good day TOR friends, i hope we are all feeling very #blessed this week by stephen amell's instagram story workouts
Arrow star Stephen Amell made an impressive run when he participated in American Ninja Warrior on Red Nose day, and he's willing to do it again.Amell was a guest at Salt Lake Comic Con over the weekend. During his panel, one fan asked about his American Ninja Warrior run and if he just "let go" ...
It is rare that I read an essay in which each paragraph is better than the paragraph that precedes it, so if you didn’t get a chance to read Caitlin Flanagan’s longread “Beware the Open-Plan Kitchen,”set aside some time.
HGTV depends on the dream that has been with us since the saltboxes of New England and the Spanish bungalows of Southern California and the Leisuramas of Montauk: that if you can just get the right house — the one that looks like your friends’ houses look, only a little bit better — your family will pour into it, like thick cream into a pitcher: smooth, fluid, pleasing. Who could get a divorce in a house with so many lush towels rolled up in the master bathroom? Who could raise a sullen teen when there is a “great room” where the family can gather for nachos and football on the big screen?
That’s just the fifth paragraph in.
The tl;dr is that HGTV has caused at least some of us to expect more out of our houses than they can provide—and pay more than we can afford in the process. But there’s also a long riff on the Property Brothers origin story, a discussion of gender stereotypes as presented in home-renovation shows, and the question of whether our revived enthusiasm for house-flipping will once again lead us into recession.
I can't remember where I saw this, but in all of the Magic School Bus reboot talk someone was like "it should be live action and Tracee Ellis Ross should play Ms Frizzle". and now I can't unsee it because it's so perfect!! Why aren't they doing that!!
Like so many TV stars the week of the Emmys, Miss Tracee had herself quite the number of red carpets to pass through, with the accompanying high number of looks. One thing we love – and that the following sets of pics demonstrate – is that she doesn’t rest on one particular style or aesthetic. She keeps things interesting not only by switching up her styles, but by choosing looks with real oomph to them, even if we don’t always love every little detail.
Tracee Ellis Ross attends the BBC America BAFTA Los Angeles TV Tea Party 2017 in Beverly Hills, California.
But we think we actually do love every little detail of this getup. We think there will not be widespread acceptance of the white pumps, but we think they really finish the look off in an unexpected way. We’re not usually big on fussy details, but we love the sleeve cuffs. The pearl military medals we probably could’ve done without.
Tracee Ellis Ross attends the Variety and Women In Film’s 2017 Pre-Emmy Celebration in West Hollywood, California.
Fun Times Miss Tracee sold separately. It’s got fringe and leopard print in the same garment, which is an indicator that we’re not looking at something demure and low-key. And yet, all things considered, this isn’t really tacky or loud or obnoxious. It’s fun. We don’t love the fringe, but she sure knows what to do with it.
Style Credits: First Look: Ulyana Sergeenko Couture Black Embellished Dress with Belt from the Fall 2017 Collection | Jennifer Fisher Jewelry | Christian Louboutin Shoes Second Look: Michael Kors Collection Animal Print Dress with Fringe Detailing from the Fall 2017 Collection | Neil Lane Jewelry
[Photo Credit: Getty Images, Courtesy of Michael Kors, IMAXTree]
Every once in a while, I discover an extraordinarily special place. And by special I mean hideous. Bergen County, New Jersey is that place. This will not be the first, nor the last time this county will show up on this blog, as its houses and I have a long working relationship ahead of us.
So where to start? I used this house as an example in another post before (can’t remember which one) but I knew from the first time I saw it, that I needed to dive deeper.
Man, where to start. First of all, the exterior of this house appears to be screaming in two different ways: either the two dormers, or the two “sidelight” windows are the eyes, with the door being the agape mouth. With the absurd windows on the front facade, the silly fake quoins, and the pseudo-Palladian elements scattered all over the place, I have a feeling this place is going to go down in McMansionHell history as a Certified Dank™ Legend.
This house (built in 1988 as we will all soon see) has seven bedrooms and six bathrooms, and is currently retailing for almost 3.5 million dollars.
By far, my favorite McMansions are the ones that are like time capsules. You open the obnoxiously large front door and step into the obnoxiously large entryway and are instantly transported into another era.
In this case, that era is 1988.
Front Entryway
My favorite part about the 80s was how they axed all of the environmental reforms made in the 70s while simultaneously obsessing over having as many house plants as possible.
Living Room (1 of 2)
At least piano makers are thankful that their art is being funded by those who buy large instruments as symbols of wealth.
Study
Fake book subjects commonly include: - Business - Law - Classic Literature
Dining Room (1 of 2)
Seriously I don’t think you guys are prepared for what you’re about to see.
This has to be one of the best worst vintage 80s rooms I’ve ever seen.
Dining Room (2 of 2)
Those poor plants, working like slaves for the man.
The Kitchen!
Who thought that orange was a remotely good idea?? Spoilers: it was probs HGTV.
Living Room (2 of 2)
Luckily for the homeowner, many elements from this room (the furniture and wall color) are coming back in style again, as dark green is all the rage this year apparently.
Master Suite (Part 1)
Shocked that the drapes don’t have the same pattern as the wallpaper.
Master Suite (Part 2)
P sure the hyper-femininity of the 80s and early 90s were what led to the creation of the ManCave during the dawn of the 21st century.
Master Bathroom
This bathroom almost looks like it came out of a Robert A.M. Stern coffee table book from the late 80s. Whoever did this interior was a licensed interior designer. I’m pretty sure those vanities are custom.
On to the last room of our tour! (Somehow there weren’t pictures of the other 6 bedrooms or the other 5 baths…)
The Basement
Seriously the mirrored door is hella choice.
Fortunately, our tour ends on a positive note this week, as the rear of this house actually makes some architectural sense:
Rear Exterior
Well folks, I hope you enjoyed that tour as much as I did. I love these time capsule houses - you can learn a lot from studying the design trends of the past; most notably, when they’re coming back.
Stay tuned for this Sunday’s special post, McMansionHell from A to Z (Part Two) and, of course, next week’s dank McMansion!
Like this post? Want to see more like it and get behind the scenes access to everything McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!
Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
throwback to one of the first posts of McMansion Hell
At first I thought "EVEN star trek wouldn't" but then I thought, no, I'm sure I could think of something. TOR, what amazing TNG episode, guest starring Diane Kruger, brought us this amazing costume??
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Ohhhhh, GIRL. Do not ever change, you Teutonic cray:
That is pure Star Trek right there. And while we laugh and point at how over-the-top it is, we find ourselves thinking it might be kind of chic if it didn’t have that twisted bust and exposed belly, no? Granted, that’s the entire design, but the skirt and sleeve look like they could’ve been pieces of a much more fabulous dress.
We don’t mind gold and silver in the same look, but we’re not sure it works here. Then again, we have no idea what would, other than more silver.
Style Credits: Prabal Gurung Titanium Lamé Hand Draped Twist Neck Dress with Asymmetric Long Sleeve, Side Cutout and Covered Button High Slit Detail Prabal Gurung ‘Berlinde’ Gold Metallic Sandal
It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.
The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.
“We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” the conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The New Yorker, speaking of the white working class. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.”
“The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.”
That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.
The Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 2016. According to preelection polling, if you tallied only white voters, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81 in the Electoral College. (Gabriella Demczuk)
Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found that “people living in areas with diminished economic opportunity” were “somewhat more likely to support Trump.” But the researchers also found that voters in their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income ($81,898) than those who did not ($77,046). Those who approved of Trump were “less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time” than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: “The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”
An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income of Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.
Part of Trump’s dominance among whites resulted from his running as a Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. Trump’s share of the white vote was similar to Mitt Romney’s in 2012. But unlike Romney, Trump secured this support by running against his party’s leadership, against accepted campaign orthodoxy, and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identified as white.
The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.
This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far. Like the black working class, the white working class originated in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the 18th century, the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged: The descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class “expressed soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of slavery,” according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. “They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of simply not being mistaken for slaves, or ‘negers’ or ‘negurs.’ ”
Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her “master” was home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a “master” and thus was a “sarvant” but for his basic ignorance of American hierarchy. “None but negers are sarvants,” the maid is reported to have said. In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the “help” (or the “freemen,” or the white workers) and the “servants” (the “negers,” the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon black labor—much as the honor accorded a “virtuous lady” was dependent on the derision directed at a “loose woman.” And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to honor the lady while raping the “whore,” planters and their apologists could claim to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.
