newyorker--2020-04-19--Who’s in Charge of the Response to the Coronavirus?

Most crises in American life have been local .
Even the disasters of earthquakes , tornadoes , hurricanes , and floods are relatively confined in space and time .
They do not spread to every state and threaten every corner of all of our lives .
The coronavirus pandemic is that rare crisis that is truly national , where the response of a state may ultimately be only as effective as the response of other states .
By now the vast majority of the country is under stay-at-home orders , issued state by state , but a handful of holdout @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others ’ costly and painful social-distancing efforts .
As a result , states with fewer infections and deaths may merely await their turn to become hot spots , particularly as some states with lockdowns could begin to lift them prematurely while others keep their lockdowns in place .
The dangers of non-uniformity urge the question : If our fates are bound together in this emergency , why has there been no national stay-at-home order ?
Asked earlier this month whether there should be a federal order locking down the nation , Anthony Fauci @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Allergy and Infectious Diseases , said , “ I just don ’ t understand why we ’ re not doing that—we really should be , ” but he also acknowledged a tension with “ states ’ rights to do what they want.
” Fauci is not alone in thinking that a national order would be preferable .
Experts who have called for one include the epidemiologist and activist Gregg Gonsalves , the former senior Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem , and the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs .
Ashish Jha , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Institute , has explained that a national shutdown could give the government time to predict hot spots and increase its testing and hospital capacity ; afterward , it could focus on the targeted testing and tracking that has been effective in South Korea .
State-by-state patchwork solutions impede these goals because asymptomatic carriers continue to travel between states , and because competition for medical supplies among states leads to the misallocation of resources .
A number of medical experts have also advocated for a national policy of requiring the wearing of masks in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and counties , as well as other nations , have done .
President Trump has resisted a mandatory national lockdown and declined to frame federal recommendations on social distancing , staying at home , and mask-wearing as legal orders .
He has explained that “ states are different ” from one another , and also that “ this country wasn ’ t built to be shut down.
” It seems unlikely that Trump ’ s reluctance to issue orders stems from a sense of constitutional limits .
When , on Monday , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coördinate their eventual easing of restrictions regionally , they provoked his false claim that the states “ can ’ t do anything without the approval of the President of the United States.
” Trump went on to falsely claim that only the President can ease the restrictions that states have imposed on economic activity , before backing down and telling governors , “ You will call the shots.
” Many liberals and conservatives have feared Trump ’ s authoritarian proclivities but , apart from his chaotic , error-filled daily use of the bully @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to wield federal executive power in this crisis .
In other democratic countries , most notably Hungary , there is genuine fear that the pandemic is enabling consolidation of emergency executive powers as a gateway to dictatorship .
It was , of course , imaginable that Trump might attempt to take his Presidency in that direction , and we may have his incompetence to thank for not witnessing that thus far .
But even with the risks of growing executive power in general and of Trump ’ s disastrous leadership in particular , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for federal orders to both lock down and eventually ease up public activity and commerce in a coördinated way—particularly if , as Fauci and other experts have warned , there may be waves of outbreaks across the country and throughout the year .
This is in addition to other steps a more active Administration might take , including providing more federal resources to states , guaranteeing loans to finance the production of needed supplies , and mobilizing the Public Health Commissioned Corps , which is overseen by the Surgeon General , to staff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Liberia during the Ebola outbreak ) .
If Trump were to impose orders that bind everyone to stay at home or wear masks , his constitutional authority to do so would be highly contested as a matter of both separation of powers and federalism .
Still , such orders might well be consistent with both .
First of all , Congress might authorize the President to issue such orders , which would vastly bolster their legitimacy if challenged in court .
Congress could certainly pass legislation imposing a temporary national stay-at-home order and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the restrictions .
The Constitution gives Congress power to regulate commerce “ among the several States , ” and it is all too clear that this deadly pandemic is destructive to interstate commerce .
Congress could also use a statute to authorize the President to act in a particular way , as it did with the Defense Production Act of 1950 , which allows the President to require companies to fill orders for products that “ he deems necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.
” President Harry Truman invoked the statute @ @ @ @ @ @ @ manufacturing companies to produce needed materials .
On March 27th , Trump , under that law , ordered a handful of manufacturing companies , including General Motors , to produce ventilators .
A host of other federal statutes give the President authority to address aspects of the crisis .
The Public Health Service Act of 1944 , passed during the Second World War , authorizes the executive branch to prevent the “ spread of communicable diseases , ” allowing the federal government to detain individuals who are “ reasonably believed to be infected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moving into states or are a “ probable source of infection ” to people moving between states .
In 1949 , the law was used to prevent carriers of yellow fever from entering the country .
The fact that Congress specifically authorized detaining the infected may be read to implicitly disallow the wider ( yet less restrictive ) measure of ordering even the healthy to only leave their homes for essential purposes .
But because the statute allows the executive branch to issue regulations that are “ necessary to prevent ” the spread @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the statute is arguably broad enough to include a federal stay-at-home order .
Beyond any congressional statutes , the Constitution authorizes the President to exercise “ the executive power ” of the United States .
Although Trump has done little with his power to address the present crisis , the Administration ’ s lawyers have previously taken a broad view of executive power , as have other Presidents .
At his Inaugural Address in 1933 , during the Great Depression , Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that , if Congress failed to act in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency , as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
” ( Congress then enacted numerous New Deal laws delegating enormous authority to the executive branch , which grew prodigiously as a result . )
Today , the framework for when the exercise of executive power is in keeping with separation of powers comes from Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Truman ’ s decision to take over the nation ’ s steel companies .
The Supreme Court declared the President ’ s order unconstitutional , with the majority finding that because nothing in a statute or in the Constitution gave the President authority to seize private property , even in an emergency , his order invaded the lawmaking power reserved for Congress .

Most crises in American life have been local. Even the disasters of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods are relatively confined in space and time. They do not spread to every state and threaten every corner of all of our lives. The coronavirus pandemic is that rare crisis that is truly national, where the response of a state may ultimately be only as effective as the response of other states.
By now the vast majority of the country is under stay-at-home orders, issued state by state, but a handful of holdout states threaten to undercut the efficacy of others’ costly and painful social-distancing efforts. As a result, states with fewer infections and deaths may merely await their turn to become hot spots, particularly as some states with lockdowns could begin to lift them prematurely while others keep their lockdowns in place.
The dangers of non-uniformity urge the question: If our fates are bound together in this emergency, why has there been no national stay-at-home order? Asked earlier this month whether there should be a federal order locking down the nation, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that—we really should be,” but he also acknowledged a tension with “states’ rights to do what they want.”
Fauci is not alone in thinking that a national order would be preferable. Experts who have called for one include the epidemiologist and activist Gregg Gonsalves, the former senior Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem, and the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, has explained that a national shutdown could give the government time to predict hot spots and increase its testing and hospital capacity; afterward, it could focus on the targeted testing and tracking that has been effective in South Korea. State-by-state patchwork solutions impede these goals because asymptomatic carriers continue to travel between states, and because competition for medical supplies among states leads to the misallocation of resources. A number of medical experts have also advocated for a national policy of requiring the wearing of masks in public, as several states, cities, and counties, as well as other nations, have done.
President Trump has resisted a mandatory national lockdown and declined to frame federal recommendations on social distancing, staying at home, and mask-wearing as legal orders. He has explained that “states are different” from one another, and also that “this country wasn’t built to be shut down.” It seems unlikely that Trump’s reluctance to issue orders stems from a sense of constitutional limits. When, on Monday, two coalitions of governors announced plans to coördinate their eventual easing of restrictions regionally, they provoked his false claim that the states “can’t do anything without the approval of the President of the United States.” Trump went on to falsely claim that only the President can ease the restrictions that states have imposed on economic activity, before backing down and telling governors, “You will call the shots.” Many liberals and conservatives have feared Trump’s authoritarian proclivities but, apart from his chaotic, error-filled daily use of the bully pulpit, he has been strikingly uneager to wield federal executive power in this crisis.
In other democratic countries, most notably Hungary, there is genuine fear that the pandemic is enabling consolidation of emergency executive powers as a gateway to dictatorship. It was, of course, imaginable that Trump might attempt to take his Presidency in that direction, and we may have his incompetence to thank for not witnessing that thus far. But even with the risks of growing executive power in general and of Trump’s disastrous leadership in particular, it is worth considering seriously the need for federal orders to both lock down and eventually ease up public activity and commerce in a coördinated way—particularly if, as Fauci and other experts have warned, there may be waves of outbreaks across the country and throughout the year. This is in addition to other steps a more active Administration might take, including providing more federal resources to states, guaranteeing loans to finance the production of needed supplies, and mobilizing the Public Health Commissioned Corps, which is overseen by the Surgeon General, to staff field hospitals (as it did in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak).
If Trump were to impose orders that bind everyone to stay at home or wear masks, his constitutional authority to do so would be highly contested as a matter of both separation of powers and federalism. Still, such orders might well be consistent with both. First of all, Congress might authorize the President to issue such orders, which would vastly bolster their legitimacy if challenged in court. Congress could certainly pass legislation imposing a temporary national stay-at-home order and insuring the national coördination of lifting of the restrictions. The Constitution gives Congress power to regulate commerce “among the several States,” and it is all too clear that this deadly pandemic is destructive to interstate commerce. Congress could also use a statute to authorize the President to act in a particular way, as it did with the Defense Production Act of 1950, which allows the President to require companies to fill orders for products that “he deems necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.” President Harry Truman invoked the statute during the Korean War, to compel manufacturing companies to produce needed materials. On March 27th, Trump, under that law, ordered a handful of manufacturing companies, including General Motors, to produce ventilators.
A host of other federal statutes give the President authority to address aspects of the crisis. The Public Health Service Act of 1944, passed during the Second World War, authorizes the executive branch to prevent the “spread of communicable diseases,” allowing the federal government to detain individuals who are “reasonably believed to be infected” and contagious, and who are moving into states or are a “probable source of infection” to people moving between states. In 1949, the law was used to prevent carriers of yellow fever from entering the country. The fact that Congress specifically authorized detaining the infected may be read to implicitly disallow the wider (yet less restrictive) measure of ordering even the healthy to only leave their homes for essential purposes. But because the statute allows the executive branch to issue regulations that are “necessary to prevent” the spread of contagious disease across state lines, the statute is arguably broad enough to include a federal stay-at-home order.
Beyond any congressional statutes, the Constitution authorizes the President to exercise “the executive power” of the United States. Although Trump has done little with his power to address the present crisis, the Administration’s lawyers have previously taken a broad view of executive power, as have other Presidents. At his Inaugural Address in 1933, during the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that, if Congress failed to act in the national emergency, he would ask “for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” (Congress then enacted numerous New Deal laws delegating enormous authority to the executive branch, which grew prodigiously as a result.) Today, the framework for when the exercise of executive power is in keeping with separation of powers comes from Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, a 1952 case that involved President Truman’s decision to take over the nation’s steel companies. The Supreme Court declared the President’s order unconstitutional, with the majority finding that because nothing in a statute or in the Constitution gave the President authority to seize private property, even in an emergency, his order invaded the lawmaking power reserved for Congress.


