newyorker--2020-11-23--“Betye Saar’s ‘Mystic Chart for an Unemployed Sorceress,’ ” by Patricia Spears Jones

My runes are in ruins , little laughter here for my sarcasm What to do , this chart confuses , conflates moon , which phase And honey , local or from some exotic shore and what of money My savings stuffed beneath deflating mattress .
Each cold Day warns me that my résumé is unworthy .
Who will hire me Now that my spells are so easily broken , my warnings useless It is a wonder that I worked as long as I could .
Incantations Memorized and recipes for spells written in an ink too pale For visibility—each item @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It did not .
Was it the well of stories drying up ?
The fish scales Stinking the kitchen table .
The cat wandering away , while Spiders spread their cosmic maps unreadable to all but The other spiders .
They cheer me .
Again , I read the signs .
Oh , how the signs obscure true knowledge and I am blazed In this dark room , hungry , cold and searching—who is this thief And why has she cast this curse .
What must I do to bring Runes from my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pockets .

Audio: Read by the author.
My runes are in ruins, little laughter here for my sarcasm
What to do, this chart confuses, conflates moon, which phase
And honey, local or from some exotic shore and what of money
My savings stuffed beneath deflating mattress. Each cold
Day warns me that my résumé is unworthy. Who will hire me
Now that my spells are so easily broken, my warnings useless
It is a wonder that I worked as long as I could. Incantations
Memorized and recipes for spells written in an ink too pale
For visibility—each item sourced, the medicine worked and then
It did not. Was it the well of stories drying up? The fish scales
Stinking the kitchen table. The cat wandering away, while
Spiders spread their cosmic maps unreadable to all but
The other spiders. They cheer me. Again, I read the signs.
Oh, how the signs obscure true knowledge and I am blazed
In this dark room, hungry, cold and searching—who is this thief
And why has she cast this curse. What must I do to bring
Runes from my parched throat, medicine back to my pockets.


newyorker--2020-11-23--How the Biden Administration Can Free Americans from Student Debt

“ Debt ” ’ s publication was perfectly timed to lend scholarly legitimacy to the frustration that fuelled Occupy Wall Street , an uprising David helped catalyze .
He recruited me to the effort , and then invited me to join an offshoot focussed on debt resistance .
One meeting led to another , and then another .
We worked together on a range of experiments , including a radical financial-literacy guide called “ The Debt Resisters ’ Operations Manual ” and the Rolling Jubilee , an initiative that bought up and erased nearly thirty-two million dollars of medical and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That set the stage for the Debt Collective , a union for debtors , which I helped found .
In 2015 , the Debt Collective organized a student-debt strike of people who had borrowed money to attend for-profit colleges , ultimately helping to eliminate more than a billion dollars of student debt through a range of direct action and legal strategies ( and causing the billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos what she described as “ extreme displeasure.
” ) For the past five years , the Debt Collective has been working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American President , should they desire , can make every penny of federal student debt disappear without consulting Congress ( and regardless of Mitch McConnell ’ s objections ) .
Based on legal research , the Debt Collective co-founder Luke Herrine and Harvard Law School ’ s Eileen Connor argue that Congress granted legal authority to the head of the Department of Education to extinguish federal student-loan debt , an action called “ compromise and settlement , ” in 1965 .
All a President has to do is instruct the Education Secretary to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ student debt .
Our public-education campaign has caught on .
In September , Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer offered a Senate Resolution urging the incoming President to cancel up to fifty thousand dollars in student loans for every borrower using compromise-and-settlement authority .
Explaining her rationale , Warren told me , over e-mail , that getting rid of student debt “ would give a big , consumer-driven boost to our economy and even help close the Black-white wealth gap.
” As the 2020 Presidential race wore on , Joe Biden shifted his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , proposing to “ forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for debt-holders earning up to $ 125,000.
” ( The government would make monthly payments to itself , in lieu of the borrower . )
Biden also promised to “ immediately cancel a minimum of $ 10,000 of student debt per person , ” as part of a coronavirus response .
Within hours of the media declaring Biden triumphant over Donald Trump , social media resounded with discussion of the President-elect ’ s ability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Joe Biden embraced progressive demands for student debt cancellation after he won the Democratic nomination , ” Bloomberg reported .
“ Whether he agrees to use executive authority to grant loan relief will test how much influence progressives hold in his administration.
” Biden will be taking office amid a daunting public-health and economic crisis ; a loudening chorus of experts and elected officials believe that a more ambitious approach to debt relief is needed to stem the suffering .
The Debt Collective has long promoted a sweeping jubilee , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not limited to the abolition of all federal student debt .
Without offering precise sums , a recent white paper from the Roosevelt Institute , a progressive think tank , advocates for the cancellation of student , housing , and medical debt as part of a broader Covid-recovery plan .
In Congress , the freshman representatives known as the Squad have lifted up grassroots demands to cancel student loans , back rent , and mortgage payments .
Debt relief , Representative Ayanna Pressley , of Massachusetts , told me , makes sound economic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put freed-up money “ right back into communities , right back into the economy.
” Pressley added , “ We have to bail out the American people.
” Though it would help struggling households make ends meet , debt relief isn ’ t just about money .
There are also deeper moral questions to consider—and this is where David Graeber ’ s work is indispensable .
In “ Debt , ” he sought to challenge his readers to rethink the very notion of owing : Who owes what to whom ?
Do all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our real obligations ever be quantified ?
As an anthropologist who had studied gift exchange , and an anarchist determined to envision a world beyond capitalism , David wanted to help build a world unconstrained by the constant and petty accounting of debits and credits , one where value and worth were not denominated in dollars .
Debt , he wrote , is “ a promise corrupted by both math and violence.
” What other types of promises might we make to one another and strive to honor ?
And , in order @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we have to renegotiate or refuse ?
With Trump ’ s freeze on student-loan payments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ’ s halt on evictions both set to expire on December 31st , a debt-addled humanitarian disaster looms .
Countless families currently teetering on the edge of financial collapse will be pushed over the brink .
People spent thirty per cent of their stimulus checks to service debts , and as back rent piles up some forty million households may soon face homelessness .
“ Without immediate and effective stabilization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bankruptcy spirals—starting with middle- and low-income Americans , ” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently warned .
Of course , not all debtors are equally desperate ; some are treated better than others .
The persistence of the racial wealth gap and predatory lending practices means that Black and Latinx communities are more economically precarious and indebted than their white counterparts .
Black women are the most burdened by student-loan debt and often have to resort to payday loans with onerous terms .
Without an intervention , the same communities disproportionately devastated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ death blow , compounding the damage wrought by the mortgage crisis .
According to a Pew Research Center analysis , between 2005 and 2009 , the median wealth among Black and Latinx households fell by more than fifty per cent .
Debt cancellation is an essential component of any sensible response to this worsening disaster , especially one attuned to questions of racial justice .
A sense of justice , however , rarely guides our financial agreements .
As David observed in “ Debt , ” money has the capacity “ to turn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by doing so , to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.
” Think of the Florida law passed by the state ’ s Republican-controlled legislature last year , and recently upheld by a federal appeals court , which requires former felons to fully pay back their court fines and fees in order to vote ; the federal government ’ s habit of garnishing Social Security payments if recipients have defaulted on their federal student loans ; or the fact that some small children are denied meals by public schools because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rarely question the moral logic that enables such obscenities—logic that views the debtors as culpable , even criminal , and thus deserving of punishment .
The German word “ Schuld , ” David was fond of pointing out , means both debt and guilt .
Debt is a power relationship built on the pretense of equality .
In theory , a debtor and creditor enter into a contract on a level playing field and with fair terms ; in reality , debts are often incurred under conditions of duress .
Right now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cards or taking out high-interest payday loans , because they ’ ve lost their jobs or unemployment benefits have dried up ( or never came through ) .
As the Debt Collective writes in its new manifesto , “ Can ’ t Pay , Won ’ t Pay : The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition , ” “ Most people are not in debt because they live beyond their means ; they are in debt because they have been denied the means to live.
” In countries with universal health care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the U.S. , it is a leading cause of poverty and the main catalyst for bankruptcy .
In some cases , failure to appear in court for unpaid medical debts lands people in jail .
No one chooses to get sick , so why is medical debt something people should feel bad about , let alone be penalized or incarcerated for ?
This is why , following David ’ s lead , the Debt Collective rejects the language of debt “ forgiveness ” —which implies a blameworthy borrower and a beneficent creditor—in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a system in which millions must take on debt in order to survive .
In modern economic life , you can count on moral judgment being inconsistently applied .
There is , as Pressley told me , “ a glaring double standard when it comes to consumer versus corporate debtors.
” It is a double standard perfectly captured in a popular meme that invites people to list things that are considered “ classy ” if an individual is rich and “ trashy ” if that person is poor .
Bankruptcy is frequently mentioned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ someone else raise your kids .
The more privileged you are , the more debt can work to your advantage , and the same can hold true for defaulting .
That ’ s certainly the case for Donald Trump , who has left a trail of corporate bankruptcies in his wake and is reportedly on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars .
High levels of corporate debt are , we mustn ’ t forget , one reason we are in this mess .
For more than a decade , companies took @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves on credit , often using the funds to buy back stock and push out dividends to shareholders , rather than raising employee wages or saving for a rainy day .
These overleveraged companies made our economy more vulnerable to the coronavirus shock .
And yet their behavior is being rewarded .
In the spring , the Federal Reserve decided to purchase corporate debt , including the junk bonds , or riskier debt , issued by companies whose investment ratings had plummeted because of the pandemic—the so-called fallen angels .
Regular debtors , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ charity ; instead of being heralded as divine , they are dubbed deadbeats .
By offering more support to corporate borrowers and lenders , the Fed bolstered the bond market in an unprecedented way , and encouraged more of the bad behavior that got us here , potentially setting the stage for a bigger disaster .
The world ’ s largest companies rushed to take advantage of the new arrangement , with entities including Alphabet and Apple ( which , in August , became the first company to be valued at more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ preposterously low rates .
“ Junk ” debt also got a boost , with some companies that are seen as risky investments now able to pay out less than three per cent on their bonds , Alexis Goldstein , a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform , told me .
For corporations , we have seen a remarkable lowering of the price to borrow money , but we have not seen anything equivalent for people at the margins of our financial markets—or some municipalities in desperate need of funds .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being able to refinance their homes , but those are people who tend to be in a good financial position , ” Goldstein explained ; they own their homes instead of renting , and have the stable incomes required to qualify for low rates .
“ People that need a payday loan are not seeing lower rates of payday loans .
People who are having to use their credit cards to avoid eviction , the people who are at the most risk of financial ruin right now , are not seeing the lowering @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at your credit-card information , you ’ ll find that your interest rate is likely not three per cent .

