The partial U.S.-government shutdown continues, while the House Democrats push forward with the establishment of a Climate Crisis Committee—to the disappointment of some activists on the party’s left, who’d hoped for a more ambitious mandate. Still at loose ends is the fallout over the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, the geopolitical impact—or lack thereof—of the withdrawal of troops from Syria, how the push for greater gun-control regulation, reignited in 2018 after another fatal year, will continue to unfold, and much more. And what will President Donald Trump confront in the new year, halfway through his first term?
The Daily will be on a break until January 2, 2019, so we leave you here with a few more stories from this past year to catch up on. Happy new year.
The New York City sky turns bright blue after an explosion in the borough of Queens on December 27, 2018. See the other most striking photos from around the world this week. (Photo by Melissa Coffey via Reuters)What to ReadFinding a way through an unspeakable loss (Deborah Copaken)
“The other mothers from our playgroup were at the funeral as well, all of us with the same guilty thoughts: Why did we still have our children when Suzi did not? It felt wrong, obscene. ‘It’s incomprehensible,’ we kept saying to one another, for lack of better words. ” → Read on.
I know Brett Kavanaugh, but I wouldn’t confirm him (Benjamin Wittes)
“If I were a senator, I would not vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. These are words I write with no pleasure, but with deep sadness. Unlike many people who will read them with glee—as validating preexisting political, philosophical, or jurisprudential opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination—I have no hostility to or particular fear of conservative jurisprudence.” → Read on.
The humiliation of Aziz Ansari (Caitlin Flanagan)
“I thought it would take a little longer for the hit squad of privileged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men. ” → Read on.
Hippos poop so much that sometimes all the fish die (Ed Yong)
“Every day, the 4,000 or so hippos in the Mara deposit about 8,500 kilograms of waste into a stretch of river that’s just 100 kilometers long.” → Read on.
Illustration by Lisk FengThe bullet in my arm (Elaina Plott)
“I stroked my mother’s hair as she cried and drove me to the hospital. The surgeon said the bullet was small, maybe a .22-caliber, and too deep in the muscle to take out, so it’s still in my arm. They never caught the shooter, or came up with a motive.” → Read on.
Why rich kids are so good at the infamous marshmallow test (Jessica McCrory Calarco)
“A child’s capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.” → Read on.
More and more Americans are reporting near-constant cannabis use, as legalization forges ahead (Annie Lowrey)
“‘Part of how legalization was sold was with this assumption that there was no harm, in reaction to the message that everyone has smoked marijuana was going to ruin their whole life.’” → Read on.
Amazon’s HQ2 spectacle isn’t just shameful—it should be illegal (Derek Thompson)
“Why the hell are U.S. cities spending tens of billions of dollars to steal jobs from one another in the first place?” → Read on.
Why do cartoon villains speak in foreign accents? (Isabel Fattal)
“The common denominator in all of these vague foreign accents is ‘the binary distinction of “like us” versus “not like us.”’ ‘Villainy is marked just by sounding different.’” → Read on.
This special edition of the Daily was compiled by Shan Wang. Concerns, comments, questions? Email swang@theatlantic.com
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With a flash, the sky over New York City turned a mystical blue.
The spectacle, which appeared without warning on Thursday night, stunned observers. They sensed something was wrong—because, obviously, would you look at the freaking sky?—and quickly formulated some possible explanations. The theories leaned heavily on science fiction. Maybe the glow signaled the end of a massive battle between superheroes. Maybe it was an alien invasion. Maybe the apocalypse was nigh, and this, these eerie turquoise clouds over Queens, were the first sign that the end was near.
What people witnessed was much less dire: a quirk of electricity. Just after 9 p.m. local time, some equipment at an electrical power plant in the Astoria neighborhood short-circuited. (There was no explosion or fire, contrary to early reports.) According to the station’s operator, Con Edison, the malfunction produced something called an arc flash. A powerful electric current shot into the air and sent atoms of gas in the air into a state of excitement. When atoms become excited, they emit light, and different gases produce different colors. In this case, the atmospheric recipe created for a ghostly blue.
“No injuries, no fire, no evidence of extraterrestrial activity,” the New York Police Department tweeted, extinguishing most of the theories that had flooded social media.
Sorry to disappoint, but the eerie blue glow last night wasn’t an alien invasion. 🤷♂️👽 Our live #EarthCam in midtown #NYC captured the electrical arc flash as it turned the night sky blue! pic.twitter.com/3fY56xu1ug
— EarthCam (@EarthCam) December 28, 2018It was a joy to watch the discussion of the blue light unfold online. This strange December night encapsulated so much of what makes the internet great: the dissemination of captivating photos and videos in real time, a shared sense of camaraderie that transcends state lines and borders, and some pretty funny jokes. But the evening also tapped into something much older and more primal. We human beings have long been intrigued by strange lights in the sky. Like the blue glow over New York, these sights have baffled, scared, and mesmerized us, even when we’ve known their source.
Perhaps the oldest example is the aurora borealis, the resplendent performance of dancing lights in the night sky. Today, we know the northern lights are the product of electrons from the sun interacting with different gases in Earth’s atmosphere. But centuries ago, observers, captivated by the wisps of colors, dreamed up their own explanations. In ancient China and Europe, the auroras were dragons and serpents, flitting around in the night. In Scandinavian folklore, they were the burning archway that allowed gods to move between heaven and Earth. During the American Civil War, soldiers thought the lights were a sign of disapproval from God to the Confederacy.
[Read: Canadian amateurs discovered a new kind of aurora]
During at least one time in history, the sight of weird lights in the sky became a business opportunity. Starting in the early 1950s, during the height of the Cold War, the United States government detonated thousands of atomic bombs in the Nevada desert, illuminating the sky with bright flashes. The city of Las Vegas, located just 65 miles away, saw lucrative potential in the morbid spectacle, and decided to monetize the mushroom clouds. As Laura Bliss wrote in a 2014 CityLab story:
The Chamber of Commerce printed up calendars advertising detonation times and the best spots for watching. Casinos like Binion’s Horseshoe and the Desert Inn flaunted their north-facing vistas, offering special “atomic cocktails” and “Dawn Bomb Parties,” where crowds danced and quaffed until a flash lit the sky. Women decked out as mushroom clouds vied for the “Miss Atomic Energy” crown at the Sands. “The best thing to happen to Vegas was the Atomic Bomb,” one gambling magnate declared.
Spectators knew what they were looking at, but they were still astonished—excited and frightened at the same time. “People were fascinated by the clouds, by this idea of unlocking secrets of atom,” Allen Palmer, then the executive director of the National Atomic Testing Museum, told CityLab. “But there was absolutely an underlying fear—we were so close by.”
[Read: How the world learned about the Pentagon’s sky-high nuclear testing]
In other cases, a shroud of mystery can heighten those feelings. Around the same time tourists in Las Vegas were watching nuclear explosions bloom, Americans on the other side of the country were enthralled by a different kind of light in the sky. On a summer day in 1952, multiple people in the Washington, D.C., area reported spotting several unearthly points of light traveling over the landscape. One commercial pilot described them as “falling stars without tails.” When they approached the White House, the military summoned a pair of jets to intercept the unknown flyers, but no mystery invaders were found.
The next day, the news of the moving objects was all over the news. Headlines suggested, in capital letters, that the objects were extraterrestrial. Government officials, stumped themselves, didn’t exactly try to quash the rumors. According to The Washington Post, an unnamed Air Force source told reporters: “We have no evidence they are flying saucers. Conversely we have no evidence they are not flying saucers. We don’t know what they are.”
Unidentified flying objects have maintained this allure for decades. As recently as 2012, the Pentagon was operating a program to investigate reports of UFOs. When The New York Times broke the story in late 2017, it proved to be full of the hallmarks of a timeless mystery—surprise, suspense, wonder.
The blue lights over New York were a good mystery, too. The unnatural glow eventually dimmed and the sky returned to its usual evening hue. Con Edison resumed normal operations. People went on with their lives. But for a brief time, they were engaged in a long-standing tradition: trying to make sense, together, of something strange in the sky.
Two writers took the time to remember loved ones who died this December. The Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer wrote a tribute to his grandmother, Ethel, who as a teenager trekked 2,600 miles to flee Nazi persecution with nothing but a pair of scissors and a winter coat. He remembers her as a woman who loved life fiercely: “Survival, in the end, feels like an insufficient word to explain her existence. To survive is to keep on breathing … To be a survivor is to emphasize toughness. Her essence was sweetness.”
The Atlantic contributing writer Deborah Copaken wrote in memory of her close friend’s 23-year-old daughter, Maddy, who died suddenly in a car accident on December 14. She recounts her memories of seeing Maddy grow up, go to college, and fall in love, and the inconceivability of her passing. “We can’t go on. We must go on,” she writes. “We can’t process the death of a child. We must speak of it anyway.”
HighlightsThe practice of paying children an allowance has been around for about a century, often providing an incentive for children to complete household chores. But as the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker notes, it can send kids counterproductive messages about their responsibility to their family, especially for middle- and upper-class children.
We asked Atlantic readers to write in with their family’s unusual winter holiday traditions, and commissioned illustrations of our favorite stories based on their family photos. Here’s a sample from our picks.
Dan Bransfield“We 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.” — Steve Schwanebeck
Dan Bransfield“In my family, we have a tradition of camping out and having a slumber party under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve every year ... 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
Dear TherapistEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a reader asks how to talk about finances with her boyfriend—specifically, how his wealthy parents share their money. She feels jealous of his twin brother’s wife, whose living expenses are partially paid for by his parents, but she isn’t sure if she should bring it up with her boyfriend.
Lori’s advice: Have a conversation about money with your boyfriend, and try to figure out what’s lying beneath the envy.
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 ... 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.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Strange blue lights in the night sky over New York, Christmas calls from the White House, a fox hunt in Ireland, icy weather in China, the Sahara Festival in Tunisia, Santa Claus on Copacabana Beach in Rio, recovery from a tsunami in Indonesia, an eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily, penguins in Italy and Antarctica, and much more.
On the morning of December 26, Alan Meloy stood on the front porch of his home in northern England and noticed that “murky” early clouds were clearing into a crisp and sunny winter’s day.
Meloy, a retired IT professional and a plane spotter of 45 years, decided to grab his best camera to see whether he could catch any interesting flyovers. Before long, he saw a “jumbo”—a Boeing VC-25A—and, knowing there were few such aircraft left, took about 20 photos of the plane. He could tell immediately that there was something unusual about it, though.
“It was just so shiny,” he told me. As it turned out, Meloy had unwittingly captured Air Force One.
Meloy’s photo, which he uploaded to the image-sharing service Flickr, provided the confirmation a group of hobbyists needed to outwit the security precautions of the world’s largest superpower transporting its leader on a secret trip to a conflict zone. In effect, President Donald Trump’s visit to a U.S. military base in Iraq the day after Christmas was publicly known among a band of enthusiasts even before he landed in the country.
[Read: The president is visiting troops in Iraq. To what end?]
The incident is just the latest in a long line in which hobbyists, hackers, or armchair internet detectives have outwitted or thwarted the best intentions of governments, secret services, and militaries, a reminder of how the connected world opens all of them to new, evolving threats—and how unprepared even the world’s most advanced governments are to deal with the simplest of these threats.
Trump is not the first world leader to run into such issues. Britain has faced its own set of headaches with the tracking of planes.
Last year, when Prime Minister Theresa May traveled to meet the newly inaugurated U.S. president, a journalist noticed that her plane was being tracked online. At the time, Jim Waterson, then the politics editor at BuzzFeed’s British operation, tweeted that the Royal Air Force refueling craft that doubles as May’s executive transport plane could be tracked on FlightRadar and similar flight-tracking websites. “No one on the trip raised a complaint when I tweeted this,” said Waterson, now at The Guardian. Weeks later, though, The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, claimed that the fact that the plane could be tracked left open the possibility of, as Waterson described it, “terrorists potentially—with the emphasis on potentially—being able to use this information to shoot the prime minister out of the sky.” May’s plane is now no longer trackable on most consumer websites.
Still more embarrassment for the British government came in the form of another Mail on Sunday story, this time noting that a U.K. spy plane, reportedly flying a U.S.-U.K. operation scouting Russia’s air defenses, was also trackable by plane-spotting apps.
Regardless of who is aboard a plane, stopping people from tracking its location is not entirely straightforward: Crossing crowded airspace over multiple countries requires a transponder to be sending information on the aircraft’s location, call sign, and similar details (Air Force One’s disguised call sign on Trump’s Iraq trip, for the record, was RCH358). That does mean that in the new, far more connected online world, there will always be a form of risk.
[Read: How Twitter is changing modern warfare]
Plane spotters such as Meloy have been watching out for aircraft for decades, but as David Cenciotti, a respected aviation blogger, notes, new technical tools at their disposal, along with the near-instantaneous communications afforded by the internet, have changed the dynamic. “You are crowdsourcing something that 20 years ago would require weeks of investigations and letters exchanged with other geeks,” Cenciotti told me.
In other words, whereas once Meloy’s photo might have been an item of curiosity in a plane-spotting magazine a month after the fact, it now allows the president’s plane to be tracked in real time.