newyorker--2020-04-18--The Homemade Insight of Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters”

Fiona Apple is a longtime practitioner of social distancing .
For nearly two decades , she has seldom left her home in Venice Beach , except to walk her dog , Mercy .
She has no social media .
She tends to avoid the press , and she rarely listens to new music , owing to some combination of disinterest and an aversion to being influenced .
These qualities lend her work a kind of feral authenticity , with no trend lines to be traced between its emotional eruptions and the music of her peers .
Even when her songs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can seem slippery , out of sight .
When Apple releases an album , as she has once or twice per decade since the late nineties , she doesn ’ t so much reëmerge as peek through the blinds of her life .
On the title track of her new record , “ Fetch the Bolt Cutters , ” Apple offers an eerie mantra for a time in which her listeners have begun to feel like caged animals : “ Fetch the bolt cutters , ” she sings .
“ I ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the song ’ s final moments , Apple ’ s voice deteriorates into whispers and gasps , and the music is overtaken by the sound of dogs barking anxiously , as if something deeply upsetting has come to their attention .
On a song called “ Heavy Balloon ” —which has unexpected key changes and the shaggy , reverberational energy of a one-take live recording—she uses nonperishable food items as metaphorical grist : “ I climb like peas and beans , ” she sings .
“ I ’ ve been sucking it in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the seams.
” Apple has never downloaded Instagram , but she ’ s managed to supply a fresh songbook of caption inspiration .
Over time , confinement has made Apple exceptionally resourceful .
“ Fetch the Bolt Cutters ” is the culmination of a long and steady rejection of formal recording processes , wherein conventional instrumentation and studio arrangements have been replaced by an at-home tool kit of gadgets , gizmos , and B-roll audio recordings made on an iPhone or with GarageBand .
Besides the dogs barking , the album contains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strange drumming surfaces : a metal butterfly , a loose stovetop Apple found on the side of the road , wooden blocks , an assortment of bells and shakers , oil cans .
Apple is a classically trained pianist who , in her early days , took songwriting cues from Ella Fitzgerald .
She wrote ballads and smoldering pop songs that could be performed behind a piano , on a big stage , or played over café speakers .
But as she has grown in age—she ’ s now forty-two—she has moved toward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more DNA with hymns and spirituals than with pop or jazz .
“ Fetch the Bolt Cutters ” is less of an album than a collection of vocal and rhythmic spasms that have fermented into deeply challenging but satisfying songs , each imbued with an intense , almost overwhelming physicality .
And yet , because of Apple ’ s ear , acumen , and precise vocal enunciation , “ Fetch the Bolt Cutters ” also has a perverse musicality .
The chants and interjections at the heart of these songs have the effect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re not designed as such .
They get lodged in the gut or the chest .
There are shades of improvisational jazz , of Delta blues , of rap-battle taunts and nursery rhymes , but the album ’ s genre is hard to place .
This is the aspiration of most artists—to cultivate a sound that defies categorization .
But those same artists , feasting on a buffet of influences online , tend to achieve this effect through maximalism , folding in the styles they ’ ve absorbed until their music takes on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , instead , builds her sound from the ground up , drawing strictly from her own experience and from the physical tools in her midst .
“ Fetch the Bolt Cutters ” is a ferociously individual work , but it ’ s also one that suggests Apple is more connected to the Zeitgeist than she has been in the past .
Apple has a poet ’ s affection for words , and for combining them in sticky and evocative ways .
No one is better at blurring the line between figurative and literal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she harnesses the themes and intensity of today ’ s political climate .
On “ Relay , ” she lists the things she ’ s been holding against some unknown opponent : These words fit neatly into the Apple catalogue , which is filled with hyper-articulate , introspective screeds about ex-boyfriends .
But the song also contains a more generalized commentary on the very nature of hatred and the need to curtail the cycle of opposition .
“ Evil is a relay sport when the one who ’ s burnt turns to pass @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the upbeat , singsong tone of someone reading a fable to children .
Apple , who ’ s always spoken openly about enduring sexual violence in her teens , has said in interviews that the song was inspired partly by Brett Kavanaugh ’ s Supreme Court hearing , in 2018 .
“ Fetch the Bolt Cutters ” is often about the shared experiences of women , rather than about the specific anguish of a failed relationship .
One song , “ Newspaper , ” is about the desire to forge a friendship with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another is about a childhood classmate named Shameika , who said that Apple “ had potential.
” Many of the vocal arrangements—some bits are sung in rounds , with Apple ’ s voice layered over itself to mimic the sound of a chorus—even have the communal spirit of an all-female pep rally .
But lest one think Apple has succumbed to the clichéd language of empowerment and sisterhood , she is there to fill in the icky backstories and the agonizing fallout of female relationships , too .
“ Ladies , ladies , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the beginning of one song , by the same name , as if at a lectern .
Here , she ’ s speaking again to the women involved with her past loves .
It could be a cheerful song about solidarity , but there ’ s an undercurrent of resignation .
“ Yet another woman to whom I won ’ t get through , ” Apple sings in a half-sigh .
It ’ s been nearly eight years since Apple released “ The Idler Wheel .
.
.
, ” a record @ @ @ @ @ @ @ icon into a messianic figurehead .
In those years , the success of popular music has come to rely almost entirely on the strategy of brand development .
In a flooded marketplace , artists must carefully frame themselves and carefully consider what will make the biggest splash , and when .
Apple can seem revolutionary for resisting these forces , though I ’ m not quite sure that she ’ s plugged in enough to be aware of them .
More than a defiant recluse , she is someone who understands that exceptional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new relationships to be forged , to simmer and evolve , to be destroyed on their own terms , and then to be processed .
“ Fetch the Bolt Cutters ” is an invigorating document of energy , innovation , spontaneity , catharsis .
These are things we ’ ve come to expect from Apple .
But there is one thing that she deserves more credit for , as she toiled in her home , for years , accumulating the material to make these songs : her patience .

