newyorker--2020-12-22--As the Vaccine Arrives, Death and Denial Rage in a California Coronavirus Epicenter

These may be the waning months of the coronavirus pandemic—the vaccine now shot into the arms of thousands of medical-health professionals available to the rest of us soon—but scenes like this will play in McMurran ’ s mind for a lifetime : brief cracks of light and human tenderness amid the despair .
Yet , even now , as the agonizingly drawn out final act of the pandemic begins , the public fails to adequately grasp what ’ s transpiring in I.C.U.s around the country .
What COVID-19 “ actually does to a person is hard for people not within @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” McMurran told me .
“ I mean , to watch them slowly suffocate , and not be able to do anything about it .
.
.
.
” As cheery headlines about vaccines scroll across cable-news screens , the virus rages around the county .
California recently hit a record sixty thousand new single-day cases .
In the San Joaquin Valley region , where McMurran works , dangerously low numbers of available I.C.U .
beds triggered Newsom ’ s stay-at-home order , which went into effect at midnight on December 6th .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ indoor mingling of people from separate households .
The mandate also shuttered hair and nail salons , gyms , and many other in-person services .
Hours later , a couple of dozen protesters , many of them business owners , gathered in Stockton , the seat of San Joaquin County .
Many were maskless as they mounted the steps of City Hall to perform a routine almost as old as the pandemic itself .
No , they would not obey Newsom ’ s order , the protesters announced .
“ I ’ m @ @ @ @ @ @ @ restaurant owner said , microphone in hand .
“ If you ’ re worried about getting sick , don ’ t go into my restaurant.
” Later , still maskless , he ladled free cups of clam chowder from a vat to passersby on City Hall grounds .
The protesters soon entered the building , mostly barefaced , tightly packed in close quarters , and demanded to speak with the city ’ s elected officials .
In footage captured by a reporter for the Stockton Record , a woman in a “ Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chant , “ We demand to be a sanctuary city for businesses .
If we can be a sanctuary city for drug addicts , and for illegal aliens , we can be a sanctuary city for businesses.
” The contrast between demonstrations like this and the scenes inside intensive-care units couldn ’ t be starker .
As the protest unfolded , area hospitals careened toward disaster .
By the end of the next day , I.C.U .
capacity in San Joaquin County hit zero per cent—meaning that the demand for beds at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
At Adventist Health Lodi Memorial , where Erika McMurran works , there were thirty-eight patients with COVID-19 ( and forty-four by week ’ s end ) .
At St. Joseph ’ s Medical Center , in Stockton , there were eighty-seven COVID-19 patients ( a hundred and nine by week ’ s end ) .
The region hadn ’ t flattened the curve , so much as erected a near-vertical line .
“ Heavy , ” is how Scott Neeley described the situation at his hospital to me .
He ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s and a pulmonary and critical-care specialist with more than thirty years of experience .
“ None of us have ever seen anything like this , ” he said .
These townships orbit midsize cities with populations exceeding three hundred thousand—Fresno , Bakersfield , Stockton—but the region is mostly rural and agricultural .
Its demographics reflect that .
Of the more than four million people in the valley , many are migrant workers .
A hundred and twelve thousand are believed to be undocumented .
At the same time , the region @ @ @ @ @ @ @ California .
In the 2020 Presidential election , half of the valley ’ s eight counties voted for Donald Trump ; in the four counties that went for Joe Biden , the Democrat won by margins far narrower than that by which he won the state as a whole .
The coronavirus exacerbates the valley ’ s long existing divisions and pain points , says Nancy Burke , a public-health professor at the University of California , Merced .
“ The health indicators rival the poorest parts of Appalachia , ” she told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Valley “ rank among the lowest in California in terms of health outcomes , as well as determinants of health , [ such as ] social and economic factors.
” Forty-one per cent of rural residents in the region are covered by Medi-Cal , the state health insurance that is available to Californians living below the federal poverty line .
So , although the region produces much of the nation ’ s food supply , Burke explained , the people here suffer some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ valley ’ s preëxisting economic disparities and political frictions , and you get what ’ s unfolding now .
You get sheriffs announcing that they won ’ t enforce state measures designed to mitigate the spread of the virus , as happened in Merced County , where Burke works .
You get barefaced protesters who demand that their town be declared “ a sanctuary city for businesses.
” Newsom ’ s lockdown order lasts at least three weeks and is triggered in each of the state ’ s five geographic regions when the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fifteen per cent .
( So far , only one region , Northern California , has not fallen below that threshold . )
In addition to banning in-person dining and services and gathering among separate households , the lockdown forbids guest visits at breweries and wineries .
Retail stores can remain open , but at only twenty per cent capacity .
Restaurants can offer only delivery and pickup .
It ’ s within that last provision that Jennifer Pappas is trying to hang on .
She and her husband own Papapavlo ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a restaurant , catering business , and event space that has served locals Mediterranean-inflected fare for decades .
When the pandemic first hit , Papapavlo ’ s restaurant quickly transformed into Papapavlo ’ s food delivery .
The couple and three of their offspring—in their late teens and early twenties—became a distribution staff overnight .
“ Every kid would have a car , ” Pappas told me , “ and we would just load up their cars with deliveries.
” The restaurant survived , but margins were thinner than ever in an industry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t know what this latest lockdown might spell .
She didn ’ t join the protesters at City Hall earlier this month , but she said that she agrees with much of the cause .
“ Are they trying to make us go out of business ?
” she wondered aloud about the policymakers behind the stay-at-home-order .
Among her frustrations are what seem to her to be the arbitrariness of the rules .
Why , for instance , do big chain stores get a pass ?
“ I mean , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people in those grocery stores and Costco and Target , for sure , than at a restaurant , ” she said .
Then there ’ s the hypocrisy of the elected officials who have been caught on camera defying the state public-health guidelines that they vehemently urge their constituents to obey .
In November , photos surfaced of Newsom dining with a large group at the tony French Laundry , in Napa Valley .
State legislators have been caught in similar acts .
“ Their flaunting it in everybody ’ s face , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Douglass Wilhoit , the C.E.O .
of the Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce , told me .
“ About twenty-eight per cent of the businesses we had in 2019 or early 2020 have closed for good.
” Several members of his organization took part in the protest at Stockton ’ s city hall .
Wilhoit says that he takes the pandemic and the guidelines seriously—he ’ s in his late seventies and considers himself vulnerable to the virus—but he understands where his members are coming from .
“ When it affects you personally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your family , your employees , it becomes very , very personal , ” he told me .
“ I think that a lot of people understand , possibly , the reason—but when it hits home , it makes it more difficult to comply.
” Those who do look to state and local leaders for guidance receive mixed messages—everything from the variability of lockdown rules to images of a maskless governor treating himself to a group meal at a posh restaurant .
“ The reality is that some of these recommendations are out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our state ’ s population who are unable to work from home and are marginally housed , ” Burke said .
For some , the pandemic ’ s economic ruin spurs defiance against public-health measures , even denial of the virus and its dangers .
Meanwhile , those dangers play out , fatally , behind hospital walls .
That split troubles Neeley , the chief medical officer at St. Joseph ’ s .
“ The disconnect between the way people are behaving , the way people are talking about this , the way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way people are saying things like , ‘ I hear people are dying of all sorts of things and they ’ re calling it COVID , ’ and then we go to work and we see a young family losing their mother , ” Neeley told me recently by Zoom , “ that ’ s devastating.
” As of this writing , a hundred and thirty-one people are being treated for COVID-19 at Neeley ’ s hospital .
The number of patients with symptoms severe enough to need I.C.U .
beds puts the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ capacity , according to Neeley , forcing staff to convert other beds in other wings into I.C.U .
beds .
“ This is a clinical scenario like nothing we ’ ve ever seen in our careers—ten or twenty or thirty times the number of just horribly ill patients that we would normally see in a year , ” he said .
Thirteen miles away , Erika McMurran , the I.C.U .
charge nurse at Lodi Memorial , reflected on how , a week earlier , she had placed her palm on the back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turn himself over onto his stomach so he could breathe .
His adult daughter , her face beamed on a computer screen provided by the I.C.U.
, spoke to him while McMurran rubbed his back ; both women working in tandem—comforting the patient with words and human touch .
“ I just want to go home , ” the man said , in pain and gasping for air .
“ I just want to go home.
” If these truly are the final months of the coronavirus , if the vaccine now being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end to the pandemic , McMurran will still hold in her mind a process she wishes she ’ d never had to memorize .
“ You knew the next step that was coming for a patient , ” she told me , speaking in the past tense , as if we were both already living in that dreamed-about future .
“ And you ’ d be like , ‘ O.K.
, in two days , this is what this patient ’ s going to do.
’ ” A fever or full-body aches or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t turn onto their stomachs unaided .
“ Yet you couldn ’ t do anything to stop that patient from hitting the next step.
” The predictability became its own variety of horror .
Then came one unpredictable thing .
It wasn ’ t as directly hopeful as a vaccine .
No one ’ s winning a prize for it .
But it was a glimmer of something that could help us climb out of the pandemic , something you ’ d never guess would happen if you ’ d been watching scenes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ city hall during the past ten months : a changed mind .

