BERLIN—The fetish cruising bar Bull is a place of pilgrimage in Berlin for more than one reason. To patrons, it is a 24-hour safe space that caters to every palate. To the British historian Brendan Nash, it is a symbol of “Babylon Berlin,” a golden decade of LGBT freedom in the city in the 1920s, when the bisexual Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich mixed with prostitutes and transgender dance-hall girls.
“There’s been a gay bar of some kind at this address for more than 100 years,” Nash, an energetic 54-year-old, explained to a walking tour he was leading as he gestured enthusiastically at a neon sign outside, which featured cattle with large nose rings. Chuckling, he told the group that an elderly woman nonchalantly wanders through Bull with a sandwich cart at 5 a.m. in case anyone is hungry. “There is nothing that she has not seen,” he said.
Germany has long been lauded for its liberal attitude toward sex. It recently passed laws allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt, and just became the first European country to legalize a third gender. But LGBT-rights groups have warned of a parallel rise of violent homophobia in mainstream politics.
Since the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party stormed into the Bundestag last year, its politicians have called for homosexuals to be imprisoned, vowed to repeal gay marriage, and denounced those suffering from HIV. Such attacks not only symbolize yet another seismic, global shift to the right. They are also reminders of Germany’s fascist past and, rights groups worry, signs of dangerous future clamp-downs on vulnerable minorities.
Berlin is a powerfully queer place—gay culture, politics, activism, clubs, and sex reverberate through the city. Crowds here dance under confetti rain at annual Christopher Street Day, or gay pride, parades. A fierce campaign is under way to protect intersex children from surgery, and antiracism protesters regularly drown out far-right rallies. But “Germany is not the shiny, progressive country it wishes to be portrayed as,” says Katrin Hugendubel, the advocacy director of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association in Europe (ILGA-Europe), which represents more than 1,000 LGBT organizations.
In 1918, when Bull’s predecessor first opened, Weimar-era Germany was embarking on a scandalous decade. Gay communities in New York, Paris, and London faced the threat of imprisonment, financial ruin, murder, or even execution. Berlin’s reputation for wild immorality and its unusually liberal law enforcement, by contrast, helped turn the city into Europe’s undisputed gay mecca.
By the 1920s, Berlin was home to an estimated 85,000 lesbians, a thriving gay-media scene, and around 100 LGBT bars and clubs, where artists and writers mixed with cross-dressing call girls who supposedly inspired the Some Like It Hot director Billy Wilder. Magnus Hirschfeld’s revolutionary Institute for Sexual Science openly lobbied for the decriminalization of homosexuality and helped transgender men apply with government agencies to live legally under their new gender. Audiences, straight and gay, queued up at Eldorado, a Jewish-owned nightclub where trans women and drag queens performed and gave paid dances to visitors. There, patrons watched the drug-addled, bisexual Anita Berber star in naked dances named after narcotics. In 1929, the British writer Christopher Isherwood, whose pivotal years in Berlin were brought to life in the film Cabaret, wrote in his diary: “I’m looking for my homeland and I have come to find out if this is it.”
Transgender and cross-dressing dancers at Berlin's infamous Eldorado nightclub in the 1920s. (Herbert Hoffman / bpk-Bildagentur)Isherwood is something of a passion for Brendan Nash. With a shaved head, a hooded jacket, and an endless supply of racy anecdotes, Nash is not your average armchair academic. For the past eight years, he has transported tourists and earnest gender-theory students back in time to search for the ghosts of their pioneering heroes, as part of his popular LGBT walking tour around West Berlin’s “gayborhood” of Schöneberg.
But lately, the tour has taken on a different meaning. Instead of merely teaching history, he’s drawing parallels with the present.
“1932 was the 2016 of its age,” Nash explained to a rapt group, muffled in thick coats in the bright, cold sunshine. Passing around a 90-year-old one million Deutsche Mark note—a legacy of the period’s hyperinflation, which drove many people to embrace populist politicians—that he had found at a flea market, he added: “Desperate people in poverty were being promised jobs, that they could ‘take back control’ and ‘make Germany great again.’”
The electorate voted, and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which would become the Nazi Party, won a shocking 6.3 million votes, increasing its presence in the Bundestag from 12 seats to 107.
Ten months later, on May 6, 1933, the Institute for Sexual Science was looted and same-sex dancing was banned. From 1933 to 1945, an estimated 100,000 LGBT individuals were arrested. An extraordinary decade of sexual freedom was over.
Nash talked ardently of the comparisons between the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and modern German rhetoric. “When I read political speeches from 1932, I think to myself, I heard someone say that on the six o’clock news last night,” he said.
[Read: How to Discuss the Far Right Without Empowering It]
The current political mood in Germany is unstable, with old fractures reopening between the conservative East and affluent West. In September 2017, the AfD made history when it became the first overtly far-right party to sit in the Bundestag in 60 years. Founded in 2013 as a fringe, anti-migrant group with alleged neo-Nazi links, it is now the third-largest party, with 92 seats in the Bundestag and a representative in every state.
Since the AfD’s arrival, the LGBT community has experienced “unbearable incitement of hatred,” says Micha Schulze, the managing editor of the LGBT news site queer.de. He cites AfD politicians calling same-sex marriage a “national death” and posting an obituary on their website mourning “the German family.” Reported hate crimes against LGBT individuals in Germany rose by roughly 27 percent in 2017, according to the German Interior Ministry—a figure that Schulze and other LGBT groups claim is “the tip of the iceberg.”
In October, the AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland, who has vowed to repeal same-sex marriage, was accused of paraphrasing a 1933 speech by Adolf Hitler. The same month, the party launched websites to recruit child informants to spy on teachers expressing political opinions, including those in favor of LGBT rights, in the classroom. The party pushed the youths to then “denounce” the teachers anonymously online. Christian Piwarz, the culture minister in the state of Saxony, called the move a “despicable mindset of snoopery...from the times of the Nazi dictatorship or the Stasi.”
On December 7, the sexual-health charity AIDS-Hilfe Sachsen-Anhalt Nord e.V. criticized the AfD representative Hans-Thomas Tillschneider for a Facebook post that echoed Nazi-era propaganda against homosexuals by claiming that HIV sufferers were “martyrs of a disinhibited, hedonistic, hypersexualized society.”
[Read: It’s Time to Drop the ‘LGBT’ From ‘LGBTQ’]
Given the AfD’s homophobic reputation, it is perhaps surprising that 39-year-old Alice Weidel, its other co-leader, is a lesbian who lives with her female partner and children. But instead of advocating for LGBT rights, the former investment banker wants to protect gay Germans from “dangerous” Muslims whom she has called “headscarf girls, welfare-claiming knife-wielding men and other do-nothings.” The party even has a vocal LGBT group called “Alternative Homosexuals” that opposes migrants.
When questioned about her comments, Weidel has blamed the media for spreading “propaganda” and insisted to Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper: “I’m being credited with being involved in a supposedly homophobic party, but that's not the reality.”
Anti-LGBT sentiment appears to be spreading beyond far-right parties, too. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s replacement as leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Union is Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s former general secretary. She has previously claimed that same-sex marriage could lead to the legalization of incest.
“You could argue that we live in a climate of hate speech,” says Markus Ulrich, the spokesperson for the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany, an influential lobbying group. While Ulrich believes that the majority of the mainstream left and center-right parties have “made their peace” with recent pro-LGBT legislation and would fight attempts to repeal it, the growing influence of far-right politicians is worrisome. “This is definitely a step towards concrete, violent action against the LGBT community,” he adds.
Historian Brendan Nash leads a historical walking tour through Berlin. (Alice Hutton)For now, Berlin’s sexual subcultures continue to walk in the footsteps of their pioneering forbears from the 1920s. It remains, still, a place for The Other.
At around 2:50 a.m., in the dark and pungent night club SO36 in the hipster neighborhood of Kreuzberg, Pansy, the blonde-wigged, gold-leotarded, hairy-legged host of the Miss Kotti drag-queen beauty pageant, leaned into the microphone.
“It gets so bad, sometimes it’s impossible to get out of bed. Being suicidal when you are queer is no fucking joke, and it happens far too often in this city,” she told the beer-soaked crowd. “But the one thing that keeps me going is drag. Coming to rooms like this and seeing everything right with the world.
“The only way that we get over it,” she said, to drunken shrieks of approval, “is when we come together as human beings and celebrate each other. You know what I mean?
Every year since 1966, the small town of Gävle in Sweden erects a 40-foot straw goat on the first day of Advent. For 37 of those years, the Gävle goat has been destroyed; more often than not, it has been set ablaze and burned to the ground.
So ensues the annual conflict for the spirit of Christmas, fought between the Christians who run Gävle’s businesses—who believe that the effigy brings local families and tourists to the city, and also serves as a symbol of light in times of darkness—and the pagans who live in the surrounding forests. The pagans’ traditions date back to pre-Christian times, when Swedes worshipped Norse gods, including the goat Heidrun, the goddess of enlightenment, and Thor, the god of thunder, who rode across the skies on a chariot led by two goats. At night, Thor would burn and eat the goats; in the morning, they would be reborn. (In Norse mythology, the world was created in a blaze of fire.)
“Every year, they build their Trojan horse, and every year, they are shocked when Troy gets burned to the ground,” says an unnamed pagan interviewed in Joe Fletcher’s short documentary, Killing Gävle. In the film, produced by The Guardian, residents from both sides of the goat conflict explain their motivations and belief systems.
“What attracted me to the story was its elemental nature,” Fletcher told The Atlantic in an email. “It was about the light fighting against the dark of the Swedish winter; it was about paganism fighting back against Christianity; good and evil. Big themes are the backdrop of this intimate tale of a small town trying to protect its giant straw goat, which somehow had come to symbolize the innocence and wonder of their children.”
Fletcher was forced to shoot the film over two Christmases because the goat was burned down in record time the first year. “And then to deepen my woes, the town council initially thought that I had burnt it down to get the perfect shot,” Fletcher said. “For the record, I really didn’t burn the Goat down in 2016.”
This year, the goat boasts more fortification than ever, with increased security and cameras being deployed in the days leading up to Christmas.
You’ve Got Mail premiered, as a not-very-holiday-focused holiday movie, in late December 1998. It was a film that could only have emerged from its particular historical moment: a rom-com about two people, Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), enemies in life, who find soulmate-level connection via the magic of the dial-up modem. “In life, they’re at odds,” the film’s trailer intones. “Online, they’re in love.”
In late 2018, with the benefit of 20 years’ worth of retrospect, you could read You’ve Got Mail as a hopeful treatise on the human-communing powers of the internet. Or as a subtle commentary on the all-consuming power of capitalism. Or as a feature-length piece of product placement for America Online. Or as an epic by another means: a hero’s journey full of ups and downs, whose true protagonist is Meg Ryan’s choppy bob. But you could also see You’ve Got Mail as something more basic: a rom-com that, in the end, doesn’t quite deserve to be. You could read it that way precisely because the person the film insists is the film’s romantic hero—Joe, the scion of the Fox family, and thus the partial owner of the big-box Fox Books, and thus the enemy of the independent-bookstore-owning Kathleen—is, objectively, kind of a jerk.