On September 2nd, the anthropologist and activist David Graeber died unexpectedly, while on holiday in Venice. David, who was my friend and collaborator for more than a decade, was best known for his groundbreaking study “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” from 2011. The book opened up a vibrant and ongoing conversation about the evolution of our economic system by challenging conventional accounts of the origins of money and markets; relationships of credit and debt, he showed, preceded the development of coinage and cash. It also influenced a movement for debt cancellation, which appears poised on the brink of a significant victory that could improve untold millions of lives. I only wish my friend could be around to see it.
“Debt” ’s publication was perfectly timed to lend scholarly legitimacy to the frustration that fuelled Occupy Wall Street, an uprising David helped catalyze. He recruited me to the effort, and then invited me to join an offshoot focussed on debt resistance. One meeting led to another, and then another. We worked together on a range of experiments, including a radical financial-literacy guide called “The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual” and the Rolling Jubilee, an initiative that bought up and erased nearly thirty-two million dollars of medical and tuition debt belonging to thousands of people. That set the stage for the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, which I helped found. In 2015, the Debt Collective organized a student-debt strike of people who had borrowed money to attend for-profit colleges, ultimately helping to eliminate more than a billion dollars of student debt through a range of direct action and legal strategies (and causing the billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos what she described as “extreme displeasure.”)
For the past five years, the Debt Collective has been working to let the world know that any American President, should they desire, can make every penny of federal student debt disappear without consulting Congress (and regardless of Mitch McConnell’s objections). Based on legal research, the Debt Collective co-founder Luke Herrine and Harvard Law School’s Eileen Connor argue that Congress granted legal authority to the head of the Department of Education to extinguish federal student-loan debt, an action called “compromise and settlement,” in 1965. All a President has to do is instruct the Education Secretary to use this authority to cancel all federal student debt. Our public-education campaign has caught on. In September, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer offered a Senate Resolution urging the incoming President to cancel up to fifty thousand dollars in student loans for every borrower using compromise-and-settlement authority. Explaining her rationale, Warren told me, over e-mail, that getting rid of student debt “would give a big, consumer-driven boost to our economy and even help close the Black-white wealth gap.”
As the 2020 Presidential race wore on, Joe Biden shifted his position on the issue of debt forgiveness, proposing to “forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for debt-holders earning up to $125,000.” (The government would make monthly payments to itself, in lieu of the borrower.) Biden also promised to “immediately cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person,” as part of a coronavirus response. Within hours of the media declaring Biden triumphant over Donald Trump, social media resounded with discussion of the President-elect’s ability to eliminate student loans using executive authority. “Joe Biden embraced progressive demands for student debt cancellation after he won the Democratic nomination,” Bloomberg reported. “Whether he agrees to use executive authority to grant loan relief will test how much influence progressives hold in his administration.”
Biden will be taking office amid a daunting public-health and economic crisis; a loudening chorus of experts and elected officials believe that a more ambitious approach to debt relief is needed to stem the suffering. The Debt Collective has long promoted a sweeping jubilee, a mass cancellation of debts, including but not limited to the abolition of all federal student debt. Without offering precise sums, a recent white paper from the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, advocates for the cancellation of student, housing, and medical debt as part of a broader Covid-recovery plan. In Congress, the freshman representatives known as the Squad have lifted up grassroots demands to cancel student loans, back rent, and mortgage payments. Debt relief, Representative Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts, told me, makes sound economic sense, given that working families would put freed-up money “right back into communities, right back into the economy.” Pressley added, “We have to bail out the American people.”
Though it would help struggling households make ends meet, debt relief isn’t just about money. There are also deeper moral questions to consider—and this is where David Graeber’s work is indispensable. In “Debt,” he sought to challenge his readers to rethink the very notion of owing: Who owes what to whom? Do all debts need to be repaid? Can our real obligations ever be quantified? As an anthropologist who had studied gift exchange, and an anarchist determined to envision a world beyond capitalism, David wanted to help build a world unconstrained by the constant and petty accounting of debits and credits, one where value and worth were not denominated in dollars. Debt, he wrote, is “a promise corrupted by both math and violence.” What other types of promises might we make to one another and strive to honor? And, in order to do that, what promises might we have to renegotiate or refuse?
Before the pandemic, American indebtedness was breaking records: last year, total household debt in the United States surpassed fourteen trillion dollars; total student-loan debt alone surpassed $1.6 trillion. More than a million people defaulted on their federal educational loans every year between 2015 and 2019. Experts have bemoaned the consequences of mass insolvency, which suppresses demand for other goods and services, impeding homeownership and entrepreneurship and increasing household insecurity. There are physical and psychological consequences, too. Being behind on bills stresses body and mind, which is exacerbated by the fact that debtors tend to delay or avoid seeking medical care, fearful of the cost. Data from the credit bureau Experian from December, 2016, showed that the average American died sixty-two thousand dollars in arrears.
With Trump’s freeze on student-loan payments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s halt on evictions both set to expire on December 31st, a debt-addled humanitarian disaster looms. Countless families currently teetering on the edge of financial collapse will be pushed over the brink. People spent thirty per cent of their stimulus checks to service debts, and as back rent piles up some forty million households may soon face homelessness. “Without immediate and effective stabilization, we could see long-term debt and bankruptcy spirals—starting with middle- and low-income Americans,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently warned. Of course, not all debtors are equally desperate; some are treated better than others. The persistence of the racial wealth gap and predatory lending practices means that Black and Latinx communities are more economically precarious and indebted than their white counterparts. Black women are the most burdened by student-loan debt and often have to resort to payday loans with onerous terms. Without an intervention, the same communities disproportionately devastated by Covid-19 will be dealt an economic death blow, compounding the damage wrought by the mortgage crisis. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, between 2005 and 2009, the median wealth among Black and Latinx households fell by more than fifty per cent.
Debt cancellation is an essential component of any sensible response to this worsening disaster, especially one attuned to questions of racial justice. A sense of justice, however, rarely guides our financial agreements. As David observed in “Debt,” money has the capacity “to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.” Think of the Florida law passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature last year, and recently upheld by a federal appeals court, which requires former felons to fully pay back their court fines and fees in order to vote; the federal government’s habit of garnishing Social Security payments if recipients have defaulted on their federal student loans; or the fact that some small children are denied meals by public schools because their families owe lunch debt. We rarely question the moral logic that enables such obscenities—logic that views the debtors as culpable, even criminal, and thus deserving of punishment. The German word “Schuld,” David was fond of pointing out, means both debt and guilt.
Debt is a power relationship built on the pretense of equality. In theory, a debtor and creditor enter into a contract on a level playing field and with fair terms; in reality, debts are often incurred under conditions of duress. Right now, countless people are putting expenses on credit cards or taking out high-interest payday loans, because they’ve lost their jobs or unemployment benefits have dried up (or never came through). As the Debt Collective writes in its new manifesto, “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition,” “Most people are not in debt because they live beyond their means; they are in debt because they have been denied the means to live.” In countries with universal health care, individual medical debt is rare; in the U.S., it is a leading cause of poverty and the main catalyst for bankruptcy. In some cases, failure to appear in court for unpaid medical debts lands people in jail. No one chooses to get sick, so why is medical debt something people should feel bad about, let alone be penalized or incarcerated for? This is why, following David’s lead, the Debt Collective rejects the language of debt “forgiveness”—which implies a blameworthy borrower and a beneficent creditor—in favor of challenging the underlying morality of a system in which millions must take on debt in order to survive.
In modern economic life, you can count on moral judgment being inconsistently applied. There is, as Pressley told me, “a glaring double standard when it comes to consumer versus corporate debtors.” It is a double standard perfectly captured in a popular meme that invites people to list things that are considered “classy” if an individual is rich and “trashy” if that person is poor. Bankruptcy is frequently mentioned, along with being bilingual and having someone else raise your kids. The more privileged you are, the more debt can work to your advantage, and the same can hold true for defaulting. That’s certainly the case for Donald Trump, who has left a trail of corporate bankruptcies in his wake and is reportedly on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.