In fact, Cenciotti noted, military aircraft are fitted with the same transponders as civilian ones, and on occasion the operators of the military aircraft have forgotten to turn off the transponders during operations—including in Syria. This has been flagged as a real “operations security risk” in a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, increasing the risk of warning an adversary of an impending strike or even of allowing an attack to be intercepted. In the case of Air Force One this past week, Cenciotti said that because it was traveling through multiple countries’ airspace, it could not simply turn off its transponder (though he suggested it could have flown a different route or, to make sighting it harder for plane spotters, flown at night).
Planes are just the most obvious area in which the worlds of government and security services connect with civilians and hobbyists in potentially dangerous ways. Another is the world of cybersecurity, where nation-states, criminal hackers, and enthusiasts can interact.
Take the hack that became known as WannaCry: Exploits and hacking tools discovered by the National Security Agency were stolen and posted online. Several of these tools were modified into a devastating ransomware attack, which effectively held a computer hostage unless the victim paid a ransom. That particular attack began in Ukraine, but soon spread much farther, infecting, among others, Britain’s National Health Service, where it did more than $100 million worth of damage. And then, once in the wild, it was modified for commercial purposes by criminal hackers and used to extort still more victims.
These are hardly isolated examples, and it’s not only Western countries that have found themselves on the wrong end of such efforts: The open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat has built its entire website on the basis of using openly available information to expose truths and counter misinformation, including using mapping information and satellite imagery to get to the bottom of attacks in both Ukraine and Syria.
The era of spy versus spy—if it ever truly existed—has certainly been ended by the internet. Today it is spy versus tweeter, plane spotter, criminal, activist, journalist, bored teenage hacker, and who knows who else. Many will intend no harm, and most breaches, such as the revelation of President Trump’s flight, will prove harmless.
But neither good intentions nor the fact that most breaches end up being inconsequential matters. The risks are real, and the signs don’t suggest that even the world’s largest superpower is ready to take the issue seriously, not least because it can’t seem to resolve even the simplest of problems: making the president’s plane hard to track.
I can’t write this story. I must write this story. My brain can’t process this story, though this story has been my brain’s main occupant since the morning of December 14th, when I heard the news.
Where to begin? With the accident itself? With the sludge of hours and days that followed? With the snow, the patch of ice, the oncoming headlights, none of which I saw in real life but all of which I now see at least once a day, in painful slow motion?
No, let’s back it up further. Way back, to the beginning, when my colleague Roberta walked into my office in Rockefeller Center and said, “I have a friend I think you should meet. She’s due right around the time you are. You guys can hang out on maternity leave!” This was 1995, when I was pregnant with my first child. We had no cellphones, no email. Just phone numbers stored in Filofaxes or in our head. “Here,” said Roberta, handing me a scrap of paper with the word Suzi on it followed by a phone number.
I feigned interest. Why would I want to hang out with a friend of a friend, just because our babies were due within weeks of each other? I smiled at Roberta and thanked her. The minute she walked out of my office, I threw the scrap away. I was busy, trying to tie up loose ends before my baby was born.
Jacob arrived two weeks early. Suzi’s baby, Madeline, hit her due date precisely. Or so I heard from Roberta, who would not be dissuaded by our lack of interest in meeting each other. A few weeks after Maddy was born, Roberta invited Suzi and me and our newborn infants to her apartment for brunch.
Suzi and I hit it off immediately, after she told me she’d tossed my number in the trash as well, and we spent not only most of our maternity leaves together, but the next 23 years. We started a music playgroup for our kids, because who wants to pay to have someone else sing “Baby Beluga” to a baby? If you know C, D, G, E minor, A, and D7, you can pretty much play any baby song ever written.
For five years, playgroup took place every Monday after work in the basement playroom of my building. After playgroup, Suzi, her husband, Franklin, Maddy, and eventually Maddy’s baby brother, Alex, would come upstairs to my apartment, where I would make us all dinner. Nothing fancy, just kid fare: mac and cheese, chicken, and one time linguine with shrimp, to the delight of Maddy, who liked to wander into the kitchen, compliment my bland cooking, and ask questions. Lots of them.
Why was the kitchen floor, in the summer, too hot for bare feet? (Because our first-floor kitchen was above a parking garage, which would overheat every July.) Could she take out the watercolors and paint? (Yes. Of course.) Could you use a toaster oven to cook chicken? (Theoretically, yes. Let’s try it and see.) Where was my husband? (At work.) But you work, and you’re here. Why? (It’s complicated, sweetheart. When you’re old enough, we’ll talk about patriarchal power structures and the plight of working mothers.)
[Read: The secret life of grief]
After my separation from my husband, when Maddy was starting her last year of boarding school, where she’d become a master at the pottery wheel, and Jacob was starting his first year of college—my son was born on May 28th, making him one of the youngest in his class; Maddy was born on July 14th, making her one of the oldest in hers—Suzi and I met for lunch at Whole Foods, and she held me as I disintegrated into pieces. “How do I even do this?” I sobbed.
“One step at a time,” she said.
I was reminded of the time Maddy and Jacob were both turning 3, or maybe it was their fourth birthday, who knows, but what I do recall is that we took the kids to the Central Park Zoo to celebrate. As we meandered our way there, the way Olmsted intended, Maddy insisted on climbing every rock along the way. Jacob stood a safe distance below, delighting in Maddy’s courage but firmly grounded by his lack of it.
“Come up! Climb with me, Jacob!” she said. When he did not budge, she climbed back down and said, “It’s not scary. I promise. Here, I’ll help you.” She grabbed his hand and led him up, one step at a time, to the top of a tall rock, showing him the beauty of life’s vista from her fearless vantage point. Maddy was that kid. The kid who drank up the world on her own terms. The kid with the unusually mature inner calm and a constant smile, as if she understood the absurdity of it all from toddlerhood on. The kid who was never on time, because why rush life when you can stop and not only smell the roses but feel the softness of their petals against your skin and then turn them into an ephemeral art project? The kid who refused to wear a coat in the winter not because she was stubborn but because she liked the feeling of cold air on her skin.
Suzi and Franklin, to their credit, never forced her to be anyone she wasn’t. They knew if she got cold enough, she’d put on a coat. That if they insisted she be on time, she would never have time to notice everything and then translate that into solid form.
Jacob recently ran into her at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) while visiting a friend. “We had such a nice time,” he said. “She’s so cool.” Maddy was studying painting, having turned her love of pottery into a mixed-medium form of two-dimensional representation. I guess you’d call it 2-D 3-D, since she used a 3-D printer to create tiny images on tiles of, say, Halloween scenes or faces, which she would then mix in with more abstract tiles and turn them into mosaics. In other words, Maddy was still being Maddy, unable to pin down with even the normal nomenclature of art.
This past September, she fell in love. She and her girlfriend insisted that both of their families have Thanksgiving dinner together, which they did, to the delight of all present. Maddy was finishing up her thesis, but the two had decided that she would stay at RISD for another year and a half so they could live together while her girlfriend, still a junior, finished up.
When I spoke to Suzi on the morning of December 14th, a few days after Maddy had finished her senior thesis, the organ harvesters had just arrived. The previous night, Maddy and her girlfriend had been driving from New York to Bennington to help Franklin pick up Alex from college. Franklin had been in the car ahead. At some point he realized that he no longer saw his daughter’s car behind him, and, growing concerned, he turned around. He found Maddy trapped in the driver’s seat. He held her in his arms, alive but unconscious, until the ambulance arrived. Her wheels had slipped on a patch of ice, sending her car into an oncoming truck. Her girlfriend walked away bruised but otherwise physically unscathed. Maddy died at the hospital on the operating table a few hours later.
[Read: The first holiday without a loved one]
“I’m going to need help getting through this,” Suzi said to me. I told her I’d be there as fast as I could. We’d take it one step at a time. Three hours later, I walked into their house in Hillsdale, New York. The first person I saw was Selma, Suzi’s mother, her head hung unusually low. “It’s unreal,” she said. “Unnatural.” I agreed. The fabric of the universe is irreversibly torn when a granddaughter leaves this earth before her grandmother. Franklin was slumped on a couch in the living room, staring out at the four empty chairs on the patio and to the mountains beyond. Everything in me wanted to run outside and remove one of the chairs from view, as if carting off a physical metaphor for their loss could ever ease the forever pain of it.
Our friend Helen walked in, crying, followed by Suzi and Alex, who’d been on a hike after arriving home from the hospital. I hugged Suzi, who, still in shock, spoke of the eerie calmness in the hospital room the night prior, as if Maddy were still there, sprinkling her never-in-a-rush essence over them. “I’ve always joked,” she said, “that the only time Maddy was ever on time was her due date. Now, for the first time, she’s early.” Alex hugged a family friend and wailed, a long, guttural moan of such pain and endurance that it will haunt all of us who heard it for years to come.
Selma, with all of her aged wisdom, kept looking for some meaning to make sense of it. “It must have been bashert,” she said, using the Yiddish word for destiny. As if it were God’s plan to take Maddy from us too soon. “I can’t believe that,” I said, having long ago decided that life is random chaos and pain, from which beauty must be sought out and appreciated every day to make it less so.
The last time I saw Maddy was this past July, when I was seated across from her at a large and lively dinner around her family’s table. Between the main course and dessert, my WeCroak app dinged, as it does every day, five times a day, with a friendly, “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.” The app was created out of a Bhutanese maxim, which asserts that contemplating death five times a day brings happiness. I downloaded it onto my phone after a near-death experience the previous summer. Maddy laughed when I explained all of this to her. “I don’t need an app to remind myself I’m going to die,” she said. “I’m aware of it every second.” She’d also made her peace with it, she said. She recently told her family that she had a premonition she would die young. She wanted them to understand that she was not scared of this, should it come to pass. “Tell Jacob I said hi,” she said, as she got in her car that night. “We had a really nice talk recently.”
“I heard,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”
Jacob and I stopped for lunch at a diner on the way to Maddy’s funeral, where a hawk would stream across the sky, in full view of the mourners, at the moment the rabbi read a prayer about flight. My son told me about Heidegger’s views on death and the importance of understanding nonexistence as an integral part of existence, and in that moment, taking a bite of my food and a sip of water, which is what living people must do to keep going, I had two radically conflicting, albeit Heideggerian, thoughts: I’m enjoying this moment of conversation and sustenance with my grown child so much, and I feel guilty for enjoying this moment of conversation and sustenance with my grown child so much.
The other mothers from our playgroup were at the funeral as well, all of us with the same guilty thoughts: Why did we still have our children when Suzi did not? It felt wrong, obscene. “It’s incomprehensible,” we kept saying to one another, for lack of better words. Roberta, of course, was there as well. I hadn’t seen her in years, as she moved away long ago, but we clung to each other and sobbed. “Thank you,” I belatedly said, “for introducing me to Suzi.” Had she never done so, I would have missed out on 23 years of having the privilege of knowing Maddy Parrasch.
Maddy’s ashes, true to her corporeal form, were late to arrive, so we didn’t get to scatter them at the funeral. I went back up to Hillsdale three days later, on Suzi’s birthday, to help her try to celebrate amidst her grief. While Franklin prepared his wife’s birthday feast—as great an act of love as I’ve ever witnessed—Suzi, Alex, a family friend, and I embarked on an hour-long hike up a Berkshire mountain, arriving at the top exactly a week after Maddy’s death. We hadn’t planned on this coincidence of timing. In fact, we were a few hours late getting started and worried about it growing dark during our descent, but we were determined to get Suzi out of the house and into nature. Knowing Maddy and her love of Central Park rock climbing and vista gazing, knowing her acceptance of her own mortality, even at 23, she would have loved (we decided for her in absentia, standing there at the summit) the synchronicity of celebrating her mother’s birth and her last breath at the top of a mountain named Monument.
“L’chaim,” Suzi said, blowing out her candles later that night—to life. Because what other choice do we humans, still with breath, have? We can’t go on. We must go on. We can’t process the death of a child. We must speak of it anyway.
There were the scissors that my grandmother somehow remembered to bring with her as she fled. She could hear the rumble of destruction in the distance. She could see the cloud of smoke that was the Nazi murder of her family and neighbors. Without forethought, she made the decision to run ahead, carrying with her the scissors and, despite the blossoms of spring, a winter coat.
In the seasons that followed, which piled into years, she kept on walking, from Poland to Uzbekistan, and then back again. Although she was a teenager, her body could barely sustain the 2,600-mile trek. Her legs would swell, and sores covered her trunk. She nourished herself with stolen potatoes, expertly hidden in the lining of her dress. When she came into the occasional possession of grains of rice, she saved them as if they were precious metals.
For decades, she said nothing about her escape. Then she gathered the courage to recite the story to her grandchildren, and she found that it fortified her against her nightmares. Narrating her life provided a sense of meaning to the improbability and pain of survival.
By the time I reached fifth grade, the scissors and the coat had become the foundational tale of my family’s existence. The small Jewish woman who turned her basement into a well-stocked bunker filled with enough bags of flour and boxes of Rice Krispies to withstand the next catastrophe emerged as our superhero. Her life was a testament to cunning, courage, and contingency. When I think about the scissors and the coat, it’s hard not to also think of the mountain of worn shoes at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, or the television clip that pauses to show the eyes of the child migrant. It’s hard not to think about the bare margin that separates survival from death, the decision made in a flicker that accounts for existence.
