newyorker--2020-12-09--The Best Podcasts of 2020

The Best Podcasts of 2020

The podcasts that stood out to me most this year , not surprisingly , were those that transported me—especially when they made me laugh .
I also appreciated shows that gave me useful information in a form I could stand .
In March , Covid-specific series sprang up—the one I liked best was a nearly robotic , just-the-facts situation called “ Coronavirus 411 ” —and , as the pandemic set in , many shows made great use of the power of voices to connect listeners in isolation .
Deeply reported local documentaries continued to flourish , sometimes at NPR affiliates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parties continued to gobble up greater percentages of the podsphere , but independent creators doing truly original things thrived , too .
And three long-running favorite podcasts of mine put out exceptional , must-listen episodes : the wrenching “ Remembering Lynn Shelton , ” on Marc Maron ’ s “ WTF , ” which Maron released two days after the death of his partner , the brilliant and beloved director Lynn Shelton ; “ Curtis Flowers , ” in which Madeleine Baran , the reporter-host of “ In the Dark , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after twenty-three years , finally interviews him ; and “ Reply All ” ’ s “ The Case of the Missing Hit , ” which brought us unlikely joy , via a mysterious Barenaked Ladies-like earworm , as we adjusted to our new reality in March .
Here ’ s to 2021 , and may things only get better .
This was a year in which you really noticed a good laugh—what is this sound , this feeling ?
—and appreciated the hell out of it .
What a surprise it was to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This Sounds Serious : Grand Casino , ” from Castbox and the Vancouver production company Kelly & Kelly , and laugh my head off over and over again .
Scripted fictional podcasts , including satirical ones , often exude a self-serious , stagey artifice that , at least for me , can produce involuntary shuddering .
But “ This Sounds Serious , ” now in its third season , deftly avoids these problems .
Carly Pope , playing Gwen Radford , a podcaster obsessed with 911 calls , narrates with intelligence and clarity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conventions , and even specific podcasts , but rarely overplays its hand .
“ Grand Casino ” profiles a Hollywood con man , from his origins as a “ con boy ” to the mystery of his last great con , the would-be blockbuster “ Grand Casino ” ; as it winds its way through the eighties , the series riffs on pop-cultural touchstones from “ Sit , Ubu , sit ” to Fido Dido to the guava-juice craze .
The show ’ s writing , acting , and audio production are expertly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sound old , and a little distorted—and it doesn ’ t telegraph the jokes , which sneak up and pack a punch .
When the series made its début , in 2018 , with a season about a weatherman murdered in his waterbed , some listeners mistook it for true crime .
In April , I appeared on “ Recode Media with Peter Kafka ” to talk about podcasts ’ response to the pandemic , and was gently mocked when , asked to name some favorite escapist podcasts , I enthused about “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in a time of constantly unfolding political and public-health crises , the PRX series , hosted by Melody Barnes , was rather escapist , transporting us to a world in which an outsized American President and personality drew on his considerable dealmaking skills to bring about progressive structural change .
Like its predecessor , “ LBJ ’ s War , ” from 2017 , it lets us eavesdrop on history—Johnson ’ s phone calls , Lady Bird ’ s audio diaries—and hear how the sausage got made .
( Not long after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Johnson strong-armed Kennedy ’ s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver into spearheading the War on Poverty : “ You ’ ve got the responsibility , you ’ ve got the authority , you ’ ve got the power , you ’ ve got the money .
Now , you may not have the glands.
” Shriver insisted that he did— “ I ’ ve got plenty of glands.
” ) The series came out before Super Tuesday , when various domestic-policy proposals were being cheered and scorned ; as we head into the Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debates , it ’ s well worth a listen .
The year ’ s most amusing podcast intro—the unmistakable voice of Bebe Neuwirth saying , “ This is ‘ Dead Eyes , ’ a podcast about one actor ’ s quest to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO miniseries ‘ Band of Brothers ’ ” —is perfectly emblematic of the charm , self-awareness , and star power of this surprisingly edifying series .
In it , the character actor and improv-comedy veteran Connor Ratliff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” “ The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ” ) examines a discomfiting milestone in his life—hearing that Hanks had him fired because he has “ dead eyes ” —and gets peers and friends ( including Tony Hale , Jon Hamm , Aimee Mann , D ’ Arcy Carden , and Mike Birbiglia ) to reflect on career successes and failures alongside him .
( Hanks is , of course , a beloved recurring theme . )
It ’ s elegantly produced , full of funny tape ( Ratliff ’ s former agent fondly tells @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he has “ a voice you could eat tomato soup to ” ) , and insightful ; every time we think Ratliff is veering toward self-centered neurosis , he pulls the frame back to make his story universal again , in ways we might not want to admit .
As he says to the actor-comedian Lauren Lapkus , who once cast Ratliff as a character called Pathetic Man in a comedy special , “ It makes me less insecure to know that everybody ’ s insecure.
” The best podcasts often help @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” sleep , an old Moby album—and , to the surprise of many of us , this year that included “ Wind of Change , ” the 1990 perestroika-focussed power ballad by the German hair-metal band the Scorpions , whose piercing whistle and anthemic force inspired millions of Soviet and European “ children of tomorrow ” to “ ring the freedom bell.
” The podcast “ Wind of Change , ” from the New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe , Pineapple Street Studios , Spotify , and Crooked Media , investigates a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ secretly responsible for writing the song ?
Combining the joy of chasing down answers with the glee of embarking on a whimsical quest , Keefe takes listeners on an adventure around the world and through Cold War history .
Though it takes the form of a romp , mightily enhanced by the production chops of Henry Molofsky , “ Wind of Change ” gets us thinking about the role of culture , and specifically music , in influencing hearts and minds .

2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
The podcasts that stood out to me most this year, not surprisingly, were those that transported me—especially when they made me laugh. I also appreciated shows that gave me useful information in a form I could stand. In March, Covid-specific series sprang up—the one I liked best was a nearly robotic, just-the-facts situation called “Coronavirus 411”—and, as the pandemic set in, many shows made great use of the power of voices to connect listeners in isolation. Deeply reported local documentaries continued to flourish, sometimes at NPR affiliates; meanwhile, Spotify and other gargantuan parties continued to gobble up greater percentages of the podsphere, but independent creators doing truly original things thrived, too. And three long-running favorite podcasts of mine put out exceptional, must-listen episodes: the wrenching “Remembering Lynn Shelton,” on Marc Maron’s “WTF,” which Maron released two days after the death of his partner, the brilliant and beloved director Lynn Shelton; “Curtis Flowers,” in which Madeleine Baran, the reporter-host of “In the Dark,” the podcast that helped free Flowers from prison after twenty-three years, finally interviews him; and “Reply All” ’s “The Case of the Missing Hit,” which brought us unlikely joy, via a mysterious Barenaked Ladies-like earworm, as we adjusted to our new reality in March. Here’s to 2021, and may things only get better.
10. “This Sounds Serious: Grand Casino”
This was a year in which you really noticed a good laugh—what is this sound, this feeling?—and appreciated the hell out of it. What a surprise it was to listen to the satirical investigative podcast “This Sounds Serious: Grand Casino,” from Castbox and the Vancouver production company Kelly & Kelly, and laugh my head off over and over again. Scripted fictional podcasts, including satirical ones, often exude a self-serious, stagey artifice that, at least for me, can produce involuntary shuddering. But “This Sounds Serious,” now in its third season, deftly avoids these problems. Carly Pope, playing Gwen Radford, a podcaster obsessed with 911 calls, narrates with intelligence and clarity; the series pokes fun at podcast conventions, and even specific podcasts, but rarely overplays its hand. “Grand Casino” profiles a Hollywood con man, from his origins as a “con boy” to the mystery of his last great con, the would-be blockbuster “Grand Casino”; as it winds its way through the eighties, the series riffs on pop-cultural touchstones from “Sit, Ubu, sit” to Fido Dido to the guava-juice craze. The show’s writing, acting, and audio production are expertly done—“old” audio clips actually sound old, and a little distorted—and it doesn’t telegraph the jokes, which sneak up and pack a punch. When the series made its début, in 2018, with a season about a weatherman murdered in his waterbed, some listeners mistook it for true crime.
9. “LBJ and the Great Society”
In April, I appeared on “Recode Media with Peter Kafka” to talk about podcasts’ response to the pandemic, and was gently mocked when, asked to name some favorite escapist podcasts, I enthused about “LBJ and the Great Society.” But, in a time of constantly unfolding political and public-health crises, the PRX series, hosted by Melody Barnes, was rather escapist, transporting us to a world in which an outsized American President and personality drew on his considerable dealmaking skills to bring about progressive structural change. Like its predecessor, “LBJ’s War,” from 2017, it lets us eavesdrop on history—Johnson’s phone calls, Lady Bird’s audio diaries—and hear how the sausage got made. (Not long after the J.F.K. assassination, for example, Johnson strong-armed Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver into spearheading the War on Poverty: “You’ve got the responsibility, you’ve got the authority, you’ve got the power, you’ve got the money. Now, you may not have the glands.” Shriver insisted that he did—“I’ve got plenty of glands.”) The series came out before Super Tuesday, when various domestic-policy proposals were being cheered and scorned; as we head into the Biden era (!) and resume such debates, it’s well worth a listen.
8. “Dead Eyes”
The year’s most amusing podcast intro—the unmistakable voice of Bebe Neuwirth saying, “This is ‘Dead Eyes,’ a podcast about one actor’s quest to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO miniseries ‘Band of Brothers’ ”—is perfectly emblematic of the charm, self-awareness, and star power of this surprisingly edifying series. In it, the character actor and improv-comedy veteran Connor Ratliff (“The Chris Gethard Show,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) examines a discomfiting milestone in his life—hearing that Hanks had him fired because he has “dead eyes”—and gets peers and friends (including Tony Hale, Jon Hamm, Aimee Mann, D’Arcy Carden, and Mike Birbiglia) to reflect on career successes and failures alongside him. (Hanks is, of course, a beloved recurring theme.) It’s elegantly produced, full of funny tape (Ratliff’s former agent fondly tells him that, like James Earl Jones, he has “a voice you could eat tomato soup to”), and insightful; every time we think Ratliff is veering toward self-centered neurosis, he pulls the frame back to make his story universal again, in ways we might not want to admit. As he says to the actor-comedian Lauren Lapkus, who once cast Ratliff as a character called Pathetic Man in a comedy special, “It makes me less insecure to know that everybody’s insecure.”
7. “Wind of Change”