newyorker--2020-11-23--The Metropolitan Museum at a Hundred and Fifty

If you ’ re so inclined , there ’ s much to think about when considering the successive mind-sets of patrician New York , from Eurocentric Victorian tastes to universalist ideals—an evolution that has rarely been rapid .
Art that the Met deemed “ primitive ” was initially consigned to the American Museum of Natural History , across Central Park .
This gaffe was remedied in the nineteen-seventies with spectacular gifts of African and Polynesian items that Nelson Rockefeller had amassed for his own Museum of Primitive Art .
Photography , scorned for decades , arrived with a bang in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the indefatigable lobbying of Alfred Stieglitz .
Three exquisite crepuscular prints of the Flatiron Building , by Edward Steichen , from 1904 , heralded that breakthrough .
But derelictions persist from the starchy conservatism that long retarded the museum ’ s engagement with twentieth-century art , when it lazily let the Museum of Modern Art get the best stuff while the getting was good .
Complaints about chronic cluelessness at the Met were once common in the art world , unmitigated by such maladroit stabs at contemporaneity as “ New York Painting and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the putatively hip curator Henry Geldzahler , which mistook abstract painting as the wave of the future and included just one woman , Helen Frankenthaler , and no Black artists .
And the less that ’ s remembered the better of a patronizing debacle from the same year , “ Harlem on My Mind , ” which again excluded artists of color .
The Met is endeavoring to counter its legacy of benightedness on this score , but , like the turning of a battleship , the process is gradual .
On @ @ @ @ @ @ @ c ’ mon .
The Met is our Home Depot of the soul .
It has just about whatever you want , and it has a lot of it , very largely the harvest of past donations , en masse , of the collections of major benefactors—a New York tradition that , per a bequest in 1969 , entitled the banker Robert Lehman to require the construction of a whole new wing , devoted to his gifts .
( That was annoying , but the art was worth it . )
It needs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cast shade on the robber-baron and colonialist provenance of many Met treasures—a problem shared by other formerly piratical museums worldwide .
But it ’ s hard to gainsay , to start with , the tremendous value of the museum ’ s foundational commitment to ancient Egyptian ( hello , Temple of Dendur , 1978 ) , Greek , and Roman treasures , from the Mediterranean cradles of Western tradition , even as it has extended its aegis to Asian , African , and other cultures , most recently with a wondrous refurbishment of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
If there ’ s ever a hitch to enjoying the Met , it ’ s satiety : so much , so all at once .
But that keeps us coming back—and the inability to do so for months during the COVID lockdown felt like a spell of localized brain damage .
To return now exhilarated me—those marble halls , the noble stairs , the niche concentrations of thises and thats .
Time becomes space , indeed , in stilled torrents of forms and epochs that engulf you , wherever you chance to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ magnifies the utter variousness of the place .
If the effect is disorderly—with a time line cutting across departmental divisions and educational chronologies—so are we these days .
I ’ m for rolling with it .
Profiting greatly are items of craft and decoration—keenly selected ceramics , jewelry , armor , furniture , and whatnot—granted solo appearances away from their normally crowded shelves and vitrines .
Some startle .
A framed swatch of wallpaper , from 1922 , by the tragically short-lived Wiener Werkstätte designer Dagobert Peche , ambushed me into rapture : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a ground of depth-shaded vertical bands of ambrosial color .
( I ’ ve been a Peche nut since a retrospective of his work at the Neue Galerie in 2002 . )
The design seemed to essentialize a human will to beauty as a matter of workaday routine : ordinary ecstasy .
Come to think of it , almost everything on display in “ Making the Met ” crowned a good day for someone , craftsman or artist , who was charged with some specific purpose , generating for the viewer a parade @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to present-tense eloquence .
The show ’ s strangest effect , for me , was a relative deflation of major art , as a consequence of having been made to compete with a melee of minor but pestering charms .
Paintings by Manet , Rembrandt , Vermeer , Chardin , and many another master , popping up unpredictably , felt almost apologetic for diverting toward profundity a general flow of enthusiasm for any and all instances of sufficiently motivated creativity .
Those painters are gods to me , and I ’ ll want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But it ’ s valuable , as an antidote to excessive piety , to register the raw fact of physical existence that they share with innumerable other made things , each with something or other to say for itself and about the human appetite for betterment , whatever the occasion .
The show induces a kind of therapeutic delirium .
Aesthetic response rejoices as readily in the eye-catching as in the sublime .
The vacation from serious judgment seemed to me serious in itself , a reminder that nothing possesses inherent qualities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ personal experience .
( Beauty really is in the eye , among other faculties , of the beholder ; that ’ s where it can do the most good . )
Putting revered works to hard tests , as “ Making the Met ” does , disrupts and may thereby reground their wonted hold on us .
Roaming the museum apart from the show , I found the levelling effect hard to shake , tamping down my giddiness at being back in the great building and dispersing my promiscuous surrender to the show @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for me , like “ Bather ( from a fountain group ) , ” a fantastically poignant young figure in white marble from 1782 by Jean-Antoine Houdon , felt off duty , as if backstage awaiting a cue .
I evaded disappointment by skipping the Renaissance , Mannerist , and Baroque demiurges—Bellini , Tintoretto , Velázquez—who normally rivet me .
The reason was a mildly estranging reminder of how artificial the assumptions and protocols of museums tend to be .
Like any learned behavior , museumgoing can slip the mind .
I had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kid , thrust into a mysterious jumble of things that grownups insisted I like .
( I liked some , but sullenly . )
That mood befits , I ’ ve decided , a thaw of sensibility after a period of benumbing house arrest .
I keep noting that the objects are the same , but we who view them are different now : not resuming , rebeginning .
Loving art always involves catching up to ourselves .
I count on my Met touchstones to be more sociable , and myself to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
There ’ s looking at art , and then there ’ s thinking about it , which can sprawl without limits across our apprehension of the ways of the world .
The Met ’ s anniversary show affords stimulus for a great deal of both , rather bravely inviting skeptical scrutiny of the institution ’ s record of cardinal decisions .
Every choice made during the museum ’ s century and a half—what to display , and how , and why—settled an in-house argument that can percolate anew , when confined to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of latter-day cultural and political realities .
Most institutions tend to be clumsy beasts in this respect , on the back foot of critical and social changes that may either confirm or trash the wisdom that they presume to embody .
I think of a section in the show that celebrates Met personnel who , as “ monuments men , ” rescued Nazi-looted art works during the late stages of the Second World War—a point of pride that touches on discomfiting issues , some not yet resolved , of the works ’ proper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stuff up was the easy part . )
Most gravely , as an open wound , there ’ s the fact that , until the last two rooms , the show features hardly a Western work that isn ’ t by a white man .
The behemoth museum details—and embarrasses—the moral character of what has been mirrored to us as the sum of a comprehensive civilization : a heritage to be lived with and , by the way , lived down .
It ’ s nice to see a painting by Romare Bearden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ burdened with token status in the art world .
More satisfying still , there ’ s “ Street Story Quilt ” ( 1985 ) , an array of three large sewn panels by Faith Ringgold .
Formally commanding , the multicolored suite captures in sprightly imagery and describes in demotic words a host of Black citizens—real lives , really led—in windows of tenements along a city street that ’ s past due for intersecting with Fifth Avenue .
♦