Fiona Apple is a longtime practitioner of social distancing. For nearly two decades, she has seldom left her home in Venice Beach, except to walk her dog, Mercy. She has no social media. She tends to avoid the press, and she rarely listens to new music, owing to some combination of disinterest and an aversion to being influenced. These qualities lend her work a kind of feral authenticity, with no trend lines to be traced between its emotional eruptions and the music of her peers. Even when her songs are deeply personal, the artist herself can seem slippery, out of sight. When Apple releases an album, as she has once or twice per decade since the late nineties, she doesn’t so much reëmerge as peek through the blinds of her life.
On the title track of her new record, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” Apple offers an eerie mantra for a time in which her listeners have begun to feel like caged animals: “Fetch the bolt cutters,” she sings. “I’ve been in here too long.” In the song’s final moments, Apple’s voice deteriorates into whispers and gasps, and the music is overtaken by the sound of dogs barking anxiously, as if something deeply upsetting has come to their attention. On a song called “Heavy Balloon”—which has unexpected key changes and the shaggy, reverberational energy of a one-take live recording—she uses nonperishable food items as metaphorical grist: “I climb like peas and beans,” she sings. “I’ve been sucking it in so long that I’m busting at the seams.” Apple has never downloaded Instagram, but she’s managed to supply a fresh songbook of caption inspiration.
Over time, confinement has made Apple exceptionally resourceful. “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is the culmination of a long and steady rejection of formal recording processes, wherein conventional instrumentation and studio arrangements have been replaced by an at-home tool kit of gadgets, gizmos, and B-roll audio recordings made on an iPhone or with GarageBand. Besides the dogs barking, the album contains a scrap yard’s worth of strange drumming surfaces: a metal butterfly, a loose stovetop Apple found on the side of the road, wooden blocks, an assortment of bells and shakers, oil cans. Apple is a classically trained pianist who, in her early days, took songwriting cues from Ella Fitzgerald. She wrote ballads and smoldering pop songs that could be performed behind a piano, on a big stage, or played over café speakers. But as she has grown in age—she’s now forty-two—she has moved toward a rawer, makeshift sound that shares more DNA with hymns and spirituals than with pop or jazz. “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is less of an album than a collection of vocal and rhythmic spasms that have fermented into deeply challenging but satisfying songs, each imbued with an intense, almost overwhelming physicality.
And yet, because of Apple’s ear, acumen, and precise vocal enunciation, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” also has a perverse musicality. The chants and interjections at the heart of these songs have the effect of choruses, even when they’re not designed as such. They get lodged in the gut or the chest. There are shades of improvisational jazz, of Delta blues, of rap-battle taunts and nursery rhymes, but the album’s genre is hard to place. This is the aspiration of most artists—to cultivate a sound that defies categorization. But those same artists, feasting on a buffet of influences online, tend to achieve this effect through maximalism, folding in the styles they’ve absorbed until their music takes on a mushy, anonymous quality. Apple, instead, builds her sound from the ground up, drawing strictly from her own experience and from the physical tools in her midst.
“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is a ferociously individual work, but it’s also one that suggests Apple is more connected to the Zeitgeist than she has been in the past. Apple has a poet’s affection for words, and for combining them in sticky and evocative ways. No one is better at blurring the line between figurative and literal expression, and in the new songs she harnesses the themes and intensity of today’s political climate. On “Relay,” she lists the things she’s been holding against some unknown opponent:
I resent you for being raised right
I resent you for being tall
I resent you for never getting any opposition at all
I resent you for having each other
I resent you for being so sure
I resent you for presenting your life like a fucking propaganda brochure
These words fit neatly into the Apple catalogue, which is filled with hyper-articulate, introspective screeds about ex-boyfriends. But the song also contains a more generalized commentary on the very nature of hatred and the need to curtail the cycle of opposition. “Evil is a relay sport when the one who’s burnt turns to pass the torch,” she sings in the upbeat, singsong tone of someone reading a fable to children. Apple, who’s always spoken openly about enduring sexual violence in her teens, has said in interviews that the song was inspired partly by Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearing, in 2018. “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is often about the shared experiences of women, rather than about the specific anguish of a failed relationship. One song, “Newspaper,” is about the desire to forge a friendship with an ex’s new girlfriend; another is about a childhood classmate named Shameika, who said that Apple “had potential.” Many of the vocal arrangements—some bits are sung in rounds, with Apple’s voice layered over itself to mimic the sound of a chorus—even have the communal spirit of an all-female pep rally.
But lest one think Apple has succumbed to the clichéd language of empowerment and sisterhood, she is there to fill in the icky backstories and the agonizing fallout of female relationships, too. “Ladies, ladies, ladies, ladies,” she utters at the beginning of one song, by the same name, as if at a lectern. Here, she’s speaking again to the women involved with her past loves. It could be a cheerful song about solidarity, but there’s an undercurrent of resignation. “Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through,” Apple sings in a half-sigh.
It’s been nearly eight years since Apple released “The Idler Wheel . . . ,” a record that transformed her from a nineties alt-pop icon into a messianic figurehead. In those years, the success of popular music has come to rely almost entirely on the strategy of brand development. In a flooded marketplace, artists must carefully frame themselves and carefully consider what will make the biggest splash, and when. Apple can seem revolutionary for resisting these forces, though I’m not quite sure that she’s plugged in enough to be aware of them. More than a defiant recluse, she is someone who understands that exceptional art requires exceptional experience. It requires new relationships to be forged, to simmer and evolve, to be destroyed on their own terms, and then to be processed. “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is an invigorating document of energy, innovation, spontaneity, catharsis. These are things we’ve come to expect from Apple. But there is one thing that she deserves more credit for, as she toiled in her home, for years, accumulating the material to make these songs: her patience.


newyorker--2020-04-20--The Superfans Springing Into Mask-Making Action

In the pandemic economy , face masks are like bars of gold .
Hoarders are hoarding them .
Governors are bartering for them .
Hospital workers desperately need them .
New Yorkers , ordered by Governor Cuomo last week to cover their faces in public , are repurposing bandannas and boxer shorts .
In Rosie the Riveter fashion , Americans with crafting skills—among them quilters , Broadway seamstresses , sportswear manufacturers , origami artists , and grandmothers—have sprung into action .
But one group has special mask-making powers : cosplayers , the superfans who specialize in making and wearing costumes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up a Spider-Man mask or a Stormtrooper helmet been so useful .
“ Cosplayers have big hearts , ” Monica Paprocki , a thirty-five-year-old accountant in Chicago , said .
Paprocki , who runs the fandom site Geeks A Gogo , started cosplaying in 2014 and taught herself how to sew by watching YouTube videos .
She dressed as Princess Jasmine at Wizard World Chicago in 2019 , the year after her Phoenix Monster costume , from the board game Rising Sun , won the Golden Needle Award at a gaming convention in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that I controlled with a remote control , ” she said .
This June , she was going to dress as Buzz Lightyear at the Origins Game Fair , in Ohio , but it had been postponed until October .
When she saw a Facebook group requesting homemade medical supplies , she recruited fellow-cosplayers .
“ Before everything closed down , I had a stash of cotton fabric and materials here in my house , ” she said .
“ I work my regular nine-to-five job in accounting .
Right after that , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cosplaying friends , Bryan Martinez , said , “ Cosplayers are people with a lot of anxiety .
We like to always be making things.
” ( He mentioned “ con crunch , ” a term for the pre-convention costuming rush . )
Martinez , an illustrator who lives in the Bronx , got into cosplaying five years ago , when he went to New York Comic Con in a store-bought Assassin ’ s Creed outfit .
He taught himself to sew and returned , in 2018 , as the Marvel villain Corvus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ competition .
He was supposed to go to a convention in Philadelphia this month , to sell handmade “ Sailor Moon ” tote bags , but he repurposed the fabric to make masks for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital .
( Homemade masks can ’ t substitute for disposable medical masks , but they can prolong the use of medical masks if worn as a second layer . )
“ I am trying to get to forty or fifty , ” he said .
“ I ’ ll keep going till I run out of materials.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ chain Providence put out a call for masks .
“ Cosplayers picked up on it right away and were , like , ‘ Boom !
Let ’ s do this , ’ ” Brian Morris , who lives in Renton , said .
Morris is the C.E.O .
of KingCon Northwest , which draws some three thousand attendees , and runs a made-to-order-costume shop called Zaklabs .
“ Most people , when they think of cosplayers , are , like , ‘ Oh , those funny people who dress up in those weird @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ But they have this incredible set of skills.
” He was planning to live-stream a mask-making tutorial that night .
Fun patterns are a plus .
Renee Spencer , a cosplayer from Snohomish County , had planned to attend Seattle ’ s Emerald City Comic Con ( now postponed ) , where she has appeared as the Marvel heroine Jean Grey , but is now making masks with leftovers from the character ’ s trademark yellow sash .
“ I dropped two off already to my acupuncturist , ” she said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ goes to conventions with her husband and kids .
“ We ’ re a big geek family , ” she said .
At Star Wars Celebration last year , in Chicago , they went as Hogwarts students with Jedi lightsabres .
Bonovich has converted her basement into a mask-making shop , using “ Game of Thrones ” and “ Star Wars ” fabric , and is delivering masks to friends who work in emergency rooms .
“ There ’ s an elastic shortage everywhere , so we ’ re finding alternatives , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forty of her scrunchies.
” Abi Gardner , a graphic designer and sometime Wonder Woman , had plenty of elastic , she said , “ because I usually use it for bowstrings .
I had a bowstring for Princess Merida , from ‘ Brave.
’ Cons don ’ t let you have real bowstrings , so elastic works really well.
” Under the circumstances , it seemed sensible to ask : Which superhero could best fight the coronavirus ?
Paprocki suggested the Invisible Woman , one of the Fantastic Four , whose force-field @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus.
” Bonovich proposed Professor Xavier , from “ X-Men , ” “ because he can use his mind to tell everybody to stay home , wash their hands , and chill out.
” Spencer voted for the Marvel heroine Rogue , whose powers preclude her from touching people , thereby making her “ the queen of social distancing.
” The Atom , Morris said , could shrink himself to germ size and “ fight ’ em hand to hand.
” Martinez chose Doctor Strange , because he ’ s a medical professional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time .
♦

