newyorker--2020-05-19--How Ben Stiller Will Remember His Father, Jerry Stiller

Jerry Stiller , the legendary comedian and entertainer , died this month , at the age of ninety-two .
In the nineteen-sixties , Stiller performed in a comedy duo with his wife , Anne Meara , appearing frequently on “ The Ed Sullivan Show ” and travelling the country on comedy tours .
Then , in his mid-sixties , he reached new audiences with his turn as George Costanza ’ s irascible , voluble father on “ Seinfeld.
” A genetic basis for comedy is yet to be proved , but the couple ’ s two kids both joined the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is a comedian , and their son , Ben , became one of the biggest movie stars of the past two decades , starring in films such as “ There ’ s Something About Mary , ” “ Meet the Parents , ” and “ Zoolander , ” which he directed .
( Tad Friend profiled Ben Stiller for The New Yorker , in 2012 . )
I recently spoke by phone with Ben , who was in his home in Westchester , New York , about his relationship with his father @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( Meara died in 2015 . )
In our conversation , which has been edited for length and clarity , we also discussed what it was like to grow up with famous comedians as parents , the roots of his father ’ s “ Seinfeld ” character , and how his father saw Ben ’ s career .
Were you able to spend some time with your dad before he died ?
Yeah .
My sister and I were able to be with him .
And , just due to the fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus-related illness , and he had been ailing for a while , we were able to be with him , which I ’ m very , very grateful for .
What were the last few weeks like ?
Was his sense of humor there at the end ?
He was just slowing down a lot , and he was dealing with a lot of issues .
And so the last week or two were tougher for him .
But he went peacefully , and he had a sense of humor , for sure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to call it a sense of humor .
He was just funny , and so he was always himself .
He was almost ninety-three , and I think his body was kind of at that point where it was time .
When did you realize that your parents were really funny ?
Wow , that ’ s a good question .
Growing up with them , we were always around their process of working together , because they worked together at home .
And so I don ’ t ever remember a moment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re funny .
I remember watching them onstage and seeing them perform and get laughs , and do their act .
I remember , as a kid , enjoying watching that and thinking , Oh , this is kind of cool that everybody thinks my parents are funny .
And it was exciting .
My sister and I really enjoyed watching them perform .
But , as parents , they ’ re always your parents .
I think we had our progression of the relationship that you have with your parents , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and all the different aspects of it .
But , honestly , when I think about it , it ’ s really when I got a little bit older , when I was a teen-ager , that I was able to really appreciate their humor .
And then , really , as I got much older and was able to have a perspective , I was able to really see outside of the lens of just being their kid .
Did you ever feel , “ I ’ m just a fourteen-year-old kid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I just want parents who are normal ” ?
Was that ever hard ?
What that makes me think of is just that they really both had separate attitudes toward the work , and they both took it very seriously .
So it wasn ’ t really them cracking jokes around the house .
My memory is of my mother feeling the stress of it .
My dad really liked to perform and do comedy more than my mom .
It came to her very easily , but it was always work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like that .
My dad was always working at it and thinking about things .
If something came to him , like , “ Oh , that ’ s funny ” —he was always writing stuff down .
He was always keeping notes and writing journals , and somehow thinking about how he could use it .
And then , eventually , my mom wrote plays , which really took a lot of her personal experience .
I think she used a lot of what was going on in her relationship with my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it in and then translating it themselves , on their own .
Was a big part of their offstage relationship based on comedy ?
Or was it the family business and , when you get home , you ’ re not necessarily talking about the shoe store you own ?
It was the fabric of our lives .
And I think that ’ s because they worked together , and there weren ’ t really lines drawn , in terms of , like , “ Oh , when we get home , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Because there weren ’ t really regular hours .
Sometimes , they were playing night clubs , or they were on the road , or they were doing a TV show .
We hardly ever sat down to have dinner together as a family .
But , by the same token , I think we were a pretty close family .
And it was just not your typical , traditional setup .
And they had a room in the apartment , on Riverside Drive , where we lived , where they would work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ improvising together , because they wrote radio commercials a lot in the seventies .
They had a sketch where they hated each other .
And they would just talk about how much they hated each other .
And my sister overheard , and really thought that they hated each other .
And then , another time , hearing them arguing and thinking it was rehearsing a sketch , and it wasn ’ t .
So that was part of the energy in the household .
They were very different people , but they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other .
A very beautiful and imperfect relationship , as every relationship is .
And so that was our life .
And it was part of all of it for us .
Do you have a memory of when you first made your parents laugh , or your dad laugh ?
Oh , man .
Well , the first thing I think of is my dad coming to see me in a play at camp .
I went to this camp in Maine , called Hidden Valley .
And I hated it at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because I got homesick .
He ’ s a very sensitive guy , a very loving dad .
My mom would be kind of like , “ No , Jerry , he ’ s got to figure out how to be on his own.
” And my dad was , like , “ No , I want to go up there and be with him.
” And , so , he came up for a couple of days and then left .
And I got acclimated , and I remember I met a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a sudden I didn ’ t want him to come back .
And then he came back to see the play .
I remember him watching the play .
And I sang some song in it , and I remember him having this big smile .
It wasn ’ t a laugh , but it was him just appreciating seeing his kid performing .
I think he just loved seeing his kids act , and do their thing .
Do you think it was important to your parents that you and your @ @ @ @ @ @ @

Jerry Stiller, the legendary comedian and entertainer, died this month, at the age of ninety-two. In the nineteen-sixties, Stiller performed in a comedy duo with his wife, Anne Meara, appearing frequently on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and travelling the country on comedy tours. Then, in his mid-sixties, he reached new audiences with his turn as George Costanza’s irascible, voluble father on “Seinfeld.” A genetic basis for comedy is yet to be proved, but the couple’s two kids both joined the family business: their daughter, Amy, is a comedian, and their son, Ben, became one of the biggest movie stars of the past two decades, starring in films such as “There’s Something About Mary,” “Meet the Parents,” and “Zoolander,” which he directed. (Tad Friend profiled Ben Stiller for The New Yorker, in 2012.)
I recently spoke by phone with Ben, who was in his home in Westchester, New York, about his relationship with his father and both his parents’ comedic legacies. (Meara died in 2015.) In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed what it was like to grow up with famous comedians as parents, the roots of his father’s “Seinfeld” character, and how his father saw Ben’s career.
Were you able to spend some time with your dad before he died?
Yeah. My sister and I were able to be with him. And, just due to the fact that he didn’t have a coronavirus-related illness, and he had been ailing for a while, we were able to be with him, which I’m very, very grateful for.
What were the last few weeks like? Was his sense of humor there at the end?
He was just slowing down a lot, and he was dealing with a lot of issues. And so the last week or two were tougher for him. But he went peacefully, and he had a sense of humor, for sure, until the end. I hesitate to call it a sense of humor. He was just funny, and so he was always himself. He was almost ninety-three, and I think his body was kind of at that point where it was time.
When did you realize that your parents were really funny?
Wow, that’s a good question. Growing up with them, we were always around their process of working together, because they worked together at home. And so I don’t ever remember a moment of thinking, Oh, they’re funny. I remember watching them onstage and seeing them perform and get laughs, and do their act. I remember, as a kid, enjoying watching that and thinking, Oh, this is kind of cool that everybody thinks my parents are funny. And it was exciting.
My sister and I really enjoyed watching them perform. But, as parents, they’re always your parents. I think we had our progression of the relationship that you have with your parents, as you go through childhood and adolescence, and all the different aspects of it. But, honestly, when I think about it, it’s really when I got a little bit older, when I was a teen-ager, that I was able to really appreciate their humor. And then, really, as I got much older and was able to have a perspective, I was able to really see outside of the lens of just being their kid.
Did you ever feel, “I’m just a fourteen-year-old kid. I don’t want humor. I just want parents who are normal”? Was that ever hard?
No. [Laughs.]
O.K., cool.
What that makes me think of is just that they really both had separate attitudes toward the work, and they both took it very seriously. So it wasn’t really them cracking jokes around the house. My memory is of my mother feeling the stress of it. My dad really liked to perform and do comedy more than my mom. It came to her very easily, but it was always work for her to put herself out there like that. My dad was always working at it and thinking about things. If something came to him, like, “Oh, that’s funny”—he was always writing stuff down. He was always keeping notes and writing journals, and somehow thinking about how he could use it. And then, eventually, my mom wrote plays, which really took a lot of her personal experience. I think she used a lot of what was going on in her relationship with my dad. I think they were taking it in and then translating it themselves, on their own.
Was a big part of their offstage relationship based on comedy? Or was it the family business and, when you get home, you’re not necessarily talking about the shoe store you own?
It was the fabric of our lives. And I think that’s because they worked together, and there weren’t really lines drawn, in terms of, like, “Oh, when we get home, we don’t talk about it.” Because there weren’t really regular hours. Sometimes, they were playing night clubs, or they were on the road, or they were doing a TV show. We hardly ever sat down to have dinner together as a family. But, by the same token, I think we were a pretty close family. And it was just not your typical, traditional setup. And they had a room in the apartment, on Riverside Drive, where we lived, where they would work, whether they were writing together or improvising together, because they wrote radio commercials a lot in the seventies.
They had a sketch where they hated each other. And they would just talk about how much they hated each other. And my sister overheard, and really thought that they hated each other. And then, another time, hearing them arguing and thinking it was rehearsing a sketch, and it wasn’t. So that was part of the energy in the household. They were very different people, but they were so, so devoted to each other. A very beautiful and imperfect relationship, as every relationship is. And so that was our life. And it was part of all of it for us.
Do you have a memory of when you first made your parents laugh, or your dad laugh?
Oh, man. Well, the first thing I think of is my dad coming to see me in a play at camp. I went to this camp in Maine, called Hidden Valley. And I hated it at first, and he came up there because I got homesick. He’s a very sensitive guy, a very loving dad. My mom would be kind of like, “No, Jerry, he’s got to figure out how to be on his own.” And my dad was, like, “No, I want to go up there and be with him.”
And, so, he came up for a couple of days and then left. And I got acclimated, and I remember I met a girl that I liked, and all of a sudden I didn’t want him to come back. And then he came back to see the play. I remember him watching the play. And I sang some song in it, and I remember him having this big smile. It wasn’t a laugh, but it was him just appreciating seeing his kid performing. I think he just loved seeing his kids act, and do their thing.
A young Ben Stiller performs for his parents. “They were always so supportive,” he says. Photograph by Joe Dombroski / Newsday / Getty
Do you think it was important to your parents that you and your sister turned out to be funny?
Interesting, but I don’t think so at all. When they knew that we both were interested in acting, and going into show business, I think they were both conflicted. My dad was very overprotective, and I think he was probably concerned about knowing all the rejection there is in this business. And, at the same time, I think he also was so nurturing of us, as creative people, and he wanted to try to foster that as much as he could. It’s kind of that thing where you go, “O.K., if you’re really going to go and try to do this, until you actually try to do it, you don’t know how hard it can be.” My parents were very different people. So he had one way of dealing with it. My mom had a different way.