Two weeks ago, as much of California adjusted to Governor Gavin Newsom’s latest stay-at-home order, Erika McMurran held the hand of a woman who was about to lose her ability to speak. McMurran, a charge nurse in the intensive-care unit of a hospital in Lodi, was helping a respiratory therapist intubate the woman, whose breathing had become so labored that the staff feared for her life. Before the tube entered the woman’s mouth and rendered her speechless, she squeezed McMurran’s hand and spoke what could have been her last words. “I’m just so thankful for everything you have done for me,” McMurran recalls the woman saying.
These may be the waning months of the coronavirus pandemic—the vaccine now shot into the arms of thousands of medical-health professionals available to the rest of us soon—but scenes like this will play in McMurran’s mind for a lifetime: brief cracks of light and human tenderness amid the despair.
Yet, even now, as the agonizingly drawn out final act of the pandemic begins, the public fails to adequately grasp what’s transpiring in I.C.U.s around the country. What COVID-19 “actually does to a person is hard for people not within a hospital setting to fully understand,” McMurran told me. “I mean, to watch them slowly suffocate, and not be able to do anything about it . . . .”
As cheery headlines about vaccines scroll across cable-news screens, the virus rages around the county. California recently hit a record sixty thousand new single-day cases. In the San Joaquin Valley region, where McMurran works, dangerously low numbers of available I.C.U. beds triggered Newsom’s stay-at-home order, which went into effect at midnight on December 6th. In-person dining was banned, along with indoor mingling of people from separate households. The mandate also shuttered hair and nail salons, gyms, and many other in-person services.
Hours later, a couple of dozen protesters, many of them business owners, gathered in Stockton, the seat of San Joaquin County. Many were maskless as they mounted the steps of City Hall to perform a routine almost as old as the pandemic itself. No, they would not obey Newsom’s order, the protesters announced. “I’m not going to close,” a restaurant owner said, microphone in hand. “If you’re worried about getting sick, don’t go into my restaurant.” Later, still maskless, he ladled free cups of clam chowder from a vat to passersby on City Hall grounds.
The protesters soon entered the building, mostly barefaced, tightly packed in close quarters, and demanded to speak with the city’s elected officials. In footage captured by a reporter for the Stockton Record, a woman in a “Trump 2020” hat lifts a bullhorn to chant, “We demand to be a sanctuary city for businesses. If we can be a sanctuary city for drug addicts, and for illegal aliens, we can be a sanctuary city for businesses.”
The contrast between demonstrations like this and the scenes inside intensive-care units couldn’t be starker. As the protest unfolded, area hospitals careened toward disaster. By the end of the next day, I.C.U. capacity in San Joaquin County hit zero per cent—meaning that the demand for beds at the county’s seven hospitals exceeded availability. At Adventist Health Lodi Memorial, where Erika McMurran works, there were thirty-eight patients with COVID-19 (and forty-four by week’s end). At St. Joseph’s Medical Center, in Stockton, there were eighty-seven COVID-19 patients (a hundred and nine by week’s end). The region hadn’t flattened the curve, so much as erected a near-vertical line.
“Heavy,” is how Scott Neeley described the situation at his hospital to me. He’s the chief medical officer at St. Joseph’s and a pulmonary and critical-care specialist with more than thirty years of experience. “None of us have ever seen anything like this,” he said.
The San Joaquin Valley is an emerald gash shaped like a fist in the middle of the state. It abuts the Sierra Nevada mountains and drinks in the rivers that zag from the foothills. Looked upon from an airplane cabin window at thirty thousand feet, the valley appears as a medley of pixels in every shade of green; irrigated fields collide at improbable angles. On the ground, viewed from a speeding car on Highway 99, it’s a blur of corduroy—rows of garlic, tomatoes, and fruit trees sprouting from the rich, dark loam. The San Joaquin Valley is California’s bread basket, the source of the state’s bounty, the source of much of the country’s bounty. Even the names of towns that dot this verdant blanket sound fecund: Chowchilla, Planada, Ripon.
These townships orbit midsize cities with populations exceeding three hundred thousand—Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton—but the region is mostly rural and agricultural. Its demographics reflect that. Of the more than four million people in the valley, many are migrant workers. A hundred and twelve thousand are believed to be undocumented. At the same time, the region skews further right politically than most of California. In the 2020 Presidential election, half of the valley’s eight counties voted for Donald Trump; in the four counties that went for Joe Biden, the Democrat won by margins far narrower than that by which he won the state as a whole.
The coronavirus exacerbates the valley’s long existing divisions and pain points, says Nancy Burke, a public-health professor at the University of California, Merced. “The health indicators rival the poorest parts of Appalachia,” she told me. The counties in San Joaquin Valley “rank among the lowest in California in terms of health outcomes, as well as determinants of health, [such as] social and economic factors.” Forty-one per cent of rural residents in the region are covered by Medi-Cal, the state health insurance that is available to Californians living below the federal poverty line. So, although the region produces much of the nation’s food supply, Burke explained, the people here suffer some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the state.
Demands for I.C.U. beds at Adventist Health Lodi Memorial and other area hospitals are now exceeding supply. Photograph by Staff Sgt. Eddie Siguenza / Army National Guard / Reuters
Add a global pandemic to the valley’s preëxisting economic disparities and political frictions, and you get what’s unfolding now. You get sheriffs announcing that they won’t enforce state measures designed to mitigate the spread of the virus, as happened in Merced County, where Burke works. You get barefaced protesters who demand that their town be declared “a sanctuary city for businesses.”
Newsom’s lockdown order lasts at least three weeks and is triggered in each of the state’s five geographic regions when the I.C.U. bed capacity there falls below fifteen per cent. (So far, only one region, Northern California, has not fallen below that threshold.) In addition to banning in-person dining and services and gathering among separate households, the lockdown forbids guest visits at breweries and wineries. Retail stores can remain open, but at only twenty per cent capacity. Restaurants can offer only delivery and pickup.
It’s within that last provision that Jennifer Pappas is trying to hang on. She and her husband own Papapavlo’s Bistro & Bar, in Stockton, a restaurant, catering business, and event space that has served locals Mediterranean-inflected fare for decades. When the pandemic first hit, Papapavlo’s restaurant quickly transformed into Papapavlo’s food delivery. The couple and three of their offspring—in their late teens and early twenties—became a distribution staff overnight. “Every kid would have a car,” Pappas told me, “and we would just load up their cars with deliveries.”
The restaurant survived, but margins were thinner than ever in an industry infamous for thin margins. Pappas doesn’t know what this latest lockdown might spell. She didn’t join the protesters at City Hall earlier this month, but she said that she agrees with much of the cause. “Are they trying to make us go out of business?” she wondered aloud about the policymakers behind the stay-at-home-order. Among her frustrations are what seem to her to be the arbitrariness of the rules. Why, for instance, do big chain stores get a pass? “I mean, you’re running into more strangers and people in those grocery stores and Costco and Target, for sure, than at a restaurant,” she said.
Then, there’s the hypocrisy of the elected officials who have been caught on camera defying the state public-health guidelines that they vehemently urge their constituents to obey. In November, photos surfaced of Newsom dining with a large group at the tony French Laundry, in Napa Valley. State legislators have been caught in similar acts. “They’re flaunting it in everybody’s face, which is kind of frustrating,” Douglass Wilhoit, the C.E.O. of the Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce, told me. “About twenty-eight per cent of the businesses we had in 2019 or early 2020 have closed for good.”
Several members of his organization took part in the protest at Stockton’s city hall. Wilhoit says that he takes the pandemic and the guidelines seriously—he’s in his late seventies and considers himself vulnerable to the virus—but he understands where his members are coming from. “When it affects you personally with your business, your livelihood, your family, your employees, it becomes very, very personal,” he told me. “I think that a lot of people understand, possibly, the reason—but when it hits home, it makes it more difficult to comply.”
Much of what’s happening in the San Joaquin Valley mirrors the situation in California at large. How is it that the world’s fifth-largest economy, the state with some of the strictest lockdown protocols in the country, remains such a hotbed of new COVID-19 cases? There are no easy answers, Burke, the U.C. Merced professor, admitted to me.
Those who do look to state and local leaders for guidance receive mixed messages—everything from the variability of lockdown rules to images of a maskless governor treating himself to a group meal at a posh restaurant. “The reality is that some of these recommendations are out of reach for a large proportion of our state’s population who are unable to work from home and are marginally housed,” Burke said.
For some, the pandemic’s economic ruin spurs defiance against public-health measures, even denial of the virus and its dangers. Meanwhile, those dangers play out, fatally, behind hospital walls.
That split troubles Neeley, the chief medical officer at St. Joseph’s. “The disconnect between the way people are behaving, the way people are talking about this, the way people are ignoring the science, the way people are saying things like, ‘I hear people are dying of all sorts of things and they’re calling it COVID,’ and then we go to work and we see a young family losing their mother,” Neeley told me recently by Zoom, “that’s devastating.”
As of this writing, a hundred and thirty-one people are being treated for COVID-19 at Neeley’s hospital. The number of patients with symptoms severe enough to need I.C.U. beds puts the hospital at nearly fifty per cent over capacity, according to Neeley, forcing staff to convert other beds in other wings into I.C.U. beds. “This is a clinical scenario like nothing we’ve ever seen in our careers—ten or twenty or thirty times the number of just horribly ill patients that we would normally see in a year,” he said.


newyorker--2020-12-22--What Do We Want from Poetry in Times of Crisis?