newyorker--2020-12-09--The Man Who Saw Through Himself

The Man Who Saw Through Himself

Leiris was , before anything , a tireless witness to lived experience .
The term he preferred for most of his work was not “ memoir ” but “ autobiographical essay , ” and he applied the rigor of an objective observer to his recording of the subjective .
Born in 1901 , he worked steadily for seven decades , but his books have yet to secure a spot with most Anglophone readers .
At least five of the translated Leiris volumes are indispensable .
These include two recent English editions , whose late appearance helps explain the low profile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ edition of “ The Ribbon at Olympia ’ s Throat , ” which was first published in 1981 , and “ Phantom Africa , ” published by Seagull Books , in 2019 , eighty-five years after it was released in French .
“ The Rules of the Game , ” an autobiography published in four volumes , between 1948 and 1976 , is Leiris ’ s longest and most essential work , glacially slow and furiously alive .
I can ’ t vouch for the fourth and final book , “ Frêle Bruit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yet appeared in English , but the first three volumes— “ Scratches , ” “ Scraps , ” and “ Fibrils , ” as translated by Lydia Davis—are among the most astonishing books I ’ ve read .
Leiris was a shy and flinty nonbeliever , who valued exactitude above all and who wrote nested , page-long sentences to create “ a series of screens ” between himself and his ideas .
He escaped calcification by holding fast to his curiosity and built ethical strength by observing the slow boil of his consciousness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ firmly anti-colonialist , anti-racist , and anti-capitalist .
In 1976 , when he was seventy-four , he wrote that his core themes were “ an aspiration to the marvellous , a desire to commit himself to the struggle against the flagrant injustices of society , a desire for universalism which has led him to have direct contacts with cultures other than his own.
” In 2020 , he was a delightful companion .
Leiris stumbled onto his themes .
As a university student , he flirted with jazz and chemistry , before graduating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spent the next few years working in Paris , and by 1929 he had married , gained renown as a poet , and joined then broken with the Surrealist movement .
( He remained committed to the “ broadly defined psychological and social liberation ” that Surrealism espoused . )
That year , he became an editor for Georges Bataille ’ s Documents , a heterodox magazine that served as a workshop for writers floating through and away from the Surrealist epicenter .
According to one front cover , the magazine was dedicated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arts , and ethnography.
” Ethnography was then a barely defined field in France , but its promise caught Leiris ’ s attention .
Eager to get out of Europe , he agreed , in 1931 , to be the “ secretary-archivist ” for a two-year expedition , organized by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule , across sub-Saharan Africa .
Leiris ’ s account of that trip , “ Phantom Africa , ” would be his first great work .
Leiris did not approach what he called the “ fortuitous circumstance ” of his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because he had no training in the field .
Instead , he kept a diary and—according to Brent Hayes Edwards , who translated the new edition— “ was adamant that , aside from minor corrections , ” the entries “ were not revised after the fact.
” The result is more than six hundred pages of journal entries , which recount dreams , the behavior of soldiers , a variety of conflicts with Griaule , erotic projections , aches , other aches , and a running measure of his distance from both the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who had sent him to do the studying .
( The first English translation , by Robin Chancellor , was abandoned after the book ’ s publisher demanded extensive cuts to what he called “ schoolboys ’ lavatory wall dirt.
” Leiris did not agree to the cuts . )
On the trip , Leiris used file cards to document the items his group would take to France .
For the rest of his life , he would use the same method to organize ideas for his books .
Leiris wrote that “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ what would result when I forced myself to record virtually everything that happened around me and everything that went through my head.
” One can sense the autobiographer taking shape in these lines , but Leiris also found room , in his mind , to make an argument about ethnography .
“ Phantom Africa ” confounded the field ’ s claims to objectivity by pointing out that the ethnographer is often just recording himself .
There was a challenge , too , in the book ’ s explicit political critique .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the French colonial mind-set and , more specifically , the moral implications of collecting so much butin ( booty ) for French museums .
( Some of the butin that Leiris described is now being considered by Emmanuel Macron for restitution . )
After the book came out , in 1934 , Griaule and Leiris had a falling out .
Five years later , in an unsent letter written to Bataille , Leiris was still warning against the “ imposition of our European casts of mind upon the facts ” of ethnography @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the experience of the native person , ” he wrote , “ we can not enter his skin , and it is always our own experience that we live.
” For Leiris , even self-esteem is suspect , another trap between you and experience .
In 1946 , in an afterword to “ Manhood , ” Leiris wrote that the book was “ the negation of a novel.
” “ In it , ” he wrote , “ I set out mainly to condense , almost in the rough , an ensemble of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exploit by allowing my imagination to work on them.
” Even if Sontag ’ s response was partly disparaging— “ The book has no movement or direction , ” she wrote , and “ provides no consummation or climax ” —she did see Leiris ’ s broader project clearly .
“ Manhood is another of those very modern books which are fully intelligible only as part of the project of a life , ” she wrote .
“ A book , ” in other words , “ is an action , giving on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was absolutely part of that project , but it may not have been the most felicitous way to introduce Anglophone readers to Leiris .
The “ impassioned frankness ” that Leiris longed for is muddled by an atypical focus on the narcissistic injuries of his early years .
But there was more to come .
In his mid-thirties , Leiris began the decades-long autobiographical study that became “ The Rules of the Game.
” The first volume , “ Scratches , ” appeared in 1948 .
Like “ Manhood , ” the book @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Leiris seemed to have changed his relationship to language .
According to Davis ’ s introduction , Leiris said that he could “ scarcely see the literary use of speech as anything but a means of sharpening one ’ s consciousness in order to be more—and in a better way—alive.
” His sentences had blossomed into a new variant , which held the reader close and pushed time into the background .
Leiris had found the music of his consciousness , and it obeyed a slow , searching tempo .
“ Scratches ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , of carpet patterns and lead soldiers and alphabet books .
He pairs the associative logic of Documents with the mode of Proust and , affixing one idea to another and another , lets both run to the pulse of memory .
This accretive pace , a ball of gum rolling through the senses , means that his memory of his father ’ s phonograph begins with the word “ Persephone ” and takes dozens of pages to unfold .
“ Persephone ” leads to “ gramophone ” and then to “ diaphragm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the “ slightly fatty quality ” of the surface noise heard when the grooves of a wax cylinder are traced by a needle and amplified through a metal horn , creating a “ tempest in a teapot ( or even in a cup for mixing watercolors ) , a seismic tremor racking the thickness of a crystal lens.
” Davis , who translated much of “ The Rules of the Game , ” told me that she “ delighted in reconstructing the complex syntax ” of such sentences , and that “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything , even more convoluted or complex than Proust ’ s. ” Davis has described both Leiris and Proust as using a “ hypotactic structure , ” with many subordinate clauses , and the poet Jean Laude called Leiris ’ s method “ fugal , ” in conversation with itself .
These are accurate summations , but it remains hard to capture , in a comprehensive way , what was a new mode for Leiris , a long and loose cadence that allowed his writing to embody his thinking .
This book is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oddly specific orientation .
One axis is a series of twenty-five observations about Édouard Manet ’ s painting “ Olympia , ” which features a nude white woman , her neck ringed with black ribbon , being brought flowers by a clothed Black servant .
Leiris doesn ’ t interpret the painting so much as study himself in its presence .
The other axis is a chain of observations , each a digression from the last , about Leiris ’ s neighborhood .
Two young women in a sports car are trying to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a beggar argues with him , and the trees near his house are “ so high , so straight and so close together that inside them not a sound is heard , as if they had placed sound outside of our reach while soaring—fearless—towards the sky and pushing sound up , out of the compact mass of the highest branches , towards a space of quarantine.
” “ Olympia ” is the ribbon that ties the book together .
Leiris ’ s father told the writer that Manet had painted a “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ repellent as her almost cadaverous complexion.
” Leiris disagreed .
He believed that the “ ribbon and other accessories only emphasize her nudity , ” and that the ribbon itself is “ the unnecessary detail that hooks us and makes Olympia real.
” This fetishistic attention is the central subject of the book .
For Leiris , the ribbon is “ the rope that keeps me from foundering.
” He keeps looking for ways to connect events to totems , “ a detail to use as a lever , like the ribbon.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , waiting to be uncovered , Leiris tends not to weight his experiences differently .
Each event is presented as equally animated or blank , and the smallest experiences are some of the richest .
“ While smoking a cigarette and drinking tea in my bedroom in Paris , the desire often strikes me—irrational but acutely felt—to smoke a cigarette , ” Leiris writes .
“ But I am already smoking , and thus it is absurd to wish to do something that , quite simply , I ’ m in the middle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Leiris argues with himself for seven pages about how to describe and interpret sunlight in the Black Forest : “ Limpid patches somehow transforming the terrestrial landscape into a kind of negative of the celestial landscape , which itself was stained by fat , dark clouds.
” Eventually , after ruminating on writing , death , and opera , he turns the lens back to himself , claiming to be a failure— “ the preoccupied snob and unquiet man I have always been ” —just as he succeeds .
“ While we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we would like the book , a tossed pebble , to make some waves , ” he writes .
“ But , whatever acclaim it may receive , the party will already be over , the spell already broken.
” In “ Scratches , ” Leiris wrote that he felt an “ irrational repugnance at the idea of going straight to the point.
” Several decades later , in 1987 , three years before his death and after all of his books had been written , he said that “ a person in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ owes it to himself to be as lucid as he can possibly be.
” These ideas , seemingly at odds , are , in fact , two sides of the same belief—that language , properly engaged , can reveal the holy glint of experience .
For Leiris , it could also provide something like an ethics .
He loved the sounds of words , their accidental commonalities , the fellowship found within a family of writers , and the house of the sentence itself , which , if built properly , contains both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we ’ ve perceived it , at the exact same time , again and again .
• New Yorker writers on the best books they read this year .
• Amanda Petrusich counts down the best music .