Here are some of the things that Joe “Eff-Oh-Ex” Fox does over the course of the film:
He lies to Kathleen. Repeatedly. Systematically. It starts with an unplanned trip to Kathleen’s almost aggressively charming children’s bookstore, the Shop Around the Corner: When Joe realizes that Kathleen is not only “enchanting,” but also the person he is about to put out of business, he does everything he can to keep her from realizing who he really is. He pays in cash. He shushes his young brother when the boy insists that every animal is spelled “Eff-Oh-Ex.” Things escalate substantially from there. When Joe realizes that Kathleen is also “Shopgirl,” the person with whom he has been corresponding in an over-30s AOL chat room, he realizes this twist well before she does. And he uses that information against her, sometimes quite cruelly. When Kathleen is planning on meeting her own cyber-correspondent, NY152, for the first time in person—and when Joe, showing up for the date, puts the pieces together—he joins her at the cafe, mocking Kathleen and the whole setup she has put together, from her red rose to her copy of Pride and Prejudice. A kinder person, realizing at the very least that Kathleen would end the evening assuming that she had been stood up, might have done things a little differently; Joe Fox, however, You’ve Got Mail suggests, is not an especially kind person. One way the movie makes that clear: Joe, over the course of the film, commits several petty acts of jerkiness. At a party, he swipes his spoon over a significant percentage of the caviar lining a large plate of egg salad (the foodstuff is molded into a massive ring, because the ’90s had their way with us all). He does so with an ease that suggests he is practiced in the arts of communal food-hogging. When Kathleen points out the selfishness—“That caviar is a garnish!” she admonishes—he scrapes his spoon further down the plate, taking a school’s worth of pricey fish eggs for himself. When Kathleen accuses Joe of going to the Shop Around the Corner as a spy, he replies thusly, his voice dripping with sarcasm: “I have in my possession the super-duper secret printout of the sales figures of a book store so inconsequential yet full of its own virtue that I was immediately compelled to rush over there for fear that it’s going to put me out of business.” (Shopgirl, telling NY152 about that encounter, will refer to Joe as the person who “recently belittled my existence.”) Kathleen, trying to avoid Joe at the grocery store (You’ve Got Mail also features extensive product placement for Zabar’s), ends up in a cash-only line. She has no cash. Joe, overhearing this, comes over, ostensibly, to help her … and achieves his goal by condescending to the register attendant, who is reluctant to let Kathleen pay with a credit card. Joe tells the worker, Rose (Sara Ramirez), a knock-knock joke. (“Orange you going to give us a break by zipping this credit card through the credit-card machine?”) He treats the other people in line similarly, asking their names and, given the time of year, making them wish each other a happy Thanksgiving. The film seems to find all this extremely charming: Joe, fighting for common civility, and all that. It is not. It is demeaning to all involved, including Joe himself. When Joe “crashes” the blind date Kathleen had set up with NY152, she says to him, “Please leave. Please, please leave, I beg you.” He ignores her. When Kathleen gets the flu, complete with a runny nose and a fever, and Joe (kindly!) comes to visit her, she is not terribly in the mood to have a guest over. “I would really appreciate it if you would just go away,” she tells him. He (unkindly) ignores her again.If you wanted to do a revisionist reading of You’ve Got Mail, you certainly could do that. You could focus on the skewed power dynamics between Kathleen and Joe—not just on the difference between the big-box behemoth and the mom-and-pop shop, but also on the even bigger differential here: The fact that Joe knows who Kathleen is, and the fact that the knowledge is not mutual. You could focus as well on the mixed messages about capitalism, or on the fact that people of color, in this love story—Dave Chappelle, in particular, as Joe’s friend and business associate—are treated primarily as props. You could focus on the fact that Kathleen’s cast-off boyfriend, Frank Navasky (Greg Kinnear), the Luddite-obsessed quasi-intellectual who loves Heidegger and typewriters, is in fact the most prescient character in the movie: He’s the only one here who seems rightly suspicious of the internet’s alleged wonders.
But there’s an even more glaring problem with the movie—another flaw that did not require the gimlet gaze of retrospect to make plain: the fundamental jerkiness of Joe Eff-Oh-Ex. The fact that he can be casually cruel. The fact that the plot of this particular rom-com involves him manipulating Kathleen and hoping—assuming—that she’ll eventually be grateful for the manipulation. (“I wanted it to be you,” she tells him when he finally reveals what he’d known all along; “I wanted it to be you so badly.” In a movie that makes Parker Posey seem like a villain and the fashion of the 1990s seem like a good idea, it’s the most unrealistic line of all.)
The film evades its own overarching problem primarily by insisting that its male lead is in fact—actually, underneath it all—a good guy. It makes this case by giving Joe an extremely adorable dog, and suggesting that he’s good with children (at least those he is related to), and assuming that telling knock-knock jokes to a weary grocery-store worker is the stuff of charm rather than smarm.
It makes its case, as well, in a more meta kind of way: Joe is played, of course, by Tom Hanks, and You’ve Got Mail invests a lot of faith in the idea that the characters Hanks has played in his previous pairings with Ryan—Joe (another Joe! a better Joe) in Joe Versus the Volcano, and Sam, the grieving single dad, in Sleepless in Seattle—have somehow transferred over to this other movie. Joe couldn’t be that bad of a guy, You’ve Got Mail suggests, because Joe, on some level, is the same person who met Meg Ryan at the top of the Empire State Building, his precocious son in tow, against Manhattan’s dreamy skyline.
But here is the film’s primary argument that Joe deserves Kathleen—Kathleen, who is smart and who is kind and who looks like Meg Ryan: Joe, it insists, simply can’t help his own jerkiness. He can’t be blamed for any of it, because he is a product of forces beyond his control. He’s a child of privilege, first of all, whose dad is the kind of guy who, when Joe tells him that he’s broken up with his live-in girlfriend, would respond, “Would I like her?” And he’s a capitalist who has convinced himself, as he puts out of business the store Kathleen owns—the one she inherited from her mother, the one she planned to pass on to her own daughter—that “it’s not personal; it’s business.”
Joe is someone, the film implies, who needs to be saved—by, specifically, Kathleen and her kindness. “Do you ever feel like you’ve become the worst possible version of yourself?” NY152 asks Shopgirl at a climactic moment of the movie. “That a Pandora’s box of all the secret, hateful parts—your arrogance, your spite, your condescension—has sprung open?” The line is meant to suggest that Joe’s jerkiness is not a fundamental element of his personality, but rather a tragic contingency. That if he were coupled with someone better for him, maybe he’d be better himself.
It’s a strangely fitting attitude for this rom-com of 1998 to adopt for itself: It belies, after all, a great faith in humanity. That guy, scraping up all the most expensive food at the party, leaving none for anyone else? He’ll probably come to regret his selfishness. The man who, when the woman says, “Please leave. Please, please leave, I beg you,” decides, instead, to stay? He probably has his reasons. The hero who spends months lying to the woman he loves, hoping and assuming that she’ll be grateful for the manipulation? He’s just being romantic.
You could definitely apply the worldview of 2018 to You’ve Got Mail and find it lacking; you also don’t really need to. Its problems are implicit. Even for the late 1990s, when the World Wide Web was barely a decade old and when people associated the internet more with human potential than with human tragedy, this rom-com had a notably sad vision of romance. Kathleen loses her shop, and her inheritance, and her livelihood. She is manipulated by the man who contributed to the loss. None of that matters, though, You’ve Got Mail says, because Shopgirl has also logged on to the internet and found herself, against all odds, a guy who seems to be nice.
Before she was a writer, Jane Austen was a reader. A reader, moreover, within a family of readers, who would gather in her father’s rectory to read aloud from the work of authors such as Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and William Cowper—as well as, eventually, Jane’s own works-in-progress.
Not surprisingly, then, in Austen’s novels, the act of reading is a key indication of how a character should initially be judged, and of major turning points in her development. For Austen, the way a character reads is emblematic of other forms of interpretation: One’s skills in comprehending written language are linked to one’s ability to understand life, other people, and oneself.
Characters’ choices of books are a frequent target of Austen’s satire. Persuasion, for example, opens with a vignette that might otherwise seem insignificant: the reading habits of the protagonist’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, who “for his own amusement, never took up any book” except one—the record of British noble families that contains his own lineage. In Pride and Prejudice, the insufferable clergyman Mr. Collins chooses to orate from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women one afternoon because (as he piously proclaims) he abstains from novels. This episode clearly represents what Henry Tilney, Catherine Morland’s love interest in Northanger Abbey, means when he says, “The person … who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” On the other hand, Catherine’s friend Isabella Thorpe takes great pleasure in novels—but not high-quality ones. Accordingly, Isabella’s character turns out to be as excessive, hyperbolic, dramatic, and deceptive as the Gothic tales she recommends to Catherine.
Northanger Abbey illustrates the dangers of undiscerning reading—of mistaking fanciful tales of mere entertainment for those that offer truthful insights into real human experience. As the novel’s heroine, Catherine, anticipates her arrival at Northanger Abbey, she imagines encountering the sorts of fantastical events that have captivated her in fiction. She relishes the idea that the ancient abbey’s “long, damp passages … were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.”
Her head thus brimming with images of delicious horrors, Catherine passes most of her first night in the Tilney family’s ancestral home by mining a large cabinet in her room for the secrets she’s sure it holds—only to find a roll of old housekeeping receipts. Her embarrassment at this harmless adventure is nothing, however, compared with her later mortification upon realizing that her wild suspicions about the sudden death of the family’s mother are not only quite unfounded, but also could have destroyed her relationship with Henry. Yet, despite being a naive reader, Catherine is teachable. She comes to see that as “charming” as she finds Gothic romances, “it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for.”
In the early 19th century, novels—a term frequently associated with the Gothic romances that form Catherine’s early reading tastes—had yet to be fully respected in the world of polite letters. Austen’s realist work contributed significantly to the artistic sophistication of the developing genre. The narrator of Northanger Abbey appears to articulate Austen’s own view in declaring novels to be works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” Austen’s works exemplify these narrative possibilities, and extol characters who are capable of appreciating them.
[Read: Jane Austen is everything]
Anne Elliot of Persuasion is just such a character. As I discuss in On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, Anne exemplifies the virtue of patience, an essential skill in reading—and living—well. The act of submitting oneself to the demands of a slowly unfolding plot entails an exercise of patience similar to that required in navigating the twists and turns (and disappointments) of life. When Persuasion opens, Anne is patiently awaiting a turn in her own life story, having long ago broken off an engagement with Captain Frederick Wentworth and borne the heavy burden of regret in the years since.
When Anne discusses literature with her new friend Captain Benwick, who is grieving over the death of his fiancée, she concludes that Benwick’s reading, which consists mainly of Romantic poetry, has deepened his sorrow in lost love (just as Marianne Dashwood’s does in Sense and Sensibility). Anne recommends that he read more prose. As a skilled reader, she understands how each mode affects the spirit differently under different circumstances, and though she loves both prose and poetry—even reciting poetry “worthy of being read” to herself while walking—she recognizes the distinction between life and art.
This conversation with Benwick helps Anne to gain the critical distance she needs to perceive her own situation more accurately. After recognizing that she, like Benwick, has succumbed in her own way to heartbreak, she realizes that she has not, as she had mistakenly thought, lost all hope of regaining Wentworth’s love. And when Wentworth renews his marriage proposal—in the form of a letter—she is able to put aside her own pride, prejudices, and doubts to readily comprehend the intent of the letter’s author. In so doing, she finds happiness at last.
Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet lacks some of Anne’s maturity, but is a more reliable reader than Catherine Morland (as indicated metaphorically by Elizabeth’s famous “fine eyes”). What’s more—as seen in Miss Bingley’s attempt to insult Elizabeth by calling her “a great reader” after Elizabeth turns down a card game in favor of a book—she reads thoughtfully in a society where women are not expected to. In contrast to her pedantic sister Mary, who is so absorbed in scholarly books that she is ill-adjusted to the real world, Elizabeth understands that reading, though worthwhile, is no substitute for living. Thus, when Mr. Darcy tries to discuss literature with Elizabeth at a ball, she objects, “No—I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of something else.”