newyorker--2020-05-19--“Miss Aluminum,” Susanna Moore’s Memoir of Trauma and Transformation

Here is a young woman : she is beautiful , stylish , sharp ; she moves in glamorous circles , composed of Hollywood players , industry magnates , fashion-world folk , society doyennes .
To the outside observer , her life is enviable—its effortlessness only making its desirability keener .
But what lies beyond this splendid exterior ?
In her excellent new memoir , “ Miss Aluminum , ” the writer Susanna Moore , known for her smart , shocking 1995 thriller “ In the Cut , ” examines the years when she appeared to be such a woman .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Honolulu , at seventeen , she spent the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies making her way from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles .
She worked as a successful commercial model and , later , as a script reader , for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson ; married the prominent production designer and Paramount executive Dick Sylbert ; and socialized with luminaries of the era like Joan Didion and John Dunne , Audrey Hepburn , and Roman Polanski .
Beneath the shiny façade , however , were the lingering effects of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ struggled with mental illness and pill addiction , and passed away when Moore was twelve .
Her father and stepmother neglected and mistreated Moore and her four younger siblings .
Constructing a smooth-faced persona served as a coping mechanism for dealing with the trauma of her early life .
“ I wanted to be admired at the same time that I wished to retain a certain prideful distance , ” she writes .
“ I understood that as a woman I was watched , and that it was important that I learn to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so successful that it often helped conceal her thoughts and feelings even from her own self— “ a mostly effective habit of not thinking too deeply about my own behavior ” —though it did not tamp down her tendency “ to indulge in intense speculation about the lives of everyone else.
” “ It had become necessary in childhood .
.
.
to maintain a keen watch at all times , and because of this , I had learned to rely , not always with reason , on my ability to interpret the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writes , of the alertness fostered in her by her mother ’ s suicidal tendencies , and , later , by her stepmother ’ s sudden brutalities .
“ It seemed to me that some people , although not all , were two persons in one , the first a visible representation of himself , with his shadow self hovering nearby to explain all that the first person was not able to tell me.
” Recently , I happened to pick up Joyce Maynard ’ s “ At Home in the World , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ novelist and journalist tells the story of her affair , as an eighteen-year-old , with the fifty-three-year-old J. D. Salinger , and its lasting impact on her life .
After the book was published , when Maynard was forty-four , she faced intense public anger for daring to reveal , as part of the unfolding of her own story , intimate details about the famously private Salinger , which she had felt obliged to leave unsaid since she was a teen .
But , over the years , I ’ ve become a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s book belongs : memoirs that provide a guts-and-all retelling of the harrowing path walked by their female authors , and which unapologetically divulge the uncomfortable realities of a woman ’ s life .
“ Miss Aluminum ” takes part in this tradition .
Now seventy-four , and a well-regarded author , Moore is ready to expose her “ shadow self ” and the pain of her early life .
But , though the events she describes are often upsetting , Moore ’ s touch is cooler than a writer like Maynard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her eye quietly ironic .
One gets a sense that what is revealed has been chosen appraisingly , not out of coyness but , rather , out of something resembling an architect ’ s appreciation of a structure ’ s good bones .
Moore ’ s writing has the slightly mysterious sense of detachment that she adopted when building her persona , many years ago , though paradoxically this is what makes her revelations , when they come , more piercing .
Moore escapes her father and stepmother in Hawaii and arrives , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , at the home of her Irish-Catholic maternal grandmother , in Philadelphia .
There , Moore is reminded of her mother ’ s modest beginnings and the way she disguised herself as a privileged débutante , allowing her to secure her ultimately disastrous marriage to Moore ’ s father , a doctor from snobbish Quaker stock .
“ Clothes , which provided the means both to conceal and to display herself , became objects of fetishistic importance to my mother , ” Moore writes .
Soon after Moore ’ s arrival in Philadelphia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ball by Singy , a Princeton boy she knows , and her grandmother sets out to make her an extravagant party dress .
The gown—long and narrow and shimmering , with matching kid gloves and an evening coat—is gorgeous , but , when Moore enters the party , wearing silk heels , with her hair in a tight chignon , she understands immediately that “ a terrible mistake had been made.
” All the other girls are wearing short colorful dresses and loose hair , their legs bare , some even shoeless , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I followed Singy to a table , where I dropped the coat onto the back of a gilt chair that immediately fell over with the weight of it , ” she writes .
“ I hid the gloves under a placemat.
” This is a perfect Moore-style description .
What more do we need in order to understand , precisely , the shame she felt : as heavy as a faille coat placed on a flimsy chair , as conspicuous as long white gloves , stuffed away hastily ?
Nothing more is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Singy .
In time , Moore becomes better at playing a part .
Ale Kaiser , an older , fabulously wealthy neighbor from Hawaii , sends her four large trunks of sumptuous hand-me-downs , which allow her , when she moves to New York , to get a job as a salesgirl at the tony Bergdorf Goodman department store , where she is treated with deference by her snooty co-workers .
( Their politeness flatters her , she writes , “ until I realized that it was my expensive clothes that they admired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a person to be snubbed.
” ) At Bergdorf ’ s , she is drawn to the areas invisible to customers—the employee cafeteria , the nurse ’ s office , and the seamstresses ’ quarters—but she remains bent on being all exterior , continuing to conceal what she calls “ a buried , still elusive self.
” ( “ I had learned to hush her.
” ) When the store ’ s house designer , who considers her for a modelling job , asks her to take her clothes off , she refuses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of shame at the disparity between the resplendence of her outfit and the penury that lies beneath it .
“ Mrs .
Kaiser understandably did not include undergarments in the boxes of clothes she continued to send me , and my badly frayed underpants and brassieres were brown with age and washing , ” she writes .
“ The old girdle that I was wearing .
.
.
although clean , was stained with old menstrual blood .
I could not possibly remove my clothes.
” When , not long after , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sleeps with , she does so mostly , she writes , because “ he left me to my own fancies , and did not trouble me with questions or even revelations of his own , possible intimacies that I was not yet ready to reveal or hear.
” The couple moves to Chicago , where Moore—only twenty , high-cheekboned and willowy—becomes a professional model .
The modelling agency , meanwhile , changes her name from the suburban “ Susan ” to the more exotic “ Susanna , ” which “ seemed to fit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to create .
”