Illustration by João Fazenda
In the pandemic economy, face masks are like bars of gold. Hoarders are hoarding them. Governors are bartering for them. Hospital workers desperately need them. New Yorkers, ordered by Governor Cuomo last week to cover their faces in public, are repurposing bandannas and boxer shorts. In Rosie the Riveter fashion, Americans with crafting skills—among them quilters, Broadway seamstresses, sportswear manufacturers, origami artists, and grandmothers—have sprung into action. But one group has special mask-making powers: cosplayers, the superfans who specialize in making and wearing costumes. Never has the ability to whip up a Spider-Man mask or a Stormtrooper helmet been so useful.
“Cosplayers have big hearts,” Monica Paprocki, a thirty-five-year-old accountant in Chicago, said. Paprocki, who runs the fandom site Geeks A Gogo, started cosplaying in 2014 and taught herself how to sew by watching YouTube videos. She dressed as Princess Jasmine at Wizard World Chicago in 2019, the year after her Phoenix Monster costume, from the board game Rising Sun, won the Golden Needle Award at a gaming convention in Indianapolis. “It had articulated wings that I controlled with a remote control,” she said. This June, she was going to dress as Buzz Lightyear at the Origins Game Fair, in Ohio, but it had been postponed until October. When she saw a Facebook group requesting homemade medical supplies, she recruited fellow-cosplayers. “Before everything closed down, I had a stash of cotton fabric and materials here in my house,” she said. “I work my regular nine-to-five job in accounting. Right after that, I start sewing.”
One of her cosplaying friends, Bryan Martinez, said, “Cosplayers are people with a lot of anxiety. We like to always be making things.” (He mentioned “con crunch,” a term for the pre-convention costuming rush.) Martinez, an illustrator who lives in the Bronx, got into cosplaying five years ago, when he went to New York Comic Con in a store-bought Assassin’s Creed outfit. He taught himself to sew and returned, in 2018, as the Marvel villain Corvus Glaive, placing third in the FX competition. He was supposed to go to a convention in Philadelphia this month, to sell handmade “Sailor Moon” tote bags, but he repurposed the fabric to make masks for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. (Homemade masks can’t substitute for disposable medical masks, but they can prolong the use of medical masks if worn as a second layer.) “I am trying to get to forty or fifty,” he said. “I’ll keep going till I run out of materials.”
In Washington State, the hospital chain Providence put out a call for masks. “Cosplayers picked up on it right away and were, like, ‘Boom! Let’s do this,’ ” Brian Morris, who lives in Renton, said. Morris is the C.E.O. of KingCon Northwest, which draws some three thousand attendees, and runs a made-to-order-costume shop called Zaklabs. “Most people, when they think of cosplayers, are, like, ‘Oh, those funny people who dress up in those weird costumes,’ ” he said. “But they have this incredible set of skills.” He was planning to live-stream a mask-making tutorial that night. Fun patterns are a plus. Renee Spencer, a cosplayer from Snohomish County, had planned to attend Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con (now postponed), where she has appeared as the Marvel heroine Jean Grey, but is now making masks with leftovers from the character’s trademark yellow sash. “I dropped two off already to my acupuncturist,” she said.
Anne Bonovich, in suburban Illinois, goes to conventions with her husband and kids. “We’re a big geek family,” she said. At Star Wars Celebration last year, in Chicago, they went as Hogwarts students with Jedi lightsabres. Bonovich has converted her basement into a mask-making shop, using “Game of Thrones” and “Star Wars” fabric, and is delivering masks to friends who work in emergency rooms. “There’s an elastic shortage everywhere, so we’re finding alternatives,” she said. “My daughter donated forty of her scrunchies.” Abi Gardner, a graphic designer and sometime Wonder Woman, had plenty of elastic, she said, “because I usually use it for bowstrings. I had a bowstring for Princess Merida, from ‘Brave.’ Cons don’t let you have real bowstrings, so elastic works really well.”
Under the circumstances, it seemed sensible to ask: Which superhero could best fight the coronavirus? Paprocki suggested the Invisible Woman, one of the Fantastic Four, whose force-field powers “can shield people from the virus.” Bonovich proposed Professor Xavier, from “X-Men,” “because he can use his mind to tell everybody to stay home, wash their hands, and chill out.” Spencer voted for the Marvel heroine Rogue, whose powers preclude her from touching people, thereby making her “the queen of social distancing.” The Atom, Morris said, could shrink himself to germ size and “fight ’em hand to hand.” Martinez chose Doctor Strange, because he’s a medical professional, and because he can turn back time. ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-04-20--Sarah Shun-lien Bynum on the Relaxing of Boundaries in Fiction

In “ Bedtime Story , ” your fiction in this week ’ s issue , a couple is putting their child to bed , and , in the process , they launch into relating and thinking of a series of memories from when they were in their twenties .
What begins as nineties nostalgia—Julia Roberts rollerblading in Manhattan—becomes the story of a tense betrayal .
One thing that struck me when first reading the story was that , though the man is named and the woman referred to as his wife or girlfriend throughout , we gradually come to learn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is told is contested territory .
Why did you decide to make the perspective less obvious than it first appears , and , as you were writing , how did you feel your way through the challenges this represented ?
A warning : this answer may get a little wonkish on the subject of point of view , which is one of my favorite things to think about .
Basically , I was trying to create the effect of a peripheral narrator , even though the story is told in third person and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s usually associated with peripheral narration .
The story names Ezra emphatically in the opening sentence in order to establish right from the start that he ’ s our protagonist ; he is and will be at the center of the action .
His wife , on the other hand , goes unnamed ; hers is the focalizing consciousness , yet she thinks of herself as an unseen onlooker , a listener and observer standing off to the side .
Later , when the “ story within the story ” begins and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it appears as if the narrative reins have been handed over to Ezra .
It appears as if the close third-person narration is now aligned with our protagonist , following his experiences and mapping his interiority .
The use of third-person makes this shift in perspective easier to pull off .
But there ’ s an awkward element in the telling of Ezra ’ s story about Meg Sand : Ezra is named , Meg is named , but his not-yet-wife is referred to cumbersomely throughout as “ the girlfriend.
” It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to give her a name !
And there ’ s no reason why Ezra wouldn ’ t think of her by name .
Yet it felt important to preserve this awkwardness , this sense of something being slightly off or amiss , because it anticipates the story ’ s eventual admission that Ezra hasn ’ t been holding the narrative reins , after all .
Once we return to the present frame , the story reveals that what seemed to be Ezra ’ s perspective was in fact his wife ’ s imagining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a chapter in his life that she wasn ’ t privy to .
And , even in this reconstructed version , her impulse is to keep herself unnamed .
So going back to your question : why all this shiftiness with point of view ?
I think it ’ s maybe because the wife doesn ’ t want their past to be contested territory .
Maybe there ’ s a hope that by inhabiting Ezra ’ s perspective she can make peace with a memory that was once intensely painful .
My sense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is an act of reconciliation , undertaken out of love .
A remarkable thing about the story is that , by the end , it seems to find a connection between the familiarity of family life and a somewhat transgressive sexuality .
That seems difficult , and novel .
How did you approach writing about that territory ?
I didn ’ t realize the story was heading in that direction when I started out .
But maybe it ended up arriving at this connection because fiction lends itself to the relaxing of boundaries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ function in the everyday world—the lines separating self and others , fantasy and reality , private and public life , etc.—can be tested , sometimes dissolved , within the space of a story .
And the boundary that keeps sexuality at a strict remove from family life—a boundary that emerged , I ’ m guessing , during a period in history when increasing prosperity meant that families no longer had to sleep in the same room ?
—interests me because it seems inherently contradictory .
The sexual closeness and trust that Ezra and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ give rise to the two children they ’ re now putting to bed , many years later .
And I don ’ t mean that simply in a biological sense ; there ’ s a causal relationship at work that goes far beyond the act of reproduction .
You mentioned to me that the story was partly inspired by Mavis Gallant ’ s “ The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street , ” which ran in The New Yorker in 1963 .
I wouldn ’ t have known that if you hadn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that story were you inspired by , and what made you want to play a variation on it ?
It is an extraordinary story , the ending of which affects me newly every time I read it , which has been many times at this point .
There is so much I love in it , Gallant ’ s language most of all—distilled and crisp , yet also nimble , ever-shifting , ready to swerve toward humor or tenderness or frank estimation—but her style is inimitable , out of reach .
Thank goodness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to borrow : in this case , a long-married couple reminisces about their past , which prompts one of them to remember a young woman of a different social class whose life briefly intersected with theirs .
The element that inspired me most was Gallant ’ s use of a frame narrative , something that at first glance seems like a rather old-fashioned device , but in her hands it feels fresh and necessary and not mannered at all .
Without its frame , the story in “ Ice Wagon ” is interesting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anxiety , a failed romantic encounter that leads unexpectedly to a profound , fleeting moment of connection—but , by placing it inside the frame of the couple ’ s shared ritual of remembering , Gallant enlarges its scope immeasurably .
It becomes about so much more .
A frame is a wonderful means of incorporating into a story the effects of time—and not just months or years but decades .
In the case of my story , the frame allowed me to think about time ’ s passage and its unpredictable effects : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and make technologies obsolete ; how it can soften or intensify feelings ; how it both illuminates and obscures the past ; how it deepens a marriage .
This is a very particular kind of bedtime story , one that ’ s probably not appropriate for the child that the couple is putting to sleep .
What are some other favorite bedtime stories for this period we find ourselves in now , the long enforced nap of the coronavirus lockdown ?
Well , I wasn ’ t sure if I should say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ placement—but here is the most truthful answer : I ’ ve been listening to the magazine ’ s fiction podcasts when I ’ m in bed at night .
The whole ongoing disaster has made it very hard for me to concentrate on anything , even reading , but there ’ s something about turning off the lights and closing my eyes and listening to a single voice that quiets my thoughts and lets me enter into a different space .
I especially love listening to Tessa Hadley read her stories aloud .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ sound of her voice , its steadiness and warmth , the pleasure it finds in the words .
And of course there is the great comfort offered by the stories themselves .
After long exposure to the staggering scale of this crisis , I find myself drawn to Hadley ’ s human-sized narratives , and her close , unwavering attention to individual lives .
She brings so much subtlety and control to everything she does that I always feel held by her stories , if that makes sense .
I always feel that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no matter where the story may take me , no matter what darkness or difficulty it may be going toward .