Yet despite being a perceptive and careful reader, Elizabeth needs improvement. The novel’s central conflict lies in her misreading of Darcy’s personality, and its plot turns on the moment when she’s forced—again, through reading—to reconsider. To emphasize the importance of critical interpretation (both for the novel’s characters and for its readers), Austen presents this plot point in two acts. First, Darcy’s voice takes over the narrative with a letter to Elizabeth that appears without commentary. Here, the audience reads along with Elizabeth as Darcy explains all the circumstances that have led her to, based on her partial knowledge, misjudge his character and refuse his marriage proposal.
Then, Austen begins a new chapter that takes the audience into Elizabeth’s thoughts as she rereads the letter. At first, she denies and resists this new interpretation of the facts, so dramatically divergent from her own. But as she pores over the letter again, she takes it in “with somewhat clearer attention,” “weigh[s] every circumstance,” and “deliberate[s] on the probability of each statement” until she realizes “how differently did everything now appear,” and how she has, in truth, been “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.”
All along, as Austen’s audience reads about Elizabeth Bennet, they also read with her. And in this way, as Elizabeth revises her reading of characters and situations she was once certain about, the readers of Pride and Prejudice do so too. As they see her “first impressions” (Austen’s original title for the novel) through her eyes, they share her misreading of Darcy’s character. Recoiling with her at Darcy’s unmistakable pride, the readers become prejudiced. They are duped into trusting Elizabeth’s interpretations because her keen insight, sharp wit, and self-assurance make her judgment seem eminently trustworthy. Reading the novel is therefore a lesson in interpretive humility. As Austen’s characters learn to question their own interpretations, Austen’s readers learn, too, that the way one reads—not just what one reads—is important.
Throughout her novels, Austen satirizes both literary works and readers that represent two kinds of excess: those that are overly moralizing, and those that are overly romanticized. Shallow, pietistic, or narcissistic readers such as Isabella Thorpe, Mr. Collins, Sir Walter Elliot, and even, initially, Catherine Morland, are blind to the power of good books to offer both instruction and delight. Austen’s wisest, most admirable characters are those who turn to books for knowledge of things outside themselves—truths about the human nature common to us all. For these readers, among them Anne Elliot and Elizabeth Bennet, good character is cultivated in learning to read literature, other people, and oneself well.
There’s a scientific reason no one outside of the South can make light and fluffy biscuits, Amanda Mull wrote in November. The secret to success, she showed, is White Lily flour—which is difficult to find north of Richmond, Virginia.
I’m not buying hard-to-get White Lily flour as the magic bullet for good biscuits. My mother in Kentucky made biscuits from scratch almost every morning for my father and she used plain old Gold Medal self-rising flour, shortening (usually Crisco), and milk, not buttermilk. The secret is in knowing the feel of the dough. Work the biscuit dough too long and you get hockey pucks. The only skills in making biscuits are the patience to keep trying and the practice of learning to work the dough quickly and know when it’s time. Come to California and I’ll make some southern-style biscuits for you out of organic butter and whatever flour is in my pantry, usually bread flour.
Pamela Herron
Vallejo, Calif.
When my sister moved from Toronto to Winnipeg (10 years before I did), my mother would ship her care packages monthly. It started out as just a few packages of St-Hubert gravy envelopes, then she added a few more items my sister couldn’t find in Winnipeg. Before you knew it, my sister was getting boxes full of gravy mixes, special honey, and several loaves of malt bread. I used to laugh until I moved here and couldn’t find a few things I used all the time, like premade pizza dough that the stores with bakeries in them always had fresh. I used to buy several and toss a few in the freezer. None to be found in Winnipeg.
Karen Baker
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Regionality in cooking is a good thing, providing diversity for the palate and a home identity for a mobile society. Ask any diasporic St. Louisan who longs for Provel cheese, toasted ravioli, a decent donut, or a real stollen. Not to be found in the South, West, North, or East.
Peter Casey
The Villages, Fla.
I felt the author’s pain in her multiyear quest for a good biscuit in NYC, but she could have found a happy ending years ago if she just went into a Popeyes. Its biscuits rock.
Irene Baldwin
Bronx, N.Y.
Louis Dohme wrote: This is a lesson in regional cooking. It’s not that we in the South make better biscuits because of the wheat grown here, it’s that biscuits are the kind of bread we bake here because of the wheat we have.
Robert C. Harding wrote: Maybe because not everyone cares for biscuits? When I first moved to the South and encountered biscuits and gravy, I thought I had mistakenly been served pig slop. No thank you.
None of this is why your biscuits suck. It's about cutting in the butter. That's all. Use super cold butter. Cut it in just barely. Press and bake. I don't even bother to roll or cut anymore. Perfect biscuits everytime.https://t.co/pT96XuNdzT
— hidden dragon (@anyane) November 27, 2018Biscuits in the American South are serious business y’all (and serious science, and serious ponderance of food distribution systems) https://t.co/luZcFyynM8
— Lisa Du (@lisadont) November 27, 2018One of my favorite feelings is discovering a fact that casts a new light on personal experiences such that they finally make sense. Case in point:https://t.co/axenvWqial
— Steven Buccini (@stevenbuccini) November 25, 2018Interesting! Had I known this, I might have started making my own in New York instead of embarking on a quest to find the perfect biscuit at a restaurant. https://t.co/YaU0Js05gA
— Linda Leseman (@lindasusername) November 22, 2018Amanda Mull replies:When I wrote about finally figuring out that regional flour variation causes the persistent gap in quality between biscuits in the South and those outside of it, responses came in a few varieties. Among them was a small group of people insisting that their (or their mother’s, or grandmother’s) biscuits were absolutely wonderful, despite the fact that they use bread flour, cornmeal, sand, or quick-dry cement instead of the flour traditionally used in the region where biscuits are a centuries-old staple.
As an obstinate person myself, I respect the obstinance of people who refuse to let food science or the hands-on experience of professional bakers offend the memory of grandma’s biscuits. That doesn’t change the fact that flour choice is elemental to absolutely all baking, and the varying gluten content of wheat flours plays an essential role in creating the wildly varying textures of things such as chewy pizza crusts and light, fluffy cakes. Anyone who’s eaten both wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they contain different ingredients. When you’re creating something that’s mostly flour, the flour matters a lot.
Using the correct flour is the easiest way to maximize the quality of your results when making biscuits, but as many people mentioned, there are also some small tips and tricks that can really help. Keeping all your ingredients cold helps ensure that your fat source doesn’t melt during preparation. Using a sharp cutter and resisting the temptation to twist it helps avoid crimped-shut layers that won’t puff during baking. Biscuit dough should be kneaded only as much as is necessary to incorporate the ingredients, and over-kneading will result in a tough, dense final product. The dough of properly made biscuits will feel light and airy.
All of those things can make big differences in how your biscuits turn out, but none of them will reverse the error of choosing high-gluten flour. In fact, the reason over-kneading is bad for biscuits is because it develops the gluten too much, so starting with lots of gluten is a setback you can’t overcome with technique alone.
That being said, good biscuits, as a genre, do have some variation. Those intended to be used for sandwiches should be flatter and broader, and some people prefer the difference in taste and texture that butter or lard provide over shortening. And if you prefer denser, bread-flour biscuits because that’s how you’ve always had them, then that’s how you should go on having them. Food is chemistry, but it’s also family and culture and nostalgia, and the pursuit of an objective “best” isn’t particularly more important than anything else about the experience of baking. That doesn’t mean bread-flour biscuits are just as light and fluffy, though. They’re not.
Imagine having a runny nose, itchy eyes, congestion, and a sore throat, and your doctor telling you that you shouldn’t worry about cancer—she consulted her colleagues and they’re certain it is not cancer, and if it were, they could fight it.
This is roughly what happened on Sunday evening, when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin put out a press release on calls he held with executives from the country’s largest banks. Mnuchin’s statement assured the public that they had not been having liquidity problems or “clearance or margin” issues—the sorts of things you would worry about if the country were on the brink of a financial crisis.
The markets have been suffering from something like a nasty cold of late, with a major correction in stock prices due to rising interest rates, trade tensions, the government shutdown, and slowing global growth. But the surprise holiday readout, which came with a heads-up that Mnuchin would be holding a call with some of the country’s top financial regulators as well, unnerved and puzzled investors, bank executives, politicians, and economists. What was the Treasury secretary thinking? Who thought we were tipping into a financial panic? None of the possible explanations are very reassuring, though it seems that Mnuchin was trying to be.
[Read: The myth of the “Trump miracle”]
Option one: The Treasury secretary was speaking to an audience of one. Mnuchin is under enormous pressure from President Donald Trump, who is upset about the market sell-off and mad at the current Federal Reserve chairman, Jay Powell. The press release was perhaps an attempt to show Trump that Mnuchin was doing something, anything, to talk the markets back into stability.
It makes some kind of squint-and-see-it sense. Mnuchin used Twitter earlier in the weekend to reassure the markets that Trump was not going to fire Powell, who has continued to tap up interest rates as the economy continues to grow at a decent pace. Mnuchin wrote that Trump told him he “totally” disagrees with Fed policy, calling it “an absolute terrible thing to do at this time.” But he said that Trump had informed him, “I never suggested firing Chairman Jay Powell, nor do I believe I have the right to do so.” The readout might be a further effort to keep Trump calm by showing him that everything is fine and his Treasury is taking action.
The problem with this explanation is that it means Mnuchin risked roiling financial markets to placate his boss (which of course would only further anger his boss).
[Reihan Salam: Trump’s high-pressure economy]
Option two: The Treasury secretary believes that the market correction is due in part to animal spirits—animal spirits he could quiet by reminding everyone that the financial system is in fine shape. Perhaps he anticipated further declines in stock prices due to the government shutdown, and wanted to calm the markets.
And it is true that the sell-off remains nothing more than a sell-off, at least in most economists’ and corporate executives’ eyes—a correction, not a crisis; a cold, not a cancer. Even if the bear market were a precursor to an economy-wide slowdown, that would not necessarily result in bank runs and liquidity panics and cratering financial firms.
But, again, nobody was worried about a banking panic before Mnuchin brought it up. “Can someone who understands markets please explain what Secretary Mnuchin did and why?” Brian Schatz, a Hawaii senator who sits on the banking committee, wrote on Twitter. “Because it seems like a bad look at minimum, and maybe more concerning than that but I honestly don’t know.”
[Read: Trump’s economic gamble]
Option three: Mnuchin has some troubling insider knowledge, and he wanted to broadcast to the markets that he is aware and in charge. Maybe some financial firms are teetering? Maybe rising interest rates and falling asset prices are straining some important market participants, and it just has not yet become evident in public reports?
Whatever Mnuchin was trying to do, he did not succeed in it, instead stoking market fears and sowing confusion. Perhaps the clearest takeaway is that Mnuchin and Trump’s Treasury lacks the expertise to communicate clearly and forcefully with the markets—no surprise, given how few experienced financial operatives Trump has hired and how many experienced non-political civil servants have fled Treasury during this administration.
If they’re communicating this poorly in the absence of a crisis, just imagine how disastrously they might perform in the presence of one.
On his second Christmas Eve in office, the president of the United States stands virtually alone in Washington, D.C.
Nine federal departments are shut down, with no resolution in sight. Democrats are furious at President Donald Trump’s attempt to hold the government hostage until he gets funding for a border wall. Many Republicans are livid about his sudden decision to pull military forces from Syria and Afghanistan—a move that’s already resulted in protest resignations from the defense secretary and a top diplomat leading the global anti-ISIS coalition. The stock market is tumbling over shutdown worries, and Trump has asked around about firing the Federal Reserve chairman. The Russia investigation is continuing to steamroll Trump’s associates. And with other recent high-profile departures within the administration, Trump is left with bare-bones executive-branch leadership.
On the Sunday-morning talk shows, the message from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike was very clear: It’s Donald Trump versus the world. But according to his new acting chief of staff, that’s exactly how the president likes it—however improbable that may seem.