Now seventy-four, Susanna Moore is ready to expose the pain of her early life in a new memoir. Photograph by Fred R. Conrad / NYT / Redux
Here is a young woman: she is beautiful, stylish, sharp; she moves in glamorous circles, composed of Hollywood players, industry magnates, fashion-world folk, society doyennes. To the outside observer, her life is enviable—its effortlessness only making its desirability keener. But what lies beyond this splendid exterior? In her excellent new memoir, “Miss Aluminum,” the writer Susanna Moore, known for her smart, shocking 1995 thriller “In the Cut,” examines the years when she appeared to be such a woman. After leaving her home, outside of Honolulu, at seventeen, she spent the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies making her way from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. She worked as a successful commercial model and, later, as a script reader, for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson; married the prominent production designer and Paramount executive Dick Sylbert; and socialized with luminaries of the era like Joan Didion and John Dunne, Audrey Hepburn, and Roman Polanski.
Beneath the shiny façade, however, were the lingering effects of a painful childhood. Moore’s mother struggled with mental illness and pill addiction, and passed away when Moore was twelve. Her father and stepmother neglected and mistreated Moore and her four younger siblings. Constructing a smooth-faced persona served as a coping mechanism for dealing with the trauma of her early life. “I wanted to be admired at the same time that I wished to retain a certain prideful distance,” she writes. “I understood that as a woman I was watched, and that it was important that I learn to perform certain parts.” This performance proved so successful that it often helped conceal her thoughts and feelings even from her own self—“a mostly effective habit of not thinking too deeply about my own behavior”—though it did not tamp down her tendency “to indulge in intense speculation about the lives of everyone else.” “It had become necessary in childhood . . . to maintain a keen watch at all times, and because of this, I had learned to rely, not always with reason, on my ability to interpret the slightest word or gesture,” she writes, of the alertness fostered in her by her mother’s suicidal tendencies, and, later, by her stepmother’s sudden brutalities. “It seemed to me that some people, although not all, were two persons in one, the first a visible representation of himself, with his shadow self hovering nearby to explain all that the first person was not able to tell me.”
Recently, I happened to pick up Joyce Maynard’s “At Home in the World,” from 1998, in which the novelist and journalist tells the story of her affair, as an eighteen-year-old, with the fifty-three-year-old J. D. Salinger, and its lasting impact on her life. After the book was published, when Maynard was forty-four, she faced intense public anger for daring to reveal, as part of the unfolding of her own story, intimate details about the famously private Salinger, which she had felt obliged to leave unsaid since she was a teen. But, over the years, I’ve become a fan of the genre to which Maynard’s book belongs: memoirs that provide a guts-and-all retelling of the harrowing path walked by their female authors, and which unapologetically divulge the uncomfortable realities of a woman’s life. “Miss Aluminum” takes part in this tradition. Now seventy-four, and a well-regarded author, Moore is ready to expose her “shadow self” and the pain of her early life. But, though the events she describes are often upsetting, Moore’s touch is cooler than a writer like Maynard’s, her prose spare, her eye quietly ironic. One gets a sense that what is revealed has been chosen appraisingly, not out of coyness but, rather, out of something resembling an architect’s appreciation of a structure’s good bones. Moore’s writing has the slightly mysterious sense of detachment that she adopted when building her persona, many years ago, though paradoxically this is what makes her revelations, when they come, more piercing.
Moore escapes her father and stepmother in Hawaii and arrives, with just the clothes on her back, at the home of her Irish-Catholic maternal grandmother, in Philadelphia. There, Moore is reminded of her mother’s modest beginnings and the way she disguised herself as a privileged débutante, allowing her to secure her ultimately disastrous marriage to Moore’s father, a doctor from snobbish Quaker stock. “Clothes, which provided the means both to conceal and to display herself, became objects of fetishistic importance to my mother,” Moore writes. Soon after Moore’s arrival in Philadelphia, she is asked to a local ball by Singy, a Princeton boy she knows, and her grandmother sets out to make her an extravagant party dress. The gown—long and narrow and shimmering, with matching kid gloves and an evening coat—is gorgeous, but, when Moore enters the party, wearing silk heels, with her hair in a tight chignon, she understands immediately that “a terrible mistake had been made.” All the other girls are wearing short colorful dresses and loose hair, their legs bare, some even shoeless, and they greet her with stares. “I followed Singy to a table, where I dropped the coat onto the back of a gilt chair that immediately fell over with the weight of it,” she writes. “I hid the gloves under a placemat.” This is a perfect Moore-style description. What more do we need in order to understand, precisely, the shame she felt: as heavy as a faille coat placed on a flimsy chair, as conspicuous as long white gloves, stuffed away hastily? Nothing more is said about the event, or about Singy.
In time, Moore becomes better at playing a part. Ale Kaiser, an older, fabulously wealthy neighbor from Hawaii, sends her four large trunks of sumptuous hand-me-downs, which allow her, when she moves to New York, to get a job as a salesgirl at the tony Bergdorf Goodman department store, where she is treated with deference by her snooty co-workers. (Their politeness flatters her, she writes, “until I realized that it was my expensive clothes that they admired, incorrectly assuming that I was not a person to be snubbed.”) At Bergdorf’s, she is drawn to the areas invisible to customers—the employee cafeteria, the nurse’s office, and the seamstresses’ quarters—but she remains bent on being all exterior, continuing to conceal what she calls “a buried, still elusive self.” (“I had learned to hush her.”) When the store’s house designer, who considers her for a modelling job, asks her to take her clothes off, she refuses, not out of prudishness but out of shame at the disparity between the resplendence of her outfit and the penury that lies beneath it. “Mrs. Kaiser understandably did not include undergarments in the boxes of clothes she continued to send me, and my badly frayed underpants and brassieres were brown with age and washing,” she writes. “The old girdle that I was wearing . . . although clean, was stained with old menstrual blood. I could not possibly remove my clothes.” When, not long after, she decides to marry the first man she sleeps with, she does so mostly, she writes, because “he left me to my own fancies, and did not trouble me with questions or even revelations of his own, possible intimacies that I was not yet ready to reveal or hear.” The couple moves to Chicago, where Moore—only twenty, high-cheekboned and willowy—becomes a professional model. The modelling agency, meanwhile, changes her name from the suburban “Susan” to the more exotic “Susanna,” which “seemed to fit the new self that I was trying to create.”
Many events follow, some of them traumatic: when travelling as a model, Moore is sexually assaulted in her hotel room by the fashion designer Oleg Cassini. During the incident, she experiences her subjecthood as split in half (“As he began to moan, I found myself crouched in a corner of the ceiling, my bare feet balanced on the molding as I watched from above”), and, feeling a great shame, she resolves never to tell anyone about the incident, not even her husband. In her contemporary recounting, however, her clear-eyed descriptive faculties are as sharp as ever, and a sense of horror cuts through: “ ‘Goodnight, cara,’ he said as he absently tucked his penis, its tip shiny with semen, into his trousers.” Later, in Acapulco, shooting a movie in which she plays a bit part alongside Dean Martin, she begins an affair with a producer, and, when she tells her husband that she wants a divorce, he beats her so badly that she loses consciousness. (“He stared at me with what seemed a bored reasonableness, then took a few steps toward me, I thought to embrace me, and punched me in the face.”) After recovering from this assault and filing for divorce, she moves to Los Angeles, where she continues to work as a model and finds herself first in the social circle of the well-connected Beverly Hills hostess Connie Wald, whose son she is dating, and, later, when she takes up with Dick Sylbert, in the New Hollywood pack of Beatty, Nicholson, and Polanski.


newyorker--2020-05-19--Fiona McFarlane Reads “Demolition”

Fiona McFarlane Reads “Demolition”

Fiona McFarlane reads her short story from the May 25 , 2020 , issue of the magazine .
McFarlane is @ @ @ @ @ “ The Night Guest ” and the story collection “ The High Places , ” @ @ @ @ @ Dylan Thomas Prize , in 2017 .

Photograph by Basso Cannarsa / Opale / Alamy
Fiona McFarlane reads her short story from the May 25, 2020, issue of the magazine. McFarlane is the author of the novel “The Night Guest” and the story collection “The High Places,” which was awarded the international Dylan Thomas Prize, in 2017.


newyorker--2020-05-19--The Children Are Swearing More During Quarantine

In the “ Simpsons ” parody of “ Lord of the Flies , ” the students of Springfield Elementary end up marooned on a desert island , which for Bart is not cause for tears but celebration .
“ It ’ ll be just like the Swiss Family Robinson , only with more cursing !
We ’ re gon na live like kings !
Damn , hell , ass , kings !
” Casual swearing is a great perquisite of adulthood , and one of the first that kids attempt to seize for themselves .
Cigarettes and wine coolers make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those takes ingenuity , to say nothing of money .
Swearing might be an art difficult to master in your youth , but it ’ s free .
At ten or eleven or twelve , itchy for adulthood before the long slog of puberty has begun , kids can perform maturity by swearing with brio .
Anyone who ’ s ever had the bad timing to share public transport with a gaggle of preteens knows this .
It ’ s almost cute : they ’ re foul-mouthed but illogical , their muddled expletives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ foreign language .
Damn , hell , ass , indeed .
Every kid is a virtuoso of language : those monkey-hear toddler approximations , a six-year-old ’ s idiosyncratic pronunciations , the malapropisms that continue well into adolescence .
Most parents guard an argot of mangled words they never correct , these mistakes a tether to their kids ’ fleeting innocence .
( For me , it ’ s my younger son ’ s use of “ forfards ” instead of “ forwards.
” I hope he never gets that one right .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ an eight-month-old trying to say “ truck ” and sounding like a Mamet character .
It ’ s less darling when a kid comprehends the power of a bad word and starts wielding it .
Kids listen closely—the diatribe when you stub your toe , the term you use for your most hated co-worker .
When Junior deploys a curse word to give voice to his own frustrations , it ’ s an echo of you , or a deeply unflattering reflection .
You ’ re revealed as the parent who can not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s low , trashy .
Years ago , another parent in our Montessori school pulled me aside to complain that my son had taught hers a bad word .
I laughed a little , which she did not like .
I remember her saying , “ It ’ s not funny ” —but wasn ’ t it a little funny ?
If not , wasn ’ t it a measure of the kids ’ savvy that they ’ d figured out how to cuss like grownups ?
It offended this woman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but her reaction just reaffirmed the illogical power we have granted forbidden words .
This was too academic a point to offer in defense .
I apologized , even though I didn ’ t quite mean it .
This became our household position on swearing .
Telling the kids that some words are only for grownups is a kind of hypocrisy , so instead we ’ ve impressed on them that they must be mindful of how such language might offend or discomfit others .
You can ’ t use these words to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outburst can be understood ; you can ’ t direct hateful language at another person , but a choice exclamation when your Lego construction collapses can be overlooked .
I like to think this grants the kids a kind of agency .
It serves as recognition that they , too , are people , with feelings they need to express—the true power of a coarse word being its ability to hold and salve a difficult emotion .
Maybe I ’ m just lazy .
You have to choose your battles as a parent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one out .
This is all to say that my kids have been swearing a lot since schools and everything else shut down .
I ’ m reassured when other parents confirm that it ’ s an issue in their quarantined households , too , even if there ’ s no consensus on why .
A friend in California jokes , of her daughter , “ I think she ’ s hanging out with the wrong crowd—me.
” I ask if she feels she ’ s being lenient .
“ I ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she said .
“ I feel like parenting is in large part hiding from your children what a monster you actually are .
Now that there ’ s nowhere to hide , I am more often modelling who I really am.
” A friend in New York echoes this : “ I think the problem in our house is that I am using more bad language out of my own weakness and frustration , and they are feeling emboldened to mimic me.
” I , too , am frayed from pretending to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a balance of professional and personal obligations .
Maybe I ’ m being lenient with myself , too , and maybe I can be forgiven for being quick to anger at the slightest of things .
Descending into the basement , I bang my head against a low beam , an excuse to vent I happily take .
Likely I ’ m not shattering the kids ’ innocence ; they surely see their parents more fully than we ’ d like to believe .
Another mother of my acquaintance wonders whether it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hearing the kids anew .
“ I don ’ t know if this brusque language is driven by the current situation , ” she said , “ or if I ’ m just getting a window into little-boy interaction that I ’ ve never had before.
” Another parent blames her kids ’ potty mouths on her own slipping standards for family movie night .
“ It turns out that ‘ Planes , Trains and Automobiles ’ and the ‘ Police Academy ’ series aren ’ t as tame as I ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I ’ m worried about COVID ’ s long-term effects on the children—if they emerge healthy and happy and the only difference is their vocabulary , I ’ ll be so relieved.
” That ’ s the crux of it .
In the scheme of a global pandemic , do a few inelegant words matter ?
A dad I know tells me his children are , as the cliché goes , swearing like sailors .
“ Or it ’ s more like submariners who have been deployed underwater with no sight of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ However , the kids are safe and happy , playing together , making the best of a frustrating situation , and , considering everything , if this is the trade-off , I think we ’ re fucking good with it for now.
” “ Shelter in place ” sounds innocuous , like “ running in place.
” The latter implies a jogger waiting out a red light , but we have no idea when the light will turn green .
The adults in my household , as in so many others , are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as they perform a complicated pantomime of spousal forbearance and parental indulgence : comforting dinners , baked goods for no reason , mildly inappropriate family movie nights .
The children are not stupid .
They fret , even if they can not articulate it : they miss going off to school , mourn the summer camp that probably won ’ t happen , feel adrift without their beloved babysitter , are lost without their peers .
They are good boys , even if the elder of them did , six years ago , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well-played “ shit.
” It is not possible for their parents ’ privilege to disguise the nature of the world into which they were born , and the boys respond with anxiety , with fraternal jockeying and punching , with stamped feet and slammed doors , with the maybe too-occasional bad word for which I scold , though my heart is not in it .
For days , the weather is rainy and grim , and seems to be matching our moods .
Tempers are short .
There ’ s a “ fuck @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” mostly muttered , occasionally exclaimed , as the kids bicker over what movie to watch or whose turn it is to bathe first .
Negotiating full-time work and child care means many things fall to the wayside .
Not swearing is just about decorum , and that ’ s a kind of façade .
I wear the same jeans eleven days in a row ; what ’ s the point in keeping up appearances ?