And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery intellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites’ labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks’ labor. Fitzhugh attacked white capitalists as “cannibals,” feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white workers were “ ‘slaves without masters;’ the little fish, who were food for all the larger.” Fitzhugh inveighed against a “professional man” who’d “amassed a fortune” by exploiting his fellow whites. But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement. The slaveholder “provided for them, with almost parental affection”—even when the loafing slave “feigned to be unfit for labor.” Fitzhugh proved too explicit—going so far as to argue that white laborers might be better off if enslaved. (“If white slavery be morally wrong,” he wrote, “the Bible cannot be true.”) Nevertheless, the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists—“white slavery”—proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s aristocratic class.
This is by design. Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and not:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.
On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:
I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community … It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white man. We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials. That belongs to the lower race—the descendants of Ham.
Southern intellectuals found a shade of agreement with Northern white reformers who, while not agreeing on slavery, agreed on the nature of the most tragic victim of emerging capitalism. “I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery,” the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued in a letter to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. “This was before I saw that there was white slavery.” Evans was a putative ally of Smith and his fellow abolitionists. But still he asserted that “the landless white” was worse off than the enslaved black, who at least enjoyed “surety of support in sickness and old age.”
Invokers of “white slavery” held that there was nothing unique in the enslavement of blacks when measured against the enslavement of all workers. What evil there was in enslavement resulted from its status as a subsidiary of the broader exploitation better seen among the country’s noble laboring whites. Once the larger problem of white exploitation was solved, the dependent problem of black exploitation could be confronted or perhaps would fade away. Abolitionists focused on slavery were dismissed as “substitutionists” who wished to trade one form of slavery for another. “If I am less troubled concerning the Slavery prevalent in Charleston or New-Orleans,” wrote the reformer Horace Greeley, “it is because I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my first efforts.”
Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating premises—white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else—lived on. This was a matter of rhetoric, not fact. The noble-white-labor archetype did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself, break monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, or bring a decent wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America’s original identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside altogether as the price of even incremental gains for the white masses. It was this juxtaposition that allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the 1930s as someone who would “raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt” and later endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting.
The juxtaposition between the valid and even virtuous interests of the “working class” and the invalid and pathological interests of black Americans was not the province merely of blatant white supremacists like Bilbo. The acclaimed scholar, liberal hero, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his time working for President Richard Nixon, approvingly quoted Nixon’s formulation of the white working class: “A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country. “It is a voice that has been silent too long,” Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.”
The fact of a black president seemed to insult Donald Trump personally. He has made the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. (Gabriella Demczuk)
It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible. The fact was, working-class whites had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863; terrorism could not be neatly separated from the racist animus found in every class of whites. Indeed, in the era of lynching, the daily newspapers often whipped up the fury of the white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in common—white women. But to conceal the breadth of white racism, these racist outbursts were often disregarded or treated not as racism but as the unfortunate side effect of legitimate grievances against capital. By focusing on that sympathetic laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.
When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate, the apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious—that Duke had appealed to the racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegregating—and instead decided that something else was afoot. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. “These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.” By this logic, postwar America—with its booming economy and low unemployment—should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.
But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists that a large swath of Louisiana’s white population thought it was a good idea to send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation’s capital. Nor was it important that blacks in Louisiana had long felt left out. What was important was the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degradation of white workers to the level of “negers.” “A viable left must find a way to differentiate itself strongly from such analysis,” David Roediger, the University of Kansas professor, has written.
That challenge of differentiation has largely been ignored. Instead, an imagined white working class remains central to our politics and to our cultural understanding of those politics, not simply when it comes to addressing broad economic issues but also when it comes to addressing racism. At its most sympathetic, this belief holds that most Americans—regardless of race—are exploited by an unfettered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that afflict the masses of all races; the people who suffer from those patterns more than others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which benefits everyone. “These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,” Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006:
Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.
Obama allowed that “blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”—but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton acknowledged the existence of systemic racism more explicitly than any of her modern Democratic predecessors. She had to—black voters remembered too well the previous Clinton administration, as well as her previous campaign. While her husband’s administration had touted the rising-tide theory of economic growth, it did so while slashing welfare and getting “tough on crime,” a phrase that stood for specific policies but also served as rhetorical bait for white voters. One is tempted to excuse Hillary Clinton from having to answer for the sins of her husband. But in her 2008 campaign, she evoked the old dichotomy between white workers and loafing blacks, claiming to be the representative of “hardworking Americans, white Americans.” By the end of the 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, her advisers were hoping someone would uncover an apocryphal “whitey tape,” in which an angry Michelle Obama was alleged to have used the slur. During Bill Clinton’s presidential-reelection campaign in the mid-1990s, Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed the “super-predator” theory of William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr. This theory cast “inner-city” children of that era as “almost completely unmoralized” and the font of “a new generation of street criminals … the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.” The “baddest generation” did not become super-predators. But by 2016, they were young adults, many of whom judged Hillary Clinton’s newfound consciousness to be lacking.
It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent). And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other social scientists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.
Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that. And though much has been written about the distance between elites and “Real America,” the existence of a class-transcending, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.
Joe Biden, then the vice president, last year:
“They’re all the people I grew up with … And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist.”
Bernie Sanders, senator and former candidate for president, last year:
“I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”
Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, in February of this year:
My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump. I think they’re profoundly wrong, but please don’t dismiss them as hateful bigots.
These claims of origin and fidelity are not merely elite defenses of an aggrieved class but also a sweeping dismissal of the concerns of those who don’t share kinship with white men. “You can’t eat equality,” asserts Joe Biden—a statement worthy of someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy, a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or the deportation of a breadwinner. Within a week of Sanders lambasting Democrats for not speaking to “the people” where he “came from,” he was making an example of a woman who dreamed of representing the people where she came from. Confronted with a young woman who hoped to become the second Latina senator in American history, Sanders responded with a parody of the Clinton campaign: “It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough … One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.” The upshot—attacking one specimen of identity politics after having invoked another—was unfortunate.
The KKK and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, July 8, 2017. Not every Trump voter is a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one. (Gabriella Demczuk)
Other Sanders appearances proved even more alarming. On MSNBC, he attributed Trump’s success, in part, to his willingness to “not be politically correct.” Sanders admitted that Trump had “said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old, same old political rhetoric.” Pressed on the definition of political correctness, Sanders gave an answer Trump surely would have approved of. “What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested,” Sanders explained. “And that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very, very powerful people.”
This definition of political correctness was shocking coming from a politician of the left. But it matched a broader defense of Trump voters. “Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and just deplorable folks,” Sanders said later. “I don’t agree.” This is not exculpatory. Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.
One can, to some extent, understand politicians’ embracing a self-serving identity politics. Candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfortable truths. But journalists have no such excuse. Again and again in the past year, Nicholas Kristof could be found pleading with his fellow liberals not to dismiss his old comrades in the white working class as bigots—even when their bigotry was evidenced in his own reporting. A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, finds Kristof wondering why Trump voters support a president who threatens to cut the programs they depend on. But the problem, according to Kristof ’s interviewees, isn’t Trump’s attack on benefits so much as an attack on their benefits. “There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” one man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a fascinating target is revealed: “Obama phones,” the products of a fevered conspiracy theory that turned a long-standing government program into a scheme through which the then-president gave away free cellphones to undeserving blacks. Kristof doesn’t shift his analysis based on this comment and, aside from a one-sentence fact-check tucked between parentheses, continues on as though it were never said.
Observing a Trump supporter in the act of deploying racism does not much perturb Kristof. That is because his defenses of the innate goodness of Trump voters and of the innate goodness of the white working class are in fact defenses of neither. On the contrary, the white working class functions rhetorically not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.