[Eliot A. Cohen: You can’t serve both Trump and America]
“This is what Washington looks like when you have a president who refuses to go along to get along,” said Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director who’s been running Trump’s White House since John Kelly left earlier this month. Mulvaney took on a third role on Sunday as the presidential liaison to Fox News Sunday and ABC’s This Week.
On Fox, the host, Chris Wallace, began the program with a dire question: “Are the wheels coming off the Trump presidency?” A calm and collected Mulvaney explained that the drama of the past week is all according to plan. He shifted the blame for the ongoing shutdown to congressional Democrats and predicted that it’d last well past Christmas, reasserted the need for a border wall, and distanced the president from outgoing Defense Secretary James Mattis, claiming that their relationship had long been “fraying.”
In an interview with Jonathan Karl on This Week, Mulvaney played defense, walking back Trump’s comments about Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, saying that Trump “now realizes” he “does not have the ability” to fire him. He also downplayed his own past criticism of the president, telling Karl that he and Trump have “joked about” comments Mulvaney made in 2016 when he called Trump “a terrible human being.”
On the Sunday shows, the Democrats’ critiques of Trump were harsh, if a tad run-of-the-mill at this point. Responding to the shutdown, the party’s representatives reiterated that they won’t allow taxpayer dollars to fund a border wall if they can help it. Republican condemnations of Trump’s recent moves were a much noisier and newsier affair.
On NBC’s Meet the Press, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania echoed the qualms that Mattis expressed in his resignation letter. “The president does not share, I would say, my view that the Pax Americana of the postwar era has been enormously good for America, it’s been good for the people that I represent, it’s been great for all of us,” Toomey told the host, Chuck Todd, emphasizing fundamental differences between Trump and “the vast majority of Republicans and probably Democrats.” Toomey called upon the Senate to take a more robust foreign-policy role in the Trump era.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, who’s long been rumored to challenge Trump in the Republican presidential primary in 2020, called the withdrawal of troops from Syria a “terrible mistake” in an interview on Fox News Sunday. And on CBS’s Face the Nation, the incoming House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney supported Trump’s desire for a border wall, but sang a different tune on Syria and Afghanistan. “I am deeply, deeply concerned and I oppose strongly the president’s decision apparently to withdraw troops from Syria,” she told the host, Margaret Brennan. “The apparent decision that we’re now going to be looking at withdrawing troops from Afghanistan … these two decisions would be disastrous.”
[Read: The Republican majority’s last act: a government shutdown]
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who appeared on Face the Nation and CNN’s State of the Union, took almost the opposite stance of Cheney, opposing the wall unless its costs are offset and praising the president for getting out of Syria and Afghanistan. He compared Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. “That was the strategy of Vietnam,” Paul said on Face the Nation. “They waited us out and the Taliban are going to wait us out. They know we will eventually leave and leave we must … The president is right, and I think the people agree with him.”
Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, who was interviewed on Face the Nation after Paul, summed up the Democratic response to Trump’s troop announcements: “By abruptly withdrawing from Syria, President Trump is handing a great big Christmas gift to Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah Khamenei,” he told Brennan. “When there is a foreign-policy decision that's cheered by Vladimir Putin and Rand Paul, that’s a pretty good sign it’s a terrible idea.” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin echoed many Democrats, too, when he offered his reaction to the Mattis news. “It breaks my heart that [Mattis] is going to step aside,” the Illinois Democrat said on Meet the Press. “We counted on him to be there to stop this president from his worst impulse.”
Trump, surrounded by a skeleton crew of government staffers, may well have watched the Sunday shows; he’s been known to tune in from time to time. If so, he would have found few on air to defend him. Way back during the presidential campaign, Trump would tell supporters that “no one knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it!” The candidate’s pronouncement was prescient: It’s become clear that if Trump is going to fix anything, he’s going to have to go it alone.
In 2014, The Killers released a Christmas single, “Joel, the Lump of Coal.” Rather than featuring a traditional Christmas character, the song tells the bittersweet story of Joel, an animated chunk of coal who wants to be given as a Christmas present. Coal, everyone knows, is not a gift anyone desires; it is a punishment and a rebuke.
But there was a time when Joel—and coal—would have been happily received by many Americans. Until the turn of the 20th century, coal was a token to ward off winter’s chill. Only as fossil-fuel supplies and access expanded did a gift of coal become a consequence of naughtiness. But a century has passed since coal was in widespread domestic and industrial use. Today, as humans still burn coal despite the known ecological costs, it might better serve as a reminder of collective ecological arrogance.
In the 19th century, when the modern forms of both Christmas and Santa Claus were developing, there was little mention of punishing naughty children with coal. The most famous depiction of Santa Claus from that period, the “Account of a Visit From St. Nicholas,” imagines St. Nick as wholly benevolent, his bag containing only toys for the good little girls and boys. Even images that record his disciplinary role leave out the dark lumps: In a similar poem published two years before, “Old Santeclaus With Much Delight,” Santa states, “But where I found the children naughty, / […] I left a long, black, birchen rod” as a threat. A lash meant for punishment appears, but again no coal.
That’s likely because coal was relatively new to domestic infrastructure. The adoption of coal, as the historian Sean Patrick Adams explains in his book Home Fires, was just beginning in the 1820s. It would not finish until roughly the 1870s. Before then, many people still burned wood in their hearths. Instead of coal, naughty children received stones, fresh whips in the form of small branches, ashes, or cold potatoes as punishment.
As the century progressed, American households became increasingly reliant on coal for heating. Stoves replaced inefficient hearths, and coal replaced rapidly dwindling supplies of wood. Around the end of the century, coal starts to appear in Christmas stories.
Among them is the 1892 W. D. Howells story “Christmas Every Day,” in which a little girl wishes for infinite Christmases. Howell writes that parents get stockings filled “with potatoes and pieces of coal wrapped up in tissue paper, just as they always had every Christmas.” Later in the tale, the narrator notes, “After a while, coal and potatoes began to be awfully scarce, so many had been wrapped up in tissue paper to fool papas and mammas,” suggesting that coal might have been a gag present—or, like socks, a disappointing gift for a child but a reasonable one for an adult.
[Read: Why you’re bad at giving gifts]
In many cases, characters are downright happy to receive coal for Christmas. In one Victorian poem, a poor couple gratefully receives turkey, potatoes, and coal from a neighbor on Christmas Day. In another short story, a poor family gets piles of Christmas presents from some relatives, including a full cellar of coal.
Coal seems to adopt its punitive symbolism around the turn of the century. The material had taken over most domestic heating by then. While there were outliers, like those with expensive wood or steam heating systems, many Americans relied more and more on their local coal merchant and the ever-more distant mines. Coal was common and plentiful, features that made it a bad gift, like the switches and stones of earlier years.
The 1912 short story “A Prince of Good Fellows,” by Myron Adams, offers a clear link between coal and bad behavior. In the story, Tom and his mother take on the responsibility of providing a “real Christmas,” including presents from Santa, for Tom’s little sisters despite the family’s poverty. To make sure the deception works, Tom tells his sisters the same story adults used a century before: that Santa gives stones to bad boys. He then fills his stocking with wrapped pieces of coal.
Coal was likely the closest stone Tom could find in his urban environment. His house would have a small pile ready to be burned. Come Christmas Day, the little girls riot when Tom’s “presents” are revealed; they believe Santa made a grievous error because Tom is not a bad boy. Tom’s story is a good model for how coal was substituted for switches or stones: Someone needed a punishment at the last second, and coal was everywhere because of its use in domestic stoves.
“The Toy-Makers’ Strike,” written by Ruth Catherine Wood in 1918, records the continued progress of coal as punishment. In this tale, the toy-making elves go on strike, so a group of fairies and an ice bear turn scab to make Christmas happen. They are not very good at their jobs, particularly the ice bear, who “gave one bad boy a nice big doll, and put the lumps of coal and the switches in a good little girl’s stocking.” Like the stones from Tom’s story, the switches here are brought forward from a century before. In fact, the coal seems to be a replacement for the ashes in the “ashes and switches” that were given to bad little children. The swap from ash to coal is an easy one, but it also suggests burgeoning wealth: Santa doesn’t stoop to scoop dead ash out from the fireplace when he can instead just grab a few handfuls of unburned coal from the scuttle. These stories seem to draw a direct connection between coal and bad behavior.
Still other stories from the turn of the century show poor families happily receiving coal. New methods of mining, shipping, and burning made coal so available, the well off might not have hesitated to give it to their children as a punishment (or a joke). But for the poor, the winters were surely brutally cold, if not fatal. As coal became an affordable commodity, that changed, and by the 1920s coal’s status as a punishment for bad children was everywhere—in humor magazines, children’s books, and newspaper articles. Coal was a fondly remembered Christmas tradition by the end of the decade. In 1928, Robert Denvir recalled the shock of seeing his stocking topped with coal: “When you looked in the stocking that hung by the edge of the fireplace there was always a large piece of coal and your heart took a sudden bump downward.”
Today, nobody would actually give anyone coal—largely because it’s hard to find in ordinary, domestic life. Instead, the lump of coal has become a symbol of its history a century ago.
For the truly dedicated, you can purchase a satchel of anthracite from Pennsylvania via the internet. One box of fresh coal advertises itself as good for school projects, crafts, displays, decorations, stocking stuffers, “or of course you can burn it.” The reviews suggest the box is frequently purchased as a gag Christmas gift. On Etsy, you can purchase artisanal coal straight from West Virginia.
Most people have no use for actual coal today, so useful items get marketed as if they were coal. You can purchase soap with charcoal in it, black popcorn, bags that say “lump of coal,” a lump-of-coal puzzle, jewelry with coal in the setting, catnip pouches that say coal on them, candy coal, and hundreds of similar items. These are all jokes, of course. Giving someone a piece of “coal” soap has the nice double meaning of telling them you think they are naughty and then giving them a tool to clean up their moral filth.
Coal symbolism also appears in popular media. Coal finds its way into pop songs, like “Joel, the Lump of Coal.” Cartoons such as SpongeBob and Teen Titans Go repeat the idea that getting coal is bad. Books for all ages, from children to adults, retell the moral to encourage good behavior or at least joke about it. Newspapers continue to hand out lumps either in headlines or cartoons. Coal gifts even come in GIF form.
[Read: The joy of no-gift Christmas]
Social media is no stranger to lumps of coal, either. On Twitter, you can find people suggesting potential lump-of-coal recipients all throughout the year. Instagram has a few thousand posts for #lumpofcoal and #coalforchristmas, although the former is mainly advertisements for products on Etsy. There’s even a strange collection of YouTube videos where parents film their children receiving coal. A poignant example of this type of video records a child gloating with thanks for Santa—only to open a box filled with what appears to be charcoal briquettes. She cries as she stares, like Lady Macbeth, at the black stains on her hands. This poor girl is so assured of the bounty that awaits her, and so keenly struck by the meaning of those black bricks (unlike some of the other videos where the symbolism is lost). The rebuke to her behavior stings. This coal carries a moral weight, visible as it slides from the girl’s hands.
That moral burden persists, even if most Americans aren’t in regular contact with lumps of coal. Coal accounted for nearly 15 percent of all the energy consumed in 2016. But it is still widely used to generate electric power. Unlike turn-of-the-century furnaces, that use of coal is largely invisible to citizens today, making a lump of coal seem merely diverting. People joke about giving gifts of coal as a nostalgic vestige of Christmases past.