In the “Simpsons” parody of “Lord of the Flies,” the students of Springfield Elementary end up marooned on a desert island, which for Bart is not cause for tears but celebration. “It’ll be just like the Swiss Family Robinson, only with more cursing! We’re gonna live like kings! Damn, hell, ass, kings!”
Casual swearing is a great perquisite of adulthood, and one of the first that kids attempt to seize for themselves. Cigarettes and wine coolers make teens feel grown up, but obtaining those takes ingenuity, to say nothing of money. Swearing might be an art difficult to master in your youth, but it’s free. At ten or eleven or twelve, itchy for adulthood before the long slog of puberty has begun, kids can perform maturity by swearing with brio. Anyone who’s ever had the bad timing to share public transport with a gaggle of preteens knows this. It’s almost cute: they’re foul-mouthed but illogical, their muddled expletives like a standup act rendered into a foreign language. Damn, hell, ass, indeed.
Every kid is a virtuoso of language: those monkey-hear toddler approximations, a six-year-old’s idiosyncratic pronunciations, the malapropisms that continue well into adolescence. Most parents guard an argot of mangled words they never correct, these mistakes a tether to their kids’ fleeting innocence. (For me, it’s my younger son’s use of “forfards” instead of “forwards.” I hope he never gets that one right.) There’s something sweet about an eight-month-old trying to say “truck” and sounding like a Mamet character. It’s less darling when a kid comprehends the power of a bad word and starts wielding it. Kids listen closely—the diatribe when you stub your toe, the term you use for your most hated co-worker. When Junior deploys a curse word to give voice to his own frustrations, it’s an echo of you, or a deeply unflattering reflection. You’re revealed as the parent who cannot self-censor in front of your kids; it’s low, trashy.
Years ago, another parent in our Montessori school pulled me aside to complain that my son had taught hers a bad word. I laughed a little, which she did not like. I remember her saying, “It’s not funny”—but wasn’t it a little funny? If not, wasn’t it a measure of the kids’ savvy that they’d figured out how to cuss like grownups? It offended this woman that my son had corrupted hers, but her reaction just reaffirmed the illogical power we have granted forbidden words. This was too academic a point to offer in defense. I apologized, even though I didn’t quite mean it.
This became our household position on swearing. Telling the kids that some words are only for grownups is a kind of hypocrisy, so instead we’ve impressed on them that they must be mindful of how such language might offend or discomfit others. You can’t use these words to punctuate daily conversation, but the occasional outburst can be understood; you can’t direct hateful language at another person, but a choice exclamation when your Lego construction collapses can be overlooked. I like to think this grants the kids a kind of agency. It serves as recognition that they, too, are people, with feelings they need to express—the true power of a coarse word being its ability to hold and salve a difficult emotion. Maybe I’m just lazy. You have to choose your battles as a parent, and I’m sitting this one out.
This is all to say that my kids have been swearing a lot since schools and everything else shut down. I’m reassured when other parents confirm that it’s an issue in their quarantined households, too, even if there’s no consensus on why. A friend in California jokes, of her daughter, “I think she’s hanging out with the wrong crowd—me.” I ask if she feels she’s being lenient. “I’ve been more lenient with myself,” she said. “I feel like parenting is in large part hiding from your children what a monster you actually are. Now that there’s nowhere to hide, I am more often modelling who I really am.”
A friend in New York echoes this: “I think the problem in our house is that I am using more bad language out of my own weakness and frustration, and they are feeling emboldened to mimic me.” I, too, am frayed from pretending to be qualified to teach my kids while attempting a balance of professional and personal obligations. Maybe I’m being lenient with myself, too, and maybe I can be forgiven for being quick to anger at the slightest of things. Descending into the basement, I bang my head against a low beam, an excuse to vent I happily take.
Likely I’m not shattering the kids’ innocence; they surely see their parents more fully than we’d like to believe. Another mother of my acquaintance wonders whether it’s the adults who are seeing and hearing the kids anew. “I don’t know if this brusque language is driven by the current situation,” she said, “or if I’m just getting a window into little-boy interaction that I’ve never had before.” Another parent blames her kids’ potty mouths on her own slipping standards for family movie night. “It turns out that ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ and the ‘Police Academy’ series aren’t as tame as I’d remembered.” But, she added, “I’m worried about COVID’s long-term effects on the children—if they emerge healthy and happy and the only difference is their vocabulary, I’ll be so relieved.”
That’s the crux of it. In the scheme of a global pandemic, do a few inelegant words matter? A dad I know tells me his children are, as the cliché goes, swearing like sailors. “Or it’s more like submariners who have been deployed underwater with no sight of sky or land for six months. However, the kids are safe and happy, playing together, making the best of a frustrating situation, and, considering everything, if this is the trade-off, I think we’re fucking good with it for now.”
“Shelter in place” sounds innocuous, like “running in place.” The latter implies a jogger waiting out a red light, but we have no idea when the light will turn green. The adults in my household, as in so many others, are preoccupied with grim headlines and lost wages as they perform a complicated pantomime of spousal forbearance and parental indulgence: comforting dinners, baked goods for no reason, mildly inappropriate family movie nights.
The children are not stupid. They fret, even if they cannot articulate it: they miss going off to school, mourn the summer camp that probably won’t happen, feel adrift without their beloved babysitter, are lost without their peers. They are good boys, even if the elder of them did, six years ago, teach another four-year-old the power of a well-played “shit.” It is not possible for their parents’ privilege to disguise the nature of the world into which they were born, and the boys respond with anxiety, with fraternal jockeying and punching, with stamped feet and slammed doors, with the maybe too-occasional bad word for which I scold, though my heart is not in it.
For days, the weather is rainy and grim, and seems to be matching our moods. Tempers are short. There’s a “fuck,” maybe a “bastard,” mostly muttered, occasionally exclaimed, as the kids bicker over what movie to watch or whose turn it is to bathe first. Negotiating full-time work and child care means many things fall to the wayside. Not swearing is just about decorum, and that’s a kind of façade. I wear the same jeans eleven days in a row; what’s the point in keeping up appearances?
My big kid has the charisma of a born politician and thrives in a crowd. Two years ago, a summer Sunday, he strayed from our side at the beach and returned twenty minutes later with a paper plate laden with fried chicken and potato chips, pressed on him by complete strangers. He needs that sort of input in his life. His brother does, too—we’re all social animals—but more than anything he relishes privacy, vanishing into a game on the playground, unobserved by adults.
My husband and I can attend to the kids’ most pressing needs, but they require more than us. Sheltering in place is a disruption of their social and emotional development. Swearing contains more than just their frustration; it’s an assertion of their nascent independence, which has been so disrupted. The big one is devastated when he punctures the inner tube on his bike tires; I understand the “shit.” The little one is baffled that his parents have usurped the role that rightly belongs to his teacher; I can forgive being called a “bald damn idiot.” The children are angry and distressed, and cannot retreat into a nightly Scotch on the rocks. I can absorb their epithets, understanding them as an expression of the anger and confusion most of us share.
My sons are old enough to know they can’t break out the bad words in front of grandparents (theirs or anyone else’s); they know they don’t belong in the classroom, even if they can be whispered on the playground; they know to censor themselves when smaller kids are within earshot. But while we’re stuck at home, cut off from society, it seems pointless to observe social niceties. I look forward to the day I can take the kids back to the playground—and that is really saying something, because the playground is its own kind of parental hell. I will wear clean jeans, and I trust that my children will watch their words.
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-19--Camus and the Political Tests of a Pandemic