[Read: A son’s quest to find the man who saved his parents’ lives during World War II]
Her life connected ours to tragedy and history. I have piles of cassettes, compiled while sitting with her as she recounted her biography at her faux-marble kitchen table, sipping instant coffee from a red mug. She died 10 days ago. Now we no longer have her witness—in a time when Jews are slaughtered in Pittsburgh, when anti-Semites have regained power in the old blood-lands of Europe. My grandmother has become a memory, at a moment when the memory of the destruction of Jewry seems too faint to restrain the return of animal hatreds.
But right now, history feels small in comparison to the example she provided of how to suffer and to love. For some reason, I have in my head the story of what happened when, as an 8-year-old, I shattered a window with an errant throw of a rubber baseball. My expectations for punishment and sense of shame sent me into my bedroom closet, where I covered myself in clothes and cried. When she called my name, however, I came running. I couldn’t help myself. Hers was the voice of worry. Instead of chastisement, she showered me with the joy of reunion.
Whenever I entered her home or she came to stay with me, I felt almost overwhelmed by the force of her love. Nobody has taken more joy from my mere existence, nobody has hugged me harder or kissed my cheeks with greater suction. It’s easy enough to describe life as a “blessing,” but with her I felt that highest sense of worth. I never asked her pointedly, How could a woman who survived such horrors remain such a bottomless font of warmheartedness?
Our superhero came from another planet. Her accented English wasn’t an immigrant’s incomplete understanding of an adopted language. Somehow her language was richer, because she possessed an easy mastery of slang. When a granddaughter showed spunk, she would delight, “Oh boy, she is pistol.” Remarking on her height, she would say, “I’m a shrimp”—the comparison of herself to trayfe, which she never touched, was just funny. Even her malapropisms felt better than the idiom she intended. When we would go to Roy Rogers, she would insist that we order a side of the “french friers.” (To experience true joy was to go with her to the buffet in the strip mall and to know that you were encouraged to abandon all sense of human limitation in the face of such a miracle.)
Her instinct to live was an expression of the instinct to survive. Her presence was so full of life, and not just the way she whirled around her house, accomplishing tasks, making to-do lists and finishing them, filling used coffee tins with spare change that had been separated by the year of issuance, organizing immense piles of coupons for shopping trips that became gratis.
As a teenager, she was a communist, an act of rebellion in a small conservative shtetl. I imagine the intensity of her yearning for a better world, the romanticism that would lead her to dream like that. It was this rebellion, her sense that the Nazis might seek her out for special punishment, that prodded her to flee. Her story of survival was bound together with her capacity for free thinking and her ability to feel deeply.
Survival, in the end, feels like an insufficient word to explain her existence. To survive is to keep on breathing. But her talent was to relish a bag of Hershey Kisses, to place phone calls to distant cousins (albeit in a very loud voice and truncated to save on long distance), to suck the emotional marrow from a grandchild’s graduation, to clap her hands as she played with a baby, to loudly sing a prayer in synagogue two words ahead of the congregation. To be a survivor is to emphasize toughness. Her essence was sweetness. While her body withered and broke down, she distilled into this true self. She lay in bed, without ever remarking on her condition. She expressed gratitude for every sip of water and every stroke of her hair. Even as she died, she provided a master class in how to live.
It’s official: When Democrats take control of the House of Representatives next month, they will form a special new committee to examine climate change, Nancy Pelosi said in a statement on Friday.
Pelosi, likely the next speaker of the House, also announced that the new committee will be named the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. It will be led by Kathy Castor, a seven-term representative from Tampa Bay.
“The American people have demanded action to combat the climate crisis, which threatens our public health, our economy, our national security and the whole of God’s creation,” Pelosi said in the statement. “Congresswoman Castor is a proven champion for public health and green infrastructure, who deeply understands the scope and seriousness of this threat.”
Castor, a longtime member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has already promised to decline all campaign contributions from coal, oil, or gas companies. Pelosi has not yet described exactly what the committee will do, but House committees of this type can hold hearings, write reports, and bring public attention to political issues.
With its formation, Pelosi makes good on her 2018 campaign promise to revive a special climate-focused committee. (After Republicans took control of the House in 2010, they shuttered the last special climate committee, which Pelosi established in 2007.) But the new committee arrives to a delicate family situation in the Democratic Party. A number of activists on the party’s left have greeted the announcement with frustration. They had hoped (and protested) for a more ambitious Green New Deal committee. Such a panel, they imagined, might finally draft a unified Democratic climate policy, a plan to improve the lot of American workers while massively overhauling the economy to prepare for climate change.
[Read: The Democratic Party wants to make climate policy exciting]
“It’s a big disappointment,” says Stephen O’Hanlon, a spokesman for the Sunrise Movement, a Millennial-led organization that championed the Green New Deal plan. “The select committee on a Green New Deal was put together based on a hard look at what the science demands, and we were hopeful that Nancy Pelosi—who says she wants to take serious action on climate change—would be willing to come to the table for it.”
“We’ll have to see what the actual mandate of the committee is,” he adds.
The Climate Crisis Committee seems likely to get a much narrower mandate than activists envisioned for a Green New Deal committee. It will probably not be allowed to issue subpoenas, as a permanent standing House committee can, nor will it be able to draft legislation. Overall, it will be less powerful than the last House select climate committee, which had subpoena power but not legislative authority.
Castor had been rumored to be Pelosi’s pick to lead the committee since last week. She gets high marks from the League of Conservation Voters, indicating a solid environmental record.
But in the past week, she has sometimes seemed ignorant of major disputes among climate activists. For instance, the Sunrise Movement initially sought to ban Green New Deal committee members from receiving donations of any kind from the fossil-fuel industry. When Castor heard that demand, she balked, claiming that the First Amendment made it impossible. Though she later walked back that comment, calling it “inartful”—and promised to forswear fossil-fuel donations herself—the episode suggested that she is unfamiliar with a constituency she will now have to entertain.
The demand should not have come as a shock: Fossil-fuel money has been a touchy subject for Democrats for years. As recently as August, climate activists warred with party moderates over whether it was appropriate to ban fossil-fuel donations for all Democrats, not just those on a climate-focused panel.
[Read: Democrats are shockingly unprepared to fight climate change]
It’s not yet clear whether Castor will impose such a ban on all members of the Climate Crisis Committee. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.
The most interesting aspect of today’s news may be the new committee’s name. Al Gore used the phrase climate crisis often, and even Hillary Clinton sometimes deployed it during the 2016 election. It feels tedious to unfurl its message—Democrats believe climate change is an emergency, obviously—but perhaps the name is a reminder of how much energy politics have changed in the last decade. In 2007, when Democrats last established a select committee on climate change, they chose a name much more fitting for an era of high oil prices: The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Now, the United States is just a few years off from exporting more energy than it imports. Thanks to fracking and renewable energy, we’ve solved the problem of American “energy independence.” Global warming, meanwhile, continues to get worse.
This piece contains spoilers for the Black Mirror special “Bandersnatch.”
For most of its existence, Netflix’s streaming television service has largely existed to pump out more and more content. Its never-ending feed is packed with new shows, revived classics, licensed hits from other countries, and big acquisitions such as Black Mirror, a cult hit from the U.K.’s Channel 4 that tells warped Twilight Zone tales for an internet age. Given the onslaught of “more,” it stands to reason that eventually one television episode would offer the viewer thousands of choices all by itself. That is Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch,” a feature-length special that behaves like a choose-your-own-adventure book, proposing various branching story options that lead the audience down different paths, many of them grim.
It’s a piece of interactive television that feels like an obvious new direction both for Netflix and for Black Mirror. It allows Netflix to harness its online platform in ways that classic broadcast television never could, letting subscribers choose plot options using their remote control and load every permutation of the story onto their site. And it allows Black Mirror’s creator and writer, Charlie Brooker, to explore the blinkered sense of freedom that comes from gaming—video gaming, especially. In “Bandersnatch,” the viewer is in control, nudging the main character, Stefan (Fionn Whitehead), to make various life choices, though the reality of the programming means there are only so many options.
[Read: The universe of ‘Black Mirror’ coalesces]
Brooker started his career as a game critic and writer, working for PC Zone magazine in the 1990s. Some of Black Mirror’s best episodes, such as “Fifteen Million Merits” and “Playtest,” explored the horrifying limits of futuristic gaming. “Bandersnatch” is set in 1984, at the height of computerized text adventures such as The Hobbit and Zork, which first introduced gamers to worlds that didn’t entirely proceed on rails. You could make choices, solve problems in different ways, and even arrive at different endings, much like you can in “Bandersnatch.”
The story itself is a simple bit of meta-narrative: Stefan is an aspiring programmer, who is building a game called Bandersnatch based on a fictional choose-your-own-adventure novel by a psychotic, now-dead cult author. He visits a cool gaming company and meets his idol, Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), and the business-minded manager Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry). The latter offers Stefan a chance to create the game in-house, while the former stresses independence; it’s the first significant choice of many the viewer will make, picking between options that flash on the screen (if you don’t choose within 10 seconds, the show randomly chooses for you).
But there are insignificant picks the viewer can make, too, such as which breakfast cereal Stefan eats, or what music he listens to, or how he talks with his father, Peter (Craig Parkinson), and his therapist (Alice Lowe). Or are these choices so meaningless? With every click of a button, the story begins to snowball in weird and confusing directions, and the panicked sense of making the wrong pick every time increases the stakes. That’s the magic of video gaming, of course—the sense that you’re in control, that every right (or wrong) move is attributable to your thinking.
Games like BioShock have poked at the fallacy of that concept. Everything is, after all, programmed; even with advanced technology at work, there’s always going to be a limit to how much you can mimic real life through scripting and algorithms. In “Bandersnatch,” Brooker sometimes lets the viewer go back if a decision ends in Stefan’s death or artistic failure, much as you could always flip backward in a choose-your-own-adventure book, or reload from a save point in a video game. I explored various permutations of Stefan’s story before finally hitting a brick wall and an end-credits sequence (the entire viewing experience ran about 90 to 100 minutes for me, but it can be shorter or much longer).
The episode also, unsurprisingly for Black Mirror, veers into self-awareness; at one point, I communicated with Stefan through his computer screen, sending him messages about how I was watching him on Netflix (from the vantage of 1984, he was mostly baffled). At another moment, I loaded a completely pointless action scene that seemed to exist mostly to mock any complaint that things were getting too boring. I’m sure there are many more rabbit holes for me to tumble down, but the overall darkness of the story (Stefan is frequently being pushed toward madness) might make it a slog to watch over and over again.
Still, that’s the magic of video games: The more you play, the more you’re emotionally invested. Through the various branches I found, I never got to an ending of “Bandersnatch” that felt truly happy or fulfilling, though I’m sure one exists; the best (and last) one I arrived at was, at least, somewhat peaceful and touching, if a little mournful. But the show’s cleverest stroke of all came when I finally exited out of the episode and returned to Netflix’s main page. Next to “Bandersnatch” was a typical red progress bar, which usually indicates how many minutes you’ve watched a TV episode or movie. In the case of “Bandersnatch,” the bar was barely full; I’d just completed the story, but there are plenty of other completions to find. It’s fiendish stuff, but an undeniably clever new entry in the boundlessly reflective Black Mirror canon: the episode that never ends.
What better way to celebrate the remaining days of 2018 than by revisiting our favorite literary parties? There’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s take on Mrs. Dalloway and the dinner soirée, reimagined under the Donald Trump presidency. And, of course, who can forget Jay Gatsby’s infamous West Egg parties, which have inspired numerous high-school proms and costumed New Year’s shindigs.
That being said, not all fêtes are actually that fun: The author Alexander Chee explains how one scene in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette made him consider just how useful parties are for exploring a character’s anxieties and insecurities. Such is the case for Mary Bennet, of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the oft-ignored and criticized Bennet sister. While readers may remember the Netherfield ball for Elizabeth Bennet’s tense (yet titillating) encounter with Mr. Darcy or Jane Bennet’s budding romance with Mr. Bingley, Mary’s story line that night is one of searing, public humiliation. And in Sean Ferrell’s Man in the Empty Suit, a lonely time-traveler hosts rather unconventional birthday parties: one where he visits his past and future selves, in the same spot, every year.
Each week in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas, and ask you for recommendations of what our list left out.
Check out past issues here, see what other Atlantic newsletter readers said were their favorite books of this year, and browse Atlantic writers’ and editors’ picks for the best books of 2018.
Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email. It’s been great reading with you this year. We’ll see you in 2019.
What We’re Reading
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway gets a political remake
“[Chimamanda Ngozi] Adichie blends blunt, harvested-from-media-profiles observations about Trump—‘Donald disliked dissent’—with subtler, more intimate observations that come from Melania’s point of view.”
📚 “THE ARRANGEMENTS,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 📚MRS. DALLOWAY, by Virginia Woolf
The sublime cluelessness of throwing lavish Great Gatsby parties
“Jay Gatsby’s weekend-long parties are lavish indictments of the whole, hard-charging scene that propelled him to sudden, extraordinary, unscrupulous wealth—‘a new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about,’ as Fitzgerald writes toward the end.”