When Michel Leiris died, in 1990, at the age of eighty-nine, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, in Libération, that Leiris was “indisputably one of the great writers of the century.” That would seem to be a big claim, especially if the name Leiris meant nothing to you. What was so great about him? The anthropologist Aleksandar Bošković wrote, in 2003, that “there is perhaps no single figure that influenced so strongly French ethnology and anthropology.” This is one Leiris. But, Bošković wrote, Leiris was also an “artist, poet, writer, critic, traveller, surrealist . . . a true ‘Renaissance Man’ whose friends included Breton, Bataille, Giacometti, Picasso, Césaire, and Métraux.” This gets us closer.
Leiris was, before anything, a tireless witness to lived experience. The term he preferred for most of his work was not “memoir” but “autobiographical essay,” and he applied the rigor of an objective observer to his recording of the subjective. Born in 1901, he worked steadily for seven decades, but his books have yet to secure a spot with most Anglophone readers. At least five of the translated Leiris volumes are indispensable. These include two recent English editions, whose late appearance helps explain the low profile: the 2019 Semiotext(e) edition of “The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat,” which was first published in 1981, and “Phantom Africa,” published by Seagull Books, in 2019, eighty-five years after it was released in French. “The Rules of the Game,” an autobiography published in four volumes, between 1948 and 1976, is Leiris’s longest and most essential work, glacially slow and furiously alive. I can’t vouch for the fourth and final book, “Frêle Bruit,” because it hasn’t yet appeared in English, but the first three volumes—“Scratches,” “Scraps,” and “Fibrils,” as translated by Lydia Davis—are among the most astonishing books I’ve read.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Leiris was a shy and flinty nonbeliever, who valued exactitude above all and who wrote nested, page-long sentences to create “a series of screens” between himself and his ideas. He escaped calcification by holding fast to his curiosity and built ethical strength by observing the slow boil of his consciousness. By the nineteen-fifties, he was firmly anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist. In 1976, when he was seventy-four, he wrote that his core themes were “an aspiration to the marvellous, a desire to commit himself to the struggle against the flagrant injustices of society, a desire for universalism which has led him to have direct contacts with cultures other than his own.” In 2020, he was a delightful companion.
Leiris stumbled onto his themes. As a university student, he flirted with jazz and chemistry, before graduating with a degree in philosophy. He spent the next few years working in Paris, and by 1929 he had married, gained renown as a poet, and joined then broken with the Surrealist movement. (He remained committed to the “broadly defined psychological and social liberation” that Surrealism espoused.) That year, he became an editor for Georges Bataille’s Documents, a heterodox magazine that served as a workshop for writers floating through and away from the Surrealist epicenter. According to one front cover, the magazine was dedicated to “doctrines, archaeology, fine arts, and ethnography.” Ethnography was then a barely defined field in France, but its promise caught Leiris’s attention. Eager to get out of Europe, he agreed, in 1931, to be the “secretary-archivist” for a two-year expedition, organized by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule, across sub-Saharan Africa.
Leiris’s account of that trip, “Phantom Africa,” would be his first great work. Leiris did not approach what he called the “fortuitous circumstance” of his journey as a traditional ethnographer, partly because he had no training in the field. Instead, he kept a diary and—according to Brent Hayes Edwards, who translated the new edition—“was adamant that, aside from minor corrections,” the entries “were not revised after the fact.” The result is more than six hundred pages of journal entries, which recount dreams, the behavior of soldiers, a variety of conflicts with Griaule, erotic projections, aches, other aches, and a running measure of his distance from both the people he was studying and the people who had sent him to do the studying. (The first English translation, by Robin Chancellor, was abandoned after the book’s publisher demanded extensive cuts to what he called “schoolboys’ lavatory wall dirt.” Leiris did not agree to the cuts.) On the trip, Leiris used file cards to document the items his group would take to France. For the rest of his life, he would use the same method to organize ideas for his books.
Leiris wrote that “Phantom Africa” was the aggregate of “what would result when I forced myself to record virtually everything that happened around me and everything that went through my head.” One can sense the autobiographer taking shape in these lines, but Leiris also found room, in his mind, to make an argument about ethnography. “Phantom Africa” confounded the field’s claims to objectivity by pointing out that the ethnographer is often just recording himself. There was a challenge, too, in the book’s explicit political critique. In his entries, Leiris questioned the validity of the French colonial mind-set and, more specifically, the moral implications of collecting so much butin (booty) for French museums. (Some of the butin that Leiris described is now being considered by Emmanuel Macron for restitution.) After the book came out, in 1934, Griaule and Leiris had a falling out. Five years later, in an unsent letter written to Bataille, Leiris was still warning against the “imposition of our European casts of mind upon the facts” of ethnography. “However intensely we imagined living the experience of the native person,” he wrote, “we cannot enter his skin, and it is always our own experience that we live.”
Most Americans first encountered a Leiris who had little to do with ethnography. In 1939, Leiris published “Manhood,” a memoir that he’d begun writing before his trip with Griaule. More than two decades later, Susan Sontag reviewed Richard Howard’s English translation for The New York Review of Books. Her oft-quoted opening is “Plunked down in translation in the year 1963, Michel Leiris’s brilliant and repulsive autobiographical narrative L’Age d’Homme, is at first rather puzzling.” (The essay became the foreword for a later edition of the book, the word “repulsive” subtracted.) Sontag reads Leiris’s honesty as “an especially powerful instance of the venerable preoccupation with sincerity peculiar to French letters.” This interpretation leads to mention of Montaigne, a common move in Leiris criticism, though Montaigne was generally more concerned with coming off well. Not so Leiris, who opens “Manhood” with a slow, disgusted X-ray of himself. “I loathe unexpectedly catching sight of myself in a mirror, for unless I have prepared myself for the confrontation, I seem humiliatingly ugly to myself each time,” he writes.
For Leiris, even self-esteem is suspect, another trap between you and experience. In 1946, in an afterword to “Manhood,” Leiris wrote that the book was “the negation of a novel.” “In it,” he wrote, “I set out mainly to condense, almost in the rough, an ensemble of images and facts that I refused to exploit by allowing my imagination to work on them.” Even if Sontag’s response was partly disparaging—“The book has no movement or direction,” she wrote, and “provides no consummation or climax”—she did see Leiris’s broader project clearly. “Manhood is another of those very modern books which are fully intelligible only as part of the project of a life,” she wrote. “A book,” in other words, “is an action, giving on to other actions.”
“Manhood” was absolutely part of that project, but it may not have been the most felicitous way to introduce Anglophone readers to Leiris. The “impassioned frankness” that Leiris longed for is muddled by an atypical focus on the narcissistic injuries of his early years. But there was more to come. In his mid-thirties, Leiris began the decades-long autobiographical study that became “The Rules of the Game.” The first volume, “Scratches,” appeared in 1948. Like “Manhood,” the book was an “action,” but Leiris seemed to have changed his relationship to language. According to Davis’s introduction, Leiris said that he could “scarcely see the literary use of speech as anything but a means of sharpening one’s consciousness in order to be more—and in a better way—alive.” His sentences had blossomed into a new variant, which held the reader close and pushed time into the background. Leiris had found the music of his consciousness, and it obeyed a slow, searching tempo.
“Scratches” begins with Leiris’s earliest memories, of carpet patterns and lead soldiers and alphabet books. He pairs the associative logic of Documents with the mode of Proust and, affixing one idea to another and another, lets both run to the pulse of memory. This accretive pace, a ball of gum rolling through the senses, means that his memory of his father’s phonograph begins with the word “Persephone” and takes dozens of pages to unfold. “Persephone” leads to “gramophone” and then to “diaphragm,” which leads to an examination of the “slightly fatty quality” of the surface noise heard when the grooves of a wax cylinder are traced by a needle and amplified through a metal horn, creating a “tempest in a teapot (or even in a cup for mixing watercolors), a seismic tremor racking the thickness of a crystal lens.” Davis, who translated much of “The Rules of the Game,” told me that she “delighted in reconstructing the complex syntax” of such sentences, and that “Leiris’s style is, if anything, even more convoluted or complex than Proust’s.” Davis has described both Leiris and Proust as using a “hypotactic structure,” with many subordinate clauses, and the poet Jean Laude called Leiris’s method “fugal,” in conversation with itself. These are accurate summations, but it remains hard to capture, in a comprehensive way, what was a new mode for Leiris, a long and loose cadence that allowed his writing to embody his thinking.
In 1981, five years after “Frêle Bruit,” the final volume of “The Rules of the Game,” came out, Leiris published “The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat,” which has been newly translated by Christine Pichini. Less a coda to his masterwork than its continuation, “The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat” is perhaps the best introduction to Leiris, his interests, and the curve of his rhythms. If skepticism is central to his project, you see it here, at the level of the sentence, where his subordinate clauses delay and delay, pushing the point away from you as you read.
This book is a memoir, again, with an oddly specific orientation. One axis is a series of twenty-five observations about Édouard Manet’s painting “Olympia,” which features a nude white woman, her neck ringed with black ribbon, being brought flowers by a clothed Black servant. Leiris doesn’t interpret the painting so much as study himself in its presence. The other axis is a chain of observations, each a digression from the last, about Leiris’s neighborhood. Two young women in a sports car are trying to pick him up (he hopes), a beggar argues with him, and the trees near his house are “so high, so straight and so close together that inside them not a sound is heard, as if they had placed sound outside of our reach while soaring—fearless—towards the sky and pushing sound up, out of the compact mass of the highest branches, towards a space of quarantine.”
“Olympia” is the ribbon that ties the book together. Leiris’s father told the writer that Manet had painted a “lifeless figure whose formal stiffness was as repellent as her almost cadaverous complexion.” Leiris disagreed. He believed that the “ribbon and other accessories only emphasize her nudity,” and that the ribbon itself is “the unnecessary detail that hooks us and makes Olympia real.” This fetishistic attention is the central subject of the book. For Leiris, the ribbon is “the rope that keeps me from foundering.” He keeps looking for ways to connect events to totems, “a detail to use as a lever, like the ribbon.”
Because the crucial detail could lie anywhere, waiting to be uncovered, Leiris tends not to weight his experiences differently. Each event is presented as equally animated or blank, and the smallest experiences are some of the richest. “While smoking a cigarette and drinking tea in my bedroom in Paris, the desire often strikes me—irrational but acutely felt—to smoke a cigarette,” Leiris writes. “But I am already smoking, and thus it is absurd to wish to do something that, quite simply, I’m in the middle of doing.” At one point, Leiris argues with himself for seven pages about how to describe and interpret sunlight in the Black Forest: “Limpid patches somehow transforming the terrestrial landscape into a kind of negative of the celestial landscape, which itself was stained by fat, dark clouds.” Eventually, after ruminating on writing, death, and opera, he turns the lens back to himself, claiming to be a failure—“the preoccupied snob and unquiet man I have always been”—just as he succeeds. “While we’re in the thick of it, we would like the book, a tossed pebble, to make some waves,” he writes. “But, whatever acclaim it may receive, the party will already be over, the spell already broken.”
In “Scratches,” Leiris wrote that he felt an “irrational repugnance at the idea of going straight to the point.” Several decades later, in 1987, three years before his death and after all of his books had been written, he said that “a person in our day and age who has self-respect owes it to himself to be as lucid as he can possibly be.” These ideas, seemingly at odds, are, in fact, two sides of the same belief—that language, properly engaged, can reveal the holy glint of experience. For Leiris, it could also provide something like an ethics. He loved the sounds of words, their accidental commonalities, the fellowship found within a family of writers, and the house of the sentence itself, which, if built properly, contains both what has happened to us and how we’ve perceived it, at the exact same time, again and again.
2020 in Review