In March , 1743 , plague struck the port of Messina in Sicily .
Suspicious deaths had been recorded on a cargo ship in the harbor ; the ship was duly burned , but too late .
Almost three-quarters of the city ’ s inhabitants perished .
More than a thousand miles away , in London , where the Great Plague of 1665 had not been forgotten , an enterprising bookseller published a compendium of information for anxious fellow-citizens .
The volume offered an explainer of contemporary British law on plague and quarantine , reprinted a parliamentary proclamation requiring ships @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Infected Places , ” and gave a horrifying account of the disease “ now raging at Messina.
” But it wasn ’ t all practical .
People didn ’ t just want to be told what to do if the worst happened ; they wanted fragments to shore against their ruin , voices and stories that proved disaster could be overcome and transfigured into something else .
The book opened with Thucydides ’ s eyewitness account of the plague of Athens and segued into two modern verse translations from Lucretius on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pestilence , swoln big with Fate , / To waste , and lay a Nation desolate.
” The bookseller had sensed the time was ripe for an anthology .
This year , desolation is back , and so , accordingly , are anthologies—promising to capture what the present feels like and remind us that we ’ re not alone in what we ’ re going through .
In two waves during the spring and early summer of this year , the scholar Alice Quinn ( who is the former poetry editor at this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the country , gathering more than a hundred pieces in “ Together in a Sudden Strangeness : America ’ s Poets Respond to the Pandemic ” ( Knopf ) .
Quinn ’ s collection covers remarkable ground .
It documents body bags in refrigerated trucks , Mardi Gras superspreading floats , lonely eels in public aquariums who miss human contact , the exploding price of toilet paper and milk .
Etymologically , “ anthology ” refers to a collection of flowers , varied species of blooms selected and arranged so that they look @ @ @ @ @ @ @ term ’ s modern origins in the seventeenth century , multiplicity has always been the form ’ s selling point : the provision in one volume of very different voices and concerns that nonetheless have some kind of collective force .
In Quinn ’ s alphabetical ordering of the poems , points of connection between them are left , as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes wrote in their 1982 anthology , “ The Rattle Bag , ” to “ discover themselves ” —much as private fears coalesce into shared conversations and strategies in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a wide-lens approach , looking to history as a way of muffling the shrillness of the present .
Influenza in Europe in 1918 or yellow fever in New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century : we have been here before .
Others narrow their aperture , looking no farther than out the window .
Nature serves both traditional and untraditional functions in a pandemic .
From one perspective , it ’ s there as it has always been , getting on with things , sticking to the familiar cyclical rhythms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while human life takes a sharp turn for the worse .
In “ Two Days in March , ” John Okrent catalogues a civilization left behind : “ The café is closed .
The bar is closed .
The daffodils / are heedless .
Today , the first death in Tacoma.
” On another view , all catastrophes are connected , and the natural world ’ s slide toward ruin— “ glaciers melting far away and faster / than we knew ” —both holds a mirror up to the human disaster and suggests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be no bad thing .
As Katha Pollitt writes , “ Perhaps it is best that we go away now.
” Writing about and to a moment always requires finding a poetic form that feels particular , but the imperative to “ make it new ” looks all the more urgent at times when institutions seem on the verge of collapse .
Quinn ’ s anthology collects several not-quite-sonnets , in which poets ’ deliberate coloring outside the lines reflects the messiness and intransigence of the facts .
Claudia Rankine ’ s “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traps , swerving between meanings to disconcert and unsettle : “ Social distancing ?
Six feet / under for underlying conditions.
” Susan Kinsolving ’ s villanelle obsessively circles the same two rhymes , keeping pace with the anxiety of a mind trying to cope .
Formal disruptions also dramatize the “ malign inequities ” that the pandemic has revealed in the population ’ s access to health care , food , and safe working conditions .
In Edward Hirsch ’ s “ Eight People , ” disconnected couplets and short , broken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be living / at one remove / from each other.
” In Evie Shockley ’ s “ an inoculation against innocence , ” the division of lines into two halves , like the columns of a balance sheet , measures the widening gap between “ the folks who can stay / at home ” and “ the ones who can ’ t. ” Throughout , poets interrogate the use of their work and the limits of the imagination when reality presses in .
Enough of verse ’ s rhetoric and deixis , its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Ada Limón writes in “ The End of Poetry , ” what we want is contact : “ I am asking you to touch me.
” Exceptional times ask to be recorded and responded to as they happen .
We don ’ t need a historian to tell us that the events of 2020 will have enduring effects ; we ’ re already processing their strangeness and bearing the marks of trying to adapt .
Quinn ’ s isn ’ t the only anthology of the past few years to take urgency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we ’ re told that we need right now is hot off the press , immediate , reactive , political .
There are “ Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration , ” “ 50 Poems Now , ” “ Poems of Protest and Revolution ” : collections cast as miniature insurgencies , reckonings , defenders of truth .
Such anthologies present themselves not as distillations of the very best ever written , or gatherings suited to particular seasons or moods , but—either modestly or immodestly , depending on how you look at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ times demand , records that have to be kept .
Contemporary anthologists emphasize the diversity of their contributors , the way they range in gender , sexuality , age , and social background , while taking care to point out affinities and connections .
If the point of poetry collections now is to speak up for our present concerns ( to “ amplify a nation , ” in the poet Richard Blanco ’ s phrase ) , they have to represent who we are : they speak for us if they speak like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a model of society in microcosm .
Pandemics are disconcerting because they reveal that people are not only more similar than they like to think but , in some essential ways , identical—made up of the same cells , the same weaknesses .
At the same time , they ’ re disconcerting because they point out demographic differences we ’ re ordinarily able to ignore , like the chasms between rich and poor .
Anthologies , with their diverse voices but convergent ideas , envision a public sphere in which solidarity doesn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bound—literally—by sympathy and ideals rather than mere biology .
Publishers and editors have long seen the anthology as a means of intervening in political or social affairs .
At the turn of the eighteenth century , anonymous collections of “ Poems on Affairs of State ” appeared every few years , containing satires that smeared monarchs , politicians , and their mistresses ( Charles II ’ s favorite , Nell Gwyn , was dismissed as a “ hare-brained , wrinkled , stopped-up whore ” ) and fuelling anti-court discontent .
A hundred years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to quash homegrown radicalism in the wake of the French Revolution , conservative satirists compiled an anthology of vicious “ anti-Jacobin ” poetry to sway public opinion .
During the Great War and Spanish Civil War , poets published anthologies with subtle or not-so-subtle propaganda aims , designed to stir up outrage against the common enemy .
The British poets Stephen Spender and John Lehmann , in their introduction to “ Poems for Spain ” ( 1939 ) , assured readers that many of the pieces they collected were “ written from inside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ defects of being extremely close to experience.
” In their view , being on the ground mattered for poets , just as we think of it mattering now for correspondents or protestors or essential workers .
Once the war was over and the register of crisis lost , poetry , they feared , would return to being “ the exalted medium of a few specialists ” —art made on high that could only observe history , never enact it .
“ Poetry makes nothing happen , ” their friend W. H. Auden wrote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t have been said of other places in Europe in 1939 , or of Britain in previous centuries , when censorship crackdowns against anthology compilers who overstepped the line made it clear that what they published had power to do damage .
Now , of course , anthologists are hardly worth persecuting .
“ How can a poet write truth to power when power doesn ’ t read poems ?
” Amit Majmudar asks in the introduction to his “ Resistance , Rebellion , Life ” anthology .
What version—or versions—of “ truth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Majmudar argues , as many have , that in dark and mendacious times we need poetry because its careful , precise way with language is a form of truth-telling .
The thing about careful and precise poetry , though , is that it takes a while to write , requiring solitude and second thoughts .
Though it may present as immediate , unfiltered—Quinn ’ s introduction emphasizes that her anthology was assembled “ quickly , ” at the pace at which everything from vaccine manufacturing to grocery shopping happens these days—its immediacy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a dramatic fiction that the reader is in on .
Trump “ spits out every coarse thing that crosses his mind , as it occurs to him ; we agonize over and refine each phrase we put out there , wondering if it rings true , ” Majmudar writes .
If truthful poetry comes of agonizing , refining , and redrafting , it can ’ t be immediate and urgent in the way that journalism or propaganda can .
Nor would we want it to be .
As documents of collective action , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s contemporary Michael Roberts connected the idea of bringing together politically like-minded writers with the Communist struggle in his anthology “ New Country ” ( 1933 ) —but their “ call to action , ” in Quinn ’ s phrase , is unlikely now to be the reason people take to the streets .
What they offer instead is the historical moment seen long-sightedly , from many directions—a collective account of the times that ’ s more considered , more patient , and more productively ambiguous than other kinds of record can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ practical or philosophical in a crisis ; sometimes they can be trivial .
Anthologies allow them to be all three .
“ There ’ s a pandemic and I think my arms are fat , ” Catherine Cohen writes .
Truth-telling comes in many forms .
• New Yorker writers on the best books they read this year .
• Amanda Petrusich counts down the best music .