“Here time becomes space.” A famously enigmatic line from Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” toyed with my mind during a recent visit, my first since last winter, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It chimed with my experience as I prowled the prodigious institution, which has been celebrating, in a pandemically muted manner, its hundred-and-fiftieth birthday as the world’s chief encyclopedic art museum. “Making the Met,” a huge show, roughly tracks the sequence of the museum’s acquisitions and policies since its founding, in 1870. A hundred and fifty is a lot of years, though a mere flicker compared with the five millennia’s worth of objects from the permanent collections that are sampled in the show.
If you’re so inclined, there’s much to think about when considering the successive mind-sets of patrician New York, from Eurocentric Victorian tastes to universalist ideals—an evolution that has rarely been rapid. Art that the Met deemed “primitive” was initially consigned to the American Museum of Natural History, across Central Park. This gaffe was remedied in the nineteen-seventies with spectacular gifts of African and Polynesian items that Nelson Rockefeller had amassed for his own Museum of Primitive Art. Photography, scorned for decades, arrived with a bang in the twenties and thirties, thanks to the indefatigable lobbying of Alfred Stieglitz. Three exquisite crepuscular prints of the Flatiron Building, by Edward Steichen, from 1904, heralded that breakthrough. But derelictions persist from the starchy conservatism that long retarded the museum’s engagement with twentieth-century art, when it lazily let the Museum of Modern Art get the best stuff while the getting was good. Complaints about chronic cluelessness at the Met were once common in the art world, unmitigated by such maladroit stabs at contemporaneity as “New York Painting and Sculpture,” a show in 1969 by the putatively hip curator Henry Geldzahler, which mistook abstract painting as the wave of the future and included just one woman, Helen Frankenthaler, and no Black artists. And the less that’s remembered the better of a patronizing debacle from the same year, “Harlem on My Mind,” which again excluded artists of color. The Met is endeavoring to counter its legacy of benightedness on this score, but, like the turning of a battleship, the process is gradual.
On the other hand, and meanwhile, c’mon. The Met is our Home Depot of the soul. It has just about whatever you want, and it has a lot of it, very largely the harvest of past donations, en masse, of the collections of major benefactors—a New York tradition that, per a bequest in 1969, entitled the banker Robert Lehman to require the construction of a whole new wing, devoted to his gifts. (That was annoying, but the art was worth it.) It needs to be said that recent scholarship has cast shade on the robber-baron and colonialist provenance of many Met treasures—a problem shared by other formerly piratical museums worldwide. But it’s hard to gainsay, to start with, the tremendous value of the museum’s foundational commitment to ancient Egyptian (hello, Temple of Dendur, 1978), Greek, and Roman treasures, from the Mediterranean cradles of Western tradition, even as it has extended its aegis to Asian, African, and other cultures, most recently with a wondrous refurbishment of the Islamic galleries, completed in 2011.
A Noh costume, with cherry blossoms and fretwork, from the first half of the eighteenth century. Art work courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art
If there’s ever a hitch to enjoying the Met, it’s satiety: so much, so all at once. But that keeps us coming back—and the inability to do so for months during the COVID lockdown felt like a spell of localized brain damage. To return now exhilarated me—those marble halls, the noble stairs, the niche concentrations of thises and thats. Time becomes space, indeed, in stilled torrents of forms and epochs that engulf you, wherever you chance to stand. “Making the Met” magnifies the utter variousness of the place. If the effect is disorderly—with a time line cutting across departmental divisions and educational chronologies—so are we these days. I’m for rolling with it.
The show starts with a chapel-like room emphasizing the museum’s present collecting goals—a political statement, unavoidably. There’s a van Gogh painting, a Rodin sculpture, a sixteenth-century Nepalese mask, a wooden power figure from the Kongo Kingdom, a Greek marble stele, a Surrealist sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, and a Richard Avedon photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Do the juxtapositions disorient? Good. You’re primed for a panoply of incongruities with a cumulatively odd effect on aesthetic perception. Anachronism reigns. An early masterpiece by Édouard Manet, “Young Lady in 1866,” predates in the acquisition annals a set of carved stone fragments of an Aramaic palace in what is now Syria (circa the tenth or ninth century B.C.). I think I never looked at those before; they’re terrific.
Profiting greatly are items of craft and decoration—keenly selected ceramics, jewelry, armor, furniture, and whatnot—granted solo appearances away from their normally crowded shelves and vitrines. Some startle. A framed swatch of wallpaper, from 1922, by the tragically short-lived Wiener Werkstätte designer Dagobert Peche, ambushed me into rapture: bright leafy and floral accents scattered across a ground of depth-shaded vertical bands of ambrosial color. (I’ve been a Peche nut since a retrospective of his work at the Neue Galerie in 2002.) The design seemed to essentialize a human will to beauty as a matter of workaday routine: ordinary ecstasy. Come to think of it, almost everything on display in “Making the Met” crowned a good day for someone, craftsman or artist, who was charged with some specific purpose, generating for the viewer a parade of privileged encounters that bestir bygone forms to present-tense eloquence.
The show’s strangest effect, for me, was a relative deflation of major art, as a consequence of having been made to compete with a melee of minor but pestering charms. Paintings by Manet, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Chardin, and many another master, popping up unpredictably, felt almost apologetic for diverting toward profundity a general flow of enthusiasm for any and all instances of sufficiently motivated creativity. Those painters are gods to me, and I’ll want their works returned to suitably dignified hangings. But it’s valuable, as an antidote to excessive piety, to register the raw fact of physical existence that they share with innumerable other made things, each with something or other to say for itself and about the human appetite for betterment, whatever the occasion. The show induces a kind of therapeutic delirium. Aesthetic response rejoices as readily in the eye-catching as in the sublime. The vacation from serious judgment seemed to me serious in itself, a reminder that nothing possesses inherent qualities except by attribution, necessarily ratified in personal experience. (Beauty really is in the eye, among other faculties, of the beholder; that’s where it can do the most good.) Putting revered works to hard tests, as “Making the Met” does, disrupts and may thereby reground their wonted hold on us.
“Street Story Quilt,” by Faith Ringgold, from 1985. Art work courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art © Faith Ringgold
Roaming the museum apart from the show, I found the levelling effect hard to shake, tamping down my giddiness at being back in the great building and dispersing my promiscuous surrender to the show’s seductive bibelots. Regular stops for me, like “Bather (from a fountain group),” a fantastically poignant young figure in white marble from 1782 by Jean-Antoine Houdon, felt off duty, as if backstage awaiting a cue. I evaded disappointment by skipping the Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque demiurges—Bellini, Tintoretto, Velázquez—who normally rivet me. The reason was a mildly estranging reminder of how artificial the assumptions and protocols of museums tend to be. Like any learned behavior, museumgoing can slip the mind. I had a flash memory of being a bored kid, thrust into a mysterious jumble of things that grownups insisted I like. (I liked some, but sullenly.) That mood befits, I’ve decided, a thaw of sensibility after a period of benumbing house arrest. I keep noting that the objects are the same, but we who view them are different now: not resuming, rebeginning. Loving art always involves catching up to ourselves. I count on my Met touchstones to be more sociable, and myself to be less self-conscious, when next we meet.
There’s looking at art, and then there’s thinking about it, which can sprawl without limits across our apprehension of the ways of the world. The Met’s anniversary show affords stimulus for a great deal of both, rather bravely inviting skeptical scrutiny of the institution’s record of cardinal decisions. Every choice made during the museum’s century and a half—what to display, and how, and why—settled an in-house argument that can percolate anew, when confined to aesthetics, or that may run afoul of latter-day cultural and political realities. Most institutions tend to be clumsy beasts in this respect, on the back foot of critical and social changes that may either confirm or trash the wisdom that they presume to embody. I think of a section in the show that celebrates Met personnel who, as “monuments men,” rescued Nazi-looted art works during the late stages of the Second World War—a point of pride that touches on discomfiting issues, some not yet resolved, of the works’ proper ownership and disposition. (Rounding the stuff up was the easy part.) Most gravely, as an open wound, there’s the fact that, until the last two rooms, the show features hardly a Western work that isn’t by a white man. The behemoth museum details—and embarrasses—the moral character of what has been mirrored to us as the sum of a comprehensive civilization: a heritage to be lived with and, by the way, lived down.
It’s nice to see a painting by Romare Bearden, a consummate artist who was long burdened with token status in the art world. More satisfying still, there’s “Street Story Quilt” (1985), an array of three large sewn panels by Faith Ringgold. Formally commanding, the multicolored suite captures in sprightly imagery and describes in demotic words a host of Black citizens—real lives, really led—in windows of tenements along a city street that’s past due for intersecting with Fifth Avenue. ♦


newyorker--2020-11-23--Patricia Lockwood on the Extremely Online

If you ’ ve ever whispered to your cat to “ show the feet , sweetie , ” then you ’ re extremely online .
If you have shirtless images of Geraldo Rivera saved in your photo roll , then you ’ re extremely online .
If , when you ’ re lying down at night , a bubble seems to open , just off to the side of your left temple , where the discourse continues even as you sleep , then you ’ re extremely online .
And , if , in the mornings , you feel a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up the conversation again and continue yourself in it , then you ’ re probably extremely online .
Growing up , I was in many ways unfit for the real world .
I was the kind of child who was scared not just of fireworks but of the half hour it took to find parking before the fireworks .
The Internet represented , to me , a place of safety .
But it was also a place of education , a place to deprogram myself after a highly eccentric upbringing .
To someone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I had , the Internet shines like a city on a hill , with a vast library at the center .
It started out as the place where I could go to find answers ; it became the place where I ended up seeing the pic of a pig with poop on its balls like ten thousand times over a period of ten years .
You may have heard the term “ irony poisoning ” before—an “ online ” attitude in which everything is a potential meme , even a historical atrocity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ we be seriously worried that the digital information glut is distorting our ability to think about one another , about the world outside ?
When I was writing the second half of my novel , I found myself thinking about a set of terms tossed around with great frequency on social media : smooth brain , big brain , galaxy brain .
How we used them against others but also about ourselves , and how they did seem to describe a real phenomenon , some shortcut that had happened among our circuits .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ our cognition , limited certain pathways , pruned conversational possibilities .
Drinking a triple espresso and calling Ted Cruz “ baby brain ” on Twitter was fun , on the one hand .
But , on the other hand , as the second half of the novel shows , this shorthand can do violence to a real human being , a mind it is a privilege to contemplate , a child that one loves .
So it is possible to see , in yourself , the limits of the ironic approach to life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to door telling people to fix their hearts or die , I think it ’ s much more important to direct our attention to how the new speech now rings in the halls of power .
In my novel , I write of the feeling that we are having a private conversation , hardly realizing that the oppressor is standing in the doorway listening in , taking up the new vocabulary , turning it to his ends .
Basically , a world where Hillary Clinton is posting “ how it started/how it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world that anyone wants to live in .
Do you think that , in recent years , in part owing to the Trump Administration and the “ online activism ” that it has spurred , there ’ s been a shift away from the ironic Internet ?
Are we inheriting a better , kinder cyberspace , or is there something else we ’ re losing ?
In times of crisis , the Internet rises to the level of a jewel , an eye .
It becomes a pure organ of documentation , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ muses at one point in the novel , she might have seen the video of Heather Heyer being struck by a car before Heyer ’ s own mother heard the news .
This ability to be remotely present in these crises is also a product of the panopticon , the surveillance state .
People are finding ways to subvert it , but it is still a repurposing of the weapons that have been turned on us .
It is not better or kinder .
It is fierce , the new face of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s pregnancy is harrowing—it ’ s an event that can ’ t be neatly summed up or contained by ready-made language .
As the protagonist might put it , she can ’ t post her way out of it .
Does this difficult pregnancy , along with the real-life politics that shape it , pull the protagonist back from the “ online ” into her immediate life ?
Or has the chaos of the Internet actually equipped her , in some way , to understand it better ?
Yes , I think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and put back into the body that suffers .
The condition of being in a body that suffers is one of the reasons that many of us enter the Internet so completely : it is an ether where you can move as a stream of air , of thinking , of Terminator fluid .
But anyone who has ever been interrupted in that life by something more immediate—anyone who ’ s ever looked at Twitter in the waiting room of a hospital—understands the feeling of being returned back to your fingertips , your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A monitor is beeping ; run to it , go .
The baby has stopped breathing ; shift her head so that her airway opens .
But the chaos of the Internet has provided the protagonist with a language , and a language is ultimately what helps us speak of our suffering to ourselves .
I think it doesn ’ t matter much what the language is .
A mind that is wallpapered with bodega cats is still a real place , where real human scenes happen .
A person who thinks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when the doctor says the words “ Proteus syndrome ” to her , is still being served by her own private language , no matter how or where it was obtained .
Abortion is an issue that maybe doesn ’ t have viral priority on the left in the same way it does on the right , where the response is driven by outrage .
Raw emotion , personal tragedy—these are the messy things that , as Internet browsers , we “ avert our eyes ” from , as the piece puts it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of writing like fiction or poetry to shelter these vulnerable experiences outside ( or alongside ) the dominance of the Internet ?
There must be .
I note in my memoir , “ Priestdaddy , ” that I ’ m uniquely positioned to observe this issue because I was raised in the white-hot fervor of the Midwestern pro-life movement that coalesced in the late seventies and early eighties .
The outrage of seeing someone like Amy Coney Barrett nominated to the Supreme Court was , for me , compounded by the fact that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ teenage ideological path , I would have greeted this nomination with jubilation .
I would have believed that she was the answer to my nightly prayers .
There is a physical horror , an encounter with a possible self that did not come to pass , which becomes an animating force of fiction .
In the novel , the real through line is that the protagonist ’ s ambient dread of something bad happening is replaced by the understanding that it already has .
We already live in the country that we fear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ privilege to come to this realization so late .
But it is also true that when it comes to abortion rights , most people have no idea how much they have already been eroded , state by state .
It is a physical shock to find yourself or someone you love in a situation like this—a life-threatening situation—and realize that the access to safe care is almost entirely out of reach .
It ’ s particularly interesting because one of the great bogeymen of my childhood was “ partial-birth abortions , ” which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who hated children on women who hated children .
In fact , this procedure might be recommended for a case just like the one presented in the novel , in order to preserve the mother ’ s fertility or her life .