📚 THE GREAT GATSBY, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
How to write a party scene
“The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people—and also so pleasurable—make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There’s a chaos agent quality to them: You just don’t know who’s going to be there, or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who’s become an enemy. You could run into an ex-lover, or your next lover. The stakes are all there, and that’s why they’re so fascinating.”
📚 VILLETTE, by Charlotte Brontë 📚 THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT, by Alexander Chee
There’s something about Pride and Prejudice’s unappealing middle sister
“Mary is mocked by her sisters; she is insulted by her father (‘You have delighted us long enough,’ he informs her at the Netherfield ball, abruptly ending her pianoforte performance and promptly humiliating her); she is by most other people—and this is the thing that really oooooofs—merely tolerated.”
📚PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, by Jane Austen 📚 THE INDEPENDENCE OF MISS MARY BENNET, by Colleen McCullough 📚 THE FORGOTTEN SISTER: MARY BENNET’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, by Jennifer Paynter 📚 THE PURSUIT OF MARY BENNET, by Pamela Mingle 📚 A MATCH FOR MARY BENNET, by Eucharista Ward
Celebrating a birthday with your past and future selves
“The time traveler’s birthday party is a curious mix of memory, anticipation, and anxiety. The narrator sees himself in various stages of alcoholism, weight gain, and hair loss. He knows full well that he was or will be everyone he meets, and will experience the party through each of their eyes.”
📚MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT, by Sean Ferrell
You RecommendLast week, we asked you to recommend stories about or related to food. Lisa Bolin Hawkins from Provo, Utah, suggested Julia Child’s My Life in France. “This autobiography … has food as a basic theme but is so much more about a fascinating woman’s struggle with her life and times,” Lisa wrote.“Ms. Child was trying to find her purpose in life, in her marriage, in Paris.” In Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie, edited by Peggy Wolff, 30 writers share gastronomic stories specific to the Midwest. “Their essays and memoirs reveal that within the context of food-based stories, the U.S. Midwest is fertile ground for meditations on the sense of place and on solid midwestern values: kindness, [familial love], an embrace of hard work and opportunity, politeness, and tradition,” Sam Gutterman, from Glencoe, Illinois, said.
What’s your favorite or most memorable literary party scene? Tweet at us with the hashtag #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.
This week’s newsletter is written by J. Clara Chan. The book on her bedside table right now is Suicide Club, by Rachel Heng.
Comments, questions, typos? Email jchan@theatlantic.com.
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“Everyday life is very discomfiting,” the American writer and illustrator Edward Gorey told The National Observer in 1976. “I guess I’m trying to convey that discomfiting texture in my books.” But Gorey’s art did not merely aim to discompose audiences with its macabre Victorian-Edwardian overlays and casual depictions of darkly comic cruelty. It also sought to unsettle by resisting definitive explanations or solutions. In a later interview, Gorey clarified—in a manner of speaking—the dominant philosophical theme of his work: the power of the ineffable, the value of what is left unsaid. “Explaining something makes it go away ... Ideally, if anything were good, it would be indescribable,” grumbled Gorey, who died in 2000 at age 75. “Disdain explanation,” he similarly wrote in a meandering postcard to Andreas Brown, a fan and publisher of Gorey’s books.
The author is, of course, better known for his period Gothic aesthetic and funereal humor than for his skepticism of clarity. Gorey’s influence is evident throughout British and American pop culture, notably in works by Tim Burton—including the stop-motion films The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride—and by Neil Gaiman, particularly the 2002 novella Coraline and its 2009 movie adaptation. Exhibitions of work by Gorey still routinely draw crowds today, much as his wildly popular and acclaimed 1977 stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula did decades ago.
At first glance, Gorey’s oeuvre might not appear to require much explication or invite readers to search meticulously for meaning. Most of Gorey’s books consist of brief blends of rhyme and lavish black-and-white drawings. Many seem to exist simply for the sake of existing. Such is the case with The Gashlycrumb Tinies—the first book of Gorey’s I read after stumbling across it in a London bookstore—a slim abecedarian that chronicles the ghastly demises of 26 children in a tone at once hilariously and eerily deadpan.
Because his books are slender and feature illustration, a medium long dismissed by establishment critics as less worthy of analysis than fine arts like painting, it is only relatively recently that Gorey has begun to receive scholarly attention. Many of his texts, under more scrutiny, are playfully and disturbingly irrational, resisting easy elucidation—a quality that reveals Gorey’s ideological views on both art and the universe. An impressively expansive new biography by Mark Dery, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, attempts, often with success, to demystify the illustrator’s wide-ranging elusiveness—a quality that was also explored in two recent art shows, Gorey’s Worlds and Murder He Wrote. To varying extents, the book and the exhibitions delve into both Gorey’s surrealism-influenced philosophy of art and into perhaps the ultimate puzzle of Gorey—the private life of the man himself.
The hallucinatory logic of surrealism, a 20th-century movement in the arts and philosophy that sought to capture the irrational air of dreams, pervades Gorey’s work. Surrealism “appeals to me,” Gorey said in 1978. “I mean that is my philosophy if I have one, certainly in the literary way … What appeals to me most is an idea by [the surrealist poet Paul] Éluard,” Gorey continued, referencing one of the movement’s founders. “He has a line about there being another world, but it’s in this one. And [the surrealist turned experimental novelist] Raymond Queneau said the world is not what it seems—but it isn’t anything else, either. Those two ideas are the bedrock of my approach.” Far from some purveyor of stock Gothic fare, Gorey embraced enigma and sought to relay, if indirectly, his surrealist philosophy through his art. “Gorey was a surrealist’s surrealist,” Dery aptly notes.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in The Doubtful Guest (1957): an illustrated poem in which a bizarre figure—part penguin, part reptile, wearing sneakers—shows up one night to a family’s house, uninvited, causing dismay and disarray. Gorey provides no sense of why it has come or when it might leave, a state of affairs resembling the existential absurdism of Franz Kafka or Albert Camus. The Doubtful Guest appeared the same year as Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, another book in which an unexpected entrant brings anarchy into a home.
But whereas Seuss’s carnivalesque cat seeks to entertain, and cleans up before leaving so that the children don’t get in trouble when their mother returns, Gorey’s guest arrives with no clear agenda, does not remove its destructive messes, and shows no sign of departing. It is just comically, exasperatingly there, a discombobulation of domestic order far beyond the antics of Seuss’s feline. The Doubtful Guest distills Gorey’s surrealistic aesthetic into a stark message: that events resist human control, that the mysteries that lie in the mundane cannot be fully solved. It’s telling, too, that Murder He Wrote, an exhibition at the Edward Gorey House, explores how influential murder mysteries were for the writer—and yet his stories regularly subverted the genre’s promises of resolution, planting misleading clues and reveling in maddeningly ambiguous endings.
If Gorey’s work embraced the inexplicable, Gorey himself was as enigmatic and textured as his art. Bedecked, in his best-known look, in a Harvard scarf, half-moon spectacles, the thick beard of a wizard, a voluminous technicolor fur coat, and blue jeans with scuffed white Keds, Gorey was easily seen as a figure of delightful contradictions: ostentatious pomp on the one hand, a sort of suburban simplicity on the other. “Half bongo-drum beatnik, half fin-de-siècle dandy,” Stephen Schiff memorably described him in a New Yorker profile. As much a persona as a person, Gorey partly seemed like one of his own illustrations, a dapper Edwardian gentleman fresh from attending executions or exequies, while simultaneously bearing the aspect of some beach-combing uncle. Gorey enjoyed things ostensibly removed from the high elegance of his illustrations: watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Golden Girls with cats perched on his shoulder while he did crossword puzzles.
Gorey’s personal art collection, on display in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art’s 2018 exhibition Gorey’s Worlds, offers a rare window into some of the works that shaped his sensibility. Dozens of these pieces—by prominent European and American artists, as well as by lesser known folk artists—feature subjects that often surfaced in Gorey’s own creations: the ballet, cats, bats, shadowy landscapes. “These works give us as convincing a picture as we will probably ever have of Gorey’s elective affinities—of his own private tradition,” Jed Perl wrote for the New York Review of Books.
As Perl suggests, despite the overtness of Gorey’s outward eccentricities, the artist’s personal life was more shrouded. When pressed by interviewers about his sexuality, Gorey declined to give clear answers, except during a 1980 conversation with Lisa Solod, wherein he claimed to be asexual—making Gorey one of few openly asexual writers even today, a short list that includes the Kiwi novelist Keri Hulme. In his interview with Solod, Gorey said, “I suppose I’m gay. But I don’t identify with it much.” Yet this admission, Dery reveals, was deleted from the published version of their exchange, possibly by an editor who believed an openly gay author would be taken less seriously.
Gorey never expressly denied being homoromantic—attracted to men for the purpose of a relationship, not for sex—but, with the exception of that excised quote, he refused to pin down his desires, as most labels repulsed him. (One failing of Born to Be Posthumous is Dery’s repeated insistence on claiming Gorey was obviously gay by virtue of his “flamboyant dress” and “bitchy wit”; here, Dery falls into the trap of equating effeminacy with gay men, an archaic stereotype.) It seemed Gorey just wanted to be himself, whatever that might be, and often found the company of his pet felines as pleasurable, if not more, than that of his fellow humans. Indeed, when asked by Vanity Fair, “What or who is the greatest love of your life?” his reply was simply, “Cats.”
Perhaps fittingly, Gorey’s books also avoided depicting sex, even in the suggestively titled The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary (an anagrammatic pseudonym for “Edward Gorey,” the first name of which also appeared as a vanity plate on Gorey’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle). The 1961 text consists of innuendo-laden sentences about the activities of a household of adults, a number of whom are described as “well-endowed,” but never, despite the subtitle, explicitly have intercourse. In the last scene, a man pulls the lever on a garish couch that seems to double as a machine. A woman screams, but Gorey never reveals what has happened; the reader must imaginatively fill in the blank.
In a relatively more straightforward—and, to me, more distressing—work, The Insect God (1963), the specter of sex also appears, but now as a possible punishment for a young girl who is kidnapped. At the start, the girl naively approached a vehicle filled with strangers, who offered her “a tin full of cinnamon balls” before they “lifted” her into the car; they brought her to be sacrificed before an insect deity, but “stunned” her and “stripped off her garments” first—an act laden with disquieting connotations of rape before murder.
Both of these stories contain subtle morals. The Insect God can be read as a demonstration of stranger danger. By never fully revealing the subtext of its lines, The Curious Sofa becomes a paean to intellectual curiosity, richer and curiouser if readers stop assuming the ending must involve pornography. But beyond that, the tales illustrate how the unexpected, and even horror, can enter at any time in Gorey’s world—and there is little, if anything, one can do to stop it.
Such is the case in Gorey’s heartbreaking tale The Hapless Child (1961), in which a young girl loses her parents and guardians one by one, until the family lawyer sends her to a school, where students torment her. She flees, then is abducted and sold into slavery to a dipsomaniacal “brute.” During one of her captor’s drunken stupors, the girl escapes but is run over by a car—that of her father, who, contrary to what she had been told, was not actually dead. To cap off the cruelty, the book ends with the revelation that the driver’s “dying child” is so emaciated that “he did not even recognize her.” Death, and suffering, is never far off in Gorey’s stories.
But nearer still is the profound sense of unfailing, even irrational cruelty in The Hapless Child’s narrative: the feeling that Gorey’s protagonist, who did not appear to do anything to deserve her fate, was just as helpless to do anything to soften it. After all, Gorey averred in a 1976 interview that “I stand by the idea that you can’t prevent things.” What does one do, when an ineffable universe sets its sights on you?
In 1984, Gorey declared that “my mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible ... because that’s what the world is like.” Gorey’s longtime friend, the writer Alexander Theroux, recorded the artist remarking that “life is intrinsically ... boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment, the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does.” Gorey’s books unquestionably achieve unease—even wordless tales like The West Wing, which unnerve solely by their sepulchral atmospherics. But Gorey’s tales are also ludic, winking at the reader with a combination of frightfulness and fun that is apparent throughout the pieces featured in Murder He Wrote and Gorey’s Worlds. Ultimately, Gorey’s work is an altar to the writer’s faith in art as a medium for attempting to translate the untranslatable language of living.
Amid the terror and tumult of the world today, the floor may already feel as if it has opened up, again and again. Gorey chose to reweave horror into odd but indelible imagery. At least, his work suggests, art can console in times of dismay, and, perhaps more important, unsettle when one grows too consoled.
Recently, Joe Pinsker talked to a handful of experts about why many ultrarich people are motivated to accumulate more and more wealth. There are two central questions people ask themselves when determining whether they’re satisfied, one researcher explained: Am I doing better than I was before? and Am I doing better than other people?
My grown sons and I have often discussed the puzzle of the wealthy who want more money and the powerful who want more power. It’s nice to know that this question has actually drawn some academic study. As a member of the middle class who’d appreciate a little more economic security, I still feel a little sorry for these folks. To never be satisfied, to be driven to nonstop competition is a sorry existence, even if said existence is spent upon a golden throne. Too bad this population doesn’t add some creativity to its desires and strive to make the world a better place.