But unlike in the 19th century, today’s gift-givers possess a darker knowledge about the substance. Even jokes about coal, like Joel, feature widely known facts about its role in climate change. Despite that awareness, people continue to accept coal power and blithely give coal gifts. That makes coal the ultimate Anthropocene stocking stuffer: Without the advent of fossil-fuel infrastructure, people would never have used coal to punish children—and now humankind can’t seem to stop relying on it. Coal need not be kept as a symbol of individual naughtiness when it persists as a real cause of collective wickedness—a nonrenewable energy resource that continues to endanger the environment. Maybe as a gift, coal can serve a new purpose: as a reminder of that ongoing fact—an earnest, ecological memento mori instead of a chastisement or a joke.
Part of the allure of the holidays is all the traditions: A turkey-and-mashed-potatoes feast on Thanksgiving, wrapped presents nestled under the bedazzled tree for Christmas, the lighting of the menorah during Hanukkah. It’s these iconic moments that Norman Rockwell captured in his popular illustrations of families’ snowy holiday revelry.
But, then again, how Americans actually celebrate the holidays doesn’t always resemble a picture-perfect Rockwell painting. Families conjure up their own traditions to attach to the holidays, from the heartwarming to the gross to the downright silly. So, this year, we had readers send in stories and photos of their families’ unique and quirky holiday traditions. And in a modern twist on the Rockwell prints of yesteryear, we had Dan Bransfield, an artist in San Francisco, illustrate eight of our favorites based on the photos the families sent.
‘Throwing Pop Away’
Dan BransfieldWhen I was little, 15 to 30 family members would gather at my grandparents’ house on Christmas Day. Everyone got presents from at least one person in each of the families (my mom is one of five, and sometimes even more extended family would show up with gifts for the 15 grandchildren).
This produced a lot of torn wrapping paper, ribbons, packing material, product packaging, and Sears toy catalogs used to weigh down gifts so the kids couldn't guess what was in them. All this went in a giant trash can, but it would still be overflowing. So, my grandfather would always climb into the trash can to push everything down so the rest of it could fit. Then we would drape ribbons and stick bows on him while he was in there. We called it “Throwing Pop Away.”
Even when he got older and sick from cancer, we still filled a smaller cardboard box with some of the wrapping paper, and he would climb in.
Now that he’s gone, several family members have kept the tradition going.
LaRae LaBouff
Wearing Doilies on Our Heads
Dan BransfieldMy great-grandmother, Nana Evelyn, was born in 1912. When she was 4 or 5 years old, her prim-and-proper, traditional “Irish matriarch” of a mother hosted a big Thanksgiving dinner for friends and family in their little home in North Jersey. My great-great-grandmother had prepared small bowls of fresh fruit as a first course, and under each bowl she placed one of those little white-lace doilies to complete each perfect, proper placement. That night, her guest of honor was a man my family knows only as Judge Hubert. (My Grandpa Doug, Nana Evelyn’s middle son, claims Judge Hubert was the guy who invented those chains that secure pens to the counter at the bank. I don’t know how fact-checkable that is.) Judge Hubert politely finished his fruit, then quietly leaned over to 4-year-old Nana Evelyn and said, “Look—this is what you’re supposed to do with these,” before fastening the doily to the top of his head with a toothpick. To my great-great-grandmother’s horror, Nana Evelyn roared with laughter and followed Judge Hubert’s lead. Before she knew it, everyone in the room had a doily on their head.
Now, more than 100 years later, my family still wears doilies on our heads every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. It’s a small, silly tradition, but one that has lasted for generations!
Erin Moran
A Purposefully Unappetizing Christmas Breakfast
Dan BransfieldMy wife’s grandfather said that Christmas was too good, and so there should be at least one thing you don’t look forward to. So he cooked a Christmas breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, and orange juice, put it in a blender, and served it to his kids as a smoothie. My father-in-law heard this story about his father-in-law and thought it was hilarious, so he made it a tradition with my wife and her sisters. But instead of doing the same thing every year, certain family members come up with an idea with which to surprise everyone else. There is always a theme to it: It could be food from The Grinch (Who pudding, rare Who roast beast, triple-decker toadstool sandwiches with arsenic sauce, and of course banana with a greasy black peel) or Elf (spaghetti, crumbled Pop-Tarts, and maple syrup) or poop (cat box filled with Cocoa Krispies topped with plops of undercooked pumpkin-pie filling, refried beans served in diapers, etc.) or oatmeal (oatmeal bread, oatmeal muffins, oatmeal cookies, oatmeal soup—busy day for the bathroom after that one). Last year, my son and my brother-in-law teamed up to create a science lab: dissected frog legs, lychee fruit “eyeballs” floating in a big jar with dry ice smoking out the top, brains made of Jell-O, and bowls of worms. We laugh a lot, and I always think, I bet nobody else in the world is eating the same thing we are right now ...
Nate Ransil
Celebrating New Year’s Eve With Video Games and Cheap Pizza
Dan BransfieldMy husband and I have been together since high school. When we were 16, in 2010, we started the tradition of playing SSX Tricky on a PlayStation 2 and eating frozen pizza while our parents were out on New Year’s Eve. (That game came out in 2001 and was already dated when we started the tradition!) We always meant to watch the ball drop, but we would get caught up with playing or making out and would forget to go hunting for the right channel until the last minute. Now we’re in our mid-20s, but we still just play video games and intentionally “forget” to turn on the TV until the last minute. We get invited to New Year’s Eve parties, but there is something really special about starting every year with just the guy I fell in love with at 16, some cheap pizza, and a quiet home.
Alyssa Mars Hakanson
A Speedo-Clad George Michael Made of Marzipan
Dan BransfieldSince 2007, my youngest daughter has baked a gingerbread house and/or a Yule log cake, which her best friend, a sculptor, has decorated with marzipan figures, always including George Michael. The first included a Speedo-clad George in a melted sugar pool outside the gingerbread house—a tribute to “Club Tropicana.” (Since we live in Houston, our holiday tends to include a tropical theme.) Beginning in 2009, the year Michael Jackson died, George began to straddle the log at the head of a marzipan procession of tributes to cultural figures who have left us during that year, starting with a silver glove, but now including lovingly molded figures ranging from Amy Winehouse to Nelson Mandela. Christmas 2016 was a somewhat somber affair for many reasons, culminating with George’s shocking death on Christmas Day. But George still rode the log that year—with a gorgeous set of angel wings—and the tiniest Speedo yet. George rode again last year, and God willing will continue to do so as long as writers write, singers sing, and bakers bake—and the marzipan doesn’t run out.
Craig Murrin
Feeding the Cows Hay on Christmas Eve
Dan BransfieldWe follow an old-world, European tradition of giving our cows hay on Christmas Eve.
The origin of the tradition is that because cows protected and kept Baby Jesus warm when he was born in a stable, we need to honor them by feeding them the best hay that we have. If you have spent time with cows, you know that they are very protective of their babies. A mother cow will talk to her calf in a low, soft voice. That is what the verse “the cattle were lowing” refers to.
We feed the cows their hay, tell the Christmas story, and sing carols. If you have never had the chance to experience it, cows chewing hay is one of the most relaxing sounds I know.
After we are done, we open presents; growing up on a dairy farm, this wasn’t unusual, because early morning milking makes Christmas-gift opening complicated. After presents, we have homemade egg noodles with butter, garlic, and anchovies.
Steve Schwanebeck
Camping Out Beneath the Christmas Tree
Dan BransfieldIn my family, we have a tradition of camping out and having a slumber party under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve every year. It involves the kids in the family and not usually the parents. We all get decked out in our most festive pajamas and bring down sleeping bags or mattresses and plenty of bedding and then make a camp under the tree. We’re not sure how this started, but it’s possible that we wanted to be closer to the tree and the presents on Christmas morning and probably didn’t want the festivities to end. Now my siblings and I are adults, but we share this sleepover tradition with our nieces and nephews.
Amanda Hopkins
A Superstitious New Year’s With Coal and Whiskey
Dan BransfieldI come from a Scottish background that marries superstition with religion: not good bedfellows. Before the new year, all debts to family or friends must be paid. The house must be thoroughly cleaned with no dirty laundry. That’s the precursor. There’s not much time for partying with the duties that must be completed before midnight—plus a bowlful of peas must be consumed to ensure there is money in the new year. A soldering iron is used to drop bits of solder into cold water, and it will form globs that are then translated to the man or woman you will marry or the luck you will have that year. By 11:30, we are exhausted and perhaps feeling the painful effects of all those peas.
And then it’s on to mission impossible: the first footer. The first footer is the person who will take the first step over your threshold on New Year’s morning. This is quite specific. It must be a man, and he needs to be tall and very dark-haired and brown-eyed. He must carry a slice of bread, a flask of whiskey, a measure of milk, and a lump of coal—and then he must bless all the rooms in the house. All to ensure heat, food, and whiskey for whatever occasion it’s needed. I married a handsome but blue-eyed, red-haired man who by custom carries the worst possible luck as a first footer. Red hair is highest on the scale of bad luck, and of course most Scots are of that coloring. One year my husband could not leave the house in the event he would be the first one back in. We waited three days before we coerced a work colleague to gather the necessities and enter our house. I now collect the items and leave them outside on New Year’s Eve so that my son can enter with blessings and thus free me for the year. Do I believe this works? No. I have had some very bad years. But can I release myself from the superstition? Absolutely not. It’s time for me to look for a lump of coal already. Not easy to find in this century.
Bev MacLeod
Over the next week, The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series will delve into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy cinematic moment from 2018. First up is Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther. (Read our previous entries here.)
By the time we revisit the waterfall in Black Panther, about 75 minutes into the film, every viewer understands the stakes of the place. Warrior Falls is Wakanda’s ceremonial proving ground, a spectacular but deadly setting that maintains the status quo of the fictional African nation. Earlier in the movie, T’Challa (played by Chadwick Boseman) claims the mantle of king by defeating a challenger, the hulking M’Baku (Winston Duke), in single combat at the site. It’s a moment that lays out the various political powers at play in this secluded country, and the value still placed on tradition even though Wakanda’s technology has reached unparalleled heights.
The return to the falls is spurred by Erik Stevens, a.k.a. Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), an outsider raised in the United States who is seeking to claim T’Challa’s throne. A forgotten cousin whose dad was killed by T’Challa’s father for threatening to expose Wakanda’s innovations to the world, Erik is an interloper, but his royal blood allows him to declare a challenge. On the day of the fight, he’s dressed not in formal Wakandan attire like his opponent and the rest of the onlookers, but in his U.S. military fatigues and armor. When handed a traditional spear, he splits it in half by kicking it.
Watching Black Panther for the first of several viewings in 2018, I was struck by just how incongruous Erik’s appearance is in this scene, even though I had just learned of Wakanda’s rituals myself. That’s how effectively Black Panther communicates the rules of an entire civilization to its audience. Every Marvel movie requires a little world-building, but Black Panther goes further, investing viewers in what feels like a living, breathing culture. When T’Challa falls in battle to Erik, this loss isn’t only personal—it also snaps the very world order in two.
[Read: The tragedy of Erik Killmonger]
The director, Ryan Coogler, and his cinematographer, Rachel Morrison, shot the battle specifically to evoke a feeling of darkness and gathering rain clouds (which required building massive structures to block out the sun). When Erik stabs T’Challa and brings him to his knees, the mood is oppressively grim; at that point, the tribal elder Zuri (Forest Whitaker) even intervenes to stop the fight because he can see the desired result slipping away.
“Is this your king?” cries Erik, as T’Challa swings wildly at him. “Him? He’s supposed to protect you! ... Nah, I’m your king.” Erik brashly admits to his status as an outsider, trained by Western powers as a soldier, stripped of his humanity by the world that Wakanda keeps itself separate from. In returning to his homeland, Erik is looking to seize power and demand justice for those of African ancestry around the world, the ones who couldn’t enjoy the spoils of Wakanda’s advances. It’s why the scene plays as both devastating and weirdly thrilling; there’s a twisted sense of justice to Erik’s approach.