In 1943 , Albert Camus lived in German-occupied Paris at the Hôtel Mercure , on the Rue de la Chaise , on the Left Bank .
He had published “ The Stranger ” during the previous year to a strong reception , and he was becoming a notable figure in Parisian literary circles .
Not far from the Mercure was the Hôtel Lutetia , the headquarters of the Abwehr , the German military ’ s notorious counterintelligence service .
Traffic signs in German dotted the area .
Camus could walk from his residence to the office of his publisher , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ manuscript reader , earning four thousand francs a month , according to Olivier Todd , one of his biographers .
In addition to his day job , Camus struggled to write what would become “ The Plague , ” a novel , published in 1947 , that has enjoyed a deserved revival in this time of the coronavirus , with writers reflecting on it as an allegory about the “ virus of Fascism ” and as a work that is , as my colleague Adam Gopnik put it , “ becoming to this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ‘ September 1 , 1939 ’ was to the aftermath of 9/11.
” The novel recounts the outlooks and actions of men in the coastal city of Oran , Algeria , as they respond to a fictional outbreak of bubonic plague and a subsequent quarantine .
Like all enduring literature , it can be read in multiple ways , and Camus made clear that this was his intention .
One such reading involves the politics of a modern epidemic .
In this political season of our own , as the right to vote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , even while President Trump routinely insults journalists of color and issues scores of false statements about his performance since the coronavirus swept the country , it can be uncanny to encounter Camus ’ s seven-decade-old account of Oran ’ s dissembling Prefect , whose advisers can not bear initially to acknowledge the catastrophe , or even to speak aloud the name of the disease that is its cause .
The novel ’ s hero and narrator , Bernard Rieux , a physician , takes quiet moral action amid his city ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his potential to bring about change is highly constrained .
His outlook is surely drawn from Camus ’ s experiences during the occupation of Paris .
For much of 1943 , he pursued his literary projects openly ; among other things , he explored working with Jean-Paul Sartre on the latter ’ s play “ No Exit.
” But , that winter , Claude Bourdet , the director of the National Resistance Committee ( mainly aligned with Charles de Gaulle in the French struggle against Germany ) , asked Camus to join up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he agreed .
He was provided false papers under the name Albert Mathe , and became the editor of Combat , a clandestine newspaper .
The paper was supposed to come out every other week , although it struggled to meet that rate of publication ; by the time Camus got involved , the resistance was printing about a quarter of a million copies of each edition .
Camus never ran guns or conducted sabotage against the Nazis , but his editorial role was risky enough ; if caught , he could expect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and , at best , interned in miserable conditions .
He wrote in Combat with clarity and force .
None of the paper ’ s authors signed their articles , but among the essays commonly attributed by scholars to Camus is one published in March , 1944 , titled “ Against Total War , Total Resistance.
” It takes note of recent incidents of collective punishment carried out by the German occupiers .
In the Isère , a department in eastern France , “ a whole village was burned by the Germans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ service holdouts might have taken refuge there.
” Another time , in the Ain , after German troops failed to find holdouts they were looking for , they “ shot the mayor and two leading citizens.
” These were Frenchmen who might have said of the occupation , Camus wrote , “ This doesn ’ t concern me.
” He went on , possibly reflecting the evolution of his own thinking during 1943 : “ Don ’ t say , ‘ I sympathize , that ’ s quite enough , and the rest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you will be killed , deported , or tortured as a sympathizer just as easily as if you were a militant .
Act : your risk will be no greater , and you will at least share in the peace at heart that the best of us take with them into the prisons.
” Camus also retained hope about the power of facts to defeat Joseph Goebbels ’ s propaganda : although a lie , he wrote , “ reprinted a million times , retains a certain power , stating the truth is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another Combat piece attributed to him , he celebrated “ clandestine journalism , ” which , in the circumstances , “ is honorable because it is a proof of independence , because it involves a risk .
It is good , it is healthy , that everything to do with current political events has become dangerous.
” In the future , he added , politics and journalism “ will be obliged .
.
.
to judge those who dishonored them.
” Early on in “ The Plague , ” Rieux meets a visiting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if he would “ be allowed to publish an unqualified condemnation of the present state of things ?
.
.
.
I ’ ve no use for statements in which something is kept back.
” Rieux presses Oran ’ s Prefect to stop denying the obvious—that the plague is rampaging in the city—and to protect the population .
One difficulty proves to be that none of the men leading Oran has the knowledge or the experience required to cope with invisible contagion .
Camus ’ s characterization suggests a colonial Algerian version of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Presidents command bureaucracies and hierarchies ; viruses elude them effortlessly .
That Camus , writing in the mid-nineteen-forties , could conjure with such clarity , during an epidemic , a political morality that advocates for factual reporting , medical science , and public-health regimens seems astonishing .
But Camus was less interested in the evolving science of epidemic response than in our capacity as individuals to face the truth , endure , and contribute to success under extreme conditions .
Rieux ’ s breakthrough in this respect , as Camus narrates , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to concentrate on the “ certitude ” of his daily medical rounds .
“ It was only a matter of lucidly recognizing what had to be recognized ; of dispelling extraneous shadows and doing what needed to be done .
.
.
.
The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
” Those sentences might sound banal in another setting , but not in the context of the imagined plague in Oran , or in the light of Camus ’ s lived experience at Combat under Fascist occupation .

During the Nazi occupation of Paris, Camus wrote with clarity and force for a clandestine paper. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum
In 1943, Albert Camus lived in German-occupied Paris at the Hôtel Mercure, on the Rue de la Chaise, on the Left Bank. He had published “The Stranger” during the previous year to a strong reception, and he was becoming a notable figure in Parisian literary circles. Not far from the Mercure was the Hôtel Lutetia, the headquarters of the Abwehr, the German military’s notorious counterintelligence service. Traffic signs in German dotted the area. Camus could walk from his residence to the office of his publisher, Gallimard, where he worked as a manuscript reader, earning four thousand francs a month, according to Olivier Todd, one of his biographers. In addition to his day job, Camus struggled to write what would become “The Plague,” a novel, published in 1947, that has enjoyed a deserved revival in this time of the coronavirus, with writers reflecting on it as an allegory about the “virus of Fascism” and as a work that is, as my colleague Adam Gopnik put it, “becoming to this disruption what W. H. Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’ was to the aftermath of 9/11.”
The novel recounts the outlooks and actions of men in the coastal city of Oran, Algeria, as they respond to a fictional outbreak of bubonic plague and a subsequent quarantine. Like all enduring literature, it can be read in multiple ways, and Camus made clear that this was his intention. One such reading involves the politics of a modern epidemic. In this political season of our own, as the right to vote safely amid the pandemic is under threat, even while President Trump routinely insults journalists of color and issues scores of false statements about his performance since the coronavirus swept the country, it can be uncanny to encounter Camus’s seven-decade-old account of Oran’s dissembling Prefect, whose advisers cannot bear initially to acknowledge the catastrophe, or even to speak aloud the name of the disease that is its cause.
The novel’s hero and narrator, Bernard Rieux, a physician, takes quiet moral action amid his city’s devastation, even as he understands that his potential to bring about change is highly constrained. His outlook is surely drawn from Camus’s experiences during the occupation of Paris. For much of 1943, he pursued his literary projects openly; among other things, he explored working with Jean-Paul Sartre on the latter’s play “No Exit.” But, that winter, Claude Bourdet, the director of the National Resistance Committee (mainly aligned with Charles de Gaulle in the French struggle against Germany), asked Camus to join up as an editor and writer, and he agreed. He was provided false papers under the name Albert Mathe, and became the editor of Combat, a clandestine newspaper. The paper was supposed to come out every other week, although it struggled to meet that rate of publication; by the time Camus got involved, the resistance was printing about a quarter of a million copies of each edition.
Camus never ran guns or conducted sabotage against the Nazis, but his editorial role was risky enough; if caught, he could expect to be tortured by his Abwehr neighbors, and, at best, interned in miserable conditions. He wrote in Combat with clarity and force. None of the paper’s authors signed their articles, but among the essays commonly attributed by scholars to Camus is one published in March, 1944, titled “Against Total War, Total Resistance.” It takes note of recent incidents of collective punishment carried out by the German occupiers. In the Isère, a department in eastern France, “a whole village was burned by the Germans on the mere suspicion that compulsory labor service holdouts might have taken refuge there.”
Another time, in the Ain, after German troops failed to find holdouts they were looking for, they “shot the mayor and two leading citizens.” These were Frenchmen who might have said of the occupation, Camus wrote, “This doesn’t concern me.” He went on, possibly reflecting the evolution of his own thinking during 1943: “Don’t say, ‘I sympathize, that’s quite enough, and the rest is no concern of mine.’ Because you will be killed, deported, or tortured as a sympathizer just as easily as if you were a militant. Act: your risk will be no greater, and you will at least share in the peace at heart that the best of us take with them into the prisons.”
Camus also retained hope about the power of facts to defeat Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda: although a lie, he wrote, “reprinted a million times, retains a certain power, stating the truth is enough to repel the falsehood.” In another Combat piece attributed to him, he celebrated “clandestine journalism,” which, in the circumstances, “is honorable because it is a proof of independence, because it involves a risk. It is good, it is healthy, that everything to do with current political events has become dangerous.” In the future, he added, politics and journalism “will be obliged . . . to judge those who dishonored them.”
Early on in “The Plague,” Rieux meets a visiting journalist, Raymond Rambert, and asks if he would “be allowed to publish an unqualified condemnation of the present state of things? . . . I’ve no use for statements in which something is kept back.” Rieux presses Oran’s Prefect to stop denying the obvious—that the plague is rampaging in the city—and to protect the population. One difficulty proves to be that none of the men leading Oran has the knowledge or the experience required to cope with invisible contagion. Camus’s characterization suggests a colonial Algerian version of a Jared Kushner-led task force:
For the most part they were men with well-defined and sound ideas on everything concerning exports, banking, the fruit or wine trade; men of proved ability in handling problems relating to insurance, the interpretation of ill-drawn contracts, and the like. . . . But as regards plague their competence was practically nil.
Prefects and Presidents command bureaucracies and hierarchies; viruses elude them effortlessly. That Camus, writing in the mid-nineteen-forties, could conjure with such clarity, during an epidemic, a political morality that advocates for factual reporting, medical science, and public-health regimens seems astonishing. But Camus was less interested in the evolving science of epidemic response than in our capacity as individuals to face the truth, endure, and contribute to success under extreme conditions. Rieux’s breakthrough in this respect, as Camus narrates, is to let go of speculations, to concentrate on the “certitude” of his daily medical rounds. “It was only a matter of lucidly recognizing what had to be recognized; of dispelling extraneous shadows and doing what needed to be done. . . . The thing was to do your job as it should be done.” Those sentences might sound banal in another setting, but not in the context of the imagined plague in Oran, or in the light of Camus’s lived experience at Combat under Fascist occupation.
“The Plague” has been criticized periodically since its publication for being heavy and overly moralistic, but the “criticism has not aged nearly as well as the novel,” as the historian and Camus biographer Robert Zaretsky wrote recently. The reason is that successive natural and political crises, such as the one we are enduring this year, have taught us, as Zaretsky put it, that “there is nothing ordinary about humanity and good sense. As we see now on both sides of the Atlantic, both traits are quite extraordinary, especially when they confront the entwined threats of biological and ideological plague.”
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-19--Oregon Primary Election 2020: Live Results, Maps, and Analysis