Photograph by Mara Casey
In “Bedtime Story,” your fiction in this week’s issue, a couple is putting their child to bed, and, in the process, they launch into relating and thinking of a series of memories from when they were in their twenties. What begins as nineties nostalgia—Julia Roberts rollerblading in Manhattan—becomes the story of a tense betrayal. One thing that struck me when first reading the story was that, though the man is named and the woman referred to as his wife or girlfriend throughout, we gradually come to learn that the perspective through which the story is told is contested territory. Why did you decide to make the perspective less obvious than it first appears, and, as you were writing, how did you feel your way through the challenges this represented?
A warning: this answer may get a little wonkish on the subject of point of view, which is one of my favorite things to think about.
Basically, I was trying to create the effect of a peripheral narrator, even though the story is told in third person and not first person, the perspective that’s usually associated with peripheral narration. The story names Ezra emphatically in the opening sentence in order to establish right from the start that he’s our protagonist; he is and will be at the center of the action. His wife, on the other hand, goes unnamed; hers is the focalizing consciousness, yet she thinks of herself as an unseen onlooker, a listener and observer standing off to the side.
Later, when the “story within the story” begins and the character of Meg Sand is introduced, it appears as if the narrative reins have been handed over to Ezra. It appears as if the close third-person narration is now aligned with our protagonist, following his experiences and mapping his interiority. The use of third-person makes this shift in perspective easier to pull off.
But there’s an awkward element in the telling of Ezra’s story about Meg Sand: Ezra is named, Meg is named, but his not-yet-wife is referred to cumbersomely throughout as “the girlfriend.” It would have been so much simpler just to give her a name! And there’s no reason why Ezra wouldn’t think of her by name.
Yet it felt important to preserve this awkwardness, this sense of something being slightly off or amiss, because it anticipates the story’s eventual admission that Ezra hasn’t been holding the narrative reins, after all. Once we return to the present frame, the story reveals that what seemed to be Ezra’s perspective was in fact his wife’s imagining of it, her attempt at re-creating a chapter in his life that she wasn’t privy to. And, even in this reconstructed version, her impulse is to keep herself unnamed.
So going back to your question: why all this shiftiness with point of view? I think it’s maybe because the wife doesn’t want their past to be contested territory. Maybe there’s a hope that by inhabiting Ezra’s perspective she can make peace with a memory that was once intensely painful. My sense is that this extended act of imagination is an act of reconciliation, undertaken out of love.
A remarkable thing about the story is that, by the end, it seems to find a connection between the familiarity of family life and a somewhat transgressive sexuality. That seems difficult, and novel. How did you approach writing about that territory?
I didn’t realize the story was heading in that direction when I started out. But maybe it ended up arriving at this connection because fiction lends itself to the relaxing of boundaries. The distinctions that allow us to function in the everyday world—the lines separating self and others, fantasy and reality, private and public life, etc.—can be tested, sometimes dissolved, within the space of a story. And the boundary that keeps sexuality at a strict remove from family life—a boundary that emerged, I’m guessing, during a period in history when increasing prosperity meant that families no longer had to sleep in the same room?—interests me because it seems inherently contradictory. The sexual closeness and trust that Ezra and his girlfriend develop as a young couple give rise to the two children they’re now putting to bed, many years later. And I don’t mean that simply in a biological sense; there’s a causal relationship at work that goes far beyond the act of reproduction.
You mentioned to me that the story was partly inspired by Mavis Gallant’s “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” which ran in The New Yorker in 1963. I wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t told me. What elements of that story were you inspired by, and what made you want to play a variation on it?
It is an extraordinary story, the ending of which affects me newly every time I read it, which has been many times at this point. There is so much I love in it, Gallant’s language most of all—distilled and crisp, yet also nimble, ever-shifting, ready to swerve toward humor or tenderness or frank estimation—but her style is inimitable, out of reach. Thank goodness for plot, which is much easier to borrow: in this case, a long-married couple reminisces about their past, which prompts one of them to remember a young woman of a different social class whose life briefly intersected with theirs.
The element that inspired me most was Gallant’s use of a frame narrative, something that at first glance seems like a rather old-fashioned device, but in her hands it feels fresh and necessary and not mannered at all. Without its frame, the story in “Ice Wagon” is interesting enough on its own—expat life, status anxiety, a failed romantic encounter that leads unexpectedly to a profound, fleeting moment of connection—but, by placing it inside the frame of the couple’s shared ritual of remembering, Gallant enlarges its scope immeasurably. It becomes about so much more.
A frame is a wonderful means of incorporating into a story the effects of time—and not just months or years but decades. In the case of my story, the frame allowed me to think about time’s passage and its unpredictable effects: how it can play tricks with memory, and make technologies obsolete; how it can soften or intensify feelings; how it both illuminates and obscures the past; how it deepens a marriage.
(And one last note of indebtedness: the breathtaking shift in point of view that occurs in the final paragraph of Gallant’s story completely inspired the handling of perspective we talked about above.)
This is a very particular kind of bedtime story, one that’s probably not appropriate for the child that the couple is putting to sleep. What are some other favorite bedtime stories for this period we find ourselves in now, the long enforced nap of the coronavirus lockdown?
Well, I wasn’t sure if I should say this—only because it sounds embarrassingly like product placement—but here is the most truthful answer: I’ve been listening to the magazine’s fiction podcasts when I’m in bed at night. The whole ongoing disaster has made it very hard for me to concentrate on anything, even reading, but there’s something about turning off the lights and closing my eyes and listening to a single voice that quiets my thoughts and lets me enter into a different space.
I especially love listening to Tessa Hadley read her stories aloud. I’m comforted by the unflustered sound of her voice, its steadiness and warmth, the pleasure it finds in the words. And of course there is the great comfort offered by the stories themselves. After long exposure to the staggering scale of this crisis, I find myself drawn to Hadley’s human-sized narratives, and her close, unwavering attention to individual lives. She brings so much subtlety and control to everything she does that I always feel held by her stories, if that makes sense. I always feel that I’m in safe hands, no matter where the story may take me, no matter what darkness or difficulty it may be going toward.