Photograph by Thomas Slack
In “The Winged Thing,” your story in this week’s magazine, we meet a nameless protagonist who is immersed in the language of the Internet—she’s completely fluent in the social-media logic that converts jokes or “takes” into social capital. For the uninitiated, how would you describe what it means to be “extremely online,” and how might a person end up that way?
If you’ve ever whispered to your cat to “show the feet, sweetie,” then you’re extremely online. If you have shirtless images of Geraldo Rivera saved in your photo roll, then you’re extremely online. If, when you’re lying down at night, a bubble seems to open, just off to the side of your left temple, where the discourse continues even as you sleep, then you’re extremely online. And, if, in the mornings, you feel a physical lurch toward your phone to pick up the conversation again and continue yourself in it, then you’re probably extremely online.
Growing up, I was in many ways unfit for the real world. I was the kind of child who was scared not just of fireworks but of the half hour it took to find parking before the fireworks. The Internet represented, to me, a place of safety. But it was also a place of education, a place to deprogram myself after a highly eccentric upbringing. To someone operating with the sort of informational deficit I had, the Internet shines like a city on a hill, with a vast library at the center. It started out as the place where I could go to find answers; it became the place where I ended up seeing the pic of a pig with poop on its balls like ten thousand times over a period of ten years.
You may have heard the term “irony poisoning” before—an “online” attitude in which everything is a potential meme, even a historical atrocity. Is this a widespread condition? Should we be seriously worried that the digital information glut is distorting our ability to think about one another, about the world outside?
When I was writing the second half of my novel, I found myself thinking about a set of terms tossed around with great frequency on social media: smooth brain, big brain, galaxy brain. How we used them against others but also about ourselves, and how they did seem to describe a real phenomenon, some shortcut that had happened among our circuits. What we were doing had changed us—reshaped our cognition, limited certain pathways, pruned conversational possibilities. Drinking a triple espresso and calling Ted Cruz “baby brain” on Twitter was fun, on the one hand. But, on the other hand, as the second half of the novel shows, this shorthand can do violence to a real human being, a mind it is a privilege to contemplate, a child that one loves.
So it is possible to see, in yourself, the limits of the ironic approach to life. But, rather than going door to door telling people to fix their hearts or die, I think it’s much more important to direct our attention to how the new speech now rings in the halls of power. In my novel, I write of the feeling that we are having a private conversation, hardly realizing that the oppressor is standing in the doorway listening in, taking up the new vocabulary, turning it to his ends. Basically, a world where Hillary Clinton is posting “how it started/how it’s going” memes is not a world that anyone wants to live in.
Do you think that, in recent years, in part owing to the Trump Administration and the “online activism” that it has spurred, there’s been a shift away from the ironic Internet? Are we inheriting a better, kinder cyberspace, or is there something else we’re losing?
In times of crisis, the Internet rises to the level of a jewel, an eye. It becomes a pure organ of documentation, and its completeness is even frightening—as the protagonist muses at one point in the novel, she might have seen the video of Heather Heyer being struck by a car before Heyer’s own mother heard the news. This ability to be remotely present in these crises is also a product of the panopticon, the surveillance state. People are finding ways to subvert it, but it is still a repurposing of the weapons that have been turned on us. It is not better or kinder. It is fierce, the new face of the fight.
The narrator’s sister’s pregnancy is harrowing—it’s an event that can’t be neatly summed up or contained by ready-made language. As the protagonist might put it, she can’t post her way out of it. Does this difficult pregnancy, along with the real-life politics that shape it, pull the protagonist back from the “online” into her immediate life? Or has the chaos of the Internet actually equipped her, in some way, to understand it better?
Yes, I think she is plucked out of it immediately and put back into the body that suffers. The condition of being in a body that suffers is one of the reasons that many of us enter the Internet so completely: it is an ether where you can move as a stream of air, of thinking, of Terminator fluid. But anyone who has ever been interrupted in that life by something more immediate—anyone who’s ever looked at Twitter in the waiting room of a hospital—understands the feeling of being returned back to your fingertips, your hair hackles, your most urgent instincts. A monitor is beeping; run to it, go. The baby has stopped breathing; shift her head so that her airway opens. But the chaos of the Internet has provided the protagonist with a language, and a language is ultimately what helps us speak of our suffering to ourselves. I think it doesn’t matter much what the language is. A mind that is wallpapered with bodega cats is still a real place, where real human scenes happen. A person who thinks, I was a mythology girl, when the doctor says the words “Proteus syndrome” to her, is still being served by her own private language, no matter how or where it was obtained.
Abortion is an issue that maybe doesn’t have viral priority on the left in the same way it does on the right, where the response is driven by outrage. Raw emotion, personal tragedy—these are the messy things that, as Internet browsers, we “avert our eyes” from, as the piece puts it. Is there a role for forms of writing like fiction or poetry to shelter these vulnerable experiences outside (or alongside) the dominance of the Internet?


“The Winged Thing”