newyorker--2020-12-09--The Future of U.S.-China Relations

The Future of U.S.-China Relations

I recently discussed the state of Chinese-American relations with John Pomfret , the author of “ The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom : American and China , 1776 to the Present ” and the former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post .
During our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we discussed the ideological competition between the U.S. and China , the complicated history of American companies doing business in the country , and how the Biden Administration ’ s approach to China might differ from that of the Trump Administration .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and I ’ m curious whether you think they ’ re part of the same story .
The first is Chinese human-rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang , and the concern they have sparked here .
The second is just a growing American-Chinese rivalry , having to do with politics and business and other things .
I think that , fundamentally , we ’ re at a point where we have an ideological problem with China .
This is not simply two large nations competing with each other , like Germany @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or America and Japan .
This is an ideological challenge .
I think that has supercharged what would naturally be competition between us and a rising power in a region of the world where the United States has , for many years , been the preëminent power .
The ideological competition has many parts , and one of the parts has to do with American revulsion at Chinese human-rights abuses , not simply in Xinjiang and Hong Kong but in Han-dominated China , as well .
I also think there ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rising power deals with the resident power , which is just something that ’ s going to be an issue regardless of the political dimensions of the relationship .
I think that the way it combines with the human-rights issue is that this is an ideological competition between two fundamentally different systems , both political and economic .
If it is an ideological competition , isn ’ t it ironic that this is peaking at a time when the United States elected someone who has the most ideologically in common with an authoritarian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ China , and has even celebrated the Communist Revolution ?
Yeah , definitely .
I think that , regardless of whether you look at the U.S.-China relationship or the U.S.-Russian relationship , the election by the United States of someone with soundly antidemocratic instincts is highly ironic , given the fact that the United States now faces an ideational challenge from the P.R.C .
and from Russia , as well .
Do you think the Chinese government sees this , similarly , as an ideological challenge ?
I think that the Chinese have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ideological enemy for far longer than we ’ ve been fighting them .
I believe that China has viewed us as an ideological foe since 1989 and even before that .
A significant faction of the Communist Party viewed America as an ideological foe , and America only really began to catch on to this sometime near the end of the Obama Administration .
Look at , for example , Document No .
9 , which was a document that came out at the tail end of the Hu Jintao era and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which fingered the United States as an ideological foe ; talked about these seven viruses of Western thinking , including constitutionalism and a free press and other values that we supposedly hold dear in this society ; and basically said , “ This is something that is going to be pushed by hostile foreign forces , and we need to be vigilant about this.
” This was the summation of years of thinking about the challenges that China faced from the United States .
In the West , the managers of the relationship @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had this belief that , with free trade and open markets , China would naturally become a more pluralistic society .
It didn ’ t happen that way .
I think the United States only came to its senses about this issue at the tail end of the Obama Administration , and then Trump came into power .
Clearly , Trump as a character was completely shambolic in how he pursued and prosecuted the relationship .
How do you think the Biden Administration is going to approach China , and how will it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Administration ?
It appears that it may be an issue in domestic politics in a way it hasn ’ t been since the Clinton Administration , maybe since 1989 .
Yeah , for sure .
I also think that the generation of the folks who managed the China relationship under the old system—which was treating China relatively well in the hope that over time there would be peaceful evolution—that generation is gone .
And the Henry Kissingers of the world and others no longer have that much influence at all .
I think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terms of intellectual dominance in the Democratic Party , are on the rise .
I think it ’ s significant that Susan Rice wasn ’ t given the Secretary of State position , from that perspective .
What do you mean by that ?
When she was Obama ’ s national-security adviser , Susan Rice argued for a broader perspective on the relationship , and not sweating smaller issues with China , in the hope of getting a bigger deal .
A lot of issues were put on the back burner because of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ getting a climate deal with China .
The Obama Administration didn ’ t put that much pressure on China on human-rights issues , or cyber espionage issues , or the South China Sea , because the big goal was what they would frame as an existential one .
Because climate change is so much more important , we have to sacrifice these other issues , ignoring the fact that if China is going to make a climate change deal with you , it ’ s not going to be because you were nice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s because it ’ s in China ’ s interest to do so .
Within the White House at the time , the attitude was “ We can ’ t let this big deal fall down , so we don ’ t need to sweat these other things , which are less important , ” and that allowed the Chinese to play the Obama Administration relatively well .
I think that generation is gone .
Can you say more about how , specifically , you think the Obama Administration was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ starts out in 2009 .
The Dalai Lama ’ s supposed to be coming to Washington .
The Obama Administration basically tells the Chinese government , “ Hey , we ’ re not going to meet him this time , because we want to set a good foundation for a relationship with you guys.
” It was a continuation of American behavior toward China , which is sort of upfronting the present in the hope of better future behavior .
They did that on several occasions .
An example would be the cyber-espionage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Within a year , the Chinese were violating it .
The obsession with getting “ deliverables ” from China blinded them to the reality that the Chinese were willing and happy to break these deals , because they didn ’ t really respect Obama ’ s use of power .
Because when the Americans would threaten to do things , they actually never did them .
Whereas the Trump people , for all their problems , they threatened to do things with China , and they actually did them .
Whether they worked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , right ?
Tariffs were a disaster , right ?
This is something that no other American Administration had done in the past , of actually carrying through on the threats that they made to the Chinese .
How does China approach the fact that America is going from an Administration that actively discouraged any action on climate change to an Administration that says climate change is one of its top priorities ?
I think from one perspective , the knee-jerk reaction in China would be , “ Oh , good .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , right ?
” I think that Biden and his people are far more wise to that M.O .
than the Obama Administration was , simply because they got burned so badly five , six , seven , eight years ago .
If you look at Biden ’ s interview with the Times , it ’ s interesting that he is not in any hurry to deal with China .
He ’ s not in any hurry to roll back the tariffs .
He ’ s not in any hurry to take back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s not in any hurry to pull up the Magnitsky Act-like restrictions on Chinese officials for Xinjiang , Hong Kong , et cetera .
I think that ’ s evidence , scant as it may be , of the fact that Biden is not in a hurry to bring the relationship back to normal .
Do you think the Chinese government wanted Trump to get reëlected ?

