decker’s “Shirley”
The film critic Richard Brody talks with Decker, one of his favorite directors of this era, about her unique approach to filmmaking and her Shirley Jackson bio-pic.