Janet Audette
Arvada, Colo.
This article was just as depressing to read as I imagine the research was to conduct. In a time of so much overabundance, it strikes me that so many people still live without the basic needs for survival.
California, where I live and work, is the world’s fifth-largest economy, thanks in part to many of the kind of high-net-worth individuals who were studied here. Even though the state’s GDP is doing so well, millions of people who live here don’t feel any of the benefits.
Almost 20 percent of California’s population lives below the federal poverty line—2 million are kids. I know humans are notoriously bad at learning from history, but I still wonder at the fact that we’ve never fully grasped the notion that the more extreme the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, the higher the likelihood of a society becoming unstable for everyone (see: the French Revolution).
The super-wealthy in California and beyond remain largely untouched by the unsustainable tendencies of our economic system. But as drought and fire and displacement become more common, even the superrich will eventually come face-to-face with their place in humanity—as part of it.
As we move into a new decade of uncertainty around the quality of our shared infrastructure and the stability of world political and economic systems, it seems that the only way forward is for individuals and private interests to wake up to their responsibility to the collective. Deploying their accumulated wealth for the public good would not be solely altruistic—it would also be an investment in the ability to continue playing the game of acquiring wealth.
Courtney McKinney
Sacramento, Calif.
Certainly the rich can be greedy, self-centered, and overly focused on image, appearance, and their peer group. They can also be unhappy with their level of success. But I’d argue that you can find those elements at all economic levels. I’d be more interested in levels of happiness within groups (i.e., are successful hedge-fund traders more or less unhappy than those who build conventional businesses), and evaluating which groups at various socioeconomic levels are most happy and what characteristics contribute to that. That would be a much harder article to write, with difficult research. But the answers might actually benefit readers by giving them concrete directions to pursue happiness versus an article that’s really about why a non-rich person can have moral superiority over a really rich one—which, quite frankly, is what this article is about, in my view.
Joe Schmitz
Orange County, Calif.
I recall reading what I think was a Wall Street Journal article in the late ’80s summarizing research that examined incomes and happiness in a novel way. The researchers started with entry-level incomes and asked respondents, “How much more money would you need to be happy?” On average, as I remember it, they said 15 percent more. They then went to folks earning 15 percent more than the entry level and asked, “How much more money would you need to be happy?” You guessed it, the answer was about 15 percent more.
No matter the income level surveyed, the results were always the same. Folks think they need about 15 percent more than they currently make to be happy.
Thirty years later I still think I need about 15 percent more to be happy!
Vogel Da
Sellersville, Pa.
There used to be a simple solution to this: The 90 percent–plus marginal income-tax rates applied to the highest bracket during the 1950s. If 90 percent or more of the multimillion-dollar salary the CEO was demanding was going to go the government in taxes, he may have been less likely to ask for it. And if he demanded it anyway, for the sake of “status,” society became its prime beneficiary. Why do we so studiously ignore this effective countermeasure to the ever-growing income gap?
Carlos D. Luria
Salem, S.C.
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. Next up is Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible—Fallout. (Read our previous entries here.)
The ludicrously dubbed “Impossible Mission Force,” the imaginary federal agency at the heart of the Mission: Impossible franchise, is difficult to define. Its members are international superspies with a gift for stagecraft; imagine MI6, but with an elaborate makeup department, a healthy CGI budget, and a flair for dramaturgy. Ethan Hunt (played by Tom Cruise) and his pals might combat villains by jumping off a building or executing a daring car chase, but they’re also fond of masks and voice-changers, and they always seem to have a wardrobe of disguises in tow. “The IMF is like Halloween, a bunch of grown men in rubber masks playing trick or treat,” sighs the CIA chief Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett).
But the beginning of Fallout, the sixth entry in the Mission: Impossible film franchise, suggests that the world has gotten too grim for fun and games. When the series launched in 1996, it was a hearty throwback, reviving a hit 1967 TV show for the decade’s biggest star. By 2018, Hunt is a man haunted by his years in the field, a marriage he had to abandon for work, and villains that are hell-bent not on financial gain or political power, but on apocalyptic destruction. Fallout is the third Mission: Impossible in a row in which the bad guy has decided that Earth is beyond saving and needs to be annihilated. And at its beginning, that’s exactly what seems to have happened.
[Read: ‘Mission: Impossible—Fallout’ doubles down on the ridiculousness of its hero]
In the film’s first scene, a sting operation to seize plutonium that’s floating around on the black market goes wrong, with Hunt saving his teammates and letting the fissile material get away. Fade to: a CNN broadcast, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, saying that three nuclear attacks have devastated Rome, Jerusalem, and Mecca. “We can assume the death toll is catastrophic,” Blitzer intones in the background of a hospital room, as Hunt enters to interrogate the captured scientist Nils Debruuk (Kristoffer Joner), who is suspected of building the bombs for the terrorist John Lark. It’s classic good cop/bad cop: Hunt threatens to kill Debruuk, is restrained by his fellow agent Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and then reluctantly assents to Debruuk’s request that Lark’s nihilistic manifesto be read on-air by Blitzer. Satisfied with the political triumph, Debruuk confesses.
It speaks to just how grim big Hollywood franchises have gotten that I fell for it. After all, this was the year that saw the Avengers movie end with half the heroes getting zapped into dust and antiheroes such as Venom and Deadpool rule the box-office roost. Maybe the Mission: Impossible creative team decided it had to raise the stakes and kick things off with something truly unthinkable, rather than relying on the usual high-tech, gadget-fueled fun. Debruuk’s confession is followed by one of the most satisfying, and ridiculous, rug-pulls of the series. His hospital room is revealed to be a facsimile, constructed by the IMF. Wolf Blitzer is the agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), wearing a rubber mask. “Told you we’d get it,” Blitzer crows, satisfied.
The hilarious twist—which helps the IMF track the location of the missing plutonium—serves as a mission statement for the movie, and the series at large, one that the film doubles down on for the rest of its running time. The IMF might be playing Halloween, reliant on absurd theatricality rather than brute strength, but that’s why people buy tickets: They’re here to see Hunt and company cleverly wriggle their way out of every situation, not do battle in a world that’s already aflame. Beginning a 2018 blockbuster with a literal “fake news” sequence might have felt like a cheap bit of topicality from another franchise, but Fallout’s version serves as a reminder that international spy thrillers don’t have to be all death and destruction to make an impact. The real world might seem on the brink of chaos, but at least in the theater, Ethan Hunt is always on hand to drag it back to safety through sheer force of will.
Previously: Leave No Trace
Next Up: A Star Is Born
One-third of Americans aren’t able to name all of their grandparents, according to the genealogy website Ancestry.com. That proportion seems very, very high—it represents more than 100 million people. Can that estimate really be right?
Ancestry filled in some details when I inquired. The figure comes from a survey the company recently commissioned that polled 2,000 American adults who were “statistically representative” of the country’s overall population. In the survey, respondents were asked whether they knew the first names of their grandparents, and were not given any indication that they were being asked exclusively about their biological grandparents.
When I asked Ancestry for possible explanations of its finding, the company noted that many family trees are passed down orally, which might make familial details prone to being misremembered or forgotten. It also pointed out that a lot of kids grow up calling their grandparents nicknames or just “Grandma” or “Grandpa”—which could make it more likely that they’d blank when asked to provide their grandparents’ actual first names.
In an attempt to better understand what else might be going on, I consulted some researchers who study family-related demographic patterns. Because these experts didn’t have access to the details of the survey’s methodology, their theories aren’t definitive explanations of Ancestry’s finding. But they are informed guesses, and together they capture the multifarious forms that American families take in the 21st century.
[Read: How do you grandparent a 20-year-old?]
“I wouldn’t have any way of assessing the 1/3 number, but it doesn’t surprise me,” says Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. Cohen and the two other researchers I emailed with brought up a variety of family structures that might complicate people’s awareness of their family line—single parenting, assisted reproductive technology, divorces, nonmarital child-rearing, adoption, and blended families.
Robert Crosnoe, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that many kids cycle through a variety of these family structures as they grow up, which means the regular introduction of new relatives. “There is more to keep track of, more to lose track of, and some family relationships may get lost in all of that churning,” Crosnoe told me. “You could see how a grandparent or two could lose visibility.” (He noted that while one-third seems high, he expects the actual proportion to be “not negligible.”)
Molly Fox, an anthropologist at UCLA, brought up several other demographic trends that could help explain the survey finding. First, she mentioned “immigration patterns to the U.S. over the past 50 years, as the geographic and linguistic separation of grandparents and grandchildren could fracture intergenerational family connections.” Another: “Diminishing family sizes in the U.S., such as having few siblings or few aunts and uncles compared to previous generations, could mean there are fewer sources for a person to call upon when trying to reconstruct the names of relatives in previous generations.”
Fox also wondered “how the ability to name your grandparents relates to them being alive during your lifetime, and perhaps events like WWII or the Vietnam War that resulted in a surge of early-adult deaths in the U.S. could have diminished the life span overlap of grandparents and grandchildren.”
Crosnoe also raised the question of how much grandparents’ lifespans overlap with their grandchildren’s, and provided some historical context. “Grandparenthood is sort of a modern invention, as for most of our history grandparents were dead before kids were born or got old enough to know them,” he said. “Declining mortality changed that and led to this modern phenomenon that kids tend to know their grandparents.”
“100 years ago,” he went on, “mortality would be the answer if you said a large chunk of grandkids could not name their grandparents (and probably immigration too).” Nowadays, happily (for the most part), there are a bunch of other, likelier explanations.
Forty-seven years ago, the Asian elephant now known as Happy was one of seven calves captured—probably in Thailand, but details are hazy—and sent to the United States. She spent five years at a safari park in Florida, time that in the wild would have been spent by her mother’s side. Then she was moved to the Bronx Zoo in New York City. There Happy remains today, and since the death of an elephant companion in 2006, she has lived alone, her days alternating between a 1.15-acre yard and an indoor stall.
For a member of a species renowned for both intelligence and sociality, the setting is far from natural. In the wild, Happy would share a many-square-mile home range with a lifelong extended family, their bonds so close-knit that witnessing death produces symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. It would seem that Happy, despite the devotions of the people who care for her, is not living her best life.
In considering Happy’s circumstances and what might be done to improve them, should something more than animal-welfare laws and zoo regulations—which the Bronx Zoo has not violated, but arguably are inadequate—be invoked? Should Happy be considered, in legal terms, a person? Which is to say, an entity capable of possessing at least some rights historically reserved for humans alone—beginning with a right to be free?
Making that case is an advocacy group called the Nonhuman Rights Project. Since 2013, the group has filed lawsuits on behalf of four captive chimpanzees in New York and, in neighboring Connecticut, three elephants used in a traveling circus. They’ve lost those cases, but they have persuaded judges to take them seriously, and in October petitioned a New York state court to order Happy’s release. She wouldn’t be returned to the wild, but would be transferred to a sanctuary in California with more space and the company of other elephants. The hearing took place earlier this month, and while no decision was reached—the case will likely be moved to a court within the Bronx Zoo’s jurisdiction—it was still a unique moment to reflect on the status of animals and the law.
Until recently, the idea of elephant personhood would have struck legal observers as a joke. Just a few decades ago, most states still treated animal cruelty as a misdemeanor, like public intoxication or driving without insurance. But an increasing number of Americans take animal well-being seriously: A 2015 Gallup poll found that a majority “are very or somewhat concerned” about animal mistreatment. The legal system has changed in turn. Every state now considers animal cruelty a felony, and laws such as California’s recently passed Proposition 12, which improves living standards for farm animals, are becoming commonplace.
Still, these laws have blind spots and inconsistencies. The federal Animal Welfare Act exempts farm animals and most lab animals; the Humane Slaughter Act omits poultry. State laws are an inconsistently enforced patchwork, and practices that many people consider cruel—such as gestation crates for pigs—remain legal in many places. Even the most beloved animals don’t always receive much consideration. “In the vast majority of jurisdictions, if someone beats your dog to death in front of you, all you can sue them for is the cost of buying another dog,” says Chris Green, the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program.
Animal-welfare laws also depend on government intervention. Citizens can’t file suit on behalf of animals they don’t own. Animal-welfare laws fall short of actual rights—and centuries of legal custom have reserved rights for humans. “A thick and impenetrable legal wall has separated all human from all nonhuman animals,” writes Steven Wise, the Nonhuman Rights Project’s founder and lead attorney, in his book Rattling the Cage.
To help Happy breach it, Wise invokes both scientific research and legal principle. Elephants, attest scientists who filed affidavits in Happy’s case, are highly self-aware, are emotional, make choices, and have a rich sense of both past and future. (Happy, in fact, was the star of a landmark 2006 Science study describing how elephants can recognize themselves in mirrors, which is considered a measure of especially human-like awareness.) “Elephants share many key traits of autonomy with humans,” write evolutionary biologists Lucy Bates and Richard Byrne in their affidavit. Wise argues that respect for autonomy underlies our own legal right to physical liberty. Extending that to elephants is simply a matter of equality.