In September, the House passed a bill that would ban imports produced by Uighur forced laborers in Xinjiang. Companies such as Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola have mounted a lobbying campaign against the bill, which passed the House by an overwhelming margin of four hundred and six to three, and is likely to pass the Senate. If the bill does become law, it will be the latest sign that the relationship between the United States and China is as contentious as it has been in decades. The Chinese Communist Party’s use of forced labor, its authoritarian activity in Hong Kong, and its obfuscation about the coronavirus have raised bipartisan concerns about the future of the relationship between the U.S. and China.
I recently discussed the state of Chinese-American relations with John Pomfret, the author of “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: American and China, 1776 to the Present” and the former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the ideological competition between the U.S. and China, the complicated history of American companies doing business in the country, and how the Biden Administration’s approach to China might differ from that of the Trump Administration.
There are two things going on right now, and I’m curious whether you think they’re part of the same story. The first is Chinese human-rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and the concern they have sparked here. The second is just a growing American-Chinese rivalry, having to do with politics and business and other things.
I think that, fundamentally, we’re at a point where we have an ideological problem with China. This is not simply two large nations competing with each other, like Germany and the United States would be, or America and Japan. This is an ideological challenge. I think that has supercharged what would naturally be competition between us and a rising power in a region of the world where the United States has, for many years, been the preëminent power.
The ideological competition has many parts, and one of the parts has to do with American revulsion at Chinese human-rights abuses, not simply in Xinjiang and Hong Kong but in Han-dominated China, as well. I also think there’s a separate piece, which is how the rising power deals with the resident power, which is just something that’s going to be an issue regardless of the political dimensions of the relationship. I think that the way it combines with the human-rights issue is that this is an ideological competition between two fundamentally different systems, both political and economic.
If it is an ideological competition, isn’t it ironic that this is peaking at a time when the United States elected someone who has the most ideologically in common with an authoritarian regime, has celebrated the leader of China, and has even celebrated the Communist Revolution?
Yeah, definitely. I think that, regardless of whether you look at the U.S.-China relationship or the U.S.-Russian relationship, the election by the United States of someone with soundly antidemocratic instincts is highly ironic, given the fact that the United States now faces an ideational challenge from the P.R.C. and from Russia, as well.
Do you think the Chinese government sees this, similarly, as an ideological challenge?
I think that the Chinese have been fighting the United States as an ideological enemy for far longer than we’ve been fighting them. I believe that China has viewed us as an ideological foe since 1989 and even before that. A significant faction of the Communist Party viewed America as an ideological foe, and America only really began to catch on to this sometime near the end of the Obama Administration. Look at, for example, Document No. 9, which was a document that came out at the tail end of the Hu Jintao era and the beginning of the Xi Jinping Administration, which fingered the United States as an ideological foe; talked about these seven viruses of Western thinking, including constitutionalism and a free press and other values that we supposedly hold dear in this society; and basically said, “This is something that is going to be pushed by hostile foreign forces, and we need to be vigilant about this.”
This was the summation of years of thinking about the challenges that China faced from the United States. In the West, the managers of the relationship basically ignored that, partly because they had this belief that, with free trade and open markets, China would naturally become a more pluralistic society. It didn’t happen that way. I think the United States only came to its senses about this issue at the tail end of the Obama Administration, and then Trump came into power. Clearly, Trump as a character was completely shambolic in how he pursued and prosecuted the relationship.
How do you think the Biden Administration is going to approach China, and how will it differ from the approach of the Trump Administration? It appears that it may be an issue in domestic politics in a way it hasn’t been since the Clinton Administration, maybe since 1989.
Yeah, for sure. I also think that the generation of the folks who managed the China relationship under the old system—which was treating China relatively well in the hope that over time there would be peaceful evolution—that generation is gone. And the Henry Kissingers of the world and others no longer have that much influence at all. I think a new generation of people, in terms of intellectual dominance in the Democratic Party, are on the rise. I think it’s significant that Susan Rice wasn’t given the Secretary of State position, from that perspective.
What do you mean by that?
When she was Obama’s national-security adviser, Susan Rice argued for a broader perspective on the relationship, and not sweating smaller issues with China, in the hope of getting a bigger deal. A lot of issues were put on the back burner because of the Obama Administration’s interest in getting a climate deal with China. The Obama Administration didn’t put that much pressure on China on human-rights issues, or cyber espionage issues, or the South China Sea, because the big goal was what they would frame as an existential one. Because climate change is so much more important, we have to sacrifice these other issues, ignoring the fact that if China is going to make a climate change deal with you, it’s not going to be because you were nice to them over the South China Sea. It’s because it’s in China’s interest to do so.
Within the White House at the time, the attitude was “We can’t let this big deal fall down, so we don’t need to sweat these other things, which are less important,” and that allowed the Chinese to play the Obama Administration relatively well. I think that generation is gone.
Can you say more about how, specifically, you think the Obama Administration was played?
Well, the Obama Administration starts out in 2009. The Dalai Lama’s supposed to be coming to Washington. The Obama Administration basically tells the Chinese government, “Hey, we’re not going to meet him this time, because we want to set a good foundation for a relationship with you guys.” It was a continuation of American behavior toward China, which is sort of upfronting the present in the hope of better future behavior.
They did that on several occasions. An example would be the cyber-espionage deal between Obama and Xi Jinping. Within a year, the Chinese were violating it. The obsession with getting “deliverables” from China blinded them to the reality that the Chinese were willing and happy to break these deals, because they didn’t really respect Obama’s use of power. Because when the Americans would threaten to do things, they actually never did them. Whereas the Trump people, for all their problems, they threatened to do things with China, and they actually did them. Whether they worked or not is a totally different question, right? Tariffs were a disaster, right? This is something that no other American Administration had done in the past, of actually carrying through on the threats that they made to the Chinese.


newyorker--2020-12-09--How Will We Tell the Story of the Coronavirus?

The story would have to be part of her exhibit , and the museum would need to start collecting new objects in order to tell it .
Lord , who has a purposeful , upbeat way about her , had already contacted people at the United States Public Health Service , and she began discussing ideas with colleagues .
She and her supervisor , Benjamin Filene , set up weekly meetings to develop collecting strategies and to decide how the museum would respond to the pandemic more generally .
On March 14th , the museum , along with the other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , was abruptly closed .
All but a handful of staff were locked out .
Like workers at office jobs across the world , the task force would have to operate online .
Rapid-response collecting , as it ’ s called , is not new .
For decades , the Smithsonian has dispatched curators to scour for memorabilia on Presidential campaign trails .
In the days after September 11 , 2001 , the New-York Historical Society began collecting artifacts while the dust was literally still settling .
The Victoria and Albert Museum , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Response project in 2014 ; among the items that now form part of its rotating display are Brexit paraphernalia and a knitted pussy hat , worn during the women ’ s marches in 2017 .
COVID-19 has pushed even more cautious institutions to try to make sense of the moment , in the moment .
The Autry Museum of the American West , in Los Angeles , has collected diaries that were kept by children and masks crafted by members of the Navajo Nation .
The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum , in Canyon , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by an eighty-one-year-old man about what it felt like to catch the coronavirus on a Carnival Cruise ship , in January , and nearly die .
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights , in Winnipeg , has asked visitors to identify “ acts of kindness ” that have lifted their spirits and to record them in online videos .
There is barely a museum in North America that hasn ’ t tried to make sense of the pandemic , and nearly all of them have done so while finding new , remote ways @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the shadow looming over museum-land : Covid-19 is not just an intriguing interpretative challenge but a disease that has killed friends and family members and put the institutions that employ curators and other staff on life support .
The American Alliance of Museums estimates that institutions have lost , on average , eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars in revenue since the pandemic began .
A third of the eight hundred and fifty museums that the alliance surveyed are at risk of permanent closure in the next twelve months .
Anthea M. Hartig @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of American History , told me that the museum , which is largely federally funded and maintained , isn ’ t in immediate danger .
There are , however , tough times ahead .
The strain that museums are feeling now only increased her sense of responsibility to do justice to the events of the past year , she said , when a pandemic , resulting unemployment , a series of political controversies , a climate crisis , and a mass movement against racial injustice came together under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of history , ” she said .
“ Sometimes , the stones are further apart , to use the metaphor , but , right now , they ’ re close together.
” Lord and her colleagues knew that the coronavirus story was huge , but they didn ’ t yet know what , exactly , the story was .
Take that scribbled sign .
Perhaps it belonged to a store that eventually ended up reopening .
Or maybe it belonged to one that closed for good .
“ That one handmade sign may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hartig said .
“ Maybe it will tell a story of resilience .
It ’ ll certainly tell an economic story.
” Lord noted that even the look of signage communicated something .
“ In April , the signs were more quirky , hand-done , ” she said .
“ Now they ’ re more professionalized .
That change is really interesting.
” Sometimes , museums can engage in so-called passive collecting , waiting to see what turns up .
That clearly wouldn ’ t suffice now .
At the same time , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as stay-at-home orders remained in force .
There was also anxiety , early on , that handling objects might itself spread the virus .
The Wellcome Collection , in London , a medical museum , posted stern guidance to curators seeking Covid-19 objects : do nothing that exacerbates the crisis .
Many museums donated personal protective equipment to hospitals .
The fear of handling objects later receded—and became largely moot when buildings and mail rooms stayed shut , meaning that normal collection procedures had to be suspended altogether .
Members of the Smithsonian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of items , and they also sent countless e-mails to potential donors , asking them to hang on to objects and preserve them as carefully as possible .
Lord and her colleagues quickly recognized three interlocking problems .
They didn ’ t yet know what posterity would want to see , but they had to decide what to collect now , because some objects wouldn ’ t survive otherwise .
Plus , the narrative of the virus was continually shifting .
Journalists are used to dealing with the zigs and zags of current @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writing history ’ s early drafts and will write a new story tomorrow .
Curators don ’ t really have that luxury : what goes into a museum collection almost always stays .
In common with many institutions worldwide , the Smithsonian is forbidden from disposing of , or “ deaccessioning , ” artifacts unless strict criteria are met .
The National Museum of American History alone has more than 1.8 million items , while the Smithsonian Institution as a whole possesses more than a hundred and fifty-five million objects , the vast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If curators want to add to the pile , and take on the duty of caring for an object in perpetuity , their case needs to be irresistible .
With that in mind , Lord spent the spring and early summer like so many of the rest of us : glued to the TV and constantly refreshing various Web sites .
She was scanning for “ flash points , ” she said—moments that felt like events , and events that crystallized as indelible moments .
Collecting digital items—photos , videos , audio recordings—is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ curators are trained to think in terms of physical objects , and that ’ s what most people come to museums to see .
Often , the most eloquent artifact is an ephemeral thing that bears the weight of a history far larger than itself : a glass bottle melted by the heat of the bomb at Hiroshima ; or a desk clock salvaged from the rubble of the Twin Towers , with its hands frozen at 9:04 a.m .
These are the items least likely to survive ; finding and preserving them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the coronavirus , curators are looking for an object that stands in not for a single hour or day but for months , if not years .
In search of contacts and firsthand testimony , Lord and her colleagues reached out to meat-processing plants and restaurants and care homes .
As it became clear that the virus was having a disproportionate impact on people of color , they redoubled their efforts to speak with members of communities that have not traditionally been well-served by the Smithsonian .
“ Our collections do not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experience , ” Lord acknowledged .
At one task-force meeting , Amanda Moniz , who curates the history of philanthropy , spoke about the challenges of collecting oral histories from health-care centers in predominantly Latino communities .
Some of the employees at these facilities are undocumented or waiting on a change in immigration status , and are reluctant to speak to official figures , even curators .
“ These are difficult voices to find , ” Moniz said .
What ’ s more , this pandemic has been marked , perhaps above all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people trapped in care homes ; different generations waving at each other across garden fences ; the appalling remoteness of saying farewell to a loved one through a screen held up by a nurse ; even just being stuck on the sofa , glued to Netflix .
These stories , common to us all , will be difficult to convey to our descendants .
But the primary topic of the meeting was the hunt for a possible “ anchor object ” for the second floor , which would host the new Covid-19 section @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Health ” exhibition .
Various potential acquisitions were up for debate .
Back in the spring—as Governor Andrew Cuomo was pleading for thirty thousand ventilators for New York , and back-yard inventors were attaching hoses to resuscitation bags—it seemed that Covid-19 might be best symbolized by such a device .
Then , as other treatments were tested , ventilators came to seem less central—or , at least , not as central as P.P.E .
or the scramble for a vaccine .
In any case , it wasn ’ t as if the Smithsonian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ventilator aside , in case one would be needed for the museum ’ s collection .
“ We ’ re constantly just evaluating , ” Lord told me .
There was a flurry of eagerness on the Zoom call when someone mentioned a dress crafted from duct tape , during prom season , by a teen-ager from Illinois .
Designed for an event that never happened , it would certainly have jumped out on the museum floor : a splendid , royal-blue-and-gold , A-line confection emblazoned with vivid images of essential workers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mask bearing the injunction “ FLATTEN THE CURVE !
” Great idea , everyone agreed—but there were questions about how durable the duct tape would be , particularly if it would be six months before the museum could call it in for inspection .
“ If a fabric conservator can talk to her about how she ’ s storing it now , that would be great , ” someone said , sounding doubtful .
“ It could end up being a big pile of goo.
” It had become clear , as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ objects now freighted with all manner of social and cultural and political baggage , were key items .
Lord said that she was interested in homemade face coverings , the more haphazardly crafted the better .
“ It tells us a great deal about how desperate people were , ” she said .
As always , the hope would be to find an object that has eyewitness value , so to speak .
“ We ’ re more interested in a Black Lives Matter mask that might ’ ve been worn at Lafayette @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one off the Internet , ” Lord told me .
But if masks served as the centerpiece , what would that look like ?
Should there be just one mask on display ?
A mask wall of some kind ?
Masks accompanied by photographs ?
There was also the shadow side of the mask story : people refusing to wear them for reasons of ideology or paranoia .
But you can ’ t put non-masks in a vitrine , Lord pointed out .
I mentioned the sight of a possibly contagious Donald Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off his mask on the Truman Balcony at the White House .
“ There ’ s a photo of that , ” Lord replied .
A few days later , I mentioned to Hartig that her team was still searching hard for an anchor object .
She laughed .
“ You know , we ’ re not collecting the cruise ship , ” she said .
Pointing out such echoes is one of the most worthwhile tasks that museums can perform .
While the Victoria and Albert was shut , the Rapid Response @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pandemic Objects , spotlighting items from the museum ’ s archive .
The researcher Kathleen Walker-Meikle contributed an essay on the history of hand washing , featuring a seventeenth-century Iranian ewer , used for the Muslim ritual of wudu , and a nineteen-sixties British sink .
Other blog posts addressed pandemic beards and toilet paper .
An essay by Catrin Jones , a V & A curator at the Wedgwood ceramics museum in the English Midlands , focussed on mourning jewelry .
Until the Victorian period , it was customary to set money @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friends could buy a ring , say , to remember you by .
In the essay , Jones wonders whether social media is bringing us “ a new language for grief , ” or whether , after lockdown , we will “ return to the more tangible mourning traditions of the past.
” Many items from the past do not survive , of course ; sometimes , the things that museums don ’ t have are as revealing as the things they do .
Even before Lord began researching her exhibit , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paucity of objects relating to the Spanish flu—there ’ s almost nothing .
“ It ’ s amazing , ” she said .
What explained this ?
The Smithsonian had different policies back then , she told me : museums weren ’ t so interested in the lives of everyday people ; the social-history revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies was still a ways off .
Plus , it took time for people to realize how serious the flu pandemic was .
But Lord thought that there might have been another , deeper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people really wanted to forget.
” But Lott detects rays of optimism , too .
Some museums , forced to close their buildings , have found a new public online : preliminary data suggest that up to half of the people visiting museum Web sites—which have seen a surge of traffic , Lott said , with pandemic-adjacent content doing particularly well—were those who had never visited the museums before .
“ It ’ s a whole new audience , ” Lott told me .
She also believes that a renewed spirit of civic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Museums have made themselves available as classrooms for schools that are unable to reopen .
Some have distributed food and operated as blood-donation sites .
The Institute of Contemporary Art San José spotted a loophole in California state law that allowed it to reopen briefly if it was repurposed as a polling place .
“ Come to Vote , Stay for the Art , ” the Times suggested .
Lott told me that many curators and administrators now feel an obligation beyond the educational duties that they typically perform , to help @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the past year .
“ It ’ s always been an element , but it ’ s been up to the visitor to use the museum in that way , ” she said .
“ I think we are taking a more proactive approach right now.
” Covid-19 is a reminder that museums can function as therapeutic spaces , she said , “ really serving people in a time of need .
People need a place to go .
”