As my colleague Adam Serwer beautifully wrote, Black Panther is Coogler’s attempt to reckon with the utopian notion of Pan-Africanism and how it clashes with the harsh realities of slavery, colonialism, and systemic racism. Erik wants to deploy Wakanda’s military force for what he sees as a greater good, but he’s been curdled by the ideas of the country he grew up in. “Killmonger’s plan for ‘black liberation,’ arming insurgencies all over the world, is an American policy that has backfired and led to unforeseen disasters perhaps every single time it has been deployed,” Serwer wrote.
With Killmonger’s triumph in this fight scene, Wakanda’s hermetic peace has been destroyed and the morality of its self-imposed isolation undermined. By contrast, the earlier waterfall battle, between T’Challa and M’Baku, is bathed in sunlight; it ends with M’Baku yielding proudly, having proved his tribe’s worthiness. Because of Wakanda’s cloistered approach, Erik was kept from those traditions, which helped to warp him into the man he became, one with righteous intentions but with less regard for human life. In any other Marvel movie, he might be framed as a simple villain; in Coogler’s hands, he’s genuinely tragic. The significance of Erik’s transgression is clear, but without the director’s loving care for detail, it wouldn’t feel so seismic.
Next Up: Annihilation
Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Lori Gottlieb answers questions from readers about their problems, big and small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Dear Therapist,
I am in a loving, five-year, long-distance relationship with my boyfriend, who happens to have a twin brother. My boyfriend is the successful one, with a doctorate from a top university, while his brother has bounced among degree programs and has yet to get a full-time job. His very wealthy parents have supported him through all of this. Recently my boyfriend's brother moved to Florida to start a new degree, and within a year married an older woman and just had a baby daughter.
I am jealous and angry at the support my boyfriend's parents are giving to his brother and his brother’s wife. They paid for their wedding, contribute to their rent and living expenses, and I suspect will now lavish money on their daughter. My boyfriend tells me that his parents are making sure the money they give is roughly even, but every time I ask him to be precise on this he gives conflicting answers or doesn't know.
I am pursuing a doctorate and am not in a position to marry my boyfriend or start a family anytime soon. But even so, why can't I also benefit from his wealthy parents like my quasi-sister-in-law does? My boyfriend says the financial matters should be between him, his brother, and his parents. However, if we are planning to spend our lives together, shouldn't I also be able to voice an opinion on these things?
My own family has been torn apart by my grandmother unequally giving money to her children, but maybe I am just creating the same thing in my boyfriend's family? I would be really grateful for any advice. I'm so upset by all of this that I can't even think.
Zoe
Edinburgh, Scotland
Dear Zoe,
Navigating the financial challenges of graduate school is not easy, and you’re certainly not the only student who wishes for a little cushion, maybe in the form of a fairy godmother that swoops in and takes the money stress away, leaving you to focus on your studies and eat something other than ramen. In your case, it must be especially envy-provoking to be in close proximity to this kind of relief and not have access to it. So your feelings are understandable and very, very human. At the same time, though, I think they’re clouding your perspective and, left unchecked, have the potential to damage your relationship with your boyfriend.
If you and your boyfriend are planning to spend your lives together, you two will need to discuss a lot of things. If these conversations haven’t happened in the five years you’ve been together, it’s important that you have them now. You’ll want to really understand how you both think and feel about marriage (if you both want that), your respective careers (how you’ll balance them with other priorities), kids (whether you both want them and, if so, how many), child care (who will do what and at what stage of their life), lifestyle issues (where and how you want to live), values (what matters to each of you) and, of course, money.
Your boyfriend is right that how his parents choose to handle their money is between them, but what’s between the two of you is how you talk about the money you do have and what you do with it. I don’t know what arrangement you currently have as a long-term couple—who pays for what between you—and how you arrived at that, but maybe part of your anger at your boyfriend’s parents is misdirected and, in fact, you’re angry with him. For instance, since he’s working and you’re a graduate student, would you like him to help pay some of your expenses? And if so, have you talked to him about this, or are you hurt that he hasn’t offered on his own? My guess is that you two haven’t sat down and talked about money—I don’t mean just the logistics of it, but what it represents to each of you.
Money can signify so many things: love, acceptance, commitment, safety. It may be that getting financial support from your boyfriend would make you feel loved and valued by him—a gesture that indicates his admiration for how hard you’re working on your doctorate and an appreciation of how much of a sacrifice you’re currently making. It could also be that your blood is boiling because you’re envious not just of his brother and sister-in-law, but of your boyfriend himself. Maybe you feel resentful that he had it easier because his parents helped him while he was working toward his doctorate and your parents aren’t. You may even, without realizing it, want his parents to make up for the care you feel you aren’t getting from your own parents. Or perhaps having his parents’ support would make you feel more accepted by them as a future member of the family, or give you a stronger sense of commitment from your boyfriend.
At the same time, money represents something to your boyfriend. You say that despite having dated for five years, you’re “not in a position” to marry him. It could be that your boyfriend doesn’t feel as if he’s in a position to share his or his parents’ money with somebody who, despite talking about spending the future with him, isn’t ready to walk down the aisle. (Plenty of people in graduate programs, and plenty of temporarily long-distance couples, don’t let those circumstances stand in the way of getting married.) Or it may be that he isn’t ready to commit to you—and the financial arrangement between you two reflects this—in part because of the painful dilemma you’re creating for him around his family.
It might be helpful for you to consider the situation through your boyfriend’s eyes. He has a twin brother, and even if he finds his brother frustrating or irresponsible, or has conflicted feelings about him, he probably loves his twin dearly. Have you considered what it must be like for your boyfriend to have one person he loves deeply (you) begrudge something given to another person he loves deeply (his brother) by yet other people he loves deeply (his parents)? I imagine that he wants to please all of you but that your anger will at some point make him feel as if he’s forced to choose. He may choose you and create conflict with his family (and resent you), or he may choose them and create conflict with you (and leave you). Either way, you won’t get what you want—his parents’ money. I know that sounds crass, but that’s essentially what you’re asking for—money from people who don’t owe you anything. They have their reasons for offering more help to the son in greater need of it, and if you have a problem with how his parents divvy up their gifts (remember, that’s what these contributions are—gifts), it’s important to note that your boyfriend, who is their son, doesn’t.
This is a great opportunity for you to get clarity about what’s behind this anger and envy, and to open up a deeper conversation with your boyfriend about how you both feel about the money you each bring to this relationship. There’s no one-size-fits-all model for how couples share their finances, and that also might change as the relationship does (from dating to marriage, from long-distance to living under the same roof, from pre-kids to life with kids, from one person earning more to the other earning more). Your own family’s history might be contributing to the feelings you’re having, but that history doesn’t have to define your future. Talking with compassion and an open mind about this delicate topic will help you and your boyfriend understand the other’s perspective better, and, with time, arrive at something that works for both of you.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
“In the beginning,” says a dream-reverberant voice in the first seconds of Netflix’s Watership Down, “Frith made the world. And he made the stars by scattering his droppings across the sky.” And in the beginning, Richard Adams, who was working at the time for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, told his children a story about some rabbits. Some of the rabbits were nice; some of the rabbits were nasty. And he wrote the story down, and a few years later, in 1972, it was published.
An unprecedented mash-up of eco-anxiety, homely bottom-of-the-garden anthropomorphism, real violence, and febrile mythmaking, Watership Down struck a nerve. Adams’s rabbits may have talked like they worked for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (“Well, I suppose we’d better go and see the Chief Rabbit …”), but they were wild. Wild! They ripped each other’s ears. They quivered in visionary throes. They devised oppressive political systems. They had a rabbit theology, rabbit jargon, and a distinctively rabbity, twitchy, neurologically extreme—you might even say paranoid—weltanschauung. “All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies,” Lord Frith promises the first rabbit, the prime trickster bunny, El-ahrairah. “And whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you.”
Netflix’s new animated miniseries has a daunting, shadowy forebear: the 1978 feature-length adaptation, also animated, that was written and directed by Martin Rosen. Trippy, brutal, and beautifully rendered, Rosen’s movie—the legend goes—was too much, freaking out all the little children with psychedelic gore. That’s not quite how I remember it: To an English schoolboy in the late ’70s, this world of small gray animals having prophetic seizures and slashing at each other with splintered claws was, if anything, comfortingly familiar. Nonetheless, its fearsome reputation persists.
[Read: Calamities and other forces of nature]
But the thing about a story like this, a story in which a gang of rabbits is forced out of its warren by the bulldozers of greenbelt development and obliged to go on a harrowing adventure to find a new home, is that it doesn’t date. Is it even necessary to point out that, in the almost half a century since Adams first scattered his bunny droppings across the sky, this tale has sharpened in resonance? So all you have to do is tell it. And the Netflix version, made in collaboration with the BBC, tells it straight and very well.
The writer Tom Bidwell and the director Noam Murro stay loyal to the lines of Adams’s plot—the power struggles among the buck rabbits, the hunt for does—while maintaining contact with the spectral realm of rabbity nervousness and augury. The bad-trip visions of poor Fiver (Nicholas Hoult), the crew’s trembling, doom-obsessed seer (“I can feel the danger like a wire around my neck!”) are spectacular. Less dramatic but more stirring are the attempts of his brother Hazel (James McAvoy) to become a leader and—oh, poignant oxymoron—a brave rabbit. “The fear has taken hold of me,” Hazel tells Fiver. “It follows me, into my dreams. What if it breaks me?”
[Read: How Netflix reverse-engineered Hollywood]
There’s been some grumbling about the quality of the animation. Looks great to me. The details are almost unsettling in their specificity and presence: every shining, twanging whisker; every knot in the fur. Broody sunset around a pylon; the half-light of a warren-tunnel, like being behind an eyeball. And the rabbits move like rabbits—that is, indolent or panicked, with nothing in between.
Of the copper-bottomed cast of voice actors, allow me to hail particularly John Boyega as the warlike and gruffly noble Bigwig, and Tom Wilkinson as the Threarah, chief rabbit of the condemned warren, munching on cabbage leaves and showing Hazel and Fiver his skeptical backside. “So you were saying,” rumbles the chief, “your brother senses things …” As for Rosamund Pike as the Black Rabbit, the consoling maternal Death Spirit that lifts all rabbits out of their fear and suffering—“You’ve been tired recently, haven’t you, old friend? Well, I can do something about that”—she made me cry like a little bunny.
So score yourself a nice muddy carrot, settle down, and enjoy this.
During the presidential campaign, the outlier in Donald Trump’s foreign-policy orations was his treatment of Iran. On Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Russia (remember President Barack Obama’s “off-mic” tête-à-tête with President Dmitry Medvedev?), and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump largely followed his predecessor. Differences existed, certainly in style and manner, but the overlap between the two men on most of the big foreign-policy questions was profound.
When it came to the clerical regime in Iran, however, the two men were polar opposites. Trump thought the nuclear agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was “the worst deal ever.” He also let loose against Tehran’s Islamic radicalism, terrorism, quest for regional hegemony, and fondness for sowing mayhem in the Middle East. Trump’s serrated rhetoric stood in contrast to the comments of Obama, his secretary of state, and other senior officials, who had muted their criticisms of Tehran in their pursuit of the atomic accord and, as important, a new strategic realignment, wherein a less interventionist America might, so the theory went, find a modus vivendi with a richer, commercially engaged, and moderating Islamic Republic.
As president, Trump followed through. The nuclear deal went down, the sanctions came back, and despite moments of wobbliness concerning troop deployments in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the Trump administration held fast in the Middle East. National-Security Advisers H. R. McMaster and John Bolton, United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, and, perhaps most of all, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out a new approach to the Islamic Republic. The Trump administration wasn’t inclined to roll back the clerical regime, but it did seem ready to contest and contain Iran’s Shiite imperialism in Syria, Yemen, and even in Iraq, in which the president had never evinced much interest.