In March, 1743, plague struck the port of Messina in Sicily. Suspicious deaths had been recorded on a cargo ship in the harbor; the ship was duly burned, but too late. Almost three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants perished. More than a thousand miles away, in London, where the Great Plague of 1665 had not been forgotten, an enterprising bookseller published a compendium of information for anxious fellow-citizens. The volume offered an explainer of contemporary British law on plague and quarantine, reprinted a parliamentary proclamation requiring ships to “perform Quarantine, that come from Infected Places,” and gave a horrifying account of the disease “now raging at Messina.” But it wasn’t all practical. People didn’t just want to be told what to do if the worst happened; they wanted fragments to shore against their ruin, voices and stories that proved disaster could be overcome and transfigured into something else. The book opened with Thucydides’s eyewitness account of the plague of Athens and segued into two modern verse translations from Lucretius on the same topic: “What drives a Pestilence, swoln big with Fate, / To waste, and lay a Nation desolate.” The bookseller had sensed the time was ripe for an anthology.
This year, desolation is back, and so, accordingly, are anthologies—promising to capture what the present feels like and remind us that we’re not alone in what we’re going through. In two waves during the spring and early summer of this year, the scholar Alice Quinn (who is the former poetry editor at this magazine) solicited work from poets across the country, gathering more than a hundred pieces in “Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic” (Knopf). Quinn’s collection covers remarkable ground. It documents body bags in refrigerated trucks, Mardi Gras superspreading floats, lonely eels in public aquariums who miss human contact, the exploding price of toilet paper and milk.
Etymologically, “anthology” refers to a collection of flowers, varied species of blooms selected and arranged so that they look like they belong together. Since the term’s modern origins in the seventeenth century, multiplicity has always been the form’s selling point: the provision in one volume of very different voices and concerns that nonetheless have some kind of collective force. In Quinn’s alphabetical ordering of the poems, points of connection between them are left, as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes wrote in their 1982 anthology, “The Rattle Bag,” to “discover themselves”—much as private fears coalesce into shared conversations and strategies in times of crisis. Several poets share a wide-lens approach, looking to history as a way of muffling the shrillness of the present. Influenza in Europe in 1918 or yellow fever in New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century: we have been here before. Others narrow their aperture, looking no farther than out the window. Nature serves both traditional and untraditional functions in a pandemic. From one perspective, it’s there as it has always been, getting on with things, sticking to the familiar cyclical rhythms that poets have tracked since Hesiod, while human life takes a sharp turn for the worse. In “Two Days in March,” John Okrent catalogues a civilization left behind: “The café is closed. The bar is closed. The daffodils / are heedless. Today, the first death in Tacoma.” On another view, all catastrophes are connected, and the natural world’s slide toward ruin—“glaciers melting far away and faster / than we knew”—both holds a mirror up to the human disaster and suggests that our disappearance from the planet might be no bad thing. As Katha Pollitt writes, “Perhaps it is best that we go away now.”
Writing about and to a moment always requires finding a poetic form that feels particular, but the imperative to “make it new” looks all the more urgent at times when institutions seem on the verge of collapse. Quinn’s anthology collects several not-quite-sonnets, in which poets’ deliberate coloring outside the lines reflects the messiness and intransigence of the facts. Claudia Rankine’s “Weather” turns line endings into bait-and-switch traps, swerving between meanings to disconcert and unsettle: “Social distancing? Six feet / under for underlying conditions.” Susan Kinsolving’s villanelle obsessively circles the same two rhymes, keeping pace with the anxiety of a mind trying to cope.
Formal disruptions also dramatize the “malign inequities” that the pandemic has revealed in the population’s access to health care, food, and safe working conditions. In Edward Hirsch’s “Eight People,” disconnected couplets and short, broken lines process how it feels “to be living / at one remove / from each other.” In Evie Shockley’s “an inoculation against innocence,” the division of lines into two halves, like the columns of a balance sheet, measures the widening gap between “the folks who can stay / at home” and “the ones who can’t.” Throughout, poets interrogate the use of their work and the limits of the imagination when reality presses in. Enough of verse’s rhetoric and deixis, its empty “pointing to the world,” Ada Limón writes in “The End of Poetry,” what we want is contact: “I am asking you to touch me.”
Exceptional times ask to be recorded and responded to as they happen. We don’t need a historian to tell us that the events of 2020 will have enduring effects; we’re already processing their strangeness and bearing the marks of trying to adapt. Quinn’s isn’t the only anthology of the past few years to take urgency as its curatorial principle. The poetry we’re told that we need right now is hot off the press, immediate, reactive, political. There are “Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration,” “50 Poems Now,” “Poems of Protest and Revolution”: collections cast as miniature insurgencies, reckonings, defenders of truth. Such anthologies present themselves not as distillations of the very best ever written, or gatherings suited to particular seasons or moods, but—either modestly or immodestly, depending on how you look at it—no more or less than what the times demand, records that have to be kept.
Contemporary anthologists emphasize the diversity of their contributors, the way they range in gender, sexuality, age, and social background, while taking care to point out affinities and connections. If the point of poetry collections now is to speak up for our present concerns (to “amplify a nation,” in the poet Richard Blanco’s phrase), they have to represent who we are: they speak for us if they speak like us, offering through their inclusive coverage a model of society in microcosm. Pandemics are disconcerting because they reveal that people are not only more similar than they like to think but, in some essential ways, identical—made up of the same cells, the same weaknesses. At the same time, they’re disconcerting because they point out demographic differences we’re ordinarily able to ignore, like the chasms between rich and poor. Anthologies, with their diverse voices but convergent ideas, envision a public sphere in which solidarity doesn’t require uniformity. They show us bound—literally—by sympathy and ideals rather than mere biology.
Publishers and editors have long seen the anthology as a means of intervening in political or social affairs. At the turn of the eighteenth century, anonymous collections of “Poems on Affairs of State” appeared every few years, containing satires that smeared monarchs, politicians, and their mistresses (Charles II’s favorite, Nell Gwyn, was dismissed as a “hare-brained, wrinkled, stopped-up whore”) and fuelling anti-court discontent. A hundred years later, as the British government strove to quash homegrown radicalism in the wake of the French Revolution, conservative satirists compiled an anthology of vicious “anti-Jacobin” poetry to sway public opinion. During the Great War and Spanish Civil War, poets published anthologies with subtle or not-so-subtle propaganda aims, designed to stir up outrage against the common enemy. The British poets Stephen Spender and John Lehmann, in their introduction to “Poems for Spain” (1939), assured readers that many of the pieces they collected were “written from inside Spain; they have the merits and defects of being extremely close to experience.” In their view, being on the ground mattered for poets, just as we think of it mattering now for correspondents or protestors or essential workers. Once the war was over and the register of crisis lost, poetry, they feared, would return to being “the exalted medium of a few specialists”—art made on high that could only observe history, never enact it. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” their friend W. H. Auden wrote that year.
The same couldn’t have been said of other places in Europe in 1939, or of Britain in previous centuries, when censorship crackdowns against anthology compilers who overstepped the line made it clear that what they published had power to do damage. Now, of course, anthologists are hardly worth persecuting. “How can a poet write truth to power when power doesn’t read poems?” Amit Majmudar asks in the introduction to his “Resistance, Rebellion, Life” anthology.
What version—or versions—of “truth” might a modern to-the-moment anthology supply? Majmudar argues, as many have, that in dark and mendacious times we need poetry because its careful, precise way with language is a form of truth-telling. The thing about careful and precise poetry, though, is that it takes a while to write, requiring solitude and second thoughts. Though it may present as immediate, unfiltered—Quinn’s introduction emphasizes that her anthology was assembled “quickly,” at the pace at which everything from vaccine manufacturing to grocery shopping happens these days—its immediacy is always to some degree feigned, a dramatic fiction that the reader is in on. Trump “spits out every coarse thing that crosses his mind, as it occurs to him; we agonize over and refine each phrase we put out there, wondering if it rings true,” Majmudar writes. If truthful poetry comes of agonizing, refining, and redrafting, it can’t be immediate and urgent in the way that journalism or propaganda can. Nor would we want it to be.
As documents of collective action, anthologies may have manifesto-like qualities—Spender and Lehmann’s contemporary Michael Roberts connected the idea of bringing together politically like-minded writers with the Communist struggle in his anthology “New Country” (1933)—but their “call to action,” in Quinn’s phrase, is unlikely now to be the reason people take to the streets. What they offer instead is the historical moment seen long-sightedly, from many directions—a collective account of the times that’s more considered, more patient, and more productively ambiguous than other kinds of record can manage. People aren’t always practical or philosophical in a crisis; sometimes they can be trivial. Anthologies allow them to be all three. “There’s a pandemic and I think my arms are fat,” Catherine Cohen writes. Truth-telling comes in many forms.
2020 in Review