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newyorker--2020-05-18--Sourdough Starter for the Baking Skeptic

“ Feed your starter every day.
” “ Discard half before each feeding.
” “ Weigh your starter.
” “ Feed it its own weight.
” “ Feed it equal parts flour and water.
” I think we can dispense with all of this .
Let ’ s sweep it aside , along with the suspicion that one ’ s value under quarantine hinges on whether one has joined the masses in baking bread .
I have a sourdough starter , which I feed a little flour and water the day before I use it .
I ’ ve never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ever will .
I rely on it like I rely on having leftover rice to fry , frozen bread to toast , chicken stock and dashi in impossible-to-thaw Mason jars for turning into soup or curry or sludge .
My friend Emma brought my first starter here , to my home in Hudson , New York , on the train on February 12 , 2017 .
I know the date because I have a time-stamped photo on my phone .
( My son was seven months old at the time , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was snowing , and part of the fantasy of Emma ’ s coming from the city to the relative winter quiet of upstate involved her wanting to teach me how to make sourdough bread .
I ’ d never made sourdough bread .
It required patience and precision and calibrated quantities of flour .
Late that night , Emma weighed her starter .
She added things .
She moved them from bowl to bowl .
The following morning , she weighed and added and relocated other things .
She kept explaining how easy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ took a train back to the city , leaving the last stages of baking to my husband and me .
I opened a bottle of wine .
I decided that dough was designed to be baked and dumped her concoction into a red Dutch oven .
To which it stuck .
Some of it is still there—whatever I didn ’ t get out with a chisel .
I still have the “ bread , ” too , sitting somewhere in the freezer .
Even after I destroyed the clod of dough it produced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my refrigerator , a half-full Mason jar that I was supposed to regularly feed .
If I didn ’ t feed the starter , it would die .
If I did feed it , it would reproduce , forever .
And whenever it grew , I would have to throw some away .
You know how when you garden , you ’ re supposed to “ thin ” seedlings once they ’ ve sprouted , so they don ’ t crowd each other out and gobble up each other ’ s resources ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ plants , their too-heavy heads bobbing on floss-like stems .
I can ’ t even bear to be outside while my husband does this thinning .
I can ’ t even know it ’ s happening .
In the case of the starter , my paralyzing sentimentality plus frugality—and resulting inviolable inability to throw anything out—combined , in a way that I now recognize as serendipitous , with my lifelong distrust of baking .
I looked up what to do with excess sourdough starter .
A site called What ’ s Cooking America @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , made with olive oil .
I felt the stirrings of providence , a rush of anticipation .
In more than two decades of cooking , I ’ d never made plain old pancakes .
Why ?
Indifference .
Anxiety .
In any baking project , I get so nervous at the thought of chemistry and rising agents that I spur myself to error .
If a bad decision presents itself , I make it .
I ’ ve managed to mess up peanut-butter cookies from the recipe on the back of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gotten yeast to bubble .
( When the recipe calls for active dry , I use instant . )
But here : a pancake recipe that required no flour—just two cups of sourdough starter , mixed with eggs , salt , sugar , a little baking soda dissolved in water , and olive oil .
I know olive oil ; its presence in a recipe comforts me .
And my son was allergic to the proteins in dairy .
I mixed the olive-oily batter and poured it into little puddles in a hot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were the best pancakes I ’ d ever eaten .
They were the best pancakes anyone had ever eaten .
They were tangy and chewy and salty , like blinis , or crêpes .
Like something studied and difficult .
I called my father-in-law , an expert baker , and asked him about feeding a starter .
He said that quantities and schedules didn ’ t matter : I could just shake some flour and water into a bowl containing the contents of my starter jar the day before I wanted pancakes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leave it out overnight to allow it to .
.
.
start .
Every Saturday , we had sourdough olive-oil pancakes .
Time passed .
My son outgrew his dairy allergy .
We started going to a bakery for croissants every Friday and to the farmers ’ market for donuts on Saturdays .
I didn ’ t feed the starter for a year .
By the time I remembered it , wedged into a sticky corner in the back of the fridge , it had shrunk to a tan , slouching inch of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moss-green liquid on top of it .
My father-in-law said to pour off the moss and feed the starter for a few days .
Three days later , we were back on sourdough pancakes .
Louis ’ s fellow-toddlers and their parents started coming for dinner occasionally , and the easiest thing to make was sourdough pancakes , with shredded carrots and sweet corn mixed into the batter and ginger-scallion vinegar on the side for the grown ups .
I realized that if I added handfuls of chopped kimchi to the batter , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kimchijeon .
Drained , chopped canned chickpeas and a little dried coconut made them taste dosa-like .
The weirdest additions I tried may have been thinly sliced celery and sauerkraut .
Dipped in habanero hot sauce ?
Yes , please !
I became dependent on Emma ’ s starter , or whatever phoenix version had emerged from the back of my fridge .
And then I lost it .
It was there , in its place , on the top shelf .
Then it wasn ’ t .
We ’ re a messy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unapologetically messy .
The starter is probably still there , somewhere .
I always half expect it to fling itself at me from a pantry like a jack-in-the-box .
But , even if it did , the microorganisms that survived the previous neglect will almost certainly have died by now .
So , a while ago , I made a new starter .
I combined flour and water in a big container .
I left it out on my kitchen counter and added more flour and water every day for four or five @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bubbled to life , I ’ ve stuck it into everything I can think of , and the results are always better than they would have been without it .
I still have never made sourdough bread .
But I ’ ve made sourdough cake : more flavorful , and more moist , than the regular kind .
The same goes for sourdough biscuits .
When quarantine started , I looked up recipes for sourdough crackers , and decided to try the two easiest ones I found , with the fewest ingredients .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ I used whatever bags of flour I had open—some einkorn , some very old “ 00 ” flour I once bought because a recipe had insisted on it , some white whole wheat .
Each time , what the combination of fat , flour , salt , and sourdough starter produced was crisp , thin , delicious .