The cursor blinked where her mind was .
She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal .
All at once they were not true , not as true as she could have made them .
Where was the fiction ?
Distance , arrangement , emphasis , proportion ?
Did they become untrue only when they entered someone else ’ s life and butted up , trivial , against its bigness ?
A twenty‐three‐year‐old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body ; his skin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Did you read .
.
.
?
” they said to each other again and again .
“ Did you read ?
” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high‐five , for they had discovered something even better than being soul mates : that they were exactly , and happily , and hopelessly , the same amount of online .
“ I have a theory , ” she said to the crowd , and then paused , for somewhere she thought she heard someone groan .
She tried to resume , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ d been about to say—something about being a woman in our time .
In Vienna the little cakes looked like the big buildings , or else the big buildings looked like the little cakes .
She ate both , layer upon layer .
Then , as she swung at the top of the Ferris wheel in the Prater , coffee sloshing in her stomach above the linden leaves , her phone buzzed and there were the words , from her far mother : “ Something has gone wrong ” and “ How @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The question that was the pure , liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect ?
—had found its stopped‐clock answer .
She fell heavily out of the broad warm us , out of the story that had seemed , up until the very last minute , to require her perpetual co‐writing .
Oh , she thought hazily , falling rain‐wise like Alice , finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once Photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities , Oh , have I been wasting my time ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to her mother in the car .
The last maternal text had been just a row of blue hearts and the spurting three droplets , which she no longer had the heart to explain were jizz .
Her mother laid her head against the steering wheel and began to weep .
The strange and sideways uses to which art is put !
She stood in the hospital dark beside her sister , holding her slender hand and smoothing a wave of bleached hair back from her forehead .
Her sister ’ s husband @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , boyish in basketball shorts and flip‐flops , unable to stand still .
The tech moved the ultrasound wand over the curve of stomach until a huge womph of heart filled the room , red‐black and fuzzed at the edges , somehow functioning .
They were waiting for the baby to move her diaphragm , the tech explained , in and out , in and out .
This would show that her body was learning how to breathe .
The tech watched and watched , pressing the wand so hard that her sister @ @ @ @ @ @ @ everything swam and bulged ; it was impossible to look at the gray-and-black wash of it and not be reminded of both the History Channel and outer space .
Still , the baby would not practice her breathing , would not practice it in preparation for being born .
The baby would not practice being in the world—why should she ?
—until she said to her sister , “ I have an idea , ” and took out her phone to blare the up‐tempo songs of the Andrews Sisters , sturdy mules and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the hospital dark , music for the boys to listen to overseas , far from home and frightened , bright lungfuls for them to gulp before they headed into battle .
It had been useful .
It was useful again .
The baby , where she did not need to , breathed .
The tech could see everything—the head that was measuring ten weeks ahead of the rest of the body , the asymmetry in the arms and legs , the eyes that would not close—but she wasn ’ t allowed to say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ measurements , her mouth like a single stitch .
At the end she smiled shyly .
“ I like your music , ” she said .
Astonishing that a twenty‐first‐century existence could be threatened by something we had been doing for a million years .
Had the caveman diet given us nothing ?
Had the ancient grains failed to fortify us against the far more ancient enemy ?
Could the person in all those Facebook pictures , the blinking three dots in the text window , could the ringtone that startled her whenever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a while all anyone could talk about , in tones of portent and doom , was what the baby might be missing .
“ Forgive me for thinking , ” she argued in the shower , “ that every baby should get to have an ass .
Call me old‐fashioned , but I happen to believe that a BABY !
should get to have an ASS !
no matter WHAT !
” None of the doctors , nurses , or specialists ever breathed a word about abortion .
Because twenty‐six weeks was already @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the governor ’ s pen was constantly hovering over terrible new legislation ?
Because the hospital was Catholic , and in the lobby there was a statue of Jesus holding a farm animal ?
They never exactly knew .
“ Did you read that article .
.
.
” her sister asked one morning , and immediately she knew which one : a woman who had to fly hundreds of miles to Las Vegas , fight , head down , through a churn of protesters , and finally lie down on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ six inches of bulletproof glass .
“ I keep thinking of the protesters , ” her sister said .
“ Spit flying from their mouths .
How none of them knew.
” “ I ’ ll drive you , ” she said , in desperation .
“ I ’ ll drive you .
I ’ ll do anything .
Just say the word.
” Her sister nodding sadly , both of them seeing that possible desert whip past , the sage and sand , those lilac mountains—they had never been , of course @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Showgirls ” —both knowing that the journey wouldn ’ t be safe , both knowing that their parents would never speak to them again .
She remembered that long‐ago trip to Norway , where one morning on her way to the market she heard a thin , high , strained sound , like a yellow thread pulled between two fingers .
It was aimed through the top of the head instead of at the back of the teeth , so she knew immediately that it was religious .
It was anti‐abortion singing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , cobwebby skirt , and a man in a white collar was standing next to her with a tambourine .
Behind them were two ginger-haired , freckled young men with Down syndrome , embracing each other with both arms and their cheeks pressed close .
Oh , my God , she had thought back then .
As soon as our pro‐lifers figure out they can have a tambourine , it ’ s over .
“ If I were you , honey , ” one social worker told her sister , “ I might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happened.
” They blinked at her .
Surely that wasn ’ t safe ?
Surely they hadn ’ t been transported back to nineteen-fifties Ireland ?
Surely no one would advise her , next , to drink a bottle of gin in a hot bath ?
What she worried for was not just her sister ’ s life but her originality .
She loved “ Star Wars ” so much , for instance , that she had walked down the aisle to “ The Imperial March.
” Would the impulse to walk down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” —which seemed the essence of survival itself , the little tune we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive ?
She went silent in the portal ; she knew how it was .
She knew that as you scrolled you averted your eyes from the ones who could not apply their lipstick within the lines , from the ones who were beginning to edge up into mania , from the ones who were Horny , from the dommes who were not remotely mean enough , from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , from the toothpaste on the mirror in bathroom selfies , from the potato salads that looked terrible , from the journalists who were making mistakes in real time , from the new displays of animal weakness that told us to lengthen the distance between the pack and the stragglers .
But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief , whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside .
If all she was was funny , and none of this was funny , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you understand that your daughter ’ s life is in danger ?
” she screamed quietly to her father in the car , for the baby ’ s head was still growing uncontrollably with no sign of slowing down , and her sister could not walk more than a few steps without starting contractions .
“ Do you understand that a century ago— ” but stopped , because her father ’ s eyes were swimming .
He was starting to see , and she couldn ’ t bear it if this was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all these years .
She tried to wrench the passenger door open but it was locked ; “ Bad to the Bone ” was playing on the radio , and it was not in her father ’ s nature to let her out of the car until it had ended .
Still , he wasn ’ t as dismissive as usual ; he was trying to be good .
“ How is .
.
.
your work .
.
.
going .
.
.
these days ?
” he asked over breakfast , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where she got legally high with some booksellers , became convinced she was dying , drank an entire pitcher of cucumber water , and then fell to the ground so slowly that she accidentally showed the entire room her snatch , all the while crying out for someone to Call an Ambulance .
On reflection , she felt no shame .
What was such an error but a replica , made miniature , of the sad trajectory that had brought her fame in the first place ?
“ It ’ s going really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her father , crossing her indefensible forearms over her undefended chest .
“ Everything that could have gone wrong with a baby ’ s brain went wrong here , ” the doctors told them , and so she began to live in that brain , thinking herself along its routes , thinking what it meant that the baby would never know the news .
The image of it approached total abstraction , almost became beautiful .
“ The neurons all migrated into isolated pods , where they will never talk to each other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ words , maybe .
Maybe she ’ ll know who you are .
Everyone in the room gazing at the blooming gray cloud ; everyone in the room seized with a secret wish to see their own , which they believed they would recognize by the subtle shadows of things in it .
Oh , look , eight years of medical school .
Oh , look , an old episode of “ Frasier.
” The neurologist stood out from the others .
Her skin had the gentle green cast of a Madonna balanced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grotto , with sea light reflecting on the long upward thought of her forehead .
Compositionally , she appeared to be fourteen per cent classical music , the kind you were supposed to listen to while you were studying .
As she spoke , she stopped every few sentences to apologize .
“ Not your fault , ” her sister kept saying , flicking solid silver away from her cheek , as whatever it was that had made the neurologist study the brain in the first place cracked the channel of her education @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a direct current .
She streamed in her fixed socket like a star .
Said , “ I am so sorry.
” If the baby lived—for the doctors did not believe she would live .
If she lived , they did not believe she would live for long .
If she lived for long , they did not know what her life would be—she would live in her senses .
Her fingertips , her ears , her sleepiness and her wide awake , a ripple along the skin wherever she was touched .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ she turned to another state .
Tide pools full of slow blinks and bubbles and little waving fronds .
The self , but more , like a sponge .
But thirsty .
The words “ shared reality ” stretched and stretched , flapped at the corners like a blue felt blanket , and failed to cover everyone ’ s feet at once , feet that all shrank from the same cold .
Picture the blanket with its wide satin hem , for didn ’ t we all have the same one ?
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” she sighed .
This happened every time she returned home , as soon as she saw the Quaker Steak & Lube , as soon as the first Tom Petty song came on the radio and began working at the zipper of her jeans , as soon as her speed on the highway produced a friction approaching fire .
As a teen-ager , she had tried to write poetry about the beauty of her surroundings , but her surroundings were so ugly that she had quickly abandoned the project .
Why were the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Why did the billboards announce “ LOOSE , HOT SLOTS ” ?
Why did her mother collect Precious Moments ?
Why did the birds seem to say “ Bur‐ger King , Bur‐ger King , ” and why , in her most solitary moments , did she find herself humming the jingle for the local accident‐and‐injury lawyer , which was so catchy that it almost seemed to qualify as a disease ?
If she had stayed , she might have gotten addicted to pills , too , she realized .
Something about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gutters in autumn , something about the way the snow stayed long after it was wanted , like wives .
Something about her memory of the multiplication table , with its fat , devouring zero at the corner , and that chalk taste on the center of the tongue .
Instead , she had disappeared into the Internet .
She had not realized what a close call she ’ d had until recently , for now , in the portal , men were coming up through the manholes to confess how near they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they , too , had wandered the sewers of communal thought for days at a time , dry‐mouthed and damp under the arms .
How they were exposed to the mutagenic glowing sludge just long enough to become perfectly , perfectly funny , just long enough to grow that all‐discerning third eye .
All along the roadside were signs reading “ KIDNEY FOR MELISSA , ” “ KIDNEY FOR RANDY , ” “ KIDNEY FOR JEANINE , ” with desperate phone numbers written underneath in Magic Marker .
“ Mom , what are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