newyorker--2020-12-22--The Year of the Cardboard Sports Fan

The Year of the Cardboard Sports Fan

Pedro Pilon doesn ’ t know a Marlin from a Royal .
He doesn ’ t like playing catch , despite being a dog .
And as far as he ’ s concerned , socks ( and sox ) are best for chewing , whether white or red .
But one of Pedro ’ s favorite activities is among a baseball fan ’ s most time-honored traditions : settling into the couch with a ballgame on and falling asleep .
Pedro , a beagle and pug mix , came to the United States from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Brooklyn , Mary Pilon , a writer and friend—and sometime New Yorker contributor—adopted him .
Mary quickly discovered that Pedro was skittish , and unnerved by quick movements or loud sounds .
As far as sports on TV went , basketball was a little overstimulating .
But baseball , with its reliable rhythms and long cadences , was perfect .
Pilon grew up a Mariners fan , in Eugene , Oregon .
When she heard that the Mariners were selling cardboard cutouts—and that it cost a relatively affordable thirty bucks for the season—she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pedro .
( A portion of the price went to support COVID-19 relief efforts . )
Pedro ’ s picture was blown up to around triple life size—about three feet by two feet—printed on PVC board , and installed in Row 38 , Section 104 .
Pilon wasn ’ t the only person to pick a pet .
Mandy Lincoln , who oversaw the project for the team , told me that the Mariners were startled when the first submission with a picture of a dog came in , but , by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dogs galore .
And a turtle .
And a cheetah .
And more than fifty local cats .
Granted , when he attended Game One of the N.B.A .
Finals , Barack Obama was not made of cardboard .
He was a video image displayed on a seventeen-foot tall L.E.D .
screen , superimposed onto a seat in a section that included fourteen N.B.A .
legends .
To his left was Shaquille O ’ Neal ; to his right , James Worthy .
At one point , Shaq raised his hand and flashed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be roughly the size of Obama ’ s head .
When the N.B.A .
announced that it would be playing the remainder of the 2020 season and post-season in a strictly controlled environment in Lake Buena Vista , Florida , there was no question of fan attendance .
Games would be played on what was essentially a television soundstage .
Even friends and family members of the players would only be cleared to enter the “ bubble ” several weeks after play began .
But there were fans , of a 2020 sort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proud of its up-to-date fan friendliness , decided to get fancy .
Working with Microsoft Teams , the league used a feature called Together mode , which connects people in different places and puts them against a shared background .
( And not just people , as they probably should have expected .
“ We didn ’ t think of all the pets , ” Sara Zuckert , who led the group behind the effort , told me . )
Fans were placed into ten groups , which were projected onto three L.E.D @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrangements were automated .
Fans within each group could actually talk to one another—which is why those who tuned into the Finals saw Obama clearly , if oddly , giving a speech to Paul Pierce , Kareem Abdul-Jabbar , Clyde Drexler , and other Hall of Famers .
His hands were stiffly punctuating his words , in a very familiar gesture .
He was , apparently , talking about the first-time election poll workers who were also in ( virtual ) attendance .
( He later posted the speech on his Instagram page @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to basketball deepened in 2020 .
After a wildcat strike by the Milwaukee Bucks , in August , led the league to halt play , and an emotional meeting of all the players in the bubble appeared to put the season on the brink of cancellation , LeBron James , Chris Paul , and a small group of other players called up Obama and asked him for advice .
His counsel was to use the moment as leverage , and to make a plan .
Led by James , who had already begun @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , focussed on voting rights , the players pushed the franchise owners to offer the stadiums that the teams owned as polling places .
At the time , there was something a little cautious-seeming about that decision , after the incredible jolt of the strike , especially considering the principled voices of some of the younger players—and the business activities and political relationships of some of the owners , which were at cross purposes with the players ’ efforts .
It seemed particularly constrained by comparison to the W.N.B.A.
, whose players helped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Senator Kelly Loeffler , a fervid Trump supporter and part-owner of the Atlanta Dream .
But , in the end , more than forty thousand people voted in the Atlanta Hawks ’ State Farm Arena alone , and Biden won Georgia by twelve thousand five hundred votes .
More Than A Vote also recruited over forty thousand poll workers .
This was a year that roiled sports , but it was a year in which athletes reckoned with the world , too .
When Marvin Yonamine was seven years old , in 1971 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a small town on the west coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu , and went to Oregon State University , in Corvallis , to get his master ’ s degree .
Marvin and his mother visited him that December .
It was Yonamine ’ s first trip to the mainland United States , and his first time on an airplane .
In Corvallis , he saw his first apple tree .
He saw Christmas trees , Douglas firs , growing from the ground .
He watched the Oregon State men ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ To the Hawaiian kid , Corvallis was paradise .
When it was time for him to go to college , a decade later , Yonamine knew he “ wanted to get off the rock for a few years , ” and he knew where he wanted to go .
At Oregon State , he met another Hawaiian student , who would become his wife .
He also developed a passion for Oregon State football , though it didn ’ t love him back .
The Beavers hadn ’ t finished a season with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than a decade earlier .
Yonamine promised friends that after the losing-record streak ended , he would wear an Oregon State shirt every day .

If I had to pick a single moment when the world as I knew it went on indefinite hiatus, I would choose shortly after eight p.m., on March 11th, when Donnie Strack, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s vice-president of human and player performance, sprinted onto the court where his team was about to play and stopped the officials from beginning their game against the Utah Jazz. Strack was delivering the news that the Jazz center Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Players were pulled off the court. A half an hour later, fans were told that the game had been postponed, and that they had to leave the arena. They have yet to come back. The N.B.A. season was suspended an hour later, and then much of modern life was, too.
Sports did return, sort of. Where I was living, in Boston, TD Garden, the home of the Celtics, was quiet. The basketball court next to my apartment had its rims removed, and the gate was locked. Instead, we watched viral videos of professional baseball players in their backyards, breaking windows with errant throws. We looked at pictures of a triathlete training in an inflatable pool, and of a hurdler in a hallway. The N.F.L. draft happened on Zoom. I watched highlights of Scottie Pippen, and played the fans’ game of arguing about greatness. Hunkered at home, up at dawn, I became a fan of the N.C. Dinos, of the Korea Baseball Organization—for a few days. There was baseball in Taiwan and soccer in Germany, places where the virus was relatively under control.
The Rakuten Monkeys, in Taiwan, were cheered on by mannequins in jerseys and cardboard cutouts of “fans,” some with emojis for eyes. Borussia Mönchengladbach, a team in Germany’s Bundesliga, began using cardboard cutouts, too, after a German filmmaker helped set up a program to populate the stands: with the team’s permission, he charged fans around twenty dollars apiece to install cutouts with their portraits on them around the stadium. He expected a couple thousand orders to come in. More than fifteen thousand did.
When sports resumed in the United States, during the summer, some leagues and teams sold tickets, much to epidemiologists’ chagrin. Others covered the empty seats, or left them empty. Still other teams embraced the surreal quality of our recent existence and sold tickets to cardboard likenesses. As the year closes, I’ve been thinking about the cutouts I’ll remember, and of the efforts that people made to simulate communion when the usual community provided by sports wasn’t safely attainable. There was something hopeful in them—a mix of silliness, and humility, and the sense of making-do.
A Young Tom Hanks
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In early May, Dave Kaval, the president of the Oakland Athletics, received a tweet from an A’s fan, showing a shot of a Borussia Mönchengladbach game. “I wrote back almost immediately saying what a cool idea,” Kaval told me recently. Faced with the prospect of a Major League Baseball season beginning with an empty stadium, Kaval put together a group to start sourcing and sizing cutouts.
Prices for “tickets” started at forty-nine dollars, with prices going up to a hundred and twenty-nine dollars for a spot in the Foul Ball Zone. (If a foul hit a cutout, the fan received the ball in the mail.) “I was thinking maybe a thousand” people would buy one, Kaval said. More than ten thousand fans did. A portion of the proceeds went to local charities.
Matt Olsen, the team’s first basemen, had more than twenty family members down the first baseline. There was a visitors’ section. Perhaps the most unexpected cutout was of Tom Hanks—as a peanut vendor, a job he’d held in Oakland as a teen-ager. Hanks got in touch with Kaval and ultimately sent him an iPhone shot of an old yearbook photo. He even recorded a clip of himself hawking hot dogs, which aired over the loudspeakers during the game.
The Field of Dreams


newyorker--2020-12-22--Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, December 22nd

Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, December 22nd

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newyorker--2020-12-24--Can Wall Street’s Heaviest Hitter Step Up to the Plate on Climate Change?