Kathleen Collins’s Otherworldly Women

Good news , these past four years , has been vanishingly sparse , like a handful of lilies in a fallow field .
One of the brightest of these rare flowers is the renewal of interest in the filmmaker , playwright , and fiction writer Kathleen Collins , who died , at the age of forty-six , in 1988 .
Under the guidance of her daughter , Nina Lorez Collins , Collins ’ s written work has come to us in a posthumous torrent , first with the 2016 short-story collection “ Whatever Happened to Interracial Love ?
, ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from a Black Woman ’ s Diary , ” which includes fiction , a pair of screenplays , excerpts from Collins ’ s diary , and scripts for plays .
Her richly symbolic , formidably smart feature film “ Losing Ground , ” from 1982 , has recently been rediscovered and restored to its rightful place in the canon of nineteen-eighties independent film .
Collins was , foremost , an artist and an interpreter of the striated psyche .
Her most striking characters are black women of a creative or intellectual bent—writers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with marriage , motherhood , and work take on cosmic proportions .
In “ Losing Ground , ” Sara Rogers ( played by the actor and theatre director Seret Scott ) , a vibrant professor of philosophy whose lectures are a kind of poetry , can feel herself being eclipsed by her husband , an impulsive painter named Victor ( Bill Gunn , the director of the cult-classic vampire film “ Ganja & Hess ” ) .
Sara ’ s students can ’ t bring up her brilliance without also mentioning her marriage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s this thing they ’ ve got about my having a husband ?
” she wonders .
Her scholarship is a medium for abandon : one of the most enthralling scenes has her sitting in a library , reading ; a propulsive , half-muttered voice-over shows how meditatively and almost prayerfully she takes to the task .
In part because of her growing troubles with Victor , she conducts an ambitious study of “ the ecstatic , ” a state that her husband accesses easily but which feels alien to her .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ goes to see a psychic , asking her what it feels like to “ read ” another person and see her future .
The session is unsatisfying ; the psychic can ’ t understand this scientific approach to a process that , to her , is totally intuitive .
She says she can tell that Sara is “ intelligent , ” which sends Sara into a fit of anger .
Anybody could figure that out by looking at her face .
Unsettled , she leaves and wanders toward what looks like a small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she says , just before she enters and rushes down the aisle , toward the altar , where , as if urged by some unseen force , she kneels .
“ What am I looking for ?
” The components of that scene—dispassionate inquiry , occult oddity , the search for understanding as an attempt at control , a wary but nonetheless ardent relationship with Christian imagery and thought—are even more densely woven and excruciatingly resolved in Collins ’ s one-act plays , several of which are collected in “ Notes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” In fact , it ’ s possible , just by reading three of them together , to put on a subtle , harrowing program of drama dealing with doubt , domestic confusion , and the persistent encroachments of color and of the spirit .
The plays take place in rooms that are at once specific and archetypal—a bedroom , a doctor ’ s office—and therefore seem designed to be staged in your living room .
In “ Remembrance , ” a woman approaching middle age addresses the audience directly .
Atop a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shrine—a candle , a cross , a bouquet of flowers .
She has begun , she tells us , to find God .
“ It ’ s not easy to pin down the exact moment when I went looking for God , ” she says , trailing off , but it has something to do with her sense of her unfitness for everyday life .
She ’ s a dancer by craft , and here , at home , she ’ s a distracted mother and wife .
Her husband does the cooking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a hundred percent all here.
” She hides in the bathroom , trying to “ locate myself , apart from other things , ” finely slivering her own identity away from those others—husband , kids—who threaten to swallow her up .
“ I try to get them out of me !
” she says .
God helps in this endeavor , somehow .
“ He ’ s so silent , and His silence is such a lovely thing , ” she says .
Later , she prays aloud , “ Cause me to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inside Your silence and be still.
” In this paradoxical idea—that God , the ultimate showstopper , makes room for the woman instead of further constraining her—there is something reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas ’ s insistence that God isn ’ t a Big Thing among other things , competing with us creatures for glory and space to breathe but , rather , the ground upon which we stand—a kind of stage .
“ Gloria Dei vivens homo , ” the early Church father Irenaeus said : “ The glory of God is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s faith , such as it is , isn ’ t orthodox , or strictly Christian .
On the contrary , she ’ s frustrated by her fixation on the tradition of her youth .
She riffles through tropes— “ the Old Rugged Cross , the Fountain Filled with Blood ” —and snorts derisively at her mastery of them , at the idea that “ you could open the Christian language and find God.
” Her own alternate language is gilded and profane .
“ I want to pee on the living room @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flaked as it is with fake Oriental gold colors that will not be distinguishable from my fake Oriental gold urine.
” This is a horror story , with domestic normalcy as the invisible , malevolent force , and a wild , unknowable deity as a balm .
“ Remembrance ” is dedicated to Seret Scott , and it ’ s hard not to think of its protagonist as an opposite of “ Losing Ground ” ’ s Sara Rogers : instead of trying to analyze the ecstatic , this woman dives into it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Reading , ” feels like a takeoff on the psychic scene in “ Losing Ground.
” Two women—one white , one black—sit in a psychic ’ s waiting room .
The black woman , Marguerite , is a fashion designer , and the white woman , Helen , is a novelist .
There ’ s a candle that keeps going out : it stays lit only if one of the women sits before it in a lotus pose , stares at it “ belligerently , ” or meditates .
This focus on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , hinting at the visual facility that makes “ Losing Ground ” such a sensual feast for the eyes .
But , in lieu of film ’ s ability to make the sublime unspoken ( in one beautiful frame of “ Losing Ground , ” a woman dressed in a red shirt and a billowing yellow skirt stands dancing in front of a calm , blue-black lake , an image that ’ s spiritual and striking enough to occasion a library of mystical texts ) , in “ The Reading ” Collins navigates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between the races .
Helen wants to unload the facts of her life on Marguerite , who ’ s not at all interested .
The psychic—who never makes it onstage—is black , too , and it becomes clear that this accounts for much of Helen ’ s attraction to this particular practice .
Helen quotes the woman at length , adding a “ black ” accent for effect .
The women are mismatched attitudinally as well : Marguerite is impeccably put-together , while Helen has made her slacker ’ s outfit an aspect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oppositional couplet that illustrates Collins ’ s genius for icily intelligent dialogue , as cold and clarifying as Aaron Copland ’ s “ Four Piano Blues , ” the women disagree about Helen ’ s sartorial affliction .
Helen calls it “ my casualness about clothes.
” For Marguerite , it ’ s “ your unwillingness to dress.
” Still , these mutually resentful women can ’ t disengage : their womanhood , and an accompanying unease in the world , keep them yoked together , entangled in talk .
The strangest , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ The Healing.
” A sick black woman , Ellen , has come to see Joe , a white healer who glides his hands around her body , applying “ energy ” to her illness .
Sometimes he holds her feet to keep them “ grounded.
” Ellen implores him not to : the gesture reminds her too much of Christ washing the feet of his disciples .
Like the woman from “ Remembrance , ” she doesn ’ t want to fall victim to iconography .
She fights her desire to sing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an old spiritual : “ Somebody ’ s crying , Lord / Come by here.
” Joe keeps applying pressure to various regions of her body , and—like so many of us , witnesses to strange happenings but unequipped to interpret them—she feels waves of relief and consolation , skeptic though she is .
Even as a thrill runs through her , she cries , “ I don ’ t even believe.
” ♦

Good news, these past four years, has been vanishingly sparse, like a handful of lilies in a fallow field. One of the brightest of these rare flowers is the renewal of interest in the filmmaker, playwright, and fiction writer Kathleen Collins, who died, at the age of forty-six, in 1988. Under the guidance of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, Collins’s written work has come to us in a posthumous torrent, first with the 2016 short-story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” then with the eclectic omnibus “Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary,” which includes fiction, a pair of screenplays, excerpts from Collins’s diary, and scripts for plays. Her richly symbolic, formidably smart feature film “Losing Ground,” from 1982, has recently been rediscovered and restored to its rightful place in the canon of nineteen-eighties independent film.
Collins was, foremost, an artist and an interpreter of the striated psyche. Her most striking characters are black women of a creative or intellectual bent—writers, dancers, designers, professors—whose quotidian struggles with marriage, motherhood, and work take on cosmic proportions. In “Losing Ground,” Sara Rogers (played by the actor and theatre director Seret Scott), a vibrant professor of philosophy whose lectures are a kind of poetry, can feel herself being eclipsed by her husband, an impulsive painter named Victor (Bill Gunn, the director of the cult-classic vampire film “Ganja & Hess”). Sara’s students can’t bring up her brilliance without also mentioning her marriage, she notices. “What’s this thing they’ve got about my having a husband?” she wonders.
Her scholarship is a medium for abandon: one of the most enthralling scenes has her sitting in a library, reading; a propulsive, half-muttered voice-over shows how meditatively and almost prayerfully she takes to the task. In part because of her growing troubles with Victor, she conducts an ambitious study of “the ecstatic,” a state that her husband accesses easily but which feels alien to her.
In one lovely and suggestive passage, Sara goes to see a psychic, asking her what it feels like to “read” another person and see her future. The session is unsatisfying; the psychic can’t understand this scientific approach to a process that, to her, is totally intuitive. She says she can tell that Sara is “intelligent,” which sends Sara into a fit of anger. Anybody could figure that out by looking at her face. Unsettled, she leaves and wanders toward what looks like a small Catholic church. “This is ridiculous,” she says, just before she enters and rushes down the aisle, toward the altar, where, as if urged by some unseen force, she kneels. “What am I looking for?”
The components of that scene—dispassionate inquiry, occult oddity, the search for understanding as an attempt at control, a wary but nonetheless ardent relationship with Christian imagery and thought—are even more densely woven and excruciatingly resolved in Collins’s one-act plays, several of which are collected in “Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary.” In fact, it’s possible, just by reading three of them together, to put on a subtle, harrowing program of drama dealing with doubt, domestic confusion, and the persistent encroachments of color and of the spirit. The plays take place in rooms that are at once specific and archetypal—a bedroom, a doctor’s office—and therefore seem designed to be staged in your living room.
In “Remembrance,” a woman approaching middle age addresses the audience directly. Atop a dresser, she has erected a simple shrine—a candle, a cross, a bouquet of flowers. She has begun, she tells us, to find God. “It’s not easy to pin down the exact moment when I went looking for God,” she says, trailing off, but it has something to do with her sense of her unfitness for everyday life. She’s a dancer by craft, and here, at home, she’s a distracted mother and wife. Her husband does the cooking and shoulders the burden of being “a hundred percent all here.” She hides in the bathroom, trying to “locate myself, apart from other things,” finely slivering her own identity away from those others—husband, kids—who threaten to swallow her up. “I try to get them out of me!” she says.
God helps in this endeavor, somehow. “He’s so silent, and His silence is such a lovely thing,” she says. Later, she prays aloud, “Cause me to remember that I may locate myself forever inside Your silence and be still.” In this paradoxical idea—that God, the ultimate showstopper, makes room for the woman instead of further constraining her—there is something reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s insistence that God isn’t a Big Thing among other things, competing with us creatures for glory and space to breathe but, rather, the ground upon which we stand—a kind of stage. “Gloria Dei vivens homo,” the early Church father Irenaeus said: “The glory of God is the living man.”
But the woman’s faith, such as it is, isn’t orthodox, or strictly Christian. On the contrary, she’s frustrated by her fixation on the tradition of her youth. She riffles through tropes—“the Old Rugged Cross, the Fountain Filled with Blood”—and snorts derisively at her mastery of them, at the idea that “you could open the Christian language and find God.” Her own alternate language is gilded and profane. “I want to pee on the living room rug,” she says, “flaked as it is with fake Oriental gold colors that will not be distinguishable from my fake Oriental gold urine.” This is a horror story, with domestic normalcy as the invisible, malevolent force, and a wild, unknowable deity as a balm.
“Remembrance” is dedicated to Seret Scott, and it’s hard not to think of its protagonist as an opposite of “Losing Ground” ’s Sara Rogers: instead of trying to analyze the ecstatic, this woman dives into it head first. Another play, “The Reading,” feels like a takeoff on the psychic scene in “Losing Ground.” Two women—one white, one black—sit in a psychic’s waiting room. The black woman, Marguerite, is a fashion designer, and the white woman, Helen, is a novelist. There’s a candle that keeps going out: it stays lit only if one of the women sits before it in a lotus pose, stares at it “belligerently,” or meditates.
This focus on light sharpens as the play winds on, hinting at the visual facility that makes “Losing Ground” such a sensual feast for the eyes. But, in lieu of film’s ability to make the sublime unspoken (in one beautiful frame of “Losing Ground,” a woman dressed in a red shirt and a billowing yellow skirt stands dancing in front of a calm, blue-black lake, an image that’s spiritual and striking enough to occasion a library of mystical texts), in “The Reading” Collins navigates there by way of an exasperating clash between the races.
Helen wants to unload the facts of her life on Marguerite, who’s not at all interested. The psychic—who never makes it onstage—is black, too, and it becomes clear that this accounts for much of Helen’s attraction to this particular practice. Helen quotes the woman at length, adding a “black” accent for effect. The women are mismatched attitudinally as well: Marguerite is impeccably put-together, while Helen has made her slacker’s outfit an aspect of her personality. In a sharp oppositional couplet that illustrates Collins’s genius for icily intelligent dialogue, as cold and clarifying as Aaron Copland’s “Four Piano Blues,” the women disagree about Helen’s sartorial affliction. Helen calls it “my casualness about clothes.” For Marguerite, it’s “your unwillingness to dress.” Still, these mutually resentful women can’t disengage: their womanhood, and an accompanying unease in the world, keep them yoked together, entangled in talk.
The strangest, perhaps, is an abstract play called “The Healing.” A sick black woman, Ellen, has come to see Joe, a white healer who glides his hands around her body, applying “energy” to her illness. Sometimes he holds her feet to keep them “grounded.” Ellen implores him not to: the gesture reminds her too much of Christ washing the feet of his disciples. Like the woman from “Remembrance,” she doesn’t want to fall victim to iconography. She fights her desire to sing along with Joe to the refrain of an old spiritual: “Somebody’s crying, Lord / Come by here.” Joe keeps applying pressure to various regions of her body, and—like so many of us, witnesses to strange happenings but unequipped to interpret them—she feels waves of relief and consolation, skeptic though she is. Even as a thrill runs through her, she cries, “I don’t even believe.” ♦