Audio available Listen to this story Audio: Patricia Lockwood reads.
Everyone at gate B6 was bathed in gold. She sat there with one foot off the edge of the earth, close to falling, until she saw the couple with matching extravagant mullets that hung down past their shoulder blades. The man took out a brush and began to fight through his mullet until it was free, and then he handed the brush to his wife and she began to fight through hers with the same consecrated look; these mullets were their acre and when God came down he would not find a rock, a stump, a weed. They shook out their hair together, as if it were all on the same head, joined hands, and rested. She sat in the gold that made them the same and felt a little less like dying.
•
The cursor blinked where her mind was. She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal. All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them. Where was the fiction? Distance, arrangement, emphasis, proportion? Did they become untrue only when they entered someone else’s life and butted up, trivial, against its bigness?
•
A twenty‐three‐year‐old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body; his skin seemed to have no pores whatsoever. “Did you read . . . ?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high‐five, for they had discovered something even better than being soul mates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.
•
“I have a theory,” she said to the crowd, and then paused, for somewhere she thought she heard someone groan. She tried to resume, but couldn’t recall what she’d been about to say—something about being a woman in our time.
•
In Vienna the little cakes looked like the big buildings, or else the big buildings looked like the little cakes. She ate both, layer upon layer. Then, as she swung at the top of the Ferris wheel in the Prater, coffee sloshing in her stomach above the linden leaves, her phone buzzed and there were the words, from her far mother: “Something has gone wrong” and “How soon can you get here?”
•
The question that was the pure, liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped‐clock answer. She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up until the very last minute, to require her perpetual co‐writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rain‐wise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once Photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, Oh, have I been wasting my time?
•
“Tell me,” she said to her mother in the car. The last maternal text had been just a row of blue hearts and the spurting three droplets, which she no longer had the heart to explain were jizz. Her mother laid her head against the steering wheel and began to weep.
•
The strange and sideways uses to which art is put! She stood in the hospital dark beside her sister, holding her slender hand and smoothing a wave of bleached hair back from her forehead. Her sister’s husband rocked back and forth on his heels, boyish in basketball shorts and flip‐flops, unable to stand still. The tech moved the ultrasound wand over the curve of stomach until a huge womph of heart filled the room, red‐black and fuzzed at the edges, somehow functioning. They were waiting for the baby to move her diaphragm, the tech explained, in and out, in and out. This would show that her body was learning how to breathe. The tech watched and watched, pressing the wand so hard that her sister cried. On the monitor a small everything swam and bulged; it was impossible to look at the gray-and-black wash of it and not be reminded of both the History Channel and outer space. Still, the baby would not practice her breathing, would not practice it in preparation for being born. The baby would not practice being in the world—why should she?—until she said to her sister, “I have an idea,” and took out her phone to blare the up‐tempo songs of the Andrews Sisters, sturdy mules and wide lapels and high brass shining in the hospital dark, music for the boys to listen to overseas, far from home and frightened, bright lungfuls for them to gulp before they headed into battle. It had been useful. It was useful again. The baby, where she did not need to, breathed.
•
The tech could see everything—the head that was measuring ten weeks ahead of the rest of the body, the asymmetry in the arms and legs, the eyes that would not close—but she wasn’t allowed to say anything about it. She marked down measurements, her mouth like a single stitch. At the end she smiled shyly. “I like your music,” she said.
•
Astonishing that a twenty‐first‐century existence could be threatened by something we had been doing for a million years. Had the caveman diet given us nothing? Had the ancient grains failed to fortify us against the far more ancient enemy? Could the person in all those Facebook pictures, the blinking three dots in the text window, could the ringtone that startled her whenever her sister called simply disappear?
“Tonight, I was thinking we could run laps around the living room and then check out that Zoom standup show, but I’m open to other horrible ideas.” Cartoon by Lars Kenseth Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
•
For a while all anyone could talk about, in tones of portent and doom, was what the baby might be missing. “Forgive me for thinking,” she argued in the shower, “that every baby should get to have an ass. Call me old‐fashioned, but I happen to believe that a BABY! should get to have an ASS! no matter WHAT!”
•
None of the doctors, nurses, or specialists ever breathed a word about abortion. Because twenty‐six weeks was already too late? Because it was Ohio, and the governor’s pen was constantly hovering over terrible new legislation? Because the hospital was Catholic, and in the lobby there was a statue of Jesus holding a farm animal? They never exactly knew. “Did you read that article . . .” her sister asked one morning, and immediately she knew which one: a woman who had to fly hundreds of miles to Las Vegas, fight, head down, through a churn of protesters, and finally lie down on the table in a paper gown behind six inches of bulletproof glass. “I keep thinking of the protesters,” her sister said. “Spit flying from their mouths. How none of them knew.”
•
“I’ll drive you,” she said, in desperation. “I’ll drive you. I’ll do anything. Just say the word.” Her sister nodding sadly, both of them seeing that possible desert whip past, the sage and sand, those lilac mountains—they had never been, of course, had only seen the movie “Showgirls”—both knowing that the journey wouldn’t be safe, both knowing that their parents would never speak to them again.
•
She remembered that long‐ago trip to Norway, where one morning on her way to the market she heard a thin, high, strained sound, like a yellow thread pulled between two fingers. It was aimed through the top of the head instead of at the back of the teeth, so she knew immediately that it was religious. It was anti‐abortion singing, led by a woman in a long, cobwebby skirt, and a man in a white collar was standing next to her with a tambourine. Behind them were two ginger-haired, freckled young men with Down syndrome, embracing each other with both arms and their cheeks pressed close.
Oh, my God, she had thought back then. As soon as our pro‐lifers figure out they can have a tambourine, it’s over.
•
“If I were you, honey,” one social worker told her sister, “I might just go out running and see what happened.” They blinked at her. Surely that wasn’t safe? Surely they hadn’t been transported back to nineteen-fifties Ireland? Surely no one would advise her, next, to drink a bottle of gin in a hot bath?
•
What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She loved “Star Wars” so much, for instance, that she had walked down the aisle to “The Imperial March.” Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The Imperial March”—which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive?
•
She went silent in the portal; she knew how it was. She knew that as you scrolled you averted your eyes from the ones who could not apply their lipstick within the lines, from the ones who were beginning to edge up into mania, from the ones who were Horny, from the dommes who were not remotely mean enough, from the nudeness that received only eight likes, from the toothpaste on the mirror in bathroom selfies, from the potato salads that looked terrible, from the journalists who were making mistakes in real time, from the new displays of animal weakness that told us to lengthen the distance between the pack and the stragglers. But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.
•
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
•
“Do you understand that your daughter’s life is in danger?” she screamed quietly to her father in the car, for the baby’s head was still growing uncontrollably with no sign of slowing down, and her sister could not walk more than a few steps without starting contractions. “Do you understand that a century ago—” but stopped, because her father’s eyes were swimming. He was starting to see, and she couldn’t bear it if this was the thing that did it, and after all these years. She tried to wrench the passenger door open but it was locked; “Bad to the Bone” was playing on the radio, and it was not in her father’s nature to let her out of the car until it had ended.
•
Still, he wasn’t as dismissive as usual; he was trying to be good. “How is . . . your work . . . going . . . these days?” he asked over breakfast, and she thought of a recent event where she got legally high with some booksellers, became convinced she was dying, drank an entire pitcher of cucumber water, and then fell to the ground so slowly that she accidentally showed the entire room her snatch, all the while crying out for someone to Call an Ambulance. On reflection, she felt no shame. What was such an error but a replica, made miniature, of the sad trajectory that had brought her fame in the first place? “It’s going really, really well,” she told her father, crossing her indefensible forearms over her undefended chest.
•
“Everything that could have gone wrong with a baby’s brain went wrong here,” the doctors told them, and so she began to live in that brain, thinking herself along its routes, thinking what it meant that the baby would never know the news. The image of it approached total abstraction, almost became beautiful. “The neurons all migrated into isolated pods, where they will never talk to each other,” the doctors said. Ten words, maybe. Maybe she’ll know who you are. Everyone in the room gazing at the blooming gray cloud; everyone in the room seized with a secret wish to see their own, which they believed they would recognize by the subtle shadows of things in it. Oh, look, eight years of medical school. Oh, look, an old episode of “Frasier.”
•
The neurologist stood out from the others. Her skin had the gentle green cast of a Madonna balanced on a single fish‐shaped foot in a grotto, with sea light reflecting on the long upward thought of her forehead. Compositionally, she appeared to be fourteen per cent classical music, the kind you were supposed to listen to while you were studying. As she spoke, she stopped every few sentences to apologize. “Not your fault,” her sister kept saying, flicking solid silver away from her cheek, as whatever it was that had made the neurologist study the brain in the first place cracked the channel of her education and began to pour toward them as a direct current. She streamed in her fixed socket like a star. Said, “I am so sorry.”
•
If the baby lived—for the doctors did not believe she would live. If she lived, they did not believe she would live for long. If she lived for long, they did not know what her life would be—she would live in her senses. Her fingertips, her ears, her sleepiness and her wide awake, a ripple along the skin wherever she was touched. All along her edges, just where she turned to another state. Tide pools full of slow blinks and bubbles and little waving fronds. The self, but more, like a sponge. But thirsty.
•
The words “shared reality” stretched and stretched, flapped at the corners like a blue felt blanket, and failed to cover everyone’s feet at once, feet that all shrank from the same cold. Picture the blanket with its wide satin hem, for didn’t we all have the same one?
•
“Back in Ohio and heterosexual again,” she sighed. This happened every time she returned home, as soon as she saw the Quaker Steak & Lube, as soon as the first Tom Petty song came on the radio and began working at the zipper of her jeans, as soon as her speed on the highway produced a friction approaching fire.
•
As a teen-ager, she had tried to write poetry about the beauty of her surroundings, but her surroundings were so ugly that she had quickly abandoned the project. Why were the trees here so brown, so stunted? Why did the billboards announce “LOOSE, HOT SLOTS”? Why did her mother collect Precious Moments? Why did the birds seem to say “Bur‐ger King, Bur‐ger King,” and why, in her most solitary moments, did she find herself humming the jingle for the local accident‐and‐injury lawyer, which was so catchy that it almost seemed to qualify as a disease?
•
If she had stayed, she might have gotten addicted to pills, too, she realized. Something about the way the lunch‐bag‐colored leaves wadded in the gutters in autumn, something about the way the snow stayed long after it was wanted, like wives. Something about her memory of the multiplication table, with its fat, devouring zero at the corner, and that chalk taste on the center of the tongue.
•
Instead, she had disappeared into the Internet. She had not realized what a close call she’d had until recently, for now, in the portal, men were coming up through the manholes to confess how near they had come to being radicalized, how they, too, had wandered the sewers of communal thought for days at a time, dry‐mouthed and damp under the arms. How they were exposed to the mutagenic glowing sludge just long enough to become perfectly, perfectly funny, just long enough to grow that all‐discerning third eye.
•
All along the roadside were signs reading “KIDNEY FOR MELISSA,” “KIDNEY FOR RANDY,” “KIDNEY FOR JEANINE,” with desperate phone numbers written underneath in Magic Marker. “Mom, what are those signs?” she finally asked.
“I’ve never seen them before,” her mother said, squinting through her drugstore glasses. “They must be a scam.”