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To continue the baseball analogy , BlackRock finally stepped up to the climate plate this year .
Larry Fink , the C.E.O.
, focussed his annual letter to investors on global warming , promising that henceforth sustainability would be at the heart of investment decisions .
For that stand , Fink was recently named the first Institutional Investor of the Year—by Institutional Investor magazine .
This encomium seems a little like awarding the season ’ s M.V.P .
during spring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ announces his plan to bat .400 .
In point of fact , BlackRock mostly whiffed on climate last year : the activist group Majority Action reports that , during proxy season , when BlackRock ’ s votes would have made a real difference , the firm voted to elect ninety-nine per cent of the directors proposed for boards at energy companies and utilities , even if the companies had made no serious climate commitments .
The group also highlights that BlackRock supported just three of thirty-six “ climate-critical resolutions ” put to shareholders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might have curbed JPMorgan Chase ’ s lending to the fossil-fuel industry , or Duke Energy ’ s lobbying efforts .
In half these cases , if BlackRock and its smaller competitor Vanguard had voted with the planet in mind , the resolutions would have passed .
Fink didn ’ t bat .400 , in other words—he batted below .100 .
But winter is for the hot-stove league , the season when we dream of the glories ahead , and so BlackRock is promising to actually do some damage this year .
Earlier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supporting investor resolutions will play an “ increasingly important role in our stewardship efforts around sustainability.
” Sandy Boss , the firm ’ s newly named head of investment stewardship , explained that , traditionally , BlackRock has given companies the “ benefit of the doubt ” regarding steps to slow global warming but there is a “ sense of urgency now.
” ( Another new report from Majority Action , this one in collaboration with the Service Employees International Union , shows that BlackRock has been similarly laggard on issues of racial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doubtless comes from the new record global temperature that 2020 seems all but certain to set—but it surely also reflects the concerted campaigns by activists to force the investment giant to change its ways .
BlackRock ’ s Big Problem , a network of organizations at the forefront of that effort , released a guardedly positive statement in response to Boss ’ s pledges , saying , “ We are optimistic that this could potentially be the start of a much more productive and ambitious engagement strategy that results in real-world impacts—but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Some of those next steps may be spurred by Washington , where BlackRock alums are populating the incoming Administration .
Environmental groups ( including , full disclosure , 350.org , which I helped found ) issued a forthright and useful challenge last week to BlackRock ’ s former director of sustainable investing , Brian Deese , who will be Biden ’ s chief economic aide .
It called on Deese to make “ regulation of the financial industry ’ s contributions to the climate crisis and the related impacts on frontline communities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Biden Administration—even if it goes against the interests of your former employer.
” ( Further full disclosure—thanks to my occasional occupation as a Methodist Sunday-school teacher , I ’ ve known Deese and his wife for decades . )
Indeed , there ’ s much that the Fed , the Treasury , the Securities and Exchange Commission , and other regulators can do to spur the clean-energy revolution .
But the groups in this fight also promise to keep a close eye on Wall Street : it ’ s not just BlackRock @ @ @ @ @ @ @ count but , even more , the firm ’ s continued inclusion of fossil-fuel companies in the index funds where its passive-investment clients park their money .
That ’ s the real ballgame : the world ’ s largest collection of money continues to behave as if the corporations rapidly destroying the planet are normal players .
It ’ s time to scratch Exxon and their ilk from the lineup .
An alternative—that will get more attention if these companies insist on playing the game by the old rules—is to break up the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Renée Lertzman is a psychologist who , for many years , has been studying the stress that comes from dealing with the fear , and the effects , of climate change .
Recently , she founded Project InsideOut , a Web site that serves as a “ hub to bring more emotional intelligence into our climate activism.
” Among other things , it lets you explore the “ three As—anxiety , ambivalence , and aspiration.
” We ’ re living through a year of almost unimaginable stress and anxiety , against a backdrop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ really equipped to deal with conditions like this ?
What should we be telling ourselves right about now ?
Humans are designed for adapting and responding to unimaginable conditions with creativity , ingenuity , tenacity , and imagination .
That said , the very conditions of stress , anxiety , and existential threats can make it very hard to access these capacities , because we also tend to shut down , tune out , flee , and numb when we feel overwhelmed or powerless .
This is the paradox of the moment .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that , if we are feeling anxious and stressed , it ’ s normal , and that the most powerful thing we can do is to talk openly and honestly with others about our experiences , what we love and care about .
And what we can do , together , to heal , repair and create new conditions .
Explain what ’ s happening at Project InsideOut .
What would it look like to have a more “ emotionally intelligent ” climate movement ?
Project InsideOut was created to help those working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a new , more inclusive approach to engaging people on these existential threats .
It is about meeting our crises with as much compassion and “ attunement ” as possible .
This highly practical , applied approach is grounded in evidence-based research and best practices in emotional intelligence , trauma studies , social sciences , public-health sectors , and interpersonal neurobiology .
A more “ emotionally intelligent ” climate movement would look like training people to have better conversations , building bridges , being humble , having curiosity about the “ other side @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for people to have their own responses and reactions , and showing up as guides and conveners of conversations—not as educators , cheerleaders , or righteous moralizers , which tends to shut people down .
An emotionally intelligent approach to climate leadership is one that openly acknowledges the complexity , the nuance , the pain—and then says , “ You are needed , the time is now , and let ’ s get on with it , together.
” A new study shows that ninety-seven per cent of young people are concerned about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ damaged as ours .
How do we go on with normal life passages even amid this kind of chaos ?
It ’ s incredibly vital that we acknowledge the radical and profound moment we are living through , openly and socially .
We need to be talking about these choices—how we are wrestling with life passages and making meaning of what it is to be human today .
And this can mean , for some , a choice to not bring new life into this world right now .
I think what we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is how we can create a way of living that continues to celebrate what it is to be human in this unfathomable world , full of intricate mysteries , tragedies , frailty , and extremes .
A way of living that affirms that we are part of this web , and that , as long as we are breathing and here , we have a role to play , and are all needed right now to be co-creating our new story .
A human story that is about regenerative practice , love , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last chance before Christmas to urge you to give someone a gift subscription to The New Yorker .
One reason is that the magazine ’ s financial health underwrites this free newsletter , which has a lot of work to do in the year ahead , as climate emerges as the organizing principle of the new Administration .
But a better reason is that it ’ s the best English-language magazine there is , and , indeed , ever was .
Its writers are perceptive , engaged , and stunningly good at their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carry on a tradition of care and attention to detail that is at odds with common practice across much of the infosphere .
But all that earnest hard work can happen only because enough readers have chosen to be part of this community .
You really should join in .
Thank you , and happy holidays .
Speaking of remarkable writing and reporting , the data journalists at the Times , which has featured superlative climate coverage in 2020 , produced a profile last week of two children in New Delhi .
Both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hideous air pollution , but one , a middle-class girl , has air purifiers at home and attends a school that keeps her exposure somewhat limited ; the other , a boy who lives in a hut and goes to an open-air school under a highway overpass , essentially never exits the cloud of smoke .
This reporting could—and should—be repeated in cities around the world , constantly reminding us that there ’ s no way to separate environmentalism from larger questions of justice .

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The year is coming to an end, and all eyes are trained on D.C., as Joe Biden prepares to helm a venerable enterprise with a four-trillion-dollar budget. On the climate front, Biden’s team, which he announced last week, with Gina McCarthy, Deb Haaland, Jennifer Granholm, and John Kerry at the forefront, seems highly credible—a hundred-and-eighty-degree shift from the coterie of coal lobbyists and oil-industry operatives that have decorated the current Administration. Biden’s group has a real shot at getting Washington squarely in the global-warming fight. But, although that federal effort will doubtless occupy much of our attention in the year ahead, let’s close out 2020 by examining the de-facto government based on Wall Street. Its obvious head is BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which is—just for purposes of scale—an eight-trillion-dollar enterprise, and the largest shareholder in almost every company that matters to the future of the Earth. BlackRock is a monetary heavy hitter.
To continue the baseball analogy, BlackRock finally stepped up to the climate plate this year. Larry Fink, the C.E.O., focussed his annual letter to investors on global warming, promising that henceforth sustainability would be at the heart of investment decisions. For that stand, Fink was recently named the first Institutional Investor of the Year—by Institutional Investor magazine. This encomium seems a little like awarding the season’s M.V.P. during spring training, simply because an intrepid player announces his plan to bat .400. In point of fact, BlackRock mostly whiffed on climate last year: the activist group Majority Action reports that, during proxy season, when BlackRock’s votes would have made a real difference, the firm voted to elect ninety-nine per cent of the directors proposed for boards at energy companies and utilities, even if the companies had made no serious climate commitments. The group also highlights that BlackRock supported just three of thirty-six “climate-critical resolutions” put to shareholders at S. & P. 500 companies—resolutions that might have curbed JPMorgan Chase’s lending to the fossil-fuel industry, or Duke Energy’s lobbying efforts. In half these cases, if BlackRock and its smaller competitor Vanguard had voted with the planet in mind, the resolutions would have passed. Fink didn’t bat .400, in other words—he batted below .100.
But winter is for the hot-stove league, the season when we dream of the glories ahead, and so BlackRock is promising to actually do some damage this year. Earlier this month, the company said that supporting investor resolutions will play an “increasingly important role in our stewardship efforts around sustainability.” Sandy Boss, the firm’s newly named head of investment stewardship, explained that, traditionally, BlackRock has given companies the “benefit of the doubt” regarding steps to slow global warming but there is a “sense of urgency now.” (Another new report from Majority Action, this one in collaboration with the Service Employees International Union, shows that BlackRock has been similarly laggard on issues of racial justice.) Some of that urgency doubtless comes from the new record global temperature that 2020 seems all but certain to set—but it surely also reflects the concerted campaigns by activists to force the investment giant to change its ways. BlackRock’s Big Problem, a network of organizations at the forefront of that effort, released a guardedly positive statement in response to Boss’s pledges, saying, “We are optimistic that this could potentially be the start of a much more productive and ambitious engagement strategy that results in real-world impacts—but it all depends on what BlackRock does next.”
Some of those next steps may be spurred by Washington, where BlackRock alums are populating the incoming Administration. Environmental groups (including, full disclosure, 350.org, which I helped found) issued a forthright and useful challenge last week to BlackRock’s former director of sustainable investing, Brian Deese, who will be Biden’s chief economic aide. It called on Deese to make “regulation of the financial industry’s contributions to the climate crisis and the related impacts on frontline communities a top priority for your role in the Biden Administration—even if it goes against the interests of your former employer.” (Further full disclosure—thanks to my occasional occupation as a Methodist Sunday-school teacher, I’ve known Deese and his wife for decades.) Indeed, there’s much that the Fed, the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other regulators can do to spur the clean-energy revolution.
But the groups in this fight also promise to keep a close eye on Wall Street: it’s not just BlackRock’s votes at shareholder meetings that count but, even more, the firm’s continued inclusion of fossil-fuel companies in the index funds where its passive-investment clients park their money. That’s the real ballgame: the world’s largest collection of money continues to behave as if the corporations rapidly destroying the planet are normal players. It’s time to scratch Exxon and their ilk from the lineup. An alternative—that will get more attention if these companies insist on playing the game by the old rules—is to break up the Yankees, I mean, BlackRock.
Passing the Mic
Renée Lertzman is a psychologist who, for many years, has been studying the stress that comes from dealing with the fear, and the effects, of climate change. Recently, she founded Project InsideOut, a Web site that serves as a “hub to bring more emotional intelligence into our climate activism.” Among other things, it lets you explore the “three As—anxiety, ambivalence, and aspiration.”
We’re living through a year of almost unimaginable stress and anxiety, against a backdrop of ongoing climate chaos. Are humans really equipped to deal with conditions like this? What should we be telling ourselves right about now?
Humans are designed for adapting and responding to unimaginable conditions with creativity, ingenuity, tenacity, and imagination. That said, the very conditions of stress, anxiety, and existential threats can make it very hard to access these capacities, because we also tend to shut down, tune out, flee, and numb when we feel overwhelmed or powerless. This is the paradox of the moment. We should be telling ourselves right now that, if we are feeling anxious and stressed, it’s normal, and that the most powerful thing we can do is to talk openly and honestly with others about our experiences, what we love and care about. And what we can do, together, to heal, repair and create new conditions.
Explain what’s happening at Project InsideOut. What would it look like to have a more “emotionally intelligent” climate movement?
Project InsideOut was created to help those working on climate change and ecological threats take a new, more inclusive approach to engaging people on these existential threats. It is about meeting our crises with as much compassion and “attunement” as possible. This highly practical, applied approach is grounded in evidence-based research and best practices in emotional intelligence, trauma studies, social sciences, public-health sectors, and interpersonal neurobiology. A more “emotionally intelligent” climate movement would look like training people to have better conversations, building bridges, being humble, having curiosity about the “other side,” asking questions, holding space for people to have their own responses and reactions, and showing up as guides and conveners of conversations—not as educators, cheerleaders, or righteous moralizers, which tends to shut people down. An emotionally intelligent approach to climate leadership is one that openly acknowledges the complexity, the nuance, the pain—and then says, “You are needed, the time is now, and let’s get on with it, together.”
A new study shows that ninety-seven per cent of young people are concerned about bringing a baby into a world as damaged as ours. How do we go on with normal life passages even amid this kind of chaos?
It’s incredibly vital that we acknowledge the radical and profound moment we are living through, openly and socially. We need to be talking about these choices—how we are wrestling with life passages and making meaning of what it is to be human today. And this can mean, for some, a choice to not bring new life into this world right now. I think what we need to be figuring out right now is how we can create a way of living that continues to celebrate what it is to be human in this unfathomable world, full of intricate mysteries, tragedies, frailty, and extremes. A way of living that affirms that we are part of this web, and that, as long as we are breathing and here, we have a role to play, and are all needed right now to be co-creating our new story. A human story that is about regenerative practice, love, compassion, kindness.
Climate School
This is my last chance before Christmas to urge you to give someone a gift subscription to The New Yorker. One reason is that the magazine’s financial health underwrites this free newsletter, which has a lot of work to do in the year ahead, as climate emerges as the organizing principle of the new Administration. But a better reason is that it’s the best English-language magazine there is, and, indeed, ever was. Its writers are perceptive, engaged, and stunningly good at their craft; the editors and fact checkers carry on a tradition of care and attention to detail that is at odds with common practice across much of the infosphere. But all that earnest hard work can happen only because enough readers have chosen to be part of this community. You really should join in. Thank you, and happy holidays.