Alexandra Lord, a curator at the National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., started to get worried in February. She was deep into planning a major exhibition called “In Sickness and in Health” that was partly about the disease outbreaks that have changed the country’s trajectory, from the Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793 to the viruses brought West by white settlers in the eighteen-thirties, which killed huge numbers of indigenous people. The exhibit was slated to open next year, but Lord and her colleagues were suddenly reading reports of a virus that had surfaced in China and that was beginning to blossom around the globe: on a cruise ship in Yokohama, at ski resorts in France. As the chair of the museum’s division of medicine and science, and a specialist in the history of public health, Lord had been on pandemic watch for a long time. Was this another SARS? Was it another Spanish flu? “By March, it was pretty clear,” she recalled recently. “This was going to be a huge story.”
The story would have to be part of her exhibit, and the museum would need to start collecting new objects in order to tell it. Lord, who has a purposeful, upbeat way about her, had already contacted people at the United States Public Health Service, and she began discussing ideas with colleagues. She and her supervisor, Benjamin Filene, set up weekly meetings to develop collecting strategies and to decide how the museum would respond to the pandemic more generally. On March 14th, the museum, along with the other buildings that make up the Smithsonian Institution, was abruptly closed. All but a handful of staff were locked out. Like workers at office jobs across the world, the task force would have to operate online.
Rapid-response collecting, as it’s called, is not new. For decades, the Smithsonian has dispatched curators to scour for memorabilia on Presidential campaign trails. In the days after September 11, 2001, the New-York Historical Society began collecting artifacts while the dust was literally still settling. The Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, launched an ongoing Rapid Response project in 2014; among the items that now form part of its rotating display are Brexit paraphernalia and a knitted pussy hat, worn during the women’s marches in 2017.
COVID-19 has pushed even more cautious institutions to try to make sense of the moment, in the moment. The Autry Museum of the American West, in Los Angeles, has collected diaries that were kept by children and masks crafted by members of the Navajo Nation. The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, in Canyon, Texas, acquired a hair-raising essay written by an eighty-one-year-old man about what it felt like to catch the coronavirus on a Carnival Cruise ship, in January, and nearly die. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, in Winnipeg, has asked visitors to identify “acts of kindness” that have lifted their spirits and to record them in online videos.
There is barely a museum in North America that hasn’t tried to make sense of the pandemic, and nearly all of them have done so while finding new, remote ways to curate and communicate. This is the shadow looming over museum-land: Covid-19 is not just an intriguing interpretative challenge but a disease that has killed friends and family members and put the institutions that employ curators and other staff on life support. The American Alliance of Museums estimates that institutions have lost, on average, eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars in revenue since the pandemic began. A third of the eight hundred and fifty museums that the alliance surveyed are at risk of permanent closure in the next twelve months.
Anthea M. Hartig, the director of the National Museum of American History, told me that the museum, which is largely federally funded and maintained, isn’t in immediate danger. There are, however, tough times ahead. The strain that museums are feeling now only increased her sense of responsibility to do justice to the events of the past year, she said, when a pandemic, resulting unemployment, a series of political controversies, a climate crisis, and a mass movement against racial injustice came together under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances. “We are in the gristmill of history,” she said. “Sometimes, the stones are further apart, to use the metaphor, but, right now, they’re close together.”
What would you put in a Covid-19 time capsule? Masks, presumably. Hand sanitizer. YouTube videos—of a teacher leading remote instruction, say, or an at-home yoga session. An obituary section from a local newspaper that runs several pages longer than normal. A worn storefront sign brightly informing customers that a shop will reopen soon.
Lord and her colleagues knew that the coronavirus story was huge, but they didn’t yet know what, exactly, the story was. Take that scribbled sign. Perhaps it belonged to a store that eventually ended up reopening. Or maybe it belonged to one that closed for good. “That one handmade sign may tell a story of hope,” Hartig said. “Maybe it will tell a story of resilience. It’ll certainly tell an economic story.” Lord noted that even the look of signage communicated something. “In April, the signs were more quirky, hand-done,” she said. “Now they’re more professionalized. That change is really interesting.”
Sometimes, museums can engage in so-called passive collecting, waiting to see what turns up. That clearly wouldn’t suffice now. At the same time, normal curatorial fieldcraft was almost impossible, as stay-at-home orders remained in force. There was also anxiety, early on, that handling objects might itself spread the virus. The Wellcome Collection, in London, a medical museum, posted stern guidance to curators seeking Covid-19 objects: do nothing that exacerbates the crisis. Many museums donated personal protective equipment to hospitals.
The fear of handling objects later receded—and became largely moot when buildings and mail rooms stayed shut, meaning that normal collection procedures had to be suspended altogether. Members of the Smithsonian team made a public appeal for donations of items, and they also sent countless e-mails to potential donors, asking them to hang on to objects and preserve them as carefully as possible. Lord and her colleagues quickly recognized three interlocking problems. They didn’t yet know what posterity would want to see, but they had to decide what to collect now, because some objects wouldn’t survive otherwise. Plus, the narrative of the virus was continually shifting.
Journalists are used to dealing with the zigs and zags of current events—it’s understood that they are writing history’s early drafts and will write a new story tomorrow. Curators don’t really have that luxury: what goes into a museum collection almost always stays. In common with many institutions worldwide, the Smithsonian is forbidden from disposing of, or “deaccessioning,” artifacts unless strict criteria are met. The National Museum of American History alone has more than 1.8 million items, while the Smithsonian Institution as a whole possesses more than a hundred and fifty-five million objects, the vast majority of which are in storage. If curators want to add to the pile, and take on the duty of caring for an object in perpetuity, their case needs to be irresistible.
With that in mind, Lord spent the spring and early summer like so many of the rest of us: glued to the TV and constantly refreshing various Web sites. She was scanning for “flash points,” she said—moments that felt like events, and events that crystallized as indelible moments. Collecting digital items—photos, videos, audio recordings—is more important than ever. But most curators are trained to think in terms of physical objects, and that’s what most people come to museums to see. Often, the most eloquent artifact is an ephemeral thing that bears the weight of a history far larger than itself: a glass bottle melted by the heat of the bomb at Hiroshima; or a desk clock salvaged from the rubble of the Twin Towers, with its hands frozen at 9:04 a.m. These are the items least likely to survive; finding and preserving them is an enormous challenge. And, with the coronavirus, curators are looking for an object that stands in not for a single hour or day but for months, if not years.
In search of contacts and firsthand testimony, Lord and her colleagues reached out to meat-processing plants and restaurants and care homes. As it became clear that the virus was having a disproportionate impact on people of color, they redoubled their efforts to speak with members of communities that have not traditionally been well-served by the Smithsonian. “Our collections do not always reflect the diversity of the American experience,” Lord acknowledged. At one task-force meeting, Amanda Moniz, who curates the history of philanthropy, spoke about the challenges of collecting oral histories from health-care centers in predominantly Latino communities. Some of the employees at these facilities are undocumented or waiting on a change in immigration status, and are reluctant to speak to official figures, even curators. “These are difficult voices to find,” Moniz said.
What’s more, this pandemic has been marked, perhaps above all, by withdrawal and isolation: older people trapped in care homes; different generations waving at each other across garden fences; the appalling remoteness of saying farewell to a loved one through a screen held up by a nurse; even just being stuck on the sofa, glued to Netflix. These stories, common to us all, will be difficult to convey to our descendants.
On an afternoon in early September, I sat in on a task-force meeting, via Zoom. Lord and seven of her co-workers, a mix of curators, archivists, and collections specialists, dialed in from across the D.C. area. Lord began by outlining plans for an online colloquium series, which would be open to the public, and which would try to involve people in their research on topics ranging from racial scapegoating in previous pandemics to voting during national crises. One session, scheduled for later this month, is called “Looking Good on that Zoom Call: Personal Appearance During a Quarantine.”
But the primary topic of the meeting was the hunt for a possible “anchor object” for the second floor, which would host the new Covid-19 section of the “In Sickness and in Health” exhibition. Various potential acquisitions were up for debate. Back in the spring—as Governor Andrew Cuomo was pleading for thirty thousand ventilators for New York, and back-yard inventors were attaching hoses to resuscitation bags—it seemed that Covid-19 might be best symbolized by such a device. Then, as other treatments were tested, ventilators came to seem less central—or, at least, not as central as P.P.E. or the scramble for a vaccine. In any case, it wasn’t as if the Smithsonian could ask a hospital to keep a ventilator aside, in case one would be needed for the museum’s collection. “We’re constantly just evaluating,” Lord told me.
There was a flurry of eagerness on the Zoom call when someone mentioned a dress crafted from duct tape, during prom season, by a teen-ager from Illinois. Designed for an event that never happened, it would certainly have jumped out on the museum floor: a splendid, royal-blue-and-gold, A-line confection emblazoned with vivid images of essential workers, accessorized with a coronavirus-shaped purse and a mask bearing the injunction “FLATTEN THE CURVE!”