newyorker--2020-04-20--Reviving Phyllis Schlafly in “Mrs. America”

You are likely familiar with the exit-poll result , in 2016 , that suggested that fifty-three per cent of white American women voted for Donald Trump .
Never mind that such polls are notoriously imprecise ; the statistic was used , repeatedly , as evidence to disprove the assumption that most women want a female President .
Since then , introspection and grief have caused liberals to ask not just why white women voted for Trump but why some of us ever thought they wouldn ’ t .
The new FX miniseries “ Mrs .
America ” —created by Dahvi @ @ @ @ @ @ @ —provides answers to both questions in its intensely psychological portrait of Phyllis Schlafly , the godmother of the modern anti-feminist movement , played with frightening , actressy charisma by Cate Blanchett .
( She was also an executive producer on the series . )
A nervy , nine-episode period piece about the fight over the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment , “ Mrs .
America ” feels like the product of a shift in pop feminist consciousness : a post-Clinton critique of the savior model and of pink-pussy-hat resistance .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mrs .
America ” —a sappier , more complacent historical drama that might have taken , as its opening , the last scene of the pilot , in which , in 1972 , the founding members of the National Women ’ s Political Caucus celebrate in the Washington , D.C. , office of the activist and politician Bella Abzug ( played by a saucy Margo Martindale ) .
Ambitious costuming and wig direction help us identify , in the mix , the popular saints of second-wave feminism : Gloria Steinem ( Rose Byrne @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and her aviator glasses ; Shirley Chisholm ( Uzo Aduba ) , with her black-salon bouffant ; Betty Friedan ( Tracy Ullman ) , her big hair streaked , skunklike , with gray .
The Senate has passed the E.R.A.
, sending it to the states for ratification , and Chisholm , the country ’ s first black congresswoman , has announced her Presidential bid .
The women ’ s toast to progress is interrupted by a staffer bearing the opposition research : a copy of “ The Phyllis Schlafly Report , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Alton , Illinois .
“ Who the hell is Phyllis Schaffly ?
” Friedan spits , mispronouncing the name .
The moment , which captures the radical élite ’ s reflexive dismissal of the allure of white conservatism , is all the more powerful because , in this “ Mrs .
America , ” we have already been warned .
The series is an ensemble vehicle , with each episode following a different character , but it opens with Schlafly—introduced by an m.c .
in a bikini competition at a charity fund-raiser @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our biggest donors , Mrs. J. Fred Schlafly ” —and stays with her throughout .
A mother of six and a Radcliffe graduate , she has had a failed run for Congress and carries with her an air of thwarted ambition .
At a meeting with Barry Goldwater in D.C. , at which she hopes to advise on his nuclear policy , she is asked instead to take notes .
Schlafly and her husband ( John Slattery ) are locked in a simmering , kinky battle of intelligences , but , in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on her , his needs win .
Schlafly sets out as the most dangerous type of powermonger : one without power .
When Alice ( Sarah Paulson ) , a kind of surrogate daughter , first brings the E.R.A .
to her attention , claiming that the libbers will force their daughters into the draft , Schlafly swiftly assembles an army of housewives who view “ equal rights ” as an implicit criticism of their choices .
Schlafly ’ s “ Stop E.R.A.
” campaign lands her on talk shows and in lecture @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the interest of Ronald Reagan , who is running for President .
Her crusade to protect the traditional family involves travel , long hours , and the kind of industry that looks suspiciously like a successful career ; meanwhile , she relies on her sister-in-law , Eleanor ( played with muted heartbreak by Jeanne Tripplehorn ) , and her smiling black maids to take care of the children .
A good bio-pic performance captures a historical figure , but a transcendent one can effectively destroy her , outdoing the original in our cultural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a pastel nightmare , arch and juicily camp .
Trump spoke at Schlafly ’ s funeral , in 2016 , apparently aware of his debt to her strategy , and there are oblique references to the Trump era in “ Mrs .
America ” —in the finale , Schlafly greets two baby-faced lawyers named Paul Manafort and Roger Stone .
But the series mostly avoids the premonitions that dog the storytelling of such dramas as Ava DuVernay ’ s 2019 “ When They See Us , ” based on the Central Park jogger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sympathies of the show ’ s creators lie , and as the prim staginess of the Schlafly suburban universe gives way to apartments in New York City and offices in Washington , the cinematography becomes warmer—reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman documentaries and stomp-down-the-street seventies dramas .
Yet the feminist fighters , drawn with less specificity and more reverence , are inevitably less interesting .
Abzug is the pushy yenta of the Senate , a pragmatist willing to make concessions to secure male allies .
The only Republican in the caucus , Jill Ruckelshaus ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the impending death of bipartisanship .
The weakest characterization is that of the spritelike Steinem , whose primary anxiety appears to be the fear that her peers tolerate her only because of her value as the movement ’ s sex symbol , and who swans through the series , cigarette in hand , eyes furrowed in telegenic sorrow for the sisters who have it harder than her .
The most recognizable faces of the feminist movement have always been white , and “ Mrs .
America ” prides itself on reminding us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In one scene , Steinem argues with the “ money guy ” at Ms. , who is reluctant to put Chisholm on the cover because she will “ depress sales , especially in the South.
” When Abzug , eager to hitch the E.R.A .
fight to George McGovern ’ s Presidential candidacy , admonishes Chisholm for continuing her symbolic campaign , Chisholm responds , mightily , “ I didn ’ t get anywhere in this life waiting on someone ’ s permission.
” But Chisholm , in reality a staunch , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ egoless exemplar of political duty .
Meanwhile , the legendary lawyer Flo Kennedy , played by the perpetually underrated Niecy Nash , delivers clapbacks to black feminists seeking to exclude black lesbians from their ranks .
From the narrative sidelines , she represents , but the show doesn ’ t let her live or love .
The eighth episode is a memorable set piece : at the National Women ’ s Conference , in Houston , Alice , Schlafly ’ s follower , accidentally takes a psychedelic and goes through the looking glass @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the feminists .
But there is something too easy about the satisfaction gained from watching a woman escape Schlafly ’ s orbit when the woman in question is one of the show ’ s few fictional characters .
Ullman ’ s portrayal of the middle-aged Friedan , the intellectual founder of the movement , feels , by contrast , painfully real .
Friedan is among the first of the feminists to take Schlafly seriously , agreeing to debate her at Illinois State University—not just because she feels a moral imperative to quash @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sees the event as an opportunity to retrieve the renown she has lost to the movement ’ s younger figures , primarily Steinem .
In one scene , we watch as Friedan , preparing for a date , opens her closet and fondles a flower-print dress that she wore , years earlier , on a talk show .
The moment is quiet , almost taboo .
Friedan may be fighting for equality , but she is also a woman , wanting to remember what it feels like to be adored .
♦