newyorker--2020-12-23--Twenty-five of the Best Films on Amazon Prime

Because of the scant financial prospects during a time of scant theatrical attendance , the year-end crop of movies being positioned for the Oscars and other awards ( alongside the alternative batch of holiday blockbusters ) is thinner than usual .
But there are still some wonderfully accomplished and delightfully surprising new movies : foremost , “ Sylvie ’ s Love , ” which is playing not in theatres but on Amazon Prime .
Even before the pandemic , that service , like others , had taken on a major role as a producer and distributor of movies that studios @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t afford ; similarly , it also plays a significant role as a virtual repertory house .
Though the actual repertory houses ( notably , Film at Lincoln Center , Film Forum , and Metrograph ) have continued to play leading roles in the release ( digital , for the time being ) of classic rediscoveries and restorations , Amazon and other services are the video store in the sky .
After I pulled together a list of movies streaming on Amazon earlier this year , I heard from some readers that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the spirit of the site ’ s habitual users : I didn ’ t distinguish between movies that required a fee ( or an additional membership ) for viewing and those that were on Prime , available for free to subscribers .
Though most of the fees in question are small , they pose a psychological hurdle—they demand a commitment , or a leap of faith in the list-maker ’ s acumen , that a no-extra-charge viewing wards off .
The psychology of online free-ness has had a devastating effect on the ability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from their music , and it also threatens the livelihoods of filmmakers and distributors ( because box-office receipts are reported transparently , and usually far exceed the pass-through of online viewing ) .
The success of the major streaming sites emerges from this disproportion : a one-month subscription costs less than a single movie ticket , and many viewers are willing to accept barely acceptable movies that then come to them without additional charges .
This list is offered as an enthusiastic alternative to the good-enough—a batch of films ( and there are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that are available to subscribers for free and that merit a place among the best of any year .
Gordon Parks , Jr.—best known for “ Super Fly ” —directed this teeming and turbulent New York teen romance between Aaron ( Kevin Hooks ) , who ’ s Black , and Angela ( Irene Cara ) , who ’ s Puerto Rican , with passionate attention to the city ’ s pleasures and pressures .
Detailed subplots involving Aaron ’ s embittered father , Ike ( Moses Gunn ) , a former star @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) , a pimp and drug dealer , spotlight the dangers and the discouragements that the protagonists , growing up in the ghetto , confront .
In his first film as a director , Jerry Lewis also stars in the title role of a uniformed service employee at the Fontainebleau Hotel , in Miami Beach .
His mishaps and misadventures at work give rise to outlandish incongruities and uproariously mighty calamities ; Lewis ’ s directorial inventiveness and precision ( as well as his self-deprecating self-depiction ) channel the inspirations of the great @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hip-hop musical is a drama based on a comedy—a loose adaptation of Aristophanes ’ “ Lysistrata , ” it ’ s set in the Black community of Chicago ’ s South Side , and involves a group of women who go on a sex strike to force men to give up their guns .
The action ranges far into politics and psychology , exposing the systemic racism and the warped masculinity that lead to violence .
Howard Hawks was fired toward the end of filming this rowdy 1936 adventure romance for changing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a novel by Edna Ferber and reflecting his personal family history—is very much his own , with its sexually tangled , multigenerational love story involving a logging tycoon ( Edward Arnold ) who yearns for but can ’ t marry a saloon waitress ( Frances Farmer ) and , decades later , falls in love with the woman ’ s daughter ( also played by Farmer ) .
Walter Brennan brings antic humor and tender poignancy to the role of the tycoon ’ s longtime friend .
The civil war in Chad is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political drama—the first feature directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun—about a young man who , while seeking revenge against the ex-soldier who killed his father , becomes a virtual member of his family and a part of a new community .
With a discerning eye for detail , Haroun depicts the moral and physical toll of endemic and unredressed violence .
This historical drama , from 2003 , is based on the true story of Black residents of a Louisiana town who , in 1965 , during their struggle for civil rights , took up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inspired others throughout the South to do so .
It stars Forest Whitaker and Ossie Davis , and it ’ s directed by Bill Duke , who centers the conflict on the effort to desegregate a factory that ’ s the town ’ s largest employer .
With scenes involving legal action by the federal government and judicial exposure of the Klan ’ s infiltration of the town ’ s police force , the movie suggests the crucial power—and subsequent failure—of government in civil-rights enforcement .
Mumblecore peers into the abyss of middle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but dark-themed drama , about a couple ( Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt ) who borrow a house for a sort-of staycation and get caught in an undercurrent of sex and violence .
The teeming cast of deftly improvising stars also includes Anna Kendrick , Melanie Lynskey , Brie Larson , Orlando Bloom , Judith Light , and Sam Elliott .
The Coen brothers ’ period fantasy , about an early-nineteen-sixties folksinger caught in the whiplash of pop-music history and its odd political implications , is one of their most heartfelt and emotionally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a melancholy showcase in the title role and lovingly re-creates the era ’ s conflicts and idiosyncrasies .
The basketball star Wilt Chamberlain , who revolutionized the game , is the subject of this passionately detailed historical drama , about his years at the University of Kansas , in the mid-nineteen-fifties , when he was encouraged by local leaders of the Black community to leverage his fame for the pursuit of justice .
Kevin Willmott wrote and directed the film with a keen focus on university politics involving the coaching staff , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they reflect national politics and larger societal trends .
“ Jeannette : The Childhood of Joan of Arc ” This freewheeling bio-pic of France ’ s sainted heroine , directed by Bruno Dumont , is a highly choreographed rock opera , filmed on rustic location , in which two children share the lead role .
Dumont boldly risks ( but never falls into ) absurdity in pursuit of astonishment ; martial valor , religious ecstasy , and naïve faith fuse in the candid performances and his audacious vision .
This 1954 Western , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the greatest and most original of all movie performances—by Joan Crawford , as a fiercely independent saloon owner , and Sterling Hayden , as the laconic and tormented gunman who helps her fight predatory businesspeople .
( The co-star Mercedes McCambridge offers an additional surge of female power as Crawford ’ s bitter adversary . )
William Wyler ’ s last film , from 1970 , is a ferocious political drama , set in a post-Jim Crow South that in many ways resembles its segregationist past .
It combines the story of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home town , in Tennessee , planning to kill a white police officer who ’ d brutalized him a dozen years earlier , with the tale of a wealthy Black man who hires a white attorney to represent him in a divorce proceeding—because his wife , a Black woman , is having an affair with a white man .
The elaborately decorative style of this sixties-set horror melodrama , written and directed by Anna Biller—who also made the costumes and sets by hand—gives Hollywood conventions a philosophical twist .
It does the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ romantic Wiccan pursues relationships with men whom she disposes of when they disappoint her .
The tweaks and inflections of genre and tone extend to the nuts and bolts of a police investigation and the fancy of a Renaissance fair .
Elaine May ’ s third feature is a rowdy and violent , outrageously funny yet tautly tragic crime story about a low-level gangster ( John Cassavetes ) who summons his best friend ( Peter Falk ) , another mobster , to help him elude a contract killer .
The byways of their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grew up , evoke her cinematic X-ray of male-centered dramas of sentimental loyalty—and reveal their misogyny .
Christina Crawford ’ s memoir about her horrific childhood as the daughter of Joan Crawford is adapted by the director Frank Perry ( who ’ s also part of a quartet of screenwriters ) into one of the finest bio-pics of a Hollywood luminary .
The drama , from 1981 , never shows the actress ( played by Faye Dunaway ) in any of her iconic roles ; rather , it suggests that her onscreen furies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ private life .
Charles Burnett ’ s 1996 drama , set on a Southern plantation in the eighteen-twenties and thirties , is centered on an enslaved Black man who takes terrifying risks to teach other enslaved people there to read and write .
Burnett depicts the horrors of slavery while offering an analytical view of its embedded place in American institutions .
( The revolt led by Nat Turner , whose life and legacy are the subject of a great documentary by Burnett , is present in the drama as a crucial subplot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Davies ’ s bio-pic of Emily Dickinson , whose life is presented as a sort of screwball tragedy—a lacerating satire on narrow New England mores that stifle her public life in advance of her agonizing and early death .
Davies ’ s writing and direction , with its heights of style and feeling , make this one of the few movies about a writer that captures the creative power at the heart of the drama .
In Martin Scorsese ’ s 1980 bio-pic about the boxer Jake LaMotta ( played with terrifying energy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ violence inflicted by LaMotta outside the ring is only a small part of the destructive and self-destructive furies that ruin his career and his life .
With its depiction of a Mafia-dominated sport and the boxer ’ s thrashing struggle to stay out of the Mob ’ s clutches , Scorsese merges his portrait of one tormented soul with the vast hydra of social pathology that more overtly dominates such masterworks as “ Goodfellas ” and “ The Irishman .
”

Because of the scant financial prospects during a time of scant theatrical attendance, the year-end crop of movies being positioned for the Oscars and other awards (alongside the alternative batch of holiday blockbusters) is thinner than usual. But there are still some wonderfully accomplished and delightfully surprising new movies: foremost, “Sylvie’s Love,” which is playing not in theatres but on Amazon Prime. Even before the pandemic, that service, like others, had taken on a major role as a producer and distributor of movies that studios wouldn’t touch and independents couldn’t afford; similarly, it also plays a significant role as a virtual repertory house. Though the actual repertory houses (notably, Film at Lincoln Center, Film Forum, and Metrograph) have continued to play leading roles in the release (digital, for the time being) of classic rediscoveries and restorations, Amazon and other services are the video store in the sky.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
After I pulled together a list of movies streaming on Amazon earlier this year, I heard from some readers that I didn’t approach it in the spirit of the site’s habitual users: I didn’t distinguish between movies that required a fee (or an additional membership) for viewing and those that were on Prime, available for free to subscribers. Though most of the fees in question are small, they pose a psychological hurdle—they demand a commitment, or a leap of faith in the list-maker’s acumen, that a no-extra-charge viewing wards off. The psychology of online free-ness has had a devastating effect on the ability of recording artists to make a living from their music, and it also threatens the livelihoods of filmmakers and distributors (because box-office receipts are reported transparently, and usually far exceed the pass-through of online viewing). The success of the major streaming sites emerges from this disproportion: a one-month subscription costs less than a single movie ticket, and many viewers are willing to accept barely acceptable movies that then come to them without additional charges. This list is offered as an enthusiastic alternative to the good-enough—a batch of films (and there are many more to be found there) that are available to subscribers for free and that merit a place among the best of any year.
“Aaron Loves Angela”
Gordon Parks, Jr.—best known for “Super Fly”—directed this teeming and turbulent New York teen romance between Aaron (Kevin Hooks), who’s Black, and Angela (Irene Cara), who’s Puerto Rican, with passionate attention to the city’s pleasures and pressures. Detailed subplots involving Aaron’s embittered father, Ike (Moses Gunn), a former star athlete, and Beau (Robert Hooks), a pimp and drug dealer, spotlight the dangers and the discouragements that the protagonists, growing up in the ghetto, confront.
“The Bellboy”
In his first film as a director, Jerry Lewis also stars in the title role of a uniformed service employee at the Fontainebleau Hotel, in Miami Beach. His mishaps and misadventures at work give rise to outlandish incongruities and uproariously mighty calamities; Lewis’s directorial inventiveness and precision (as well as his self-deprecating self-depiction) channel the inspirations of the great silent comedies.
“Chi-Raq”
Photograph from Amazon Studios / Kobal / Shutterstock
Spike Lee’s hip-hop musical is a drama based on a comedy—a loose adaptation of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” it’s set in the Black community of Chicago’s South Side, and involves a group of women who go on a sex strike to force men to give up their guns. The action ranges far into politics and psychology, exposing the systemic racism and the warped masculinity that lead to violence.
“Come and Get It”
Howard Hawks was fired toward the end of filming this rowdy 1936 adventure romance for changing the script, but the resulting movie—based on a novel by Edna Ferber and reflecting his personal family history—is very much his own, with its sexually tangled, multigenerational love story involving a logging tycoon (Edward Arnold) who yearns for but can’t marry a saloon waitress (Frances Farmer) and, decades later, falls in love with the woman’s daughter (also played by Farmer). Walter Brennan brings antic humor and tender poignancy to the role of the tycoon’s longtime friend.
“Daratt”
The civil war in Chad is the backdrop for this tense psychological and political drama—the first feature directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun—about a young man who, while seeking revenge against the ex-soldier who killed his father, becomes a virtual member of his family and a part of a new community. With a discerning eye for detail, Haroun depicts the moral and physical toll of endemic and unredressed violence.
“Deacons for Defense”
This historical drama, from 2003, is based on the true story of Black residents of a Louisiana town who, in 1965, during their struggle for civil rights, took up arms to resist the Ku Klux Klan—and inspired others throughout the South to do so. It stars Forest Whitaker and Ossie Davis, and it’s directed by Bill Duke, who centers the conflict on the effort to desegregate a factory that’s the town’s largest employer. With scenes involving legal action by the federal government and judicial exposure of the Klan’s infiltration of the town’s police force, the movie suggests the crucial power—and subsequent failure—of government in civil-rights enforcement.
“Digging for Fire”
Mumblecore peers into the abyss of middle age in Joe Swanberg’s brisk-toned but dark-themed drama, about a couple (Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt) who borrow a house for a sort-of staycation and get caught in an undercurrent of sex and violence. The teeming cast of deftly improvising stars also includes Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, Brie Larson, Orlando Bloom, Judith Light, and Sam Elliott.
“Inside Llewyn Davis”
The Coen brothers’ period fantasy, about an early-nineteen-sixties folksinger caught in the whiplash of pop-music history and its odd political implications, is one of their most heartfelt and emotionally sophisticated films; it offers Oscar Isaac a melancholy showcase in the title role and lovingly re-creates the era’s conflicts and idiosyncrasies.
“Jayhawkers”
The basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, who revolutionized the game, is the subject of this passionately detailed historical drama, about his years at the University of Kansas, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, when he was encouraged by local leaders of the Black community to leverage his fame for the pursuit of justice. Kevin Willmott wrote and directed the film with a keen focus on university politics involving the coaching staff, the administration, and the curriculum, as they reflect national politics and larger societal trends.
“Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc”
This freewheeling bio-pic of France’s sainted heroine, directed by Bruno Dumont, is a highly choreographed rock opera, filmed on rustic location, in which two children share the lead role. Dumont boldly risks (but never falls into) absurdity in pursuit of astonishment; martial valor, religious ecstasy, and naïve faith fuse in the candid performances and his audacious vision.
“Johnny Guitar”
This 1954 Western, directed by Nicholas Ray, features two of the greatest and most original of all movie performances—by Joan Crawford, as a fiercely independent saloon owner, and Sterling Hayden, as the laconic and tormented gunman who helps her fight predatory businesspeople. (The co-star Mercedes McCambridge offers an additional surge of female power as Crawford’s bitter adversary.)
“The Liberation of L. B. Jones”
Photograph from Alamy
William Wyler’s last film, from 1970, is a ferocious political drama, set in a post-Jim Crow South that in many ways resembles its segregationist past. It combines the story of a Black man who returns to his home town, in Tennessee, planning to kill a white police officer who’d brutalized him a dozen years earlier, with the tale of a wealthy Black man who hires a white attorney to represent him in a divorce proceeding—because his wife, a Black woman, is having an affair with a white man.
“The Love Witch”
The elaborately decorative style of this sixties-set horror melodrama, written and directed by Anna Biller—who also made the costumes and sets by hand—gives Hollywood conventions a philosophical twist. It does the same for the story, in which a romantic Wiccan pursues relationships with men whom she disposes of when they disappoint her. The tweaks and inflections of genre and tone extend to the nuts and bolts of a police investigation and the fancy of a Renaissance fair.
“Mikey and Nicky”


newyorker--2020-12-23--Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, December 23rd

Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, December 23rd

“I’m at my work’s virtual holiday party, drinking my fourth virtual white-wine spritzer, staring at my virtual phone, behind a large virtual potted plant.”