[Read: The Trump administration’s lowest point yet]
Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, concurrently with his intention to drastically reduce the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan and the likely soon-to-be-announced further drawdown of U.S. personnel in Iraq, has made mincemeat of the administration’s efforts to contain Iran. If you add up who wins locally by this decision (the clerical regime in Iran, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite radicals, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) and who loses (Jordan, Israel, the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds and Sunni Arabs, everyone in Lebanon resisting Hezbollah, the vast majority of the Iraqi Shia, the Gulf States), it becomes clear that the interests of the United States have been routed.
Before Trump pulled the plug in Syria, the rhetorical center of the president’s Iran policy was the “New Iran Strategy” speech by Pompeo at the Heritage Foundation on May 21, 2018. The 12 demands that Pompeo issued to Tehran are not historically provocative—they were, until the coming of Obama, essentially what the United States had always sought: to deny the mullahs nuclear weapons and stop them from spreading their version of Islamic militancy. Washington hadn’t been brilliantly successful in countering Tehran and only occasionally efficient in bringing real pain to the mullahs and their praetorians, the Revolutionary Guards, who are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers since they first drew blood in Lebanon in 1983. But Pompeo, by redrawing the lines, clearly signaled that the United States wasn’t giving up, that a campaign of “maximum pressure” was still coming. It is clear now, however, that the secretary’s speech was a bridge too far for Trump, who may never have read it.
To be fair to the president: The administration’s developing approach was probably never his. A close read of Pompeo’s Heritage speech reveals the tactical quandary that has always been at the core of the Trump presidency’s approach. The secretary put forth a lot of “don’ts” for the regime: “Iran must end support to Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including Lebanese Hizballah, Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad … respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi Government … end its military support for the Houthi militia [in Yemen] … must withdraw all forces under Iranian command throughout the entirety of Syria … end support for the Taliban and other terrorists in Afghanistan … cease harboring senior al-Qaeda leaders … and end its threatening behavior against its neighbors.” But he did not clearly indicate that the United States would do anything to punish the Islamic Republic for its malign actions other than use sanctions.
[Read: The Kurds: Betrayed again by Washington]
It is an excellent guess that Pompeo, Bolton, McMaster, and Haley were willing to apply more pressure than just sanctions, and would have given speeches to that effect if they’d been allowed to do so. Even Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who was more reticent about committing U.S. troops to an anti-Iran mission, would have likely been more forward-leaning if he had trusted Trump to stay the course in Syria and Iraq. All these officials certainly agreed that U.S. forces in Syria, which don’t cost much and have incurred few casualties, should stay. Those troops and civilians were the hinge of long-term Iranian containment—a low-cost use of American soldiers, backed up by allied European special-operations units, that had checked the advance of much larger and more costly Iranian, Russian, and Syrian-regime forces.
To their credit, Pompeo, Bolton, McMaster, Haley, and Mattis removed the rhetorical legerdemain surrounding the reasons for American troops being in Syria: They were there to squash the Islamic State and prevent its rebirth, and they were there to check Russia and Iran, which controls Syrian-regime ground forces as well as the indispensable foreign Shiite militias. This American engagement was easily the best bang for the buck that Washington had gotten in the region since 2001.
Nor were Bolton, McMaster, Pompeo, Haley, and Mattis operating outside congressional authorization: At any time, Congress could have cut off funding for U.S. forces if it thought they were straying too far from their original mandate. Congress didn’t do so. Syria may be the one locale where congressional Democrats and Republicans largely agreed about the use of American military power. And if the president were ever serious about rebuilding a transatlantic alliance against the Islamic Republic, Syria was the place to do it.
But Trump just couldn’t buy in. It’s ironic that the president snapped when discussing Syria with Turkey’s President Erdoğan, who is modern Turkey’s first real Islamist ruler and certainly not a friend of the United States. The president’s tweets are a muddle: At one moment, he thinks the Islamic State is destroyed, and therefore our soldiers can come home; at another, he suggests that ending the Islamic State isn’t even America’s business because the group is aligned against the Syrian regime, Iran, and Russia. (“Why are we fighting for our enemy, Syria, by staying & killing ISIS for them, Russia, Iran & other locals?”) All one can conclude is that the president just wants out of Syria, regardless of the consequences. Even more than Obama, Trump is post-post-9/11.
[Read: Trump goes from threatening Iran to threatening the world]
Which leaves the administration’s Iran policy centered on sanctions. Sanctions have many things going for them as a foreign-policy tool. Against Iran, they eliminated the surreality under Obama of the United States returning money that could be used to support the clerics’ imperialism for, at best, a short-term surcease to our nuclear anxieties. Tehran now has tens of billions less in hard currency to further its ambitions than it did when Trump took office. And Trump was right: Iranian aggression abroad got much worse after the nuclear deal was concluded.
But sanctions aren’t strategy. If they encourage Americans to stop thinking about the other factors required to counter the Islamic Republic, they become a delusion, an appealing, inexpensive choice for those not quite ready to admit they no longer have the intestinal fortitude to play hardball in the Middle East. Without the complementary use of other instruments of national power, they serve the same purpose that nuclear diplomacy and the JCPOA did for Obama: They are cover for our continuing retreat.
When Trump won the presidential election, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, speculated on the potential upside of his victory: Trump might actually follow through on what he’d preached—an American withdrawal from the Middle East. Surrounded by Bolton, Pompeo, and Mattis, Trump’s promise seemed to dim. But Khamenei, who is the most accomplished dictator in modern Middle Eastern history, in part because he can see and exploit the weaknesses and strengths in both his enemies and friends, appears again to have seen his adversary correctly: Trump’s desire to be done with the Muslim Middle East (and so much else) is deep.
And unlike the Iranian cleric, who imbibed radical European literature and melded it to the revolutionary Islamist ethos of his heroes, Sayyid Qutb and Ruhollah Khomeini, Trump has no grand vision. He has the sense of a populist politician who knows America will, without leaders arguing otherwise, always go with less, not more, in foreign affairs. Trump has gutted and left powerless his senior officials, who have tried hard to give some coherence and mundane effect to his waves of emotion and disconnected data points. It’s hard to think of a time when an American president has so publicly stripped his most senior advisers of their credibility.
Although Khamenei didn’t say so, it’s a good guess that if given the choice between dealing with American sanctions or America staying in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, he’d take the former. Trump’s withdrawal has severely weakened his own Iran policy, signaling boredom, fickleness, fatigue, and fear. He’s weakened American allies in the region and probably obliged the Kurds who fought with us in Syria to seek protection from Iran and Russia. The great Iranian-American tug-of-war, which has defined so much of Khamenei’s life, may well be over. It is odd and wry that many Americans, on the right and left, may believe that what is good for Khamenei could possibly be good for the United States, too.
This year’s battle in the War on Christmas is being fought over “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” According to some, the song’s lyrics promote date rape. According to others, including a radio station in Kentucky playing the tune on continuous loop, it’s a harmless ditty and a Christmas classic. Commentators on Fox News, who look forward to the War on Christmas more eagerly than children await actual Christmas, put the controversy in heavy rotation on their airwaves. “Do we get to a point where human worth, warmth, and romance are illegal?” Tucker Carlson wailed on his television show.
In some ways, the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” squabble is as contemporary as it gets: an outgrowth of the #MeToo movement on the one hand, and of the right’s anti-PC hysteria on the other. But it also fits into the long history of censoring and scrutinizing Christmas songs, and the much larger debate over who gets to control the holiday.
Like so many early Christian rituals, singing carols was a holdover from the winter feast celebration of Saturnalia, when people sang and danced in a ring. Now celebrants danced and sang around nativity scenes, though often with the same drunken abandon that had been a part of the pagan festivities. Because of those origins, some church leaders tried to prohibit carol singing while others sought to tame and solemnize it. In the year 129, for example, Bishop Telesphorus of Rome exhorted believers to gather inside churches to sing “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” on Christmas Day. Centuries later, both St. Francis of Assisi and later Martin Luther emphasized carol singing as central to Christian worship at Christmastime.
[Read: Millennials are keeping family holiday cards alive]
The rise of the Puritans brought a halt to carol singing of all types in England and North America. Puritans argued that the celebration of Christmas had no biblical support, condemned the holiday’s pagan roots, and blamed the Catholic Church for embellishing the day with excessive ritual and pageantry. Opposed to feast days for both reasons of theology and social control, the Puritans banned Christmas altogether in the 1640s, imposing strict penalties on anyone found celebrating it. (Talk about a War on Christmas … ) For Puritan authorities, singing carols was one of the gravest offenses because the practice could be traced to singing songs to the Roman goddess Ceres and because caroling also usually involved heavy drinking and louche conduct.
In Scotland, Calvinist authorities cracked down on carol singing especially hard. Those who invited holiday singers into their homes could be fined five pounds. In the city of Aberdeen, more than a dozen women were arrested one Christmas for the crime of “singing of filthy carols on Yule Day.” At least one Calvinist minister denounced the singing of carols as on par with the sin of fornicating.
Even once the Anglican Church restored Christmas in the late 17th century, religious authorities still allowed only a subdued observance of the holiday, and carols remained on the list of prohibitions. The Anglican minister Henry Bourne decried carols as a “disgrace” because they were “generally done, in the midst of Rioting and Chambering”—a euphemism for fornication—“and Wantonness.”
[Read: The first holiday without a loved one]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the religious ban on carols enhanced their popularity, especially among the lower classes. Indeed, battles over carol singing in the 17th and 18th century in England and the American colonies revealed fractures not only between religious authorities and secular citizens, but also between upper-class city dwellers and poorer country folk. Bourne attacked Christmas carols as a “sin against Christ” and a custom of the “common People.” On both sides of the Atlantic, the rise of the Callithumpian parade— where boisterous revelers traveled in packs singing songs, banging pans, and making scatological sounds—was felt by many to be an assault on the genteel refinement of upper-class neighborhoods. That was exactly the point. Christmas offered the rare occasion to invert the social hierarchy and challenge societal constraints. The targeting of wealthy neighborhoods through raucous songs provided, for them, the holiday’s chief pleasure.
Upper-class folks complained bitterly about having their sleep disrupted for nights on end. One 19th century Englishman lamented that the carolers “make night hideous for three weeks before Christmas with wretched performances of indifferent melodies.” They also objected to singers demanding, often with violent threats, that their unwilling audiences give them food, drink, and money in order for them to move on. Though probably written many years later, the lyric from “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” announcing “We won’t go until we get some” referred to how revelers used Christmas carols to extort what they wanted from the wealthy.
In the 19th century, the Church (with help from business interests) managed to remake Christmas, transforming it from an unruly public affair into a quiet domestic occasion. Accordingly, carols, now sung in churches and homes as often as in the streets, became more reverent than rebellious. Think “The First Noel,” “O Holy Night, “We Three Kings,” and “Silent Night,” all products of this era.
[Read: Christmas’s war on America]
Thanks to commercial capitalism, this quiet period was short lived. In the late 19th and early 20th century, retailers, advertisers, and artists created a holiday of conspicuous consumption. This reimagining of Christmas gave it yet another public expression, although one more built around shopping than drinking and carousing. (Of course, the boozy dimensions of Christmas never went away, as scores of office parties and the annual SantaCon fiasco still attest.)
In this context, carols and songs accelerated Christmas’s commercialization, although not without controversy. Songs like “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (1934) and “Nuttin’ for Christmas” (1955) emphasized the holiday’s materialistic motives and helped push products. The classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” embroiled in its own controversy this year, began as a story to promote Chicago’s Montgomery Ward department store in 1939 before being turned into the popular song a decade later. That version, recorded by Gene Autry, climbed to the top of the Billboard pop-singles chart for the week of Christmas 1949 and sold 2.5 million copies in its first year.