You are likely familiar with the exit-poll result, in 2016, that suggested that fifty-three per cent of white American women voted for Donald Trump. Never mind that such polls are notoriously imprecise; the statistic was used, repeatedly, as evidence to disprove the assumption that most women want a female President. Since then, introspection and grief have caused liberals to ask not just why white women voted for Trump but why some of us ever thought they wouldn’t. The new FX miniseries “Mrs. America”—created by Dahvi Waller (“Mad Men”)—provides answers to both questions in its intensely psychological portrait of Phyllis Schlafly, the godmother of the modern anti-feminist movement, played with frightening, actressy charisma by Cate Blanchett. (She was also an executive producer on the series.) A nervy, nine-episode period piece about the fight over the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, “Mrs. America” feels like the product of a shift in pop feminist consciousness: a post-Clinton critique of the savior model and of pink-pussy-hat resistance.
It’s easy to imagine an alternate “Mrs. America”—a sappier, more complacent historical drama that might have taken, as its opening, the last scene of the pilot, in which, in 1972, the founding members of the National Women’s Political Caucus celebrate in the Washington, D.C., office of the activist and politician Bella Abzug (played by a saucy Margo Martindale). Ambitious costuming and wig direction help us identify, in the mix, the popular saints of second-wave feminism: Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), with her long hair middle-parted and her aviator glasses; Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), with her black-salon bouffant; Betty Friedan (Tracy Ullman), her big hair streaked, skunklike, with gray. The Senate has passed the E.R.A., sending it to the states for ratification, and Chisholm, the country’s first black congresswoman, has announced her Presidential bid. The women’s toast to progress is interrupted by a staffer bearing the opposition research: a copy of “The Phyllis Schlafly Report,” a newsletter published monthly by a homemaker in Alton, Illinois.
“Who the hell is Phyllis Schaffly?” Friedan spits, mispronouncing the name. The moment, which captures the radical élite’s reflexive dismissal of the allure of white conservatism, is all the more powerful because, in this “Mrs. America,” we have already been warned. The series is an ensemble vehicle, with each episode following a different character, but it opens with Schlafly—introduced by an m.c. in a bikini competition at a charity fund-raiser as “the wife of one of our biggest donors, Mrs. J. Fred Schlafly”—and stays with her throughout. A mother of six and a Radcliffe graduate, she has had a failed run for Congress and carries with her an air of thwarted ambition. At a meeting with Barry Goldwater in D.C., at which she hopes to advise on his nuclear policy, she is asked instead to take notes. Schlafly and her husband (John Slattery) are locked in a simmering, kinky battle of intelligences, but, in the evening, as he presses his weight on her, his needs win. Schlafly sets out as the most dangerous type of powermonger: one without power.
When Alice (Sarah Paulson), a kind of surrogate daughter, first brings the E.R.A. to her attention, claiming that the libbers will force their daughters into the draft, Schlafly swiftly assembles an army of housewives who view “equal rights” as an implicit criticism of their choices. Schlafly’s “Stop E.R.A.” campaign lands her on talk shows and in lecture halls; her vast mailing list piques the interest of Ronald Reagan, who is running for President. Her crusade to protect the traditional family involves travel, long hours, and the kind of industry that looks suspiciously like a successful career; meanwhile, she relies on her sister-in-law, Eleanor (played with muted heartbreak by Jeanne Tripplehorn), and her smiling black maids to take care of the children. A good bio-pic performance captures a historical figure, but a transcendent one can effectively destroy her, outdoing the original in our cultural memory. Blanchett’s Schlafly is a pastel nightmare, arch and juicily camp.
Trump spoke at Schlafly’s funeral, in 2016, apparently aware of his debt to her strategy, and there are oblique references to the Trump era in “Mrs. America”—in the finale, Schlafly greets two baby-faced lawyers named Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. But the series mostly avoids the premonitions that dog the storytelling of such dramas as Ava DuVernay’s 2019 “When They See Us,” based on the Central Park jogger case. It is clear where the sympathies of the show’s creators lie, and as the prim staginess of the Schlafly suburban universe gives way to apartments in New York City and offices in Washington, the cinematography becomes warmer—reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman documentaries and stomp-down-the-street seventies dramas. Yet the feminist fighters, drawn with less specificity and more reverence, are inevitably less interesting. Abzug is the pushy yenta of the Senate, a pragmatist willing to make concessions to secure male allies. The only Republican in the caucus, Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks), is a symbol of the impending death of bipartisanship. The weakest characterization is that of the spritelike Steinem, whose primary anxiety appears to be the fear that her peers tolerate her only because of her value as the movement’s sex symbol, and who swans through the series, cigarette in hand, eyes furrowed in telegenic sorrow for the sisters who have it harder than her.
The most recognizable faces of the feminist movement have always been white, and “Mrs. America” prides itself on reminding us why without ever quite redressing the balance. In one scene, Steinem argues with the “money guy” at Ms., who is reluctant to put Chisholm on the cover because she will “depress sales, especially in the South.” When Abzug, eager to hitch the E.R.A. fight to George McGovern’s Presidential candidacy, admonishes Chisholm for continuing her symbolic campaign, Chisholm responds, mightily, “I didn’t get anywhere in this life waiting on someone’s permission.” But Chisholm, in reality a staunch, ingenious politician, is portrayed as an egoless exemplar of political duty. Meanwhile, the legendary lawyer Flo Kennedy, played by the perpetually underrated Niecy Nash, delivers clapbacks to black feminists seeking to exclude black lesbians from their ranks. From the narrative sidelines, she represents, but the show doesn’t let her live or love.
The eighth episode is a memorable set piece: at the National Women’s Conference, in Houston, Alice, Schlafly’s follower, accidentally takes a psychedelic and goes through the looking glass, wandering into a Pete Seeger sing-along with the feminists. But there is something too easy about the satisfaction gained from watching a woman escape Schlafly’s orbit when the woman in question is one of the show’s few fictional characters. Ullman’s portrayal of the middle-aged Friedan, the intellectual founder of the movement, feels, by contrast, painfully real. Friedan is among the first of the feminists to take Schlafly seriously, agreeing to debate her at Illinois State University—not just because she feels a moral imperative to quash Schlafly’s rise but because she sees the event as an opportunity to retrieve the renown she has lost to the movement’s younger figures, primarily Steinem. In one scene, we watch as Friedan, preparing for a date, opens her closet and fondles a flower-print dress that she wore, years earlier, on a talk show. The moment is quiet, almost taboo. Friedan may be fighting for equality, but she is also a woman, wanting to remember what it feels like to be adored. ♦


newyorker--2020-04-20--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons April 27, 2020

“ Good news—Shakespeare is using this time to write ‘ King Lear , ’ so we ’ ll have more @ @ @ @ @ ”

“Good news—Shakespeare is using this time to write ‘King Lear,’ so we’ll have more stuff to binge soon.”
Cartoon by Joe Dator


newyorker--2020-04-20--“The Longer Prayer,” by Sophie Cabot Black

Field of silos , of did we keep enough To keep us through ; walk the fence line where The @ @ @ @ @ the traps By the manger .
Did we pay enough Attention ; should have done @ @ @ @ @ more , Learned the ditch , repeated the row , the glare Of sun in @ @ @ @ @ your back , the undersong Of the sickle to rise , and lower , the @ @ @ @ @ Forgive the mind its winter , its gnaw— The softening ground waits ; the ridge @ @ @ @ @ spire , windvane , To receive what we can not handle , in sight As @ @ @ @ @ light To light , each room becoming many Houses filled with their own good doings @ @ @ @ @ .
The unlost birds come back To crown the trees and do not wonder How @ @ @ @ @ , how free fall Is ever the stars .
Come home changed Or be changed @ @ @ @ @ Weighed against the still to be done .

Audio: Read by the author.
Field of silos, of did we keep enough
To keep us through; walk the fence line where
The middle rail broke, reset the traps
By the manger. Did we pay enough
Attention; should have done with less, put up more,
Learned the ditch, repeated the row, the glare
Of sun in your eyes, again at your back, the undersong
Of the sickle to rise, and lower, the tractor
That still runs. Forgive the mind its winter, its gnaw—
The softening ground waits; the ridge
Where the sky steeples with spire, windvane,
To receive what we cannot handle, in sight
As elsewhere small is the first light
To light, each room becoming many
Houses filled with their own good doings until astonished
You also remain. The unlost birds come back
To crown the trees and do not wonder
How each branch bursts into again, how free fall
Is ever the stars. Come home changed
Or be changed; every harvest will be
Weighed against the still to be done.