Happy the elephant in the Bronx Zoo’s Asia display (Bebeto Matthews / AP)In a news release issued after this month’s hearing, the Wildlife Conservation Society—the Bronx Zoo’s owner—describes the lawsuit as “an academic exercise” that, in the words of the zoo’s director, Jim Breheny, is intended to “promote their radical philosophical view of ‘personhood.’” Happy’s present conditions, the society says, are perfectly suitable and meet established welfare standards, and moving her could be traumatic. (That issue won’t be adjudicated in this article; for more information, see court documents filed by Patrick Thomas, the Bronx Zoo’s associate director, and Joyce Poole, one of the biologists supporting the lawsuit.)
More to the philosophical point, the Wildlife Conservation Society cites rulings against similar Nonhuman Rights Project lawsuits filed on behalf of captive chimpanzees. According to those decisions, rights belong only to those who can also accept moral responsibility and social duties—which even the smartest animals can’t.
The rulings have been criticized, though, both by scientists who insisted that chimps do in fact have responsibilities within their own societies and by some legal theorists who don’t necessarily support chimp rights but fear a rationale that could threaten many human beings. The rights of an infant or an elderly grandmother with severe dementia are hardly contingent on the duties they fulfill.
[Read: Is the future of zoos no zoos at all?]
This past May, in rejecting a Nonhuman Rights Project request to appeal these decisions, the New York judge Eugene Fahey wrote that he did so only on procedural grounds. “Does an intelligent nonhuman animal who thinks and plans and appreciates life as human beings do have the right to the protection of the law against arbitrary cruelties and enforced detention?” he wrote. “This is not merely a definitional question, but a deep dilemma of ethics and policy that deserves our attention.”
Fahey’s opinion—intended, as legal opinions are, as a resource for future deliberation—seems to leave New York courthouse doors open for Happy. Whether they’re wide enough remains to be seen. There are certainly other arguments against elephant personhood. Richard Cupp, an animal-law professor at the Pepperdine School of Law, worries that extending rights to animals could ultimately erode our own. “Courts and society might, with this new paradigm, be tempted not only to look at more intelligent animals as being like humans,” he said in a debate with Wise, “but start to think of less intelligent humans a little more like animals.”
Cupp also fears opening a “floodgate of litigation” as animal advocates work their way through the animal kingdom, moving from elephants and chimpanzees to common creatures—a worry echoed by Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University, who spoke to Harvard Magazine about his concern that people might claim personhood for farm animals. “We kill millions of animals a day for food,” said Epstein. “If they have the right to bodily liberty, it’s basically a holocaust.” Rather than rights, Epstein suggests more animal-welfare protections.
There are rejoinders to both points: Expanding rights to women, racial minorities, and children didn’t erode the rights of property-holding white men, and implications for other species are immaterial to the question of elephant or chimpanzee rights. Lawsuits involving other species and other rights would certainly follow—but those deserve to be addressed case by case rather than forestalled en masse because it’s uncomfortable to consider what they imply for animals we eat.
[Read: Why are baby animals dying at the National Zoo?]
Regardless of how Happy’s case is decided, though, the legal landscape for animals is changing. Outside the United States, an Argentine court granted freedom to an orangutan at the Buenos Aires Zoo; courts in the Indian state of Uttarakhand ruled that animals both wild and domestic are not property but “legal entities” on whose behalf humans must act as guardians. The European Union, New Zealand, and Quebec explicitly recognize animals as sentient, though the actual impact of sentience laws has been limited. Legal rights for animals are no longer a fringe idea.
Inside the United States, judges in Alaska and Illinois have started to consider the well-being of pets, rather than mere ownership claims, in divorce-custody proceedings. Though an Oregon court rejected a high-profile lawsuit that would have allowed a horse’s advocates to sue for damages caused by criminal neglect, another court in that state ruled that animals could legally be considered victims of crimes—an implicit recognition that they’re more than just property.
The Animal Legal Defense Fund, which filed the aforementioned Oregon horse case, has also pushed for animals to be covered by the Freedom of Information Act, which, by the law’s letter, applies to individuals—not individual humans. Meanwhile, Friends of Animals, another advocacy organization, has collaborated with the legal philosopher Martha Nussbaum to develop what they call a “right to ethical consideration”: In their eyes, the Nonhuman Rights Project’s focus on autonomy sets too high a cognitive bar; rights might instead be based on simpler capacities, such as emotions and imagination.
Ethicists have even suggested property rights for wild animals threatened by development, labor rights for working animals, and the use of citizenship theory as a framework for thinking about animal rights. Domestic animals might be treated as full-blown citizens; wild animals are likened to members of other nations. Even if such ideas seem impractical, they’re valuable prompts to moral imagination. What would fair-labor law look like for a chicken?
“For the most part, there’s been an invisibility to anything but humans throughout the legal system,” says Irus Braverman, a law professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “We have to bring the animals back in.”
Ask Israelis what they appreciate about President Donald Trump, and they can tick off a substantial list: the long-sought move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; the abandonment of the much-maligned Iran nuclear deal; the lack of pressure (so far) on Israel to curtail settlement expansion or make concessions to the Palestinians; and the absence of tensions with Israel’s leaders, which plagued the relationship between former President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But dig a bit deeper, and you hear something else, best captured in a phrase used frequently by young Israelis I meet who consider themselves Trump fans: gever-gever, a real man. Something about the Trump style appeals to an Israeli sense of machismo, an appreciation for direct, gut-level expressions of toughness, such a contrast from the more analytical Obama.
Trump’s sudden decision this month to reverse course and announce the withdrawal of the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, though, forced Israelis to recognize, in many cases for the first time, both their policy differences with Trump and the downsides of his stylistic idiosyncrasies. The implications, for Israel’s strategic interests in the region and for its management of its relationship with the United States, are broad.
Start with the way the decision was made. Trump had signaled months ago his preference for a prompt declaration of victory over ISIS and the return of U.S. troops from Syria. But persuaded by his national-security team, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the special representative for Syria engagement, James Jeffrey, he reversed course. Netanyahu also called for maintaining the U.S. deployment. The presence of U.S. forces meant that Israel did not feel left to manage the threat entirely on its own, or appear to others to be doing so, even as it conducts its ongoing campaign of air strikes in Syria against Iranian military entrenchment.
[Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz: Trump delivers a victory to Iran]
Trump’s sudden about-face, announced by tweet on December 19, so shocked and upset his own national-security team that Mattis and the special envoy for the counter-ISIS campaign, Brett McGurk, resigned. Netanyahu reportedly received a heads-up in a phone call with Trump two days before the announcement, but failed to dissuade Trump; he was not, in any meaningful sense, consulted. Israel’s tight-lipped statements calling it a “U.S. decision” that would in no way constrain Israel’s own actions betrayed Netanyahu’s unhappiness.
Surprises are bad enough. I know it firsthand, having informed the Israeli government in August 2013 of Obama’s decision to strike Syrian targets in response to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, only to have Obama pull back to seek congressional approval. In that case, the surprise stung and left lingering region-wide doubts about the willingness of the United States to use military force. But at least then, a plausible policy alternative emerged: an agreement with Russia that led to the removal and destruction of 1,300 tons of Syrian chemical-weapons stocks. Israel endorsed the new approach.
The problem for Israel today, though, goes beyond the surprise. If Obama was too cautious for many Israelis, Trump has now shown them how his approach to foreign policy—impulsive, isolationist, transactional, turning on a dime with no alternative in place—can work against their interests. And Netanyahu—who praised Trump in almost messianic terms and who knows how poorly he responds to criticism—now has few tools at his disposal to object to this policy. Israelis can only shake their heads at the absence of any strategy as they survey the regional fallout.
Take ISIS. By every account, the battle to destroy ISIS is not finished. The removal of U.S. forces will put at risk the gains of the campaign’s first three years, and could facilitate the group’s regeneration. Israel is not threatened by ISIS in an existential sense, but preventing Sunni jihadist terrorists from harassing Israel’s borders and undermining its neighbors is undoubtedly an Israeli interest.
[Kori Schake: Trump just messed up the one thing he did better than Obama]
And who persuaded Trump to make the ill-advised move? None other than Netanyahu’s regional nemesis, the Israel-bashing Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Netanyahu has seemed unconcerned as Trump cozied up to the international club of autocrats—Putin, Orbán, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Mohammed bin Salman—and has even taken a swim in the same pool. Now he sees what happens when Trump strikes a deal with the local Islamist member of this club, who harbors ambitions for regional leadership. Obama may have hung in too long with Erdogan as he dismantled Turkish democracy. But Trump, knowing who Erdogan really is from the start, sees it as no impediment to doing deals. A Trump-Erdogan bromance is the stuff of Netanyahu’s nightmares.
The first victims of Erdogan’s empowerment, of course, will not be Israelis. They will be Kurds. Kurdish fighters—who make up the Syrian Democratic Forces (including, it must be acknowledged, some affiliated with the anti-Turkish terrorist group the PKK)—have led the battle on the ground against ISIS, liberating city after city in northeastern Syria. With no U.S. troops to coordinate with and protect them, they will be left to Erdogan’s tender mercies.
Israelis see the Kurds—a moderate, pro-Western, Muslim community that eschews anti-Israel sentiment, and with whom Israel has worked quietly—as exactly the kind of element that the Middle East needs more of. They constantly press for more American support for the Kurds. Israel, against American wishes, encouraged the Kurds of northern Iraq in their ill-advised independence referendum of 2017. For Israel, the U.S. abandonment of the Kurds represents both a strategic and an emotional blow.
The blow is that much more painful for what it says about U.S. staying power in the Middle East. This concern did not originate with Trump, of course. Obama, too, was criticized by Israelis for withdrawing troops from Iraq, for failing to strike Syria in response to chemical-weapons use, and for his perceived reluctance to use force against Iran’s nuclear program. But Trump, the gever-gever, Israelis hoped, would reverse the trend. Instead, Trump is doubling down on reducing U.S. involvement in the Middle East in an even more brutal fashion: bashing regional allies as freeloaders, demanding payment for U.S. protection, and loudly declaiming against any plausible logic for a U.S. military presence in the region. America’s friends, including Israel, feel a chill wind at such talk.
[Conor Friedersdorf: What the Syria hawks refuse to acknowledge]
Meanwhile, its adversaries take heart. The main source of Israel’s concern in Syria is the continuous effort by Iran to transfer ever more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to deploy its own forces and weapons against Israel from Syria. U.S. troops in eastern Syria have not been directly involved in Israel’s campaign against such threats, but their presence denies Iran access to certain locations in Syria, including the key border-crossing between Syria and Iraq at al-Tanf.
More broadly, they signify a U.S. interest in what happens in Syria and provide a measure of leverage in the diplomacy that will help shape postwar arrangements. Once they are gone, the U.S. voice demanding Iran not be permitted to use Syria as a venue to threaten Israel will weaken. The rest of Trump’s vaunted “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran will weaken along with it. U.S. sanctions remain, but U.S. seriousness is in question. Netanyahu claimed that Obama’s nuclear deal empowered Iranian aggression across the region. Any serious analyst would make the same assertion about Trump’s latest move.
The other major beneficiary of the U.S. withdrawal is Russia, now the unchallenged power in Syria, with influence that radiates out throughout the region. Declining U.S. involvement and increasing Russian dominance empower Russian President Vladimir Putin. When it suits Russia’s interests, he may attempt to constrict Israeli freedom of action against targets in Syria. On cue, Moscow blasted this week’s Israeli strike on Iranian-Hezbollah weapons facilities and the Syrian air-defense units that protect them with the dubious claim that Israeli pilots endangered civilian airliners.
Israel has maintained effective communication and deconfliction with Russia in Syria for three years, but it can expect more such Russian bullying tactics with the United States out of the picture. Israelis who complained that Obama “allowed” Russia to deploy heavily to Syria in 2015 can hardly feel better about Trump’s decision.
A more dominant Russia in Syria means a reinforced Assad regime. That process was happening anyway, much to the chagrin of Israeli strategists and anyone with a moral conscience. But the folding of the U.S. tent cements the outcome. Where Turkey does not wipe out the Kurds, Russian-backed Syrian forces will mop them up. The Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah weapons highway will be disrupted only by Israeli action. Other Arab states, long funders of anti-Assad opposition groups, have given up and are welcoming Syria back to the fold. Syria’s prospective invitation to the Arab League summit, the visit of Assad’s security chief to Cairo, and the reopening of the UAE embassy in Damascus mark Syria’s best week diplomatically since the war began in 2011.
Following Trump’s tweet announcing the U.S. withdrawal, Netanyahu told the Israeli people there was no cause for alarm. In the big picture, he’s right. Israel can and will defend itself against the array of threats it faces. U.S. military assistance to Israel and diplomatic support at the United Nations are not in jeopardy.
But management of the conversation about the region between these two allies is now hobbled. A planned coordination visit to Israel by Mattis was scotched. Multiple conversations with a range of American envoys, premised on the continuation of the U.S. presence in Syria, have proved worthless. Israelis now know the dread of Trump’s Twitter feed that has tormented many other U.S. allies.
And most of all, Israel’s confidence in the robust, muscular backing of the gever-gever in the White House must now be tempered by a new understanding. Trump’s disdain for any American military role in the Middle East, his eagerness to cut deals with his autocratic friends, and his lack of any sense of obligation toward U.S. allies should prepare Israelis for the bitter truth that the second half of Trump’s term could look quite different from the first.