Mark Lilla’s New York Times essay “The End of Identity Liberalism,” published not long after last year’s election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” which distorted liberalism’s message “and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, he says, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism” of Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era—flying home to Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor would you know that the “pre-identity” liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist “solid South.” The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla’s essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics—the possibility of the first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. “Identity politics … is largely expressive, not persuasive,” Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections—but can lose them.” That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.
White tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers. George Packer’s New Yorker essay “The Unconnected” is a lengthy plea for liberals to focus more on the white working class, a population that “has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban ‘underclass.’ ” Packer believes that these ills, and the Democratic Party’s failure to respond to them, explain much of Trump’s rise. Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers’ views on “elites,” much less their views on racism. He offers no sense of how their views and their relationship to Trump differ from other workers’ and other whites’.
That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people—not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people—working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.
Packer’s essay was published before the election, and so the vote tally was not available. But it should not be surprising that a Republican candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers among white voters, given that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties since the civil-rights era. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia—a state that remained Democratic through the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the level of presidential politics. This relatively recent rightward movement evinces, to Packer, a shift “that couldn’t be attributed just to the politics of race.” This is likely true—the politics of race are, themselves, never attributable “just to the politics of race.” The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism; the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing independence of women; the civil-rights movement can’t be disentangled from the Cold War. Thus, to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is to make an empty statement, one that is small comfort to the people—black, Muslim, immigrant—who live under racism’s boot.
The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Democratic primary there, 95 percent of the voters were white. Twenty percent of those—one in five—openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four years later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison; Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well?
But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer’s essay. There’s no attempt to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy and cosmopolitan elite that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution. Like Kristof, Packer is gentle with his subjects. When a woman “exploded” and told Packer, “I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat French fries or Coca-Cola—no way,” he sees this as a rebellion against “the moral superiority of elites.” In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when the government first began advising Americans on their diets. As recently as 2002, President George W. Bush launched the HealthierUS initiative, urging Americans to exercise and eat healthy food. But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he witnessed had anything to do with the fact that similar advice now came from the country’s first black first lady. Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country “more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember,” a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian’s home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.
The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry. The implications—that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos; that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures—were just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion—the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.
Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of “rising professionals and diversity.” The dismissal is derived from, of all people, Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled the Democratic Party “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as “diversity.” It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”—resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as “diversity” simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.
When Barack Obama came into office, in 2009, he believed that he could work with “sensible” conservatives by embracing aspects of their policy as his own. Instead he found that his very imprimatur made that impossible. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP’s primary goal was not to find common ground but to make Obama a “one-term president.” A health-care plan inspired by Romneycare was, when proposed by Obama, suddenly considered socialist and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations. The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one man. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump’s genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favored nominee of the other.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump bragged in January 2016. This statement should be met with only a modicum of skepticism. Trump has mocked the disabled, withstood multiple accusations of sexual violence (all of which he has denied), fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, personally exposed those lies by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstruction to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump—to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent’s father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and then successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.
January 6, 2017. Republicans applaud after Congress certifies Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. The American tragedy now being wrought will not end with him. (Gabriella Demczuk)
But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evinces this, too. In a recent New Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where “necessary conditions” and an “existing background” were present. In America, that “existing background” was a persistent racism, and the “necessary condition” was a black president. The two related factors hobbled America’s ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a majority of Republican voters doubted that Barack Obama had been born in the United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president. Republican politicians acted accordingly, infamously denying his final Supreme Court nominee a hearing and then, fatefully, refusing to work with the administration to defend the country against the Russian attack. Before the election, Obama found no takers among Republicans for a bipartisan response, and Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.
The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance—and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility—doing a much more effective job than Trump.
It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.
When the Curiosity rover studies soil on Mars, it does it with a little shimmy. Its robotic arm collects a pinch of soil and drops it into the sample-analysis unit in the robot’s belly. The unit vibrates at different frequencies, shaking the powdery sample so it settles down into small cups. There, the unit heats up the soil, causing the grains to release fumes that scientists can study for hints of organic compounds.
In August 2013, NASA decided to use the sample-analysis unit’s vibrations for something a little different. To celebrate the mission’s first successful year on Mars, engineers programmed the unit to vibrate to a musical tune. From inside a Martian crater, millions of miles away from home, Curiosity sang “Happy Birthday” to itself.
The news of Curiosity’s mini-celebration of perhaps the loneliest birthday in the galaxy prompted a deluge of empathy in comment sections around the Internet. “WHEN HUMANS LAND ON MARS, WE BETTER DAMN GIVE THAT ROVER A HUG!!!” one user wrote. The thought of a space robot serenading itself all by its lonesome certainly tugs at the heartstrings.
Curiosity marked its fifth year on Mars last week. (NASA counts the anniversaries in Earth years, which are shorter than Martian years.) But the rover didn’t sing. “The reports of my singing are greatly exaggerated,” the rover’s Twitter account reported, presumably referring to news coverage about its fifth birthday. “I only hummed ‘Happy Birthday’ to myself once, back in 2013.”
Huh. Why, over five years, did Curiosity get only one birthday party?
To find out, I emailed Florence Tan, the deputy chief technologist at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Tan was the electrical lead engineer for Curiosity’s sample-analysis unit, known as SAM.
“The answer to your question will sound rather cold and unfeeling,” her email began.
Oh, no.
“In a nutshell, there is no scientific gain from the rover playing music or singing ‘Happy Birthday’ on Mars,” Tan said. In the battle between song and science, science always wins.
Tan acknowledged that this may be a difficult truth for some. “We earthlings,” as she put it, tend to anthropomorphize robots. Many studies have shown that people can have feelings of attachment and protectiveness toward robots as they would for humans. The more “alive” a robot appears, the more likely people are to react to it in ways usually reserved for living beings. In various scenarios, people have felt empathy for Roombas, dinosaur toys, and bomb-disposal robots. All three are nothing more than boxes of wires, circuits, and sensors, but they exhibit enough autonomy, enough signs of “aliveness,” to trigger emotional responses. Scientists and astronomy fans are currently slogging through a weeks-long public mourning period for the Cassini spacecraft, which will end its mission next month. One planetary scientist recently told me she feels like she should be sipping vodka the day Cassini burns up in Saturn’s atmosphere, in a somber tribute to a brave pioneer.
So it’s no surprise that the idea of a space robot “celebrating” its birthday—the very thing that makes something alive—makes people feel all the feels, even if they know it doesn’t make sense. As one user wrote back in 2013, “It’s literally an inanimate object why am I still crying.”
For Tan, Curiosity isn’t a cute robot, it’s a $2.5 billion national asset. Tan said she and other Curiosity team members are mindful of the purpose of the mission, which is to study Mars. The process of generating and transmitting commands to Curiosity takes weeks of preparation and involves reviews and walk-throughs with various groups. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, I’m ready to send a command, just send an email to somebody,’” Tan said in a phone interview. The rover’s activities are scheduled down to the minute, and SAM requires power to operate. Curiosity runs on a nuclear battery that turns heat into electricity, and it will eventually die.
Tan and Tom Nolan, her husband and fellow Curiosity engineer, came up with the idea of turning SAM’s vibrations into music in 2007 as they worked on the hardware. Nolan quickly built a program and got SAM to “sing” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” In August 2013, as Curiosity’s first anniversary approached, Tan asked Paul Mahaffy, the lead scientist on SAM, if they could get Curiosity to sing “Happy Birthday.” The team tested the commands on an identical version of SAM that resides at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and then transmitted them to the real thing. The tune, which you can listen to here, sounds almost like the humming noises of the animated robot, WALL-E.
If someone had been standing next to Curiosity when it sang “Happy Birthday,” they could probably hear it through their spacesuit, Tan said. But it would be very, very faint. Sound waves need air particles to carry them to our ears, and the lower the atmospheric pressure, the slower they travel. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is 1/100th that of Earth’s, so SAM will sound quieter than its twin back on Earth. We can’t know for sure how Curiosity’s various noises—the crunch of its wheels on terrain, the whirring of the camera atop its long neck—sound on Mars. Unlike NASA’s next class of Mars rovers, Curiosity doesn’t have a microphone.
So, how does Tan feel about Curiosity? Does she see it, like others do, as something other than a machine, as something a little alive?