“Feed your starter every day.” “Discard half before each feeding.” “Weigh your starter.” “Feed it its own weight.” “Feed it equal parts flour and water.” I think we can dispense with all of this. Let’s sweep it aside, along with the suspicion that one’s value under quarantine hinges on whether one has joined the masses in baking bread. I have a sourdough starter, which I feed a little flour and water the day before I use it. I’ve never made bread with it. I doubt I ever will. I rely on it like I rely on having leftover rice to fry, frozen bread to toast, chicken stock and dashi in impossible-to-thaw Mason jars for turning into soup or curry or sludge.
My friend Emma brought my first starter here, to my home in Hudson, New York, on the train on February 12, 2017. I know the date because I have a time-stamped photo on my phone. (My son was seven months old at the time, and I was photographing everything.) It was snowing, and part of the fantasy of Emma’s coming from the city to the relative winter quiet of upstate involved her wanting to teach me how to make sourdough bread. I’d never made sourdough bread. It required patience and precision and calibrated quantities of flour. Late that night, Emma weighed her starter. She added things. She moved them from bowl to bowl. The following morning, she weighed and added and relocated other things. She kept explaining how easy it all was. Eventually, she took a train back to the city, leaving the last stages of baking to my husband and me. I opened a bottle of wine. I decided that dough was designed to be baked and dumped her concoction into a red Dutch oven. To which it stuck. Some of it is still there—whatever I didn’t get out with a chisel. I still have the “bread,” too, sitting somewhere in the freezer.
Even after I destroyed the clod of dough it produced, Emma’s starter remained in my refrigerator, a half-full Mason jar that I was supposed to regularly feed. If I didn’t feed the starter, it would die. If I did feed it, it would reproduce, forever. And whenever it grew, I would have to throw some away. You know how when you garden, you’re supposed to “thin” seedlings once they’ve sprouted, so they don’t crowd each other out and gobble up each other’s resources? You pluck out the weakest sprouts—tiny baby plants, their too-heavy heads bobbing on floss-like stems. I can’t even bear to be outside while my husband does this thinning. I can’t even know it’s happening.
In the case of the starter, my paralyzing sentimentality plus frugality—and resulting inviolable inability to throw anything out—combined, in a way that I now recognize as serendipitous, with my lifelong distrust of baking. I looked up what to do with excess sourdough starter. A site called What’s Cooking America popped up. It suggested sourdough-starter pancakes, made with olive oil. I felt the stirrings of providence, a rush of anticipation. In more than two decades of cooking, I’d never made plain old pancakes. Why? Indifference. Anxiety. In any baking project, I get so nervous at the thought of chemistry and rising agents that I spur myself to error. If a bad decision presents itself, I make it. I’ve managed to mess up peanut-butter cookies from the recipe on the back of the peanut-butter jar. I’ve never gotten yeast to bubble. (When the recipe calls for active dry, I use instant.) But here: a pancake recipe that required no flour—just two cups of sourdough starter, mixed with eggs, salt, sugar, a little baking soda dissolved in water, and olive oil. I know olive oil; its presence in a recipe comforts me. And my son was allergic to the proteins in dairy. I mixed the olive-oily batter and poured it into little puddles in a hot pan containing more olive oil. They were the best pancakes I’d ever eaten. They were the best pancakes anyone had ever eaten. They were tangy and chewy and salty, like blinis, or crêpes. Like something studied and difficult.
I called my father-in-law, an expert baker, and asked him about feeding a starter. He said that quantities and schedules didn’t matter: I could just shake some flour and water into a bowl containing the contents of my starter jar the day before I wanted pancakes, mix a couple of times, and leave it out overnight to allow it to . . . start. Every Saturday, we had sourdough olive-oil pancakes. Time passed. My son outgrew his dairy allergy. We started going to a bakery for croissants every Friday and to the farmers’ market for donuts on Saturdays. I didn’t feed the starter for a year. By the time I remembered it, wedged into a sticky corner in the back of the fridge, it had shrunk to a tan, slouching inch of sludge, with an equal amount of moss-green liquid on top of it. My father-in-law said to pour off the moss and feed the starter for a few days.
Three days later, we were back on sourdough pancakes. Louis’s fellow-toddlers and their parents started coming for dinner occasionally, and the easiest thing to make was sourdough pancakes, with shredded carrots and sweet corn mixed into the batter and ginger-scallion vinegar on the side for the grown ups. I realized that if I added handfuls of chopped kimchi to the batter, I could make an approximation of a kimchijeon. Drained, chopped canned chickpeas and a little dried coconut made them taste dosa-like. The weirdest additions I tried may have been thinly sliced celery and sauerkraut. Dipped in habanero hot sauce? Yes, please!
I became dependent on Emma’s starter, or whatever phoenix version had emerged from the back of my fridge. And then I lost it. It was there, in its place, on the top shelf. Then it wasn’t. We’re a messy family. All of us guiltlessly, unapologetically messy. The starter is probably still there, somewhere. I always half expect it to fling itself at me from a pantry like a jack-in-the-box. But, even if it did, the microorganisms that survived the previous neglect will almost certainly have died by now.
So, a while ago, I made a new starter. I combined flour and water in a big container. I left it out on my kitchen counter and added more flour and water every day for four or five days. Ever since that second starter bubbled to life, I’ve stuck it into everything I can think of, and the results are always better than they would have been without it. I still have never made sourdough bread. But I’ve made sourdough cake: more flavorful, and more moist, than the regular kind. The same goes for sourdough biscuits. When quarantine started, I looked up recipes for sourdough crackers, and decided to try the two easiest ones I found, with the fewest ingredients. I switched butter for olive oil. I used whatever bags of flour I had open—some einkorn, some very old “00” flour I once bought because a recipe had insisted on it, some white whole wheat. Each time, what the combination of fat, flour, salt, and sourdough starter produced was crisp, thin, delicious.
In this long liminal period, time scales have shifted. I have vinegar fermenting now, too, in a few jars, above the pots, below the cobwebs. I used to think, impatiently, that it would take a week for the first batch to be done. What takes longer than a week? Now months are fine. Months are good. I’m sure I’ll misplace this starter, too. When that happens, I’ll just make another.
Sourdough-Starter Pancakes
(adapted from What’s Cooking America)


newyorker--2020-05-20--“Michael Kohlhaas,” the Book That Made the Novel Modern

“ Michael Kohlhaas , ” an 1810 novella by the German poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist , is a work of almost total calamity .
Its speed and cataclysmic force are palpable from the opening paragraph : In the middle of the 16th century there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas , son of a schoolmaster , at once one of the most righteous and appalling individuals of his time .
Until his thirtieth year , this unusual man would have been accounted the very model of a good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bears his name , he owned a farm that provided him with a comfortable living ; the children his wife gave him he brought up in the fear of God , to be hardworking and loyal ; there was not one among his neighbors who hadn ’ t benefited from his charity and his fair dealing ; in sum , the world would have blessed his memory , if he hadn ’ t followed one of his virtues to excess .
His sense of justice led him to robbery and murder .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eponymous hero seeks redress over a minor infraction , is both satisfyingly atavistic and indelibly modern .
Loosely based on the life of a sixteenth-century merchant , the book ’ s initial , indiscriminate violence—thieving , arson , maiming , execution—gives way , in its second half , to cosmic inscrutability .
The horse-dealer ’ s implacable quest for justice is stymied by the opacity of the law .
( That the novella was beloved by Franz Kafka is perhaps unsurprising .
“ This is a story I read with true piety , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Felice Bauer , in 1913 . )
Its bottomless ambiguity and sense of futility anticipate the modern novel by nearly a century ; not only Kafka but writers as disparate as Samuel Beckett , Thomas Bernhard , Witold Gombrowicz , and J. M. Coetzee are unimaginable without Kleist ’ s example .
His life , like much of his work , was brief and dramatic .
Born the eldest of eight children in Frankfurt an der Oder , Kleist became a member of the Potsdam Guard Regiment at fourteen ; fought Napoleon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Kant crisis , ” in which he despaired of reason ; wandered restlessly through Paris and Switzerland ; broke off his engagement to a German pastellist ; was arrested by the French as a possible spy ; suffered a nervous breakdown ; and killed himself , at thirty-four , on the shore of the Wannsee , in a suicide pact with a terminally ill friend .
His work often eulogized European high culture , which could provoke the opprobrium of its elder statesmen .
( Goethe , whom Kleist both admired and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phantom of acrimony and hypochondria.
” ) He was attracted to a life of regimented , almost militaristic order , even as psychological disarray engulfed him .
This conflict lends Kleist ’ s œuvre its remarkable , even shocking , sense of paradox and turmoil .
“ Michael Kohlhaas , ” which was recently reissued by New Directions in a sparkling new translation from Michael Hofmann , makes for a fine entry point into Kleist ’ s passionate , grotesque , hysterical , and deeply strange body of work .
It begins , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Kohlhaas , en route to a Leipzig marketplace , is stopped by a castellan in the employ of the knight Wenzel von Tronka , who demands to see a travel permit .
Lacking the necessary visa , Kohlhaas is coerced into leaving two of his finest horses as collateral , along with his trusty groom to watch over them .
While passing through Dresden , he learns from a government notary that the permit is in fact a fairy tale .
As so often occurs in “ Michael Kohlhaas , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by human cupidity .
The castellan is merely an avatar , the first of several figures whose knowledge of the law allows them to shape or pervert it for private aims .
Kleist introduces the self-serving technocratic interpreter to modern literature .
Extraordinary cruelties beset Kohlhaas in rapid succession .
He returns to find his horses near collapse , and his groom badly beaten .
His demands for redress are laughed off by Tronka and his retinue .
In a ghastly turn , his beloved wife is fatally injured while bringing his plea @ @ @ @ @ @ @ guard crushes her sternum . )
Kleist offers little psychological garnish to this great feast of suffering .
His hero ’ s setbacks are relayed with the compression and impassivity of a parable , albeit one whose moral proves elusive .
Kleist comes to inhabit the same terrifying remoteness as Job ’ s God : pitiless , obscurely motivated , and not above a bit of mockery .
After such rigorous sadism , Kohlhaas wastes no time in dedicating himself to “ the business of revenge.
” Assembling a band of loyal men @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at nightfall , killing everyone he finds and burning the castle to its foundations .
When his quarry manages to escape , he proceeds to raid outlying communities , burn houses and churches , and rout military detachments sent to quell his rebellion .
His amnesty is eventually brokered by none other than Martin Luther .
( Their improbable , clandestine tête-à-tête is a dialectical wonder .
“ Mad , baffling , and appalling man , ” Luther calls him . )
While Kohlhaas awaits trial in Dresden , a trap is set @ @ @ @ @ @ @ marauders .
He is given up as a traitor , and promptly sentenced to be drawn and quartered .
Kohlhaas is the archetype for a particular kind of protagonist : the little man provoked beyond the limit of endurance .
The figure is essentially modern , and well represented in fiction and film .
We cheer on these ill-used men—Andreas Pum in Joseph Roth ’ s novel “ Rebellion , ” say , or William Foster in Joel Schumacher ’ s film “ Falling Down ” —as they rampage fruitlessly against the societies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terrorists , their lawlessness affords them a clarity denied the average citizen .
Their moral authority precisely parallels the severity of their transgression .
These knights of immoderation are all the horse-dealer ’ s heirs .