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi is not a game of Clue, but it often resembles one. Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, in the annex, with a syringe. Or was it Salah al-Tubaigy, in the consul’s office, with a bone saw? About three months have passed since Khashoggi walked into the consulate in Istanbul, and nearly as much time has passed since Saudi Arabia confirmed—after a period of flailing attempts at denial—that its agents had killed him there shortly after he arrived. Souad Mekhennet and Greg Miller, writing in The Washington Post (where Khashoggi was a contributing writer), recently offered further details, purporting to exclude one possibility: that the Saudis killed Khashoggi in a botched rendition, a kidnapping gone wrong. According to their account, and it is the one that has been most widely accepted, the assassins downed Khashoggi with an injection of sedatives and immediately set to work dismembering him and hiding his remains.
[Read: Saudi Arabia’s shifting narrative on Jamal Khashoggi’s killing]
The Saudis have ceased offering new versions of their own account of these events. But The Washington Post’s reporting raises many macabre questions:
Why kill him in the consulate—the one place in Istanbul where Saudi culpability would be undeniable? Istanbul is a big city, and Khashoggi lived there openly and without security. I met up with him in London not long before his assassination, and when we had breakfast, he sat with his back to the street, in an open café. To slay him with a bullet to the head would have been simple, speedy, and deniable. Many other options exist. Consider the lengthy menu of deniable assassination techniques apparently used by Russia in Ukraine, England, and elsewhere. Why kill him with sedatives? “The Saudi team brought a syringe packed with enough sedative to be lethal,” according to the Post. Assassins have used many weapons, ranging from firearms to a ricin pellet embedded in the tip of an umbrella. You can guess the advantages of each weapon. A syringe of sedatives is, by any measure, a peculiar choice. Sedatives are not reliable killers, unlike, say, cyanide. But why get pharmacological at all? Evidently the integrity of Khashoggi’s body was not a major concern, so why not just shoot him in the head, strangle him, or stab him in the heart? Why deploy a team of more than a dozen easily recognized Saudi operatives? A kill mission, especially one in a location of the assassins’ choice, does not require a team of that size, and indeed is more secure with fewer people. Instead of sending in two jets loaded with security personnel, why not fly in three or four killers on Turkish Airlines, traveling separately and using false identities?Some have suggested that the whole point of the operation was to intimidate other dissidents, and that the assassination was a “noisy” one, conducted at the consulate to demonstrate the Saudis’ willingness to kill anyone, anywhere. That hypothesis prompts still other questions:
Why bring in a Jamal Khashoggi look-alike? Among the most ludicrous details of this whole stupid plot is that the Saudis seem to have brought in a Khashoggi double, dressed him in the real Khashoggi’s clothes, and sent him from the consulate to blend into crowds, as if the real Khashoggi had left the consulate alive. (In a further touch of incompetence, reminiscent of a Coen brothers’ film, the double wore his own shoes instead of the victim’s.) The easiest explanation for this premeditated act of subterfuge is that the assassins did not want anyone to know that Khashoggi was in the hands of the Saudis, either dead or kidnapped. Why was Saudi Arabia so ill-prepared for Khashoggi’s death? One might expect a killer to profess shock at the death of his victim. The Saudis’ response was pathetically clumsy, far in excess of what would be necessary to convey genuine shock. The crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, gave denials that directly contradicted his own government’s official admissions just days later. His brother, the ambassador to the United States, did the same, burning all credibility and perhaps requiring his imminent replacement in that role. In the unrefereed cage match of international diplomacy, Saudi Arabia has spent most of the past few months being thrashed mercilessly by its rival Turkey. Saudi is more isolated than before in its cold war with Iran and Qatar. The assassination has caused a rift with the United States larger than any in the past 40 years. No one thinks the Saudis have chosen this disaster, or indeed prepared themselves for it.According to multiple anonymous reports, the assassination began with a threat. One of the assassins “informed Khashoggi that he was going back to Saudi Arabia,” write Mekhennet and Miller. Even if the speaker implied “… in multiple Samsonite suitcases,” this is an odd way to begin an assassination, but a sensible way to tell your victim that he can come home the easy way or the hard way. A scuffle ensues. Khashoggi loses consciousness and dies—possibly of asphyxia from mismanaged anesthesia, possibly of blood loss after having his limbs sawed off.
[Graeme Wood: Three theories on Jamal Khashoggi’s fate]
Both scenarios—murder and botched rendition—end the same way, with Khashoggi dead. (Neither should inspire any pity for the Saudis. If you kill someone in your consulate, even by accident, you own the consequences.) One advantage to the “botched rendition” scenario is that it would answer all the questions above. You can’t render someone from a café; you need a setting over which you have total control. Sedatives are an odd way to kill someone, but they are the only way to bring him home alive against his will. You need a large team, perhaps including a jet configured for a medical flight, to render someone.
In the months before Khashoggi’s murder, rumors were circulating about his desire to return to Riyadh. I do not know whether the rumors were true, although he himself told me expatriate life had left him lonely and homesick. If the rendition theory is correct, I suspect the body double was intended to buy the Saudis enough time and deniability to allow the real Khashoggi to appear in Riyadh and announce that he had returned to the kingdom and resumed total loyalty to the king and crown prince.
That the Khashoggi murder might have been a botched rendition remains an unpopular opinion, and contrary to the growing perception of the crown prince as brash and incapable of considering even the fairly obvious concerns outlined above. It is possible that the assassination of Khashoggi proceeded exactly as the conventional account has it. But I have not heard any of those who believe the operation went as intended explain these lingering mysteries. Keep asking these questions. Any story about the killing that doesn’t answer them is incomplete.
Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2018” coverage here.
Among the watershed cultural moments of 2018, Americans can count plenty of tearjerkers: the addictively heartwarming makeover magic of Queer Eye, say, or the squeal-worthy teen romance that gave the actor Lana Condor her first lead role. Some artists, such as the comedian Hannah Gadsby and the performer Mj Rodriguez, made powerful statements both on and off the stage. Others, such as the figure skater Adam Rippon, captivated through sheer, unapologetic joy. The non-comprehensive list below includes not only people who have become household names, but also those whose time in the spotlight has likely just begun. Meet a few of the actors, singers, directors, and other stars whom we admired this year—and whose work we’ll be looking out for in 2019.
mark Humphrey / APKane BrownThe Kane Brown album that debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200—an achievement matched by only two (far more established) country stars this year—is titled Experiment, which would seem to advertise songs that challenge mainstream Nashville’s sameness just as Brown’s biracial identity does. It’s savvy exaggeration: The 25-year-old Tennessean’s real knack is for lightly updating cherished clichés in the way that the genre’s breakouts always have. Equipped with good looks, tattoos, and a stout-beer-savory baritone, he pulls off such feats of tweeness as turning his own wedding into a music video or telling his girl to lose her “good-for-nothing phone” for something more authentic. With traditionalist goodwill thus engendered, he’s also able to attempt a statement such as “American Bad Dream,” which laments brutal cops and school shootings—a mild provocation that, with courage, might foretell greater ones.
—Spencer Kornhaber
Sophie Mutvelian / BBC AmericaJodie ComerWho could forget Villanelle? Yes, the assassin in Killing Eve is a psychopath—there’s the awkward fact that she stands over her victims while they die, apparently reveling in the moment. Then there’s the stalking, and the home invasions, and the running over of her ex, and the snipping off of her French instructor’s husband’s penis. Otherwise: what a woman. In Villanelle, Jodie Comer has a character who subverts every rule and trope about femininity, and the 25-year-old actor paints her as the most alluring kind of monster—a Hannibal Lecter for the iPhone age. Comer’s career before Killing Eve mostly included television roles in her native England: characters ranging from Elizabeth of York in The White Princess to a woman held captive in a cellar for more than a decade in Thirteen. Now Comer has placed Villanelle securely in the pantheon of complex female characters, and ensured her own rise in the process.
—Sophie Gilbert
netflixLana CondorNoah Centineo’s Peter, the heartthrob love interest of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, attracted many of the headlines when the film became a breakout hit on Netflix this summer. But the real star was Lana Condor, who played the protagonist Lara Jean with the perfect mix of teenage uncertainty and sparkling confidence. She’s an actor possessed of that special rom-com ability to turn on a dime between witty repartee and heartfelt emotion, several times in the same scene if necessary. Condor first cropped up in 2016, in a minor role as Jubilee in X-Men: Apocalypse. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is ample evidence that she needs more lead roles, stat.
—David Sims
Marvel studiosWinston DukeBlack Panther is a film so laden with talent, it’s near-impossible to imagine how an unknown actor could be its most memorable star. But one could easily argue that Winston Duke walks away with the movie—or, at least, with any scene he appears in as M’Baku, the leader of Wakanda’s renegade Jabari tribe. In his first scene, a waterfall battle with T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), Duke is so imposing that it seems like he could plausibly defeat the film’s hero. Then, when M’Baku emerges as a crucial ally in the back half of the film, he’s charming, winsome, and funny—without ever losing his intimidating edge. Duke has been cast in Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us, and M’Baku should be back soon enough for the Black Panther’s future adventures.
—D.S.
Mark Blinch / ReutersKarena EvansDrake donned the cape of “the good guy” this year with hits that seemed to grin and shake hands rather than pout, scowl, or finger wag. The visual steward of this makeover was Karena Evans, a 23-year-old from Toronto who can now boast of having directed four sterling clips for one of pop’s all-time megastars. Her sense of visual rhythm—vérité camcorder and slick HD, skewed low angles and vertiginous crane shots, loose choreography and tight editing—locates humanity in gimmicks that could have come off as pure thirst: Drake distributing cash on the streets of Miami, corralling famous women to shake and shimmy, reuniting the Degrassi cast, and reclaiming a viral dance craze. That Evans’s career will be bigger than her association with Drake is already assured by her gigs in TV-making and film-acting. But like the rapper, the newbie isn’t hiding her ambition. When she wished a happy birthday on Instagram to her mentor, Director X, an industry legend, she lovingly added, “I’m coming for your spot.”
—S.K.
Austin Hargrave / NetflixThe Fab Five (Queer Eye)Remember when the first season of the rebooted Queer Eye debuted three years ago? Just kidding, it was in February. It’s hard to imagine now what life was like before the Fab Five were around, with their flawless Emmys looks, their thirst-trap Instagram accounts, and their gazillions of merch deals and brand tie-ins. Tan France, Karamo Brown, Antoni Porowski, Bobby Berk, and Jonathan Van Ness burst into 2018 with all the zest and piquancy of grapefruit in an avocado salad, and their radiant positivity was a beam of sunshine amid the ashen nuclear wasteland of the news cycle. From the airy perch of their downtown Atlanta loft, the Fab Five staged vow renewals, facilitated coming-outs, found common cultural ground with their political polar opposites, and helped a trans man refine his new identity after top surgery. Never have life lessons looked so good, or made quite so many people cry all over the world, all at once.
—S.G.
NetflixHannah GadsbyTo the untrained eye (mine), Hannah Gadsby appeared out of nowhere. Seemingly overnight, her Netflix special, Nanette—filmed live at the Sydney Opera House last year—became the kind of cataclysmic cultural event after which it seemed everything would always be a little bit different. Nanette spurred a variety of ongoing debates about what the work was, exactly: comedy, a one-woman show, a dismantling of the patriarchal hegemony the likes of which women had only been dreaming of. But most people (at least those who actually watched it) agreed: It was stupendous. Mingling observational humor (the pride flag is “six very shouty, assertive colors stacked on top of each other”) and brutally honest storytelling, Gadsby picked at the seams of comedy’s fabric, showing how the very structure of joke telling can reinforce systems that keep marginalized people down. Whatever she does next (and a book is imminent), 2019 probably won’t be ready for it.
—S.G.
Jason Koerner / Getty images for betGunna and Lil BabyThe Atlanta rappers Gunna and Lil Baby had an undeniably phenomenal year. Their joint mixtape, Drip Harder, was released in October, and followed the tremendous success of “Drip Too Hard,” their September single (along with several prior collaborations). The synergy between the two is palpable in all of their joint recordings. On “Drip Too Hard,” over hypnotic production, the duo raps with Young Thug–ian dexterity about their lyrical prowess, impressive work ethic, and unvarnished style. On another standout, the string-heavy “Sold Out Dates,” the two marry references to high-end fashion with jokes about their own chaotic schedules: “I got on two watches,” Lil Baby raps. “I still come in late.” It’s a cheeky boast, the kind that emphasizes both the newness of the artist’s fame and the delight he takes in it. Gunna and Lil Baby sound like they have fun together. This dismal year, that’s meant more than ever.
—Hannah Giorgis
Ashley Connor / Oscilloscope / Everett collectionHelena HowardJosephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, a tiny indie film about the pressures (and vampiric pleasures) of acting and making collaborative art, is intended as a harsh, challenging viewing experience, and it succeeds in its aim. But the debut performance at its center, from 20-year-old New Yorker Helena Howard, is absolutely flooring. Decker discovered Howard at a local teen-arts festival, and in a way, the film imitates those circumstances, following a teenager whose theater teacher is pushing her to blur the boundaries between her troubled real life and the play in which she’s starring. Whether she’s writhing on the floor pretending to be a turtle or in the midst of a screaming fight with her mother, Howard is alive with energy. She’s set to appear in an upcoming TV pilot, and an exciting career should lie ahead.