newyorker--2020-12-09--Trump Attempts to Fire Amy Coney Barrett

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —A furious Donald J. Trump attempted to fire the Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney @ @ @ @ @ According to the sources , Trump was so irate about the Supreme Court ’ s @ @ @ @ @ on Tuesday that he phoned Barrett directly to inform her that she was “ history.
@ @ @ @ @ to get a job done , and you didn ’ t get it done , @ @ @ @ @ .
“ You ’ re out of here.
” Sources say that Barrett had the @ @ @ @ @ that Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life and therefore can not be fired , @ @ @ @ @ “ flabbergasted.
” “ If I can ’ t fire anybody I want , maybe @ @ @ @ @ to be President anymore , ” he reportedly muttered .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A furious Donald J. Trump attempted to fire the Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, sources report.
According to the sources, Trump was so irate about the Supreme Court’s dismissal of his election challenge on Tuesday that he phoned Barrett directly to inform her that she was “history.”
“I hired you to get a job done, and you didn’t get it done,” Trump angrily informed Barrett. “You’re out of here.”
Sources say that Barrett had the unenviable task of informing Trump that Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life and therefore cannot be fired, a revelation that left Trump “flabbergasted.”
“If I can’t fire anybody I want, maybe I don’t want to be President anymore,” he reportedly muttered.
Read More Satire from the Borowitz Report


newyorker--2020-12-10--“Emily in Paris” Season 2, Directed by David Lynch

The camera is crawled through a dark , cavernous abyss , finally emerging to reveal that we are in an air pocket of a baguette .
Emily tries to juggle dating two men—Matthieu , a struggling artist , and Romain , a malevolent spirit inhabiting a human shell .
After scoring free tickets to Disneyland Paris , Emily must follow her heart and choose which man to bring along .
Whom will she pick—the artist or the guy who feeds on human souls to survive ?
Emily struggles to order a pain au chocolat at a boulangerie .
When finger-pointing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ want that one ” doesn ’ t seem to translate , she demands to see the manager .
Unfortunately , the manager is a stoic giant who is neither of this world nor this dimension .
Much to Emily ’ s horror , the giant doesn ’ t even speak English !
Emily is put to the test when she must convince a marketing client ( played by Monica Bellucci ) to trust her American perspective on French culture .
After Emily uses the word “ content ” one too many times , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ begins to flicker and eerie saxophone music plays .
Monica Bellucci turns to Emily and cryptically whispers , “ We are living in a dream within a dream.
” Emily likes the tagline , but thinks it could still use a fresh , American take .
Emily scores a table at a legendary Parisian restaurant .
But things take a disastrous turn when she orders her steak well done .
The horrified waiter begs her to reconsider , but Emily refuses , insisting that the customer is always right and that steak should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Suddenly , the restaurant goes dark .
The waiter detaches his face , revealing a beaming white light ( played by Kyle MacLachlan ) that unleashes a blast of fire which scorches Emily ’ s table .
She leaves a one-star Yelp review .
Emily is stuck in an alternate dimension and must find a way to navigate through it without the right SIM card .
Emily finally escapes the alternate dimension and returns to Paris , only to discover that her previous actions have catastrophically altered reality .
Everyone speaks English @ @ @ @ @ @ @ illegal .
The Eiffel Tower is now a kiosk that offers free Wi-Fi .
And Emily now has a döppelganger named Cecily .
To make matters worse , Emily ’ s döppelganger can really pull off a beret .
Emily ’ s Uber coasts along a two-lane highway .
The scene is dark and desolate and suffused with an overwhelming sense of dread .
The car ’ s headlights illuminate a figure on the road .
.
.
.
It ’ s Mickey Mouse , welcoming Emily to Disneyland Paris !
She and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) , are excited to spend a romantic day together—or at least until Romain ’ s human shell expires and his organs dissolve into a toxic ooze .
In the season finale , it is revealed that Emily has been dreaming this entire time , and that her spirit is actually trapped inside a baguette .

Episode 1
The camera is crawled through a dark, cavernous abyss, finally emerging to reveal that we are in an air pocket of a baguette.
Episode 2
Emily tries to juggle dating two men—Matthieu, a struggling artist, and Romain, a malevolent spirit inhabiting a human shell. After scoring free tickets to Disneyland Paris, Emily must follow her heart and choose which man to bring along. Whom will she pick—the artist or the guy who feeds on human souls to survive?
Episode 3
Emily struggles to order a pain au chocolat at a boulangerie. When finger-pointing and saying, “No, I want that one” doesn’t seem to translate, she demands to see the manager. Unfortunately, the manager is a stoic giant who is neither of this world nor this dimension. Much to Emily’s horror, the giant doesn’t even speak English!
Episode 4
Emily is put to the test when she must convince a marketing client (played by Monica Bellucci) to trust her American perspective on French culture. After Emily uses the word “content” one too many times, a single bare bulb in the office begins to flicker and eerie saxophone music plays. Monica Bellucci turns to Emily and cryptically whispers, “We are living in a dream within a dream.” Emily likes the tagline, but thinks it could still use a fresh, American take.
Episode 5
Emily scores a table at a legendary Parisian restaurant. But things take a disastrous turn when she orders her steak well done. The horrified waiter begs her to reconsider, but Emily refuses, insisting that the customer is always right and that steak should be as stiff as a Birkin bag. Suddenly, the restaurant goes dark. The waiter detaches his face, revealing a beaming white light (played by Kyle MacLachlan) that unleashes a blast of fire which scorches Emily’s table. She leaves a one-star Yelp review.
Episodes 6 and 7
Emily is stuck in an alternate dimension and must find a way to navigate through it without the right SIM card.
Episode 8
Emily finally escapes the alternate dimension and returns to Paris, only to discover that her previous actions have catastrophically altered reality. Everyone speaks English in the streets. Steak tartare is illegal. The Eiffel Tower is now a kiosk that offers free Wi-Fi. And Emily now has a döppelganger named Cecily. To make matters worse, Emily’s döppelganger can really pull off a beret.
Episode 9
Emily’s Uber coasts along a two-lane highway. The scene is dark and desolate and suffused with an overwhelming sense of dread. The car’s headlights illuminate a figure on the road. . . . It’s Mickey Mouse, welcoming Emily to Disneyland Paris! She and her date, Romain (malevolent-spirit guy), are excited to spend a romantic day together—or at least until Romain’s human shell expires and his organs dissolve into a toxic ooze.
Episode 10
In the season finale, it is revealed that Emily has been dreaming this entire time, and that her spirit is actually trapped inside a baguette.