newyorker--2020-11-23--Dark Sitcom Reboots: Beyond “Bel-Air”

Dark Sitcom Reboots: Beyond “Bel-Air”

“ Lucille ” To stay in the United States , Ricardo , a hardworking Latinx immigrant , is forced to marry Lucille , a volatile , racist redhead .
Although they live together in a small New York apartment , they sleep in separate beds and lead separate lives .
Lucille frequently conspires with her fellow-Karen , a neighbor named Ethel , to thwart Ricardo ’ s efforts to help other immigrants band together and build a better world .
“ Howser ” This medical drama is set in a hospital of the future , when the number of adult @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the broken health-care system that child doctors must fill the void .
The hospital ’ s jaded but seasoned chief physician ?
Sixteen-year-old Doogie Howser , M.D .
“ I ’ m too old for this job , ” he growls , as he struggles to save the lives of a pregnant woman and her unborn doctor .
“ The Junction ” The breakdown of America ’ s transportation infrastructure is seen through the eyes of three sisters working dead-end , minimum-wage jobs in Hooterville , a depressed rural town .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the Shady Rest , a nursing home next to the defunct train station , where the lack of basic facilities necessitates bathing in an old water tank .
Though they try to keep their spirits up with listless games of horseshoes , the women are ruthlessly exploited by their fearsome but sluggish patriarch , Uncle Joe .
“ How I Never Met Your Mother ” Ted Mosby is a single architect looking for a soul mate .
Unfortunately , he ’ s doing this during a global pandemic—an era of Zoom calls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and drug-resistant herpes .
But this doesn ’ t stop him from trying to find love , with consistently heartbreaking results—all told in flashbacks , as he sits in an empty living room talking to himself .
“ Captain Miller ” In the face of Black Lives Matter protests , Captain Barnett Miller of the N.Y.P.D .
is given the assignment of turning around the precinct with the highest number of excessive-force claims .
Can he reform a deeply ingrained culture and the loose cannons that fuel it—like Detective Wojo , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t escalate ?
“ Two and a Half Men ” The COVID pandemic has wreaked havoc on the life of Alan Harper : his wife succumbed to the virus , and his grown son , Jake , had both legs amputated .
To help him care for Jake , Alan reconnects with his estranged brother , Charlie , who wrestles with opioid addiction and a string of angry creditors .
“ Huxtable ” The sinister ob-gyn at the center of this drama tries to keep a dark secret from his loving family .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ set against the ravages of global warming .
Seven day-trippers stranded on an uncharted desert isle combat hurricanes , rising tides , radioactive vegetables , and freak storms .
One , known only as the Professor , insists that the disasters are the result of human-induced climate change and urges the group to find higher ground , while anti-science billionaire Thurston Howell III claims that climate events are random , and builds a beachfront mansion out of bamboo .
The survivors must choose sides while steering clear of the Captain , a large @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his guilt over the desperate situation by hitting others with his hat .
“ The Nun ” A novice assigned to a convent in San Juan becomes aware of a clandestine pedophile ring involving priests .
She also learns how to fly .
“ Friends ?
” The haunting title song sums up the mood of this dark drama : So no one told you life was gon na be this way .
Whom can you trust when anyone in your pod could be carrying a deadly virus ?
Follow six poorly socialized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learn that , when you ’ re this young and good-looking , vows of isolation are difficult to maintain , and breaking them can be lethal .
“ I Dream of Jinn-i ” When Major Anthony Nelson returns from the war in Iraq , he discovers that the souvenir incense burner he picked up in Baghdad contains Jinn-i , a supernatural being who manifests as a young Islamic woman .
Anthony , who is an evangelical Christian , is torn between his feelings for Jinn-i and the need to hide her from his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who moonlights as an ICE agent and is convinced that Anthony is harboring a demonic spirit .
“ The Really Bad Place ” In this thriller , Eleanor , Chidi , Jason , and Tahani wake up from comas in what they think is Hell .
What isn ’ t revealed until the end of Season 1 ( spoiler alert ) is that they haven ’ t actually died—they ’ ve just woken up in 2020 .
♦

“Bel-Air” is a serialized one-hour dramatic analogue of the 90’s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” that leans into the original premise: Will’s complicated journey from the streets of West Philadelphia to the gated mansions of Bel-Air. —Press release from Peacock.
“Lucille” To stay in the United States, Ricardo, a hardworking Latinx immigrant, is forced to marry Lucille, a volatile, racist redhead. Although they live together in a small New York apartment, they sleep in separate beds and lead separate lives. Lucille frequently conspires with her fellow-Karen, a neighbor named Ethel, to thwart Ricardo’s efforts to help other immigrants band together and build a better world.
“Howser” This medical drama is set in a hospital of the future, when the number of adult doctors has been so depleted by pandemics and the broken health-care system that child doctors must fill the void. The hospital’s jaded but seasoned chief physician? Sixteen-year-old Doogie Howser, M.D. “I’m too old for this job,” he growls, as he struggles to save the lives of a pregnant woman and her unborn doctor.
“The Junction” The breakdown of America’s transportation infrastructure is seen through the eyes of three sisters working dead-end, minimum-wage jobs in Hooterville, a depressed rural town. The women and their mother toil long hours at the Shady Rest, a nursing home next to the defunct train station, where the lack of basic facilities necessitates bathing in an old water tank. Though they try to keep their spirits up with listless games of horseshoes, the women are ruthlessly exploited by their fearsome but sluggish patriarch, Uncle Joe.
“How I Never Met Your Mother” Ted Mosby is a single architect looking for a soul mate. Unfortunately, he’s doing this during a global pandemic—an era of Zoom calls, social distancing, terrible dating apps, and drug-resistant herpes. But this doesn’t stop him from trying to find love, with consistently heartbreaking results—all told in flashbacks, as he sits in an empty living room talking to himself.
“Captain Miller” In the face of Black Lives Matter protests, Captain Barnett Miller of the N.Y.P.D. is given the assignment of turning around the precinct with the highest number of excessive-force claims. Can he reform a deeply ingrained culture and the loose cannons that fuel it—like Detective Wojo, who never met a situation he couldn’t escalate?
“Two and a Half Men” The COVID pandemic has wreaked havoc on the life of Alan Harper: his wife succumbed to the virus, and his grown son, Jake, had both legs amputated. To help him care for Jake, Alan reconnects with his estranged brother, Charlie, who wrestles with opioid addiction and a string of angry creditors.
“Huxtable” The sinister ob-gyn at the center of this drama tries to keep a dark secret from his loving family.
“Island” A tale of survival set against the ravages of global warming. Seven day-trippers stranded on an uncharted desert isle combat hurricanes, rising tides, radioactive vegetables, and freak storms. One, known only as the Professor, insists that the disasters are the result of human-induced climate change and urges the group to find higher ground, while anti-science billionaire Thurston Howell III claims that climate events are random, and builds a beachfront mansion out of bamboo. The survivors must choose sides while steering clear of the Captain, a large, rage-filled white man who takes out his guilt over the desperate situation by hitting others with his hat.
“The Nun” A novice assigned to a convent in San Juan becomes aware of a clandestine pedophile ring involving priests. She also learns how to fly.
“Friends?” The haunting title song sums up the mood of this dark drama: So no one told you life was gonna be this way. Whom can you trust when anyone in your pod could be carrying a deadly virus? Follow six poorly socialized friends in New York City as they learn that, when you’re this young and good-looking, vows of isolation are difficult to maintain, and breaking them can be lethal.
“I Dream of Jinn-i” When Major Anthony Nelson returns from the war in Iraq, he discovers that the souvenir incense burner he picked up in Baghdad contains Jinn-i, a supernatural being who manifests as a young Islamic woman. Anthony, who is an evangelical Christian, is torn between his feelings for Jinn-i and the need to hide her from his nosy, xenophobic neighbors—especially Reverend Bellows, who moonlights as an ICE agent and is convinced that Anthony is harboring a demonic spirit.
“The Really Bad Place” In this thriller, Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani wake up from comas in what they think is Hell. What isn’t revealed until the end of Season 1 (spoiler alert) is that they haven’t actually died—they’ve just woken up in 2020. ♦


“November”

The crosses all men and women Must carry through life Even more visible On this dark and rainy night .

The crosses all men and women
Must carry through life
Even more visible
On this dark and rainy night.