—D.S.
Justin Lubin / NBCKirby Howell-BaptisteKilling Eve, the decadently murderous BBC America drama, revolved most obviously around the tension between its two leads: the assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and the woman obsessed with catching her (Sandra Oh, in the title role). Even so, the show was bolstered by the charm and wit of Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Eve’s co-worker turned co-conspirator, Elena, who granted the thriller a delightful levity. Howell-Baptiste also served as a voice of reason to the central foursome of the NBC sitcom The Good Place: As Simone, a neuroscientist who later dates the preternaturally neurotic Chidi, she injected some much-needed humanity into the heady series (even after the pair’s much-agonized split). Whether balancing assassins or lovers, Howell-Baptiste is a joy to watch—the kind of actor who channels #relatability without seeming gimmicky or contrived.
—H.G.
Jessica Brooks / Amazon Prime VideoStephan JamesBefore he even turned 25, the actor Stephan James had starred in one of the most critically acclaimed movies of 2018 and one of the year’s most buzzed-about television shows. In Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, James played Fonny, a sculptor falsely accused of rape, imbuing the character with depth, poignancy, and grace. In Sam Esmail’s psychological thriller Homecoming, James (playing Walter, a veteran) matched Julia Roberts’s megastar charisma scene for scene, and the ambiguous relationship between the two made for one of television’s most fascinating pairings. For an actor whose highest-profile work prior to this year involved playing iconic figures (John Lewis in Selma, Jesse Owens in Race), James was indubitably cemented as a star in his own right.
—S.G.
Tatum Mangus / Annapurna PicturesKiKi LayneAs the lead of Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of the 1974 James Baldwin novel If Beale Street Could Talk, KiKi Layne is the film’s soul. Layne is alternately vulnerable and sage as Clementine “Tish” Rivers, a young Harlemite whose soon-to-be husband has been falsely accused of rape and incarcerated. It’s a meaty, challenging role that the actor handles with grace and empathy. The 26-year-old spent much of her early career acting in plays, and Beale Street is her first major film performance. But even surrounded by a star-studded cast, Layne beams with the kind of enthusiasm and palpable talent that makes her impossible to look away from. If there’s any justice in Hollywood, she’ll have plenty of opportunities to keep radiating that brilliance.
—H.G.
HuluBing LiuFor someone who’s not yet 30, Bing Liu has made a good amount of astounding art. There’s America to Me, the Starz docuseries about a high school outside Chicago, for which Liu helmed three of the story lines. And there’s Minding the Gap, the documentary he crafted from years’ worth of skate-park footage filmed while he was growing up in Rockford, Illinois, which just won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film. In Minding the Gap, Liu takes a world that’s likely alien to many viewers and turns it into an engrossing study of violence, exploring how three skaters—Zack, Keire, and Liu himself—deal with the physical brutality they’ve all experienced in different ways. It’s a movie that questions what it means to be a man, and what it takes to break out of cycles that seem destined to repeat themselves ad infinitum. It’s also punctuated with moments of sheer, restless, infectious joy.
—S.G.
Scott Green / Bleecker Street Media / Everett CollectionThomasin McKenzieThe director Debra Granik has a way of picking future stars: Her last fiction film, 2010’s Winter’s Bone, was a breakout moment for its steely young lead, Jennifer Lawrence. Granik’s latest effort, Leave No Trace, likewise announces a major talent in Thomasin McKenzie, an 18-year-old New Zealander who plays the young survivalist Tom with a mix of warmhearted guilelessness and rugged perseverance. In depicting a character raised in the wilderness by her father, McKenzie never leans into stereotypes: Tom isn’t feral, nor is she so awkward that she can’t make other human connections once she’s brought into the social world. She’s just entirely lacking in affect, irony, or self-deprecation, in a way that makes her seem strikingly different from “normally” socialized teens. Especially at such a young age, it takes uncommon talent to convey that difference so subtly—talent McKenzie obviously possesses.
—D.S.
Bernat Armangue / APAdam RipponThat the United States had never before sent an openly gay figure skater to the Olympics is a stark reminder that in so many social arenas, Americans have yet to learn what it’s like to have unapologetically queer folks in the mix. Adam Rippon, the 29-year-old bronze medalist in Pyeongchang, was happy to show them that it can be pretty great. As amusingly unguarded in interviews as he was lithe on the rink, outspoken on topics from skating’s problem with eating disorders to the Olympic Village’s problem with condoms, Rippon effortlessly implanted himself in the social-media firmament—just as his professional athletic career drew to a close. Though he declined NBC’s on-the-spot offer of a commentating job, he’ll surely add pizzazz to pop culture for years to come: This is a born entertainer with deeper points to make. “FUN FACT,” he tweeted during the competition. “Being true to who you are and not giving a shit about what others think about you is an awesome and liberating thing whether you are gay or not.”
—S.K.
JoJo Whilden / FXMj RodriguezThe richly constructed FX drama Pose, which follows queer and trans youth of color as they navigate New York life in 1987, produced no shortage of stellar performances this year. Chief among them was that of the actor Mj Rodriguez, who plays Blanca Evangelista, a young trans woman who leaves the protection (and drama) of her chosen family to start her own “House of Evangelista.” Rodriguez channels Blanca’s fear and defiance with deft attention to the role’s emotional contours. She’s thoughtful, conflicted, and vibrant. And audiences have been paying attention: Rodriguez is intentional about using her platform to advocate for her communities, and her voice extends far beyond the limits of the series.
—H.G.
Michael LavineSnail Mail (Lindsey Jordan)It’d be a lie to say the 19-year-old songwriter Lindsey Jordan is clearly destined for mega-popularity. She rasps and reaches in so raw a manner that it kept me, for some time, from connecting with Lush, the most acclaimed (and rightly so, it turns out) indie-rock debut of the year. But she’s working in a tradition—connecting ’70s Laurel Canyon, ’90s Pacific Northwest, and ’00s Brooklyn—that shows how a listener’s greatest pleasures can come from a singer’s purity of vision, and Jordan’s is as pristine as the title of her signature single. Her guitars zap and swarm with harmonic trickiness; her drums click and clack satisfyingly. Often, elements that first seem thin—arrangements, melodies, lyrical ideas—suddenly thicken, and then become last-day-of-a-life-chapter heavy. “Would they stick around?” she asks in an ace refrain that hints at her future: This is art to obsess over, the stuff of long and significant careers.
—S.K.
Taylor Jewell / invision / apChloé ZhaoA Chinese director and screenwriter who studied filmmaking in the United States after emigrating as a teenager, Chloé Zhao debuted in 2015 with Songs My Brothers Taught Me, a keenly felt if one-note portrayal of a Lakota Sioux family’s life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Her follow-up, The Rider, is an astonishing artistic leap forward. Again set in Pine Ridge and starring a mostly nonprofessional cast, the film (which Zhao wrote and directed) blends fiction and reality with astonishing confidence, translating the life of the injured rodeo cowboy Brady Jandreau, who plays the lead role, into a story of struggling to let go of one’s deepest passions. Zhao’s exceptional care for her characters quickly drew the eye of Hollywood—she’s already been hired to make an Eternals movie for Marvel.
—D.S.
If Hunter S. Thompson were still alive—if the so-called Gonzo journalist hadn’t killed himself in 2005, his ashes subsequently propelled from a cannon in a ceremony financed by Johnny Depp—the odds are high that he’d be linking Donald Trump to “that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character,” and contending that Trump “speaks for the Werewolf in us.”
That’s how Thompson reported on Richard Nixon back in his Rolling Stone ’70s heyday, when his anarchic attitude broke the rules of objectivity and bonded with his fans in that divisive era. He was, in a sense, America’s first blogger, and his tone seems eerily contemporary. Even a letter he wrote to a friend in 1965 sounds like a common lament in 2018: “I think there is a terrible angst on the land, a sense that something ugly is about to happen, an hour-to-hour feeling of nervous anticipation.”
One might argue that there’s no need for another book about Thompson—who has been repeatedly parsed by biographers, played by actors (Depp and Bill Murray), and deconstructed in a slew of academic dissertations (for instance, “as a modern practitioner of the carnivalesque in literature”)—but Timothy Denevi, an assistant professor at George Mason University, begs to differ. His new book, Freak Kingdom, tracks Thompson’s peak professional years, from 1963 to 1974, but in truth, Denevi says, “Trump is present on every page, even though he’s never mentioned once.”
Denevi tells me, “A lot of people today know Thompson as a drugged-out cartoon character”—indeed, the Doonesbury artist Garry Trudeau has made “Duke” a recurring character—“but what many of us are feeling right now [about Trump], Thompson was articulating beautifully in the ’60s and early ’70s, about how difficult it was to watch a government lie to its citizenry, and about how the country disfigured itself. When you’re constantly told one thing and you know the truth is another thing, the citizenry begins to fracture.
[Read: The Hunter S. Thompson you don’t know]
“That’s what we saw with the Vietnam War, with the Nixon administration and Watergate, with what Thompson saw as shameless, ruthless criminality. I think Thompson would look at the shameless criminality in the Trump administration, and he would’ve been able to dramatize the trauma of the situation, using the New Journalistic techniques.”
Not everyone, of course, loves the iconoclastic Thompson persona (the cigarette holder, the ever-present bottle of Wild Turkey), nor does every scribe and chronicler embrace the “New Journalistic techniques,” which combine reportage with the narrative devices typically associated with fiction. Thompson once wrote that “fiction is a bridge to the truth that the mechanics of journalism can’t reach … you have to add up the facts in your own fuzzy way,” and some journalists in recent decades, perhaps inspired by Thompson, have been accused of fuzzing the line that separates fact from fantasy, of inventing details in the pursuit of a higher truth.
[Read: An interview with Hunter S. Thompson]
Nor does everyone in the news business endorse Thompson’s flagrant participatory style (hence the term Gonzo); in 1974, he told Playboy magazine, “I like to get right in the middle of whatever I’m writing about, as personally involved as possible”—which arguably skewed the reality he was covering. During his Rolling Stone stint at the 1972 Republican convention, he infiltrated a Youth for Nixon rally and told the kids that NBC News’s John Chancellor loved to drop acid. Because the kids hated the media, they believed his fake LSD rumor—which arguably heightened the reality he was covering, because it exposed the Nixon kids’ naïveté. (“Golly,” he quotes a girl as saying about Chancellor, “that explains a lot, doesn’t it?”)
Denevi defends Thompson’s immersive subjectivity, which was developed only after years of objective reportorial spadework; today, by contrast, “too many people have decided that the more opinions they have, the more likely they’ll get noticed. But there’s no inherent worth to the opinions … Tucker Carlson [on Fox News] thinks he’s Hunter Thompson, whereas in reality, he’s not reporting; he’s just an opinion who’s trying to further Trump’s power.”
The keepers of Thompson’s flame contend that his shoe-leather reporting provided ballast for observations that today seem prescient. He hung out for a year with the ’60s Hell’s Angels, and his descriptions—of white guys without college degrees, “rendered completely useless in a highly technical economy”—bring to mind Trump’s so-called forgotten Americans. Thompson said they were motivated by an “ethic of total retaliation.” He wrote: “They are out of the ball game and they know it, (so) they spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand … Instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the (establishment) for good or ill. (That) gives them a power and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.”
A year earlier, in 1964, he’d covered the Republican convention and captured the first populist rumblings that culminated in Trump’s nomination 52 years later. When the nominee Barry Goldwater declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” the delegates went wild. Thompson later wrote, “I remember feeling genuinely frightened at the violent reaction … As the human thunder kept building, they mounted their metal chairs and began howling, shaking their fists at Huntley and Brinkley up in the NBC booth—and finally they began picking up those chairs with both hands and bashing them against chairs other delegates were still standing on.”
He was similarly frightened and fascinated by George Wallace, the Alabama governor who twice sought the presidency with demagogic pitches to Americans who felt they’d been left behind in a time of profound cultural and technological change. After one Wallace rally in 1972, Thompson wrote, “The air was electric even before he started talking … He campaigns like a rock star (with) a thundering, gut level appeal to rise up and smash all the ‘pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington’ who’d been (screwing) them over for so long”—although Wallace, in his appeals to emotion, “never bothered to understand the problems.”
It’s not a stretch to imagine how Thompson would have chronicled the contemporary chants of “Lock her up.” Denevi, the new biographer, tells me, “There’s something ugly in the American character, a sense of resentment, that very charismatic politicians have always tapped into. ‘Come to me, and I will give you the answers; they’re very simple.’” But how Thompson would handle Trump is, of course, a moot question, because the writer was burned out by 1980. His love of alcohol and Dexedrine sapped his strength, and a string of partisan disappointments—Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Nixon’s two electoral wins, Ronald Reagan’s ascent—sapped his spirit.
I witnessed that mood firsthand when I had dinner with Thompson (and several handlers) in June 1981. As I wrote at the time, he ordered two beers, two