“No, I’m sorry. I’m a cold-hearted engineer,” she said, laughing. She suspects she knows it too well. “I feel a different thing. I feel a sense of ownership. I don’t feel that it’s alive, but I feel in awe of its capacity and capability.”
But she totally gets why others might experience something more.
“When I watch WALL-E, I definitely feel the same feeling that everybody feels, so I understand,” Tan said. “When WALL-E was all alone ... I watched that movie and I shed a tear.”
It looks like the cover to a fun beach-read of a summer novel or the cover of a videocassette staring back at you from the shelf of a late, lamented Blockbuster Video. Which means “mission accomplished,” we suppose, since Stranger Things is pretty much entirely an homage to those exact two things. You can check out our (mostly complimentary) review of season one, where we talk more about the homages in Stranger Things and how they were handled here.
In case you were wondering, here’s the completely NOT spoiler-filled pitch for season two:
“It’s 1984 and the citizens of Hawkins, Indiana are still reeling from the horrors of the demagorgon and the secrets of Hawkins Lab. Will Byers has been rescued from the Upside Down but a bigger, sinister entity still threatens those who survived.”
Okay, so that doesn’t tell us much. Maybe more stills from the season will give us some clues:
Newp.
But again, this is probably to be expected. We doubt season 2 will be substantially different from season one. The whole point is the loving homage and the good feelings it engenders in the audience. In other words, the whole point? Those kids in those dead-on Ghostbusters costumes. It doesn’t matter what the plot’s going to be. There will be monsters. Adorable ’80s kids will fight them. Millennials and Gen-Xers will eat it all up like a sugary cereal.
Hobby Lobby purchased thousands of ancient artifacts smuggled out of modern-day Iraq via the United Arab Emirates and Israel in 2010 and 2011, attorneys for the Eastern District of New York announced on Wednesday. As part of a settlement, the American craft-supply mega-chain will pay $3 million and the U.S. government will seize the illicit artifacts. Technically, the defendants in the civil-forfeiture action are the objects themselves, yielding an incredible case name: The United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3,000) Ancient-Clay Bullae.
Under any circumstances, this case would be wild: It involves thousands of ancient artifacts that seem to have been stolen from Iraq, where the pillaging of antiquities has been rampant. The longstanding trade in antiquities of dubious provenance has become an especially sensitive topic in recent years, and a target of increased law-enforcement scrutiny: ISIS has made some untold millions—or billions—by selling ancient goods. While nothing in the case indicates that these objects were associated with any terrorist group, the very nature of smuggled goods means their provenance is muddy.
But the case really matters because of who’s involved. The members of the Green family, which owns the Hobby Lobby chain, are committed evangelical Christians who are probably most famous for their participation in a 2014 Supreme Court case, Burwell v.Hobby Lobby, which helped dismantle certain birth-control-coverage requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The Greens are big collectors of ancient antiquities; they’re also the primary visionaries and contributors behind the Museum of the Bible opening in Washington, D.C., this fall. Steve Green is the chairman of the board. The family’s famous name, now tied to a story of dealer intrigue and black markets, is likely to bring even further scrutiny and attention as they prepare to open their museum.
Law-enforcement officials report that in 2010, Hobby Lobby’s president, Steve Green, visited the United Arab Emirates with an antiquities consultant to inspect more than 5,548 artifacts. The objects—which were precious and collectively worth millions of dollars—“were displayed informally,” the complaint stated, “spread on the floor, arranged in layers on a coffee table, and packed loosely in cardboard boxes, in many instances with little or no protective material between them.” They included cuneiform tablets, which display writing used in ancient Mesopotamia, and clay bullae, or balls of clay printed with ancient seals.
Two Israeli dealers and one dealer from the UAE were present; the objects allegedly belonged to the family of a third Israeli dealer. One of the Israeli dealers sent Hobby Lobby a statement of provenance, claiming that the objects were legally acquired through purchases made in the 1960s. It also named a custodian who purportedly, in the 1970s, took care of the objects while they were being stored in the United States.
But that person never actually stored anything for the third Israeli dealer, the complaint alleges, and Hobby Lobby never contacted the custodian. The company went forward with the sale, even though it had retained an antiquities expert who cautioned against the purchase. “I would regard the acquisition of any artifact likely from Iraq … as carrying considerable risk,” that expert wrote in a memorandum shared with the company’s in-house counsel, according to the complaint. “An estimated 200-500,000 objects have been looted from archaeological sites in Iraq since the early 1990s; particularly popular on the market and likely to have been looted are cylinder seals, cuneiform tablets.” Cultural objects looted from Iraq since 1990 are protected by special import restrictions that carry criminal penalties and large fines, the expert added.
Hobby Lobby “was new to the world of acquiring these items, and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process.”
Hobby Lobby wired $1.6 million to seven different bank accounts associated with five different people to pay for the items. The artifacts were shipped to the United States in multiple packages falsely labeled “Tiles (Sample).” They were also sent to multiple locations. As the complaint notes, “The use of multiple shipping addresses for a single recipient is consistent with methods used by cultural property smugglers to avoid scrutiny by Customs.” On customs forms, the UAE dealer supplied false invoices that substantially undervalued the pieces, presumably as a way to avoid customs inspection.
In January 2011, Customs and Border Protection seized five packages falsely labeled as originating in Turkey. Following its investigation, CPB has seized roughly 3,450 objects—the 450 ancient cuneiform tablets and 3,000 ancient clay bullae for which the case is named. As part of a settlement to the government’s civil action against Hobby Lobby, the company has “accepted responsibility for its past conduct” and agreed to revise its internal procedures and train its employees, along with submitting quarterly reports on further acquisitions over the next 18 months.
That period of time will be crucial as the museum prepares for its opening. “We don’t have any concerns about our collection,” said Steven Bickley, the vice president of marketing, administration, and finance. “The artifacts that were referred to were never in our collection.” He added that the museum wasn’t part of the investigation or the settlement.
For its part, the Green family has framed this as a lesson learned. In 2010, Hobby Lobby “was new to the world of acquiring these items, and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process,” read a statement on the company’s website. “This resulted in some regrettable mistakes. The company imprudently relied on dealers and shippers who, in hindsight, did not understand the correct way to document and ship these items.”
Green says he takes responsibility for what happened. “We should have exercised more oversight and carefully questioned how the acquisitions were handled,” he said in a statement on Hobby Lobby’s website. “Hobby Lobby has cooperated with the government throughout its investigation, and with the announcement of today’s settlement agreement, is pleased the matter has been resolved.”
However, there’s one thing that Millennials aren’t killing. A SINGLE CONSUMER MARKET WE HAVE ALLOWED TO LIVE.
Can you guess what it is?
If you are a long-term Billfold reader, you might remember the phrase “Middle Class Snack Kids.” Lindsay Katai’s essay about only being able to afford snacks was The Billfold’s first feature article, published on April 4, 2012:
“Middle Class Snack Kid” is a term I made up for people who do not spend a lot on themselves on the whole, but are running themselves into the ground buying food and drink. I coined this term for myself because I needed to diagnose my disease — the disease being that no matter how much money I make and how little it feels like I spend on myself, I am always living paycheck to paycheck. How can I be so damn broke all the time? Me! The person who doesn’t own a single piece of furniture that wasn’t given to her for free! The person who will wear one pair of jeans until they literally fall apart! The person who will wait until she looks like a crazy mountain woman before she will shell out $40 for a haircut!
Then it hit me: snacks. Fuck. I am all about snacking.
Anyway, I’d suggest you re-read Katai’s essay instead of this CNBC post about Millennials saving Hershey’s through their love of snacking, but the point is that Millennials have kept something alive for once. We’ve destroyed lunch and napkins and marmalade in our quest to buy Cadbury Creme Eggs year-round and eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups stuffed with smaller Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and anything that is not a snack should stay away because we are coming to get you.
Kittens, it could make a couple of queens weep. Give us a moment here.
…
Okay, now let’s assess their outfits.
The idea of her not coming out for the premiere in either red, gold, blue or a combo of all three seemed extremely unlikely. Almost as unlikely as the idea that she would eschew metallics or sparkle. Let’s face it; this is not the film where you want to be coming out in your serious black column gown. If you’re Wonder Woman, you better go big.
We’re afraid we’ve got some problems with this one, however. The colors and sparkle are great. The style is not. A criss-cross halter with a high-waisted cutout is, quite honestly, one of those designs that puzzle the shit out of us because we don’t understand why anyone would opt for it, seeing as its unflattering on pretty much any body. It visually flattens the boobs and thickens the waist. Every time. On every body. Fashion peeps, you gotta stop it with this one. Don’t even get us started on the weird little below-the-waist cutouts in the skirt. It’s a damn shame, because this dress would be more or less perfect without the cutouts.
And boy, is that head-styling a disappointment. We’re sort of getting the clue, based on her promotional looks so far, that Miss Gal is not a high-glam gal. While we want any ladystar to be comfortable with how she looks when she’s promoting her work, this really should’ve been the time for her to suck it up a little – especially if she’s opting for brighty colored sequined gowns. Her hair and makeup are so underwhelming here that it looks like she pinned the former up in order to get started on the latter and then realized she was running late. Personally, we think this gown – and this tour – call for a blowout, some red lips and some significant sparkle on the ears, but since that doesn’t seem like her bag at all, we’d suggest she figure out some sort of happy medium. A pony tail, a white gown, and some gold jewelry, if you’re the low-key type.
LOVE.
We will ignore the posing. She doesn’t get to do it all that often.
Love that this Wonder Woman knows how to accessorize for a Wonder Woman premiere. The clutch is cute, but the jewelry is stunning. We love the idea of her acting as a sort of Wonder Woman Emeritus and not trying to compete with Gal by wearing some big sparkly gown. Especially because “big sparkly gown” is Lynda Carter’s style sweet spot. The suit is a great idea – especially since she took the opportunity to play up her face and accessories – but the jacket is a bit small and the top is a missed opportunity. If she wasn’t going to do an old-school WW t-shirt under there (which we would’ve implored her to wear), then we think she should’ve gone for a metallic shell to bump it up a little. Emeritus you may be, Miss Lady, but you’re still a princess.
We interviewed Lynda years ago for Metrosource magazine, at a time when there was a Wonder Woman TV show revival shooting (that was eventually scrapped). When we asked her about this proposed new version, she was thrilled. One of the most charming things about her is how she’s served as an ambassador for the character for decades now, and she’s always expressed a deep desire to see her story retold for new generations, especially since there’ve been a dozen Batmen and Supermen since her show went off the air. She enthusiastically told us all of this and said she couldn’t wait to see some young woman come along and reinterpret Wonder Woman. There’s not an ounce of jealousy or grandstanding in the above pics. She’s the equivalent of a proud superhero mama watching her daughter graduate.
Style Credits: Gal Gadot:Givenchy Red Metallic Halter Dress with Cutout Detailing from the Fall 2017 Collection | Tiffany & Co. Bracelets and Rings
[Photo Credit: Sara De Boer/startraksphoto.com, Getty Images]
And now, a slice of Primo Hamm for your breakfast sandwich.
This is what Don Draper would have looked like on the off-chance he made it into heaven.
Hamm, we will forgive the pointing; first, because you clearly have a posing disability and we feel bad about that; and second, because you are, as we noted, serving up some first-class pork product here. That slightly blocky, but fitted mid-Century cut of suit really is the best possible style for you. Don’t fight it. January and Christina eventually succumbed to the reality that they were each born to wear fit-and-flare dresses and pencil skirts, respectively.
In the third episode of GLOW, a new 10-part series debuting on Netflix Friday, a male producer and a male director brainstorm possible characters for their women’s wrestling circuit. As in the real-life Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling—which featured characters named Palestina, Jailbait, and Big Bad Mama—the various identities rely heavily on stereotypes. Jenny (Ellen Wong) becomes Fortune Cookie. Tammé (Kia Stevens) is Welfare Queen. Arthie (Sunita Mani) is Beirut. “It’s not a judgment,” GLOW’s coked-up producer, Sebastian (Chris Lowell) explains. “It’s just what I and the entire world see with our eyes.”
GLOW, created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch and executive produced by Orange Is the New Black’s Jenji Kohan, arrives in a heady fog of hairspray and ’80s nostalgia, but it pulls no punches in its treatment of the entertainment industry. In the show’s very first scene, Ruth (Alison Brie), an actress, delivers a monologue in an audition and raves about the role, commenting on how few roles like this there are for women. “You’re reading the man’s part,” the casting agent replies. Which is how Ruth ends up in a gym with 50 or so other “unconventional” women, auditioning for a new kind of “family-friendly” entertainment. On the one hand, she can see how patently absurd it all is. On the other, it’s still the only job going where she can actually dig into a strong female character.
Ruth has more than a little of OITNB’s Piper to her—she’s pretentious, earnest, and painfully self-centered, and there’s a reveal in the first episode that might put viewers off entirely if Brie weren’t so endearing in the role. After one failed audition, she goes home, immerses herself in WWE, and practices wrestling personas at home wearing a makeshift cape and cut-off rubber gloves (“I’m Pre-Menstrual Syndrome!,” she bellows). But it’s an actual fight with her friend Debbie (Betty Gilpin) that persuades the director, Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) to cast both of them—Debbie as Liberty Bell, an all-American superhero, and Ruth as her Russian nemesis. “Relax,” Sam tells Ruth. “The devil gets the best lines.”
Flahive and Mensch’s ensemble cast is terrific. Gayle Rankin plays Sheila the She-Wolf, a monosyllabic goth whose outfits Ruth tries to identify with by explaining that she once went to school dressed as Anne of Green Gables every day for a year. Sydelle Noel is Cherry, an out-of-work actress who becomes the girls’ primary trainer and caretaker. The British singer-songwriter Kate Nash plays Rhonda, a daffy and lovable type whose character, Britannica, is a Nobel-prize winning scientist in spandex. And Britney Young is Carmen, the neglected 25-year-old scion of a professional wrestling family. The show has fun with the fact that the characters are literally grappling with female stereotypes in the ring while proving how much more complex and interesting the real women are.
Maron, as the unkempt and past-his-prime Sylvia, is so charming that he steals virtually every scene he’s in. A frustrated former B-movie director based on Matt Cimber, Sylvia is a chain-smoking, drug-snorting, womanizing wreck who’s also surprisingly protective of the team he’s assembled. (“Don’t take that!” he snaps at “Beirut” when Sebastian offers her “terrorist” persona a gun to wield.) And Gilpin (Nurse Jackie) is stellar as Debbie, a bombshell former soap star dealing with a cheating husband and an infant son who bites her while he’s breastfeeding. Just like Ruth, she seems to find something in the ring that’s unexpectedly satisfying, even if it’s just a momentary chance to be a star-spangled superhero.
GLOW has plenty of ’80s accoutrements—some nostalgia-inducing (a synth-heavy soundtrack, leotards for every occasion, neon eyeshadow, Steve Guttenberg) and some not (a home pregnancy test that resembles an AP chemistry exam). Each episode runs around 30 minutes, which allows the show to both delve into individual stories and spin a larger arc, with few of the pacing issues of Netflix’s longer shows. Mostly, though, it’s just a blast to watch women having so much fun. GLOW fully owns its campiness and its showy aesthetics, but it’s smart and subversive underneath the glitter.
Alexander Skarsgård (“Big Little Lies”), Riz Ahmed (“The Night Of”), Milo Ventimiglia (“This Is Us”), and Rupert Friend (“Homeland”) are featured in W magazine‘s annual portfolio of television’s hottest stars photographed by Alasdair McLellan and styled by Edward Enninful.
Alexander Skarsgård, “Big Little Lies” “My first crush was Jessica Lange in ‘Tootsie.’ I was maybe 8 or 9 when I first saw the movie, and I had never felt anything for a girl before that. I was just mesmerized by her. I watched the film over and over again because of Jessica Lange. I’m still not over her. Every time I meet someone, I compare her to Jessica Lange in ‘Tootsie. ‘That’s probably why I’m not married.”
Riz Ahmed, “The Night Of” “I usually get stopped in the U.K. before I board a plane. What’s funny is that Heathrow is in a heavily South Asian neighborhood, and the kids working at the airport are fans of mine. So while they’re swabbing me for explosives, they’re asking me for selfies. While they’re going through my underwear, they’re quoting my raps back at me. It’s quite a surreal experience that speaks to the insider/outsider status I’ve felt all my life.”
Milo Ventimiglia, “This Is Us” “I’m not a big crier. But family stuff gets to me. Fathers and brothers and children. If I wasn’t on ‘This Is Us,’ I’d be a wet noodle watching the show. I’d be crying along with everyone else.”
Rupert Friend, “Homeland” “For ‘Homeland,’ I made an audition tape with a point-and-click camera and sent it in. The ratio was off. It was out of focus. I was also wearing the wrong thing, and I filmed it against a door that they later told me made it look like I was in a mental asylum. The producers were like, ‘Where the hell is this kid?!’ In the end, I did seven separate audition tapes of the same scene. They finally said yes.”
All the respect in the world to a lady who thinks “I’m gonna wear Balmain but make sure my hair is the centerpiece of my look.”
To be fair, she snagged herself a pretty fine Balmain, instead of some of the over-designed monstrosities the Kardashia tribe has favored in the past. We’re not sure we’d have advised a knit blazer in June, but it works well because it’s brightly colored, almost completely unstyled so it isn’t fighting with anything, and it comes off fairly lightweight.
But the head styling is off the chain. Her makeup is flawless and we can’t stop staring at her hair, which manages to be bold but give off a fairly simple vibe. We’re not crazy about the two braids framing her face, if only because they obscure the earrings, which are pretty spectacular. Also not crazy about the frayed hem. And we think the shoes come off like an afterthought when a well-chosen pair could’ve pulled the whole look together. But she still looks bright, colorful, chic and gorgeous. We’re just professional nitpickers, is all.
Miss Press Release, we’re gonna let you finish, but we just had to jump in here and swoon the fuck out. We thought perhaps Jesus was telling us he loved us when he gave us the Wonder Woman movie of our dreams this year, but clearly, that was just a prelude to LUPITA IN A SUPERHERO MOVIE PLAYING A BADASS DORA MILAJE WARRIOR WOMAN IN A KILLER COSTUME OMG
SORRY. WE FELL OUT FOR A MINUTE THERE.
Also, hello there, Michael B. and Chadwick. This is all very culturally important and a true watershed moment in the development of this particular genre of film. Which is why we’re being all respectful and stuff and not, like, horribly objectifying, because WOW. GENTLEMEN.
This movie is going to be a veritable showcase of fabulous hairstyles for people of color, isn’t it?
EXCLUSIVE FIRST LOOK AT BLACK PANTHER EW senior writer Anthony Breznican takes us to Wakanda, the advanced African nation that we got a glimpse of at the end of Captain America: Civil War. It’s ruled by the most groundbreaking hero in the Marvel universe. On the set of Black Panther (out Feb. 16), EW has the first look at how this regal cast is shattering a cinematic ceiling. In 1966, Black Panther claimed a proud place in history as the first black superhero, and in 2018, this movie will add to that legacy as the first big-budget comic-book tentpole to feature a black hero, a black filmmaker, black screenwriters (Coogler and Joe Robert Cole of American Crime Story), a black executive producer (Civil War’s Nate Moore), and a predominantly black cast, starring Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther/T’Challa.
As the ruler of this fictional African kingdom, T’Challa’s got the weight of a whole nation on his shoulders as he defends his homeland from a cast of star-studded villains, including Andy Serkis’ arm-less mercenary and Michael B. Jordan’s exiled outcast and challenger to the throne. T’Challa’s friends also encompass the biggest of stars—from Angela Bassett, who plays his mother, to Lupita Nyong’o’s agent love interest, and Martin Freeman’s CIA officer.
Director/co-writer Ryan Coogler says, “What makes [Black Panther] different from other superheroes, first and foremost, is he doesn’t see himself as a superhero. He sees himself as a politician.”
As for its place in today’s cultural conversation, Coogler has a personal connection to Black Panther. As a young boy at a comic books store in his hometown, he asked, “‘You got any black superheroes? Got anybody who looks like me?’ The first thing they did was walk me over to Black Panther.”
Now, Coogler is doing the same thing on a global scale. “Ryan’s making this movie for his 8-year-old self,” says Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios and producer on Black Panther. “That’s why you do it. Most importantly, you do it for other 8-year-olds, to inspire the next generation the way we were inspired. And when Ryan was growing up, there weren’t that many of these heroes to be inspired by that looked like him.”
All I ended up getting was the $0.99 unlimited music for 4 months (and set a reminder to cancel it 4 months from now). The Instant Pot is 100% my favorite kitchen thing that I own. I probably should have just bought a 2nd one for no reason because PRIME DAY SUCH A GOOD DEAL Y'ALL.
Did you buy that Instant Pot? I’ve heard it’s amazing.
The big news story on everyone’s mind today, of course, is… well, um… let’s talk about Amazon Prime Day instead! What kind of news do we have about that?
To start us off, here’s Gizmodo’s list of Amazon Prime Day deals on items that can be used as deadly weapons. Seriously.
There were also so many stories about the Instant Pot that I just picked one. Have you heard about the Instant Pot? I’ve heard a lot about the Instant Pot. It does everything. Stews, beans, rice, you name it. There’s a button on it labeled “porridge,” which might revolutionize the way I make breakfast. (Currently, I pour hot water over oatmeal and then add fruit, nuts, and honey. With an Instant Pot, I could do all of that plus have one extra item to clean!)
And The Oregonian would like to remind us that Amazon Prime Day is a manufactured holiday. Not like the types of holidays that grow naturally on trees, and yes I know I stole that joke from Tumblr.
When I opened up Amazon, it “recommended” several Prime Day deals, including an Amazon Echo (which I would probably enjoy playing with), the ubiquitous Instant Pot, golf clubs, a hammock, a Roomba, and teeth-cleaning treats for dogs and cats.
Amazon should know, from my purchase history, that I do not currently own any pets. (It should also know that I am not interested in golf.) So why is it trying to sell me chewable teeth-cleaning treats? If I chewed them, would my teeth get cleaned as well? Have dentists been telling us to brush and floss all these years when they could have been tossing us bags of oven-roasted-chicken-flavored chewables?
So I have not yet purchased any Amazon Prime Day products, and I don’t really plan on buying any. (I’m actually trying to avoid seeing deals on stuff I might want, since my income is pretty strictly budgeted for the rest of the summer.)
The cost of housing has gotten so expensive that Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) thinks that a monthly subsidy of $2,500 from the Government is a good idea to help ease the burden — for members of Congress.
He told The Hill on Monday that “I really do believe Congress would be much better served if there was a housing allowance for members of Congress,” given that “Washington, D.C., is one of the most expensive places in the world.” He said that “a $2,500 housing allowance would be appropriate and a real help to have at least a decent quality of life in Washington.”
As Ester notes, members of Congress earn $174,000 annually. If they put the recommended 25 percent of that income towards rent, they could budget for homes or apartments that cost $3,625 per month—and don’t get me wrong, there are many apartments in DC going for $3,625/month or higher, but they’d still be in a way better position than most of us. Right?
(And yeah, I get that many congresspeople have other homes in other states that they also gotta pay for. So maybe they’ll have to put more than 25 percent of their income towards housing… you know, just like the rest of us.)
Felice Varini’s anamorphic paintings seem senseless until they’re viewed from the right perspective — the key is to find the correct viewpoint. (One clue is that it’s always 1.62 meters from the ground, the artist’s own eye level.)
“Varini catches our eye by introducing an anomalous element into our field of vision,” writes Céline Delavaux in The Museum of Illusions. “His paintings are like frameless pictures that give the illusion of a single plane in three-dimensional space. In his hands, painting works like photography: it flattens a space while revealing it.”
I was going to write something in honor of the 20th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and then I remembered that in 2014 I spent six months writing short stories about Harry Potter characters and their financial futures.
So here’s the series in its entirety. If you only have time to read a few, I suggest Ron’s, Ginny’s, Cho’s, and Goyle’s—and Harry’s, of course.
How Wizards Do Money was originally published in The Billfold on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Bryan Fuller fans, did you watch? I loved it, but it's hard to figure out how much of my love was for the show vs how much was residual good feelings about seeing my favorite book getting made into a TV show.
In the interest of full disclosure, we feel we must admit that it’s taken us the better part of a day to write this post. In the interest of accuracy, we must inform you that the reason it took so long is that there’s only so many ways you can say “GOD, that was so much fun. Wasn’t that fun, you guys? SO FUN.” But we might as well admit, in the interest of further full disclosure, that the rest of this review is just going to be a slightly more long-winded way of saying just that. It was fun – more fun than we had a right to expect, to be honest.
Because yes, American Gods‘ first season had a couple of issues with pacing. And it’s true that the story, such as it is, has spent roughly half the season on wheel-spinning or narrative detours (some of which worked far better than others). And like so many Bryan Fuller joints, there were times when the stylization threatened to cause the whole thing to capsize under the weight of too much slo-mo or extreme closeups of mundane items. But in the end – literally – when it came time for the show to make its case as to why you should wait out the hiatus before season 2 comes back, it did that thing that so many reviewers and recappers say shows are supposed to do (ourselves included), to the point that even pointing it out feels like an enormous cliche: American Gods stuck the landing.
Nailed it, even. CRUSHED it.
That was simply a super-fun, super-entertaining hour of television in which the stakes were high, the emotional payoffs were more than earned, the character introductions were enthralling, the confrontations were thrilling and the ending left you gasping for more. We couldn’t have asked for more. In fact, it was so satisfying that if this were a later season of American Gods, we’d have pegged an episode like this one as “fan service.”
From the reappearance of Mr. Nancy in high style and flair, to the utterly jaw-dropping imagery of Bilquis as a beautiful, dark-skinned goddess at the height of her power – imagery brilliantly designed to push the maximum number of buttons, by the way (Tom, when we saw this screener weeks ago: “Oh my GOD, I can’t WAIT until Black Twitter gets a load of that Bilquis scene.” Followup note: Black Twitter, you did not disappoint), to the thrilling showdown between old gods and new and finally, to the introduction of the most fun character of them all, Kristin Chenoweth as Ostara, the ancient goddess of the dawn (and the apparent new goddess of drag queens, judging by her wig and eyeshadow game), this season finale was literally everything we love about the show, thrown into the mix. The only thing missing was Cloris Leachman and a bottle of good vodka. And even then, we can’t say we missed her much in an episode where we we got DISCO BILQUIS, YOU GUYS.
(And also a really powerful metaphor about female power and how the history of humanity revolves around tearing it down, but also Disco Bilquis, tearing up Tehran dancefloors in the ’70s.)
But it wasn’t just the eye-popping imagery (although we’ve been rewinding the Bilquis scene non-stop and lightly arguing over whether Ostara’s decor is too over the top or not) that made this so much fun. It was the pleasure of watching everything come to a head and almost every character converge on the same spot. It was the delight of watching your protagonist finally state his name and claim his power. It was the sheer joy of watching the disenfranchised snatch power unexpectedly from the smugly powerful. Media’s panicked “What have you done?” was the ultimate payoff of the season.
We could complain about Shadow being so dim-witted that it took him this long to declare his belief. We could note that the final showdown came down to gods of the earth and wind – tactile gods, ancient gods of primal forces vs. gods of ideas and concepts, making the latter seem like nothing but a lot of talk and hot air. As Odin noted, the new gods offer only distraction instead of giving people something to believe, making their power somewhat illusory in the end. Or at least for now. We could talk about the somewhat hilarious way the story hand-waves away Jesus. Or that, in this telling, Jesus is something akin to the God of Believing. He’s less a symbol of Christianity as he is a metaphor for the power of belief. Or we could just talk about the fabulous butterfly shoes Miss Easter was wearing or the fact that Ricky Whittle looked ridiculously hot in that suit. But the only thing that truly matters is that American Gods stuck the landing, showed the audience what it can really do when it sets its mind to it, and gave us one of the most fun 60 minutes of TV we’ve experienced all year.
"White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in a text message “Sean got fatter,” and did not respond to a follow-up."
I can no longer tell where The Awl's "Jared Kushner Does A Thing" stories end and reality begins.
Over the course of the Trump administration, the White House’s daily press briefings have been pared progressively further back; they are now shorter, less frequent, and routinely held off-camera.
The daily briefing is a venerable Washington tradition, though one that has often been a target of criticism. Media critic Jay Rosen has called for media outlets to “send the interns,” arguing that the briefing is a largely useless exercise in grandstanding. President Trump himself has publicly mused about canceling them, tweeting “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future "press briefings" and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”
But instead of canceling them entirely, the White House has appeared to embrace a different strategy: simply downgrading them bit by bit, from “briefings” to “gaggles,” and from on-camera to off-camera. Guidance for the briefings have begun to include a note that audio from them cannot be used. Additionally, though Trump has held short press conferences when foreign leaders visit, he has not held a full press conference since February.
The changes haven’t gone unnoticed, although reporters are still attending the gaggles. A clearly exasperated Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, said on Monday that Spicer had become “kind of useless.”
“It feels like we’re slowly but surely being dragged into what is a new normal in this country, where the president of the United States is allowed to insulate himself from answering hard questions,” Acosta said on CNN. “I don’t know why we covered that gaggle today, quite honestly Brooke, if they can’t give us the answers to the questions on camera or where we can record the audio. They’re basically pointless at this point.”
Asked for further comment, Acosta said in an email, “Unless we all take collective action, the stonewalling will continue.”
“If the WH is going to place unreasonable demands on our newsgathering, we should walk out,” he said.
What’s not clear is how much the White House would care if this happened. Reporters’ demands for access have not been a top priority for this administration, and though Trump is an avid media consumer and did a large number of interviews as a candidate and earlier in his term, he has begun to hold the press at arm’s length, skipping the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and doing fewer interviews lately.
Monday also marked the latest round of stories about the likelihood that Spicer will move into a different role, a rumor that has made the rounds in the media in different iterations several times now. The departure of Communications Director Michael Dubke earlier this month has created a hole at the top of the communications structure, and stories in Bloomberg and Politico on Monday said that Spicer is looking for a replacement to handle the briefings, such as they are, while he moves up to a higher position.
Neither Spicer nor deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders responded to queries about the changes to the briefings. Asked why the briefings are now routinely held off-camera, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in a text message “Sean got fatter,” and did not respond to a follow-up.
The White House Correspondents Association has been critical of this administration’s stance towards press access. WHCA president Jeff Mason said the body would “object” to any move to cancel briefings back when Trump tweeted that he was considering it. In an email, Mason said this is something the WHCA “had been working on” but that he is out of the country and didn’t have an on the record statement right now.
But the current scenario, with the briefings being increasingly diminished without being entirely eliminated, makes it murkier for journalists to figure out the correct response. If there’s one thing the national political press corps doesn’t excel at, it’s the kind of solidarity for which Acosta is calling. News organizations didn’t organize a collective boycott of Trump events when the campaign was maintaining a blacklist of banned outlets during the campaign, and seem unlikely to be able to pull one off now.
Spicer was asked during Monday’s gaggle, which lasted 33 minutes according to NPR’s White House correspondent, why the gaggle was not being made available or broadcast and audio.
“I've said it since the beginning--the president spoke today, he was on camera,” Spicer said. “He'll make another comment today at the technology summit. And there are days that I'll decide that the president's voice should be the one that speaks, and iterate his priorities.”
Another small but significant change in the White House’s press access is that the daily email that goes out at night previewing the White House schedule the next day is now routinely flagged as “For Planning Purposes Only / Not Reportable.”
As BuzzFeed’s Chris Geidner recently illustrated, the Trump White House initially tagged these emails “for immediate release.” Then, they were marked “for planning purposes only.” During Trump’s first foreign trip, though, the words “not reportable” were added. Just like that, the White House had shifted from providing the information to reporters so that they could share it with their audiences, to insisting that it not be publicly disclosed.
On Monday night, the schedule for Tuesday went out to the press — with no briefing on the agenda at all.
“Moonlight” actor Mahershala Ali covers the July 2017 Issue of GQ Magazine photographed by Peggy Sirota.
Every day, it seems, we get up, brace ourselves, and wait for the latest shitty news to come. It’s a time of great stress and tension in people’s lives.
What we all need right now is a gorgeous black muslim man with a killer smile and some super-cute summer print shirts.
Mmf. That will do NICELY. We’re just doing our part to heal America here, darlings. You’re quite welcome.
Putting our own shallowness aside for a second, he’s clearly more than pecs and fashion:
On life after his Oscar win: “When suddenly you go from being followed in Barneys to being fawned over, it will mess with your head.”
On being a black man in America: “Those experiences that you have from age 10, when you start getting these little messages that you are something to be feared… Walking down the street in Berkeley and some cops roll up on you and say straight up, ‘Give me your ID,’ and you’re like, ‘What the fuck?’”
On his hopes for America: “I think African-Americans have a very convoluted relationship with patriotism. The fact is, we essentially were the abused child. We still love the parent, but you can’t overlook the fact that we have a very convoluted relationship with the parent. I absolutely love this country, but like so many people have some real questions and concerns about how things have gone down over the years and where we’re at. And that’s from a place of love, because I want the country to be what it says it is on paper.”
“I want the country to be what it says it is on paper.” That about says it all.
But can we just slide back into shallowness for a second and say that we kind of want everything he’s wearing here? Lorenzo feels a menswear shopping post coming on…
I don’t know what you are doing for the next eleven minutes, but if you don’t have anything planned, I suggest you watch Maria Bamford’s University of Minnesota commencement speech.
Bamford spends the first half of her speech explaining exactly how she negotiated a $10,000 speaking fee with the university — after receiving an email inviting her to speak for free.
The second half is standard “advice to the graduates” stuff, but watch to the end, because… well, I don’t want to spoil what happens, but let’s just say that Bamford ends up speaking for free after all.
I haven’t seen a transcript go live yet, but I’m sure one will eventually. Until it does, I’ll leave you with two of my favorite quotes:
Was the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts suggesting that I couldn’t get paid for the exact job that I paid them to teach me how to get paid to do?
Also this:
[Quoting the email:] “As you can imagine, being a state-funded institution, we have to be careful regarding the use of our resources.” Well, I thought to myself. But I am a self-funded institution who needs to be careful regarding the use of my resources!
I am going to write that last sentence on a Post-It and stick it to my wall.
~~did you evah waaant it? did you want it baaad?~~ click through "big little lies style" at the end for the rest of the posts, all great.
Time for installment number two in a series, darlings! And in a way, it’s the biggest, most important one of them all. We’re not sure we’d argue that Celeste was the story’s “main” character, but so much of the major plot drivers centered around her life, her decisions, and her relationships, right up to the climax, in which her life, her decisions and her relationships all exploded in front of the rest of the characters, demanding that they react to it.
As we noted when we talked about Madeline’s wardrobe, costume designer Alix Friedberg is doing very good work by not being remotely subtle about what she’s trying to say about each character. Think of Pat Field on Sex and the City. It’s roughly the same approach: rendering a small group of women in such highly consistent, unsubtle-to-the-point-of-obvious character-defining costumes that you feel you know them like good friends with an astonishing quickness. The only reason BLL doesn’t invoke the same kind of “I’m a Miranda!” “I’m a Charlotte!” response in the audience is because SATC was aspirational fantasy and BLL is about the complicated interior and exterior lives of women. You may want her house (GUILTY), her wardrobe, and maybe even a no-strings chance to fuck her husband, but this isn’t the kind of tale that makes you cry out “I’m a CELESTE!”
Anyway, our point is this: Like Madeline’s wardrobe, Celeste’s is very simple, very consistently rendered, and says something fairly obvious about her life, if you know what you’re looking for.
You could make the argument that appearances matter very much to Celeste and that, like Madeline, she places a great deal of value on her own attractiveness. But unlike Madeline, Celeste doesn’t dress for attention or to be noticed. She is always impeccably turned out in expensive-looking clothes that are highly coordinated with each other, but she eschews most colors and tends to keep herself as covered as possible.
This choice manages to draw huge distinctions between Celeste and the other two women. Madeline dresses to show off and gain eyes on her. We’ll get to Jane in our next installment, but she basically dresses like a depressed person without any money. Celeste is somewhere in between the two. She needs to feel attractive and show an image of coordinated control like Madeline, but she tends to dress in a “don’t look at me too long” manner that evokes Jane’s style.
In fact, she works as hard as she can to ensure that in most of her public outfits, she shows only her face (with her hair brushed forward and in bangs, so as much of her can be obscured as possible) and hands and wears little in the way of color or print to draw attention to herself.
Impeccable, neutral coverage is Celeste’s style brief.
This is, of course, both a symbolic choice as well as a practical one. Celeste wears sweaters because it’s cold. Celeste covers herself up constantly because she’s covered in bruises she’s trying to hide. Celeste dresses in neutrals because she doesn’t want to gain the wrong kind of attention or have anyone ask too many probing questions about her. She lives in a self-created space of neutrality, forever trying to keep the boat from rocking.
Which is why that need to remain covered and neutral isn’t just a public style choice for her. She dresses that way around the house, too.
Again, she can’t have the boys seeing her wounds.
And she lives in constant fear of setting him off. Staying covered up and neutral is her vain attempt to create a safe space in her life.
And it is rendered with a rather jaw-dropping consistency. This is one of those “If only we’d seen the signs” things rendered in costume form. These ARE the signs with Celeste.
It’s also notable, given how much Celeste remains covered throughout the story, that she has quite a few nude scenes, sex scenes and lingerie-wearing scenes. These tend to draw a sharp contrast against her constant modesty when dressed and allows two very important themes to make their way to the surface: That she is insanely vulnerable in her husband’s presence and that most of their intimacy is a performative act for her. These scenes of nudity and overt sexual expression stand out so much because in EVERY OTHER SCENE, Celeste tells us through her clothing that she needs to be covered, be neutral, and be safe. Not a woman pulsing with sensuality, but a woman trying to remove it from her life as much as possible.
We have to say something about her suit here that is going to sound like a value judgment but isn’t meant as one. She looks great. But to us, what stood out is that her suit isn’t quite of-the-moment stylish. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it tends to underline the back-of-the-closet nature of her paused career. Note again that it’s very covered up and neutral, but note also that she’s quite uncharacteristically showing her legs. Again, a subtle point about how this moment, this action and this costume are all helping her open up her life a little and consider the possibilities.
It’s why she figured “fuck it,” and went for the really cute and sexy dress for her next meeting:
Still neutral, but a lot more revealing than her usual wear; short sleeves, a V neck and an above-the-knee hem. She’s opening up – and he didn’t like it one bit.
But nothing was more revealing – in every sense of the word – than what Celeste wore to her therapy sessions; something she religiously refuses to wear in any of the other parts of her life:
A print. A busy, focus-pulling print.
And she will continue to wear them through most of the therapy scenes, including ones of increasing color. Until the point and the message cannot be denied:
“Please SEE ME sitting here.”
She does try to fight it at times, which is indicative of her own emotional struggle.
But it’s notable once she makes the decision to change her life how subtly declarative her clothes start to become. She’s taking that need to be seen that blossomed in her therapist’s office and allowing it to keep growing in her daily life.
And her choice of Audrey costume is slightly ironic, because we have no doubt she conceived it and put it together before she made the choice to leave him. It speaks of her need to be seen as beautiful, but also her need to not draw too much attention to herself simply because it was likely to be the most repeated costume of the night. There’s a reason she and Jane both wore versions of this costume. It helped illustrate the dark connection they have with each other as the mothers of Perry’s children and the victims of his rage, but it also spoke of class differences as well as personality differences between the two women. Note how covered she is.
As we noted in Madeline’s entry, the final beach scene didn’t make some sort of unlikely leap in the costumes of the characters even though they were all in different places emotionally than they were at the start. We think the point of this is to note that they are all, deep down, the same women they’ve always been, just with a bit more self-knowledge and some much improved relationships. But there is one notable difference. Celeste may be on the beach wrapped in neutrals like we’ve come to expect from her…
But she’s literally uncovering herself at the end.