The explosion of commercial-oriented Christmas songs in the 20th century was good for the music business, but arguably bad for the faithful: It made many Christian leaders worry that the holiday’s real meaning—especially for children, who were advertisers’ chief targets—was being lost. Religious authorities who once condemned Christmas carols for paying homage to pagan gods and celebrating libidinous pleasures now fretted that Americans were really worshipping the great god of consumerism through the songs they sang about Santa, presents, and the Christmas tree.
Nowhere has the debate about Christmas songs been more fraught or fierce than in the nation’s public schools. While conservatives often depict disputes over public-school holiday programs as a recent development in the “post-Christian” era of political correctness, parents, teachers, and communities have butted heads over the contents of these school assemblies since public schools first started holding Christmas pageants in the late 19th century. In one early example, 20,000 Jewish students stayed home from the New York City public-school system in 1906 to boycott their being forced to take part in a required holiday program that featured only Christian content. “We wonder what the Christian population would say,” The Jewish Daily News observed at the time, “if there were introduced in the schools … Chanuca [sic] exercises in commemoration of the Maccabean victory.”
[Read: President Trump’s nightmare before Christmas]
For decades, Jewish objections to Christmas carols sung in public-school music classes and assemblies provoked more backlash than policy changes. In 1921, Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic publication, The International Jew, for instance, blasted “the Jews” who “make such demands as that Christmas carols should be suppressed in the schools, as ‘offensive to the Jews.’”
But when the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools in the early 1960s, educators finally adjusted their Christmas programs, especially their musical content. Although the Court rulings did not concern religious performances or forbid specific songs, schools protected the events by tipping the balance away from religious hymns to secular songs and incorporating a Hanukkah song or two. In fact, schools defended these programs as cultural events rather than religious exercises specifically by pointing to diverse musical offerings. The superintendent of the Arlington, Virginia, school system told The Washington Post in 1972 that their schools honored “the traditions of Christmas but don’t emphasize the religious aspects of it … the music in the schools represents the ecumenical nature of Christmas.”
Such accommodations kept holiday traditions alive in schools while keeping most parents and students happy—even as they elicited pushback from some conservative Christians. In 1994, a Christian Coalition executive complained to the Los Angeles Times that the public-school system harmed students when it de-Christianized its school program and limited Christmas carols. “We’re allowing our children to grow up without the beauty, the warmth—Christmas is such a beautiful thing,” she said. A whole cottage industry of War on Christmas diatribes, including books by Sarah Palin and the Fox News anchor John Gibson, have pointed to the overshadowing of Christmas hymns by secular songs in public schools as one of the most insidious attacks made against the holiday.
That’s why the defense of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” by Christmas warriors is particularly odd. For one, the song makes no mention of Christmas or any holiday. And its message is decidedly sensual and secular, not sacred—the very stuff that many long worried threatened the holiday. In the longer history of Christmas, the song would most likely have been banned or, at least, despised by the same sorts of people who now seek to protect and promote it. But as the moral authorities of American society shift, so too do the objects of derision. For centuries, cultural and religious conservatives worried that Christmas celebrations, especially its songs, were an affront to society and demeaned true religion. Now, they are affronted that anything about Christmas could possibly offend.
This will likely go down as the year in which technology, once envisioned as an empowering and equalizing force, finally went headlong down the path toward dystopia and oppression. Our story this summer about Google planning to return to China with censored search at first shocked Silicon Valley, but it was the dark nature of what followed — internal dissent squelched, executives dissembling, Chinese users to be closely tracked — that proved most surprising.
Other depressing developments seemed right out of an ominous sci-fi film like “Blade Runner,” whether it was reporting that revealed the National Security Agency’s prowess at voice recognition, Facebook’s plans to use artificial intelligence to predict users’ future behavior, or just how badly ultrawealthy Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was exploiting underlings. As tech enters 2019, its brightest days seem to be well behind it.
Illustration: Other Means
By Ryan Gallagher
Photo: Bill O’Leary/Getty Images
By Sam Biddle
Illustration: Brandon Blommaert
By Ava Kofman
Photo: Elaine Thompson/AP
By H. Claire Brown
Still: The Intercept
By Briahna Gray
Illustration: Erik Blad
By Belle Lin
Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP
By Kim Zetter
Illustration: Erik Blad
By Sam Biddle
Illustration: Soohee Cho
By Ava Kofman
Photo: David Goldman/AP
By Kim Zetter
Photo: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images
By Sam Biddle
Illustration: Angie Wang
By Ava Kofman
Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
By Sam Biddle
Illustration: Scott Gelber
By Sam Biddle
The post Silicon Noir and the End of Techno-Optimism: The Intercept’s 2018 Tech Coverage appeared first on The Intercept.
Ask someone to close their eyes and picture a typical homegrown, American recruit for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Chances are the image that springs to mind is of a brown-skinned person with an immigrant background, likely with ties to the Middle East, South Asia, or North Africa. That image of the average accused terrorist might be out of date, a new study published by the Rand Corporation suggests. In the study, “Trends in the Draw of Americans to Foreign Terrorist Organizations from 9/11 to Today,” which sought to explore why ISIS has relative successes recruiting in the U.S., researchers found that in recent years the most common demographic profile for an accused terrorist motivated by “radical Islam” has been a native-born American, either white or African-American.
As the nature of terrorism changes, the average “jihadi” in the United States is starting to look less like the type of person President Donald Trump wants to ban from the country.As the nature of terrorism changes — both ideologically and under the influence of new technologies like social media — the average “jihadi” in the United States is starting to look less like the type of person President Donald Trump wants to ban from the country. The finding has serious implications for immigration policies like the so-called Muslim ban, which posit terrorism as something naturally emanating from immigrant communities, particularly of Middle Eastern extraction.
The Rand study identified 476 individuals implicated in cases of “jihadist terrorism” in the United States in the 16 years following the September 11 attacks. (The Intercept also maintains a running database of terrorism cases called “Trial and Terror,” which includes a broader scope of offenses.) Of the individuals in the Rand study, 206 were of Middle Eastern, North African, and/or South-Central Asian background, accounting for about 43 percent of the cases. The study, however, notes that this number is “somewhat surprisingly” trending downward over time, stating that “in percentage terms the number of individuals of Middle Eastern, North African, and/or South Central Asian descent has declined in recent years relative to other demographics.”
The main driver of this phenomenon appears to have been the rise of ISIS. In the years 2014 to 2016 — the peak years of ISIS recruitment in the U.S. — the study found that a majority of so-called jihadi terrorist recruits in the country were Caucasian or African-American, two demographics not generally associated with immigration. In those three years, 79 percent, 57 percent, and 62 percent of “jihadist terrorism” cases came from the combination of those two groups.
The findings show that the popular stereotype of who becomes a homegrown militant in the era of ISIS is at odds with the actual data.
“Perhaps most notably, individuals radicalized by ISIL’s influence have ethnically and racially not tended to be of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Central Asian descent; only 26 percent of persons fit this profile, compared to approximately 53 percent of al Qaeda recruits and supporters,” the authors, Heather Williams, Nathan Chandler, and Eric Robinson, wrote, using the alternative acronym ISIL instead of ISIS. “Conversely, about 65 percent of U.S. persons drawn to ISIL since 2013 have been either African American/black or Caucasian/white.”
This is obviously not to say that Caucasians or African-Americans are thus inherently more likely to support ISIS. The number of people from either demographic who have turned toward the militant group is minuscule, particularly among African-Americans who have large and long-established Muslim communities in the United States. What it does suggest, however, is that terrorism in the U.S. today is much more of an American problem than an immigrant one. People implicated in terrorism plots in the United States in recent years are more likely to have no pre-existing ties to Muslim-majority countries.
“The portrait that emerges from our analysis suggests that the historic stereotype of a Muslim, Arab, immigrant male as the most vulnerable to extremism is not representative of many terrorist recruits today,” the study notes. “Instead, recruits are more likely to be Caucasian/white or African American/black; they are more likely to be U.S. born; and they are more likely to have converted to Islam as part of their radicalization process.”
Experts say that these findings throw even more cold water on Trump’s argument that banning Muslim immigrants from the United States is helpful for national security.
“This study supports what most terrorism scholars have been saying for a long time. There is no single solution to the threat faced by groups like ISIS,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a counterterrorism expert and senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“Demonizing refugees and immigrants — whether with respect to the Muslim ban or even more recently the ‘unknown Middle Easterners’ coming from Latin America — only serves to dehumanize already marginalized communities. It has nothing to do with national security.”
The study also shows a generational shift in the nature of this kind of violent fundamentalism. The original Al Qaeda organization that went to war with the United States in the late 1990s was mainly comprised of people with roots in the Middle East and South Asia, as well as some from sub-Saharan Africa. These individuals tended to be relatively educated, with a particular overrepresentation of people trained in engineering-related fields.
In contrast, the individuals implicated in domestic “jihadist plots” in recent years — most of whom have gravitated toward ISIS — tended to be younger, less educated, and seemingly driven as much by personal pathology as much as geopolitics.
A recent illustrative example is Damon Joseph, a 21-year-old Toledo man arrested by the FBI this December for pledging support to ISIS online, who was planning a shooting attack against a local synagogue. In conversations with an undercover FBI agent, Joseph, who is white, expressed sympathies for ISIS and repeated some of their common conspiracy theories and propaganda tropes. He also, however, expressed admiration for Robert Bowers — the white supremacist who murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh this October — whose massacre also seems to have inspired Joseph’s own choice of target.
Discerning motive is always a difficult exercise, but the affidavit that accompanied the criminal complaint against Joseph gives the impression of a young man already deeply mired in a noxious brew of hatreds and conspiracies. In conversations with undercover agents, Joseph said, “I absolutely despise Jews — always have, even before being Muslim.” At another point during the investigation, Joseph was asked if he felt hate for any groups people in the United States. “Oh yeah definitely,” he replied. “The gays, the Christians, the Catholics, the Jews, you name it.”
Cases like this seem to show a shift in emphasis in terrorism plots from foreign political grievances to personal pathology.Cases like this have become typical in recent years. Among other things, they seem to show a shift in emphasis in terrorism plots from foreign political grievances to personal pathology. A significant number of those implicated in homegrown plots in recent years — again, mostly ISIS-related — have had long histories of petty crime, drug use, and mental illness, factors that were already strong predictors for incarceration in the U.S.
“Our analysis of the demographic profile of U.S. persons drawn to Islamist terrorism since the rise of ISIL may not match the mental image held by law enforcement, policymakers, and the general public,” the authors of the Rand study wrote. “The changing racial and national demographic of terrorist recruits suggests that the draw of extremism does not necessarily appeal to something unique among the Muslim or Middle Eastern communities.”
Thanks in part to technologies like social media that effectively annihilate borders to communication, terrorism in the U.S. has simultaneously become less sophisticated and more demographically dispersed. As the nature of the phenomenon changes, extremist groups have begun to draw more support from the indigent and marginalized segments of the native-born U.S. population.
“The problem we face is largely homegrown — our kids, our citizens who are turning toward these violent organizations. The solution should also come from within, working with communities instead of seeing them as suspect and helping youth overcome their challenges instead of seeing them as troubled or troublesome,” said Amarasingam. “Focusing your attention abroad as if terrorists are launching a stealthy ground invasion will almost certainly result in resources and time being wasted, looking for threats in all the wrong places.”
The post Sorry, Trump: Most ISIS Recruits in America Aren’t Immigrants, a New Study Suggests appeared first on The Intercept.
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