Heinrich von Kleist’s life, like much of his work, was brief and dramatic. Photograph from Hulton Archive / Getty
“Michael Kohlhaas,” an 1810 novella by the German poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, is a work of almost total calamity. Its speed and cataclysmic force are palpable from the opening paragraph:
In the middle of the 16th century there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas, son of a schoolmaster, at once one of the most righteous and appalling individuals of his time. Until his thirtieth year, this unusual man would have been accounted the very model of a good citizen. In the village that still bears his name, he owned a farm that provided him with a comfortable living; the children his wife gave him he brought up in the fear of God, to be hardworking and loyal; there was not one among his neighbors who hadn’t benefited from his charity and his fair dealing; in sum, the world would have blessed his memory, if he hadn’t followed one of his virtues to excess. His sense of justice led him to robbery and murder.
The narrative that follows, in which the eponymous hero seeks redress over a minor infraction, is both satisfyingly atavistic and indelibly modern. Loosely based on the life of a sixteenth-century merchant, the book’s initial, indiscriminate violence—thieving, arson, maiming, execution—gives way, in its second half, to cosmic inscrutability. The horse-dealer’s implacable quest for justice is stymied by the opacity of the law. (That the novella was beloved by Franz Kafka is perhaps unsurprising. “This is a story I read with true piety,” he wrote to his soon-to-be fiancée, Felice Bauer, in 1913.) Its bottomless ambiguity and sense of futility anticipate the modern novel by nearly a century; not only Kafka but writers as disparate as Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Witold Gombrowicz, and J. M. Coetzee are unimaginable without Kleist’s example.
His life, like much of his work, was brief and dramatic. Born as one of seven children in Frankfurt an der Oder, Kleist became a member of the Potsdam Guard Regiment at fourteen; fought Napoleon; briefly studied law; experienced a “Kant crisis,” in which he despaired of reason; wandered restlessly through Paris and Switzerland; broke off his engagement to a German pastellist; was arrested by the French as a possible spy; suffered a nervous breakdown; and killed himself, at thirty-four, on the shore of the Wannsee, in a suicide pact with a terminally ill friend. His work often eulogized European high culture, which could provoke the opprobrium of its elder statesmen. (Goethe, whom Kleist both admired and despised, called him a “Nordic phantom of acrimony and hypochondria.”) He was attracted to a life of regimented, almost militaristic order, even as psychological disarray engulfed him. This conflict lends Kleist’s œuvre its remarkable, even shocking, sense of paradox and turmoil.
“Michael Kohlhaas,” which was recently reissued by New Directions in a sparkling new translation from Michael Hofmann, makes for a fine entry point into Kleist’s passionate, grotesque, hysterical, and deeply strange body of work. It begins, as it ends, in bureaucratic entanglement. Kohlhaas, en route to a Leipzig marketplace, is stopped by a castellan in the employ of the knight Wenzel von Tronka, who demands to see a travel permit. Lacking the necessary visa, Kohlhaas is coerced into leaving two of his finest horses as collateral, along with his trusty groom to watch over them. While passing through Dresden, he learns from a government notary that the permit is in fact a fairy tale. As so often occurs in “Michael Kohlhaas,” the law is invoked only to be disfigured by human cupidity. The castellan is merely an avatar, the first of several figures whose knowledge of the law allows them to shape or pervert it for private aims. Kleist introduces the self-serving technocratic interpreter to modern literature.
Extraordinary cruelties beset Kohlhaas in rapid succession. He returns to find his horses near collapse, and his groom badly beaten. His demands for redress are laughed off by Tronka and his retinue. In a ghastly turn, his beloved wife is fatally injured while bringing his plea before the sovereign. (An overzealous guard crushes her sternum.) Kleist offers little psychological garnish to this great feast of suffering. His hero’s setbacks are relayed with the compression and impassivity of a parable, albeit one whose moral proves elusive. Kleist comes to inhabit the same terrifying remoteness as Job’s God: pitiless, obscurely motivated, and not above a bit of mockery.
After such rigorous sadism, Kohlhaas wastes no time in dedicating himself to “the business of revenge.” Assembling a band of loyal men, he attacks Tronka’s castle at nightfall, killing everyone he finds and burning the castle to its foundations. When his quarry manages to escape, he proceeds to raid outlying communities, burn houses and churches, and rout military detachments sent to quell his rebellion. His amnesty is eventually brokered by none other than Martin Luther. (Their improbable, clandestine tête-à-tête is a dialectical wonder. “Mad, baffling, and appalling man,” Luther calls him.) While Kohlhaas awaits trial in Dresden, a trap is set with a letter from one of his marauders. He is given up as a traitor, and promptly sentenced to be drawn and quartered.
Kohlhaas is the archetype for a particular kind of protagonist: the little man provoked beyond the limit of endurance. The figure is essentially modern, and well represented in fiction and film. We cheer on these ill-used men—Andreas Pum in Joseph Roth’s novel “Rebellion,” say, or William Foster in Joel Schumacher’s film “Falling Down”—as they rampage fruitlessly against the societies that brutalized them. Martyrs or spiritual terrorists, their lawlessness affords them a clarity denied the average citizen. Their moral authority precisely parallels the severity of their transgression. These knights of immoderation are all the horse-dealer’s heirs.
The ecstatic violence that such men commit is one of Kleist’s central themes. But the indulgence of his novella—scenes of blasphemy, defenestration, disaster, augury—is offset by the Latinate solidity of his prose. It is a stony eminence, slab-like and somehow airtight despite its continued accretion of character and event. Kleist confounds us by appraising his fevers with the exactness of a logician. “The war I am waging against the bulk of mankind is sinful,” Kohlhaas tells Luther, “were it not that I am, as you assure me, cast out from it.” Kleist erects gorgeous, formal structures in which to house the demons that plague him. He locates a profound mystery in the hearts of men and the institutions that guide them, something inexorable, unyielding, and ultimately destructive.
Kohlhaas, determined to set the world to rights, seeks clarity within the mystifying apparatus of the courts. They do not represent the law but something like its hardened excrescence, or else a vexing formal discipline, like calculus or ballet. From the first, Kohlhaas is out of his depth. Subject to a dizzying hierarchy of peerage and obscure jurisdiction, justice eludes him at every opportunity. His pleas are interrupted, denied, or ignored, due to well-placed adversaries. Smelling blood in the water, Tronka and his retinue begin “with cunning and obstructive arguments to deny their guilt altogether.” Infinite barriers of paper and plausibility accumulate. Kohlhaas is punished, finally, not for his crimes but for his novitiate status.


newyorker--2020-05-20--Quarantine Lessons from Alfred Hitchcock

In these suspenseful times , let us turn to the Master of Suspense himself—though perhaps this is one horror film in which he might not want a cameo .
Plot synopsis : Man trapped in his apartment stares at neighbors through the window all day .
No one bakes bread .
Quarantine takeaway : New hobbies can be a bad thing .
Plot synopsis : Woman leaves town even though she probably should have stayed home .
World ’ s loneliest boy owns a B .
& B. that ’ s not doing so hot right now .
Imaginary friend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heavy lifting .
Plot synopsis : Man is in shock after sudden , unexpected events .
Has bouts of extreme dizziness , such as those one might experience after watching six hours of true-crime reënactments .
Is tasked with following a woman at a safe distance .
Plot synopsis : Two men purposefully engage in a close conversation on public transportation , without a face mask in sight .
It doesn ’ t work out well for either of them .
Plot synopsis : Man worries about maintaining his comfortable life style and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a friend he hasn ’ t spoken to in many years , then orders delivery .
Quarantine takeaway :  Business is best conducted over the phone .
Plot synopsis : Man eats at a restaurant , inadvertently risking his life in the process .
He seeks assistance with his problems from a government official , with disappointing results .
Everyone is having an identity crisis .
Plot synopsis : Chaos at an international level ; church services and concerts are disrupted as a result .
Iconic song that ’ s meant to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anyone ’ s questions .
Quarantine takeaway : There ’ s such a thing as being too informed .
Plot synopsis :  Bad things are happening outside your house .
Those bad things are birds .
Even though you may not have personally seen the birds , or known someone who was attacked by the birds , be assured those birds are out there .

In these suspenseful times, let us turn to the Master of Suspense himself—though perhaps this is one horror film in which he might not want a cameo.
“Rear Window”
Plot synopsis: Man trapped in his apartment stares at neighbors through the window all day. No one bakes bread.
Quarantine takeaway: New hobbies can be a bad thing.
“Psycho”
Plot synopsis: Woman leaves town even though she probably should have stayed home. World’s loneliest boy owns a B. & B. that’s not doing so hot right now. Imaginary friend has to do a lot of emotional heavy lifting.
Quarantine takeaway: Avoid non-essential businesses.
“Vertigo”
Plot synopsis: Man is in shock after sudden, unexpected events. Has bouts of extreme dizziness, such as those one might experience after watching six hours of true-crime reënactments. Is tasked with following a woman at a safe distance.
Quarantine takeaway: Don’t ignore your symptoms.
“Strangers on a Train”
Plot synopsis: Two men purposefully engage in a close conversation on public transportation, without a face mask in sight. It doesn’t work out well for either of them.
*Quarantine takeaway:* It’s not a great time to travel.
“Dial M for Murder”
Plot synopsis: Man worries about maintaining his comfortable life style and regular income. He reaches out to a friend he hasn’t spoken to in many years, then orders delivery.
Quarantine takeaway: Business is best conducted over the phone.
“North by Northwest”
Plot synopsis: Man eats at a restaurant, inadvertently risking his life in the process. He seeks assistance with his problems from a government official, with disappointing results. Everyone is having an identity crisis.
Quarantine takeaway: Planes = danger.
“The Man Who Knew Too Much”
Plot synopsis: Chaos at an international level; church services and concerts are disrupted as a result. Iconic song that’s meant to be comforting doesn’t really answer anyone’s questions.
Quarantine takeaway: There’s such a thing as being too informed.
“The Birds”
Plot synopsis: Bad things are happening outside your house. Those bad things are birds. Even though you may not have personally seen the birds, or known someone who was attacked by the birds, be assured those birds are out there.
Quarantine takeaway: Fear the outdoors.