newyorker--2020-12-10--The Best TV Shows of 2020

The Best TV Shows of 2020

In early spring , there were plenty of prognostications about the role that art would serve during the period in which we would all be stuck at home .
The nature of television—produced months in advance , enjoyed from the safety of one ’ s couch , and , thanks to streaming services , infinitely bingeable—separated it from the other popular art forms whose production had been utterly halted .
Here was the last form of entertainment standing .
At least there would always be something to watch .
( No guarantee that it would always be that good .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ help quarantiners sort through the muck , many with half-joking invocations of escapism : “ These Travel TV Shows Will Help You Escape From Your Couch ” ; “ 30 Reality TV Shows That Will Help You Escape Reality.
” Escape , as it turned out , was impossible .
Watching television this year was often a fraught activity , the passiveness of the auto-play highlighting the collapse of time outside the frame .
I found myself watching all species of television this year , including what I typically neglect ( Taiwanese baseball @ @ @ @ @ @ @ else was there to do ?
I loved and resented it ; I relied on it and was exhausted by it .
It made me feel alive and sometimes a little bit dead .
Unscripted programs , canonically the wallpaper of the television landscape , kept me rapt .
Daytime talk shows were one of the first to adapt to the constraints of the pandemic , replacing the in-person jamboree with a virtual Brady Bunch formation—a remodelling that felt like a neat commentary on the country ’ s idealization of resilience .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ felt sort of quaint .
I am thinking of the return of the group watch : documentary series such as “ Tiger King ” and “ The Last Dance ” ; the political peacocking of the Cuomo brothers ; an N.B.A .
season with no fans , at Walt Disney World ; the interview gauntlet “ Baited with Ziwe , ” on Instagram Live ; and , most recently , the silliness of “ The Undoing.
” Shows now awkwardly seek to wrangle the pandemic , to produce a culture around the crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like “ Social Distance , ” on Netflix , and “ Coastal Elites , ” on HBO , as well as pandemic camp on ABC ’ s “ Grey ’ s Anatomy ” and NBC ’ s “ Law and Order : S.V.U.
” But Hollywood is learning that not every event can be narrativized or managed .
Some shows have been cancelled , and we ’ ve been hearing increasingly more often about seasons that have been postponed ; it ’ s likely that , in 2021 , we ’ ll finally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But , for now , here is a list—in no particular order—of the shows that did something both small and miraculous this year : demanded our full attention .
For the past few years , reality-TV producers have been tripping over themselves to create an American equivalent of “ The Great British Bake Off ” : a competition of arrestingly kind eccentrics who display a devotion toward a stress-inducing hobby that verges on the religious .
Only “ The American Barbecue Showdown ” has come close .
Officially , it is a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a gloss of Americana , an atonement for colonial sins , and a platform encouraging obsession with figures such as Grubbs , a “ backwood grill-billy ” ; Shotgun , a mohawked giant ; and Boatright , a man who sings love songs to his meats .
The show is so charming that you can excuse one dystopian detail : the contestants wear the same clothes throughout its eight episodes .
“ Ramy ” had the best sum of performances of any show I watched this year .
The second season pulled back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ protagonist ( also its co-creator , Ramy Youssef ) and became more of an anthology , with some episodes diverging from the main story line to produce vignettes of secondary characters .
Graceful performances by Mahershala Ali , Hiam Abbass , and Amr Waked invigorated “ Ramy ” before it had a chance to become stale .
A stunning episode about the closeted life of Uncle Naseem , the churlish owner of a Diamond District jewelry shop , should raise the profile of the underrated actor Laith Nakli .
What else is there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ masterpiece ?
This pick is really about Kaley Cuoco .
Movie stars have colonized the small screen , overwhelming prestige dramas with their meta-recognizability .
I miss the blunt , workman magnetism of the career television star , who lives by the ethic of disappearing , body and soul , into the world of the character .
Bless network television for giving us Cuoco .
Not even the formulaic rhythm of the weekly sitcom ( “ 8 Simple Rules ” ; “ The Big Bang Theory ” ) has dulled the actor ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are on roaring display in her voice acting as a post-breakup Harley Quinn , in the namesake animated series , now in its second season .
Check out “ The Flight Attendant , ” on HBO , which stars Cuoco , too .
Everyone has something to say about Chicago .
In this five-part documentary series covering the 2019 mayoral election , the documentarian Steve James lets the people of Chicago speak for themselves .
Its fifth episode , about Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the city ’ s residents grappling with the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coda—one that further brings into focus the documentary ’ s exploration of a complicated city .
Its cancellation is an injustice .
Kathleen Jordan ’ s début series , about wealthy twin sisters living double lives as bounty hunters , took so many surprising and rewarding detours in its ten episodes ; the wackiness of the show ’ s rude premise allowed for sweet explorations of race , Southernness , queerness , and the struggle to be good .
Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini form a mesmerizing odd couple .
As a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s “ a messy bitch ” of an adventure .
The achievement of this drama—an adaptation of a Sally Rooney novel—is in its depiction of intimacy .
Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones twine around each other so believably that the later episodes are almost painful .
It was a fitting romance for the quarantined viewer : Irish horniness laced with dread .

In early spring, there were plenty of prognostications about the role that art would serve during the period in which we would all be stuck at home. The nature of television—produced months in advance, enjoyed from the safety of one’s couch, and, thanks to streaming services, infinitely bingeable—separated it from the other popular art forms whose production had been utterly halted. Here was the last form of entertainment standing. At least there would always be something to watch. (No guarantee that it would always be that good.) Lists and recommendations were compiled to help quarantiners sort through the muck, many with half-joking invocations of escapism: “These Travel TV Shows Will Help You Escape From Your Couch”; “30 Reality TV Shows That Will Help You Escape Reality.”
Escape, as it turned out, was impossible. Watching television this year was often a fraught activity, the passiveness of the auto-play highlighting the collapse of time outside the frame. I found myself watching all species of television this year, including what I typically neglect (Taiwanese baseball, for instance), because what else was there to do? I loved and resented it; I relied on it and was exhausted by it. It made me feel alive and sometimes a little bit dead.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Unscripted programs, canonically the wallpaper of the television landscape, kept me rapt. Daytime talk shows were one of the first to adapt to the constraints of the pandemic, replacing the in-person jamboree with a virtual Brady Bunch formation—a remodelling that felt like a neat commentary on the country’s idealization of resilience. I also watched people watch television, which felt sort of quaint. I am thinking of the return of the group watch: documentary series such as “Tiger King” and “The Last Dance”; the political peacocking of the Cuomo brothers; an N.B.A. season with no fans, at Walt Disney World; the interview gauntlet “Baited with Ziwe,” on Instagram Live; and, most recently, the silliness of “The Undoing.”
Shows now awkwardly seek to wrangle the pandemic, to produce a culture around the crisis. We’ve gotten hamfisted commentary like “Social Distance,” on Netflix, and “Coastal Elites,” on HBO, as well as pandemic camp on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” and NBC’s “Law and Order: S.V.U.” But Hollywood is learning that not every event can be narrativized or managed. Some shows have been cancelled, and we’ve been hearing increasingly more often about seasons that have been postponed; it’s likely that, in 2021, we’ll finally start to feel the pickings grow slim. But, for now, here is a list—in no particular order—of the shows that did something both small and miraculous this year: captured our full attention.
“The American Barbecue Showdown” (Netflix)
For the past few years, reality-TV producers have been tripping over themselves to create an American equivalent of “The Great British Bake Off”: a competition of arrestingly kind eccentrics who display a devotion toward a stress-inducing hobby that verges on the religious. Only “The American Barbecue Showdown” has come close. Officially, it is a grilling contest. Spiritually, it is a gloss of Americana, an atonement for colonial sins, and a platform encouraging obsession with figures such as Grubbs, a “backwood grill-billy”; Shotgun, a mohawked giant; and Boatright, a man who sings love songs to his meats. The show is so charming that you can excuse one dystopian detail: the contestants wear the same clothes throughout its eight episodes.
“Ramy” (Hulu)
Photograph by Craig Blankenhorn / Hulu
“Ramy” had the best sum of performances of any show I watched this year. The second season pulled back from the exploits of its charming fuckboy protagonist (also its co-creator, Ramy Youssef) and became more of an anthology, with some episodes diverging from the main story line to produce vignettes of secondary characters. Graceful performances by Mahershala Ali, Hiam Abbass, and Amr Waked invigorated “Ramy” before it had a chance to become stale. A stunning episode about the closeted life of Uncle Naseem, the churlish owner of a Diamond District jewelry shop, should raise the profile of the underrated actor Laith Nakli.
“I May Destroy You” (BBC/HBO)
What else is there to say about Michaela Coel’s masterpiece?
“Harley Quinn” (Originally DC Universe; now HBO Max)
This pick is really about Kaley Cuoco. Movie stars have colonized the small screen, overwhelming prestige dramas with their meta-recognizability. I miss the blunt, workman magnetism of the career television star, who lives by the ethic of disappearing, body and soul, into the world of the character. Bless network television for giving us Cuoco. Not even the formulaic rhythm of the weekly sitcom (“8 Simple Rules”; “The Big Bang Theory”) has dulled the actor’s natural warmth and wildness, which are on roaring display in her voice acting as a post-breakup Harley Quinn, in the namesake animated series, now in its second season. Check out “The Flight Attendant,” on HBO, which stars Cuoco, too.
“City So Real” (Hulu/National Geographic)
Photograph courtesy Chicago Story Film, LLC
Everyone has something to say about Chicago. In this five-part documentary series covering the 2019 mayoral election, the documentarian Steve James lets the people of Chicago speak for themselves. Its fifth episode, about Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the city’s residents grappling with the pandemic and civil unrest, is a brilliant coda—one that further brings into focus the documentary’s exploration of a complicated city.
“Teenage Bounty Hunters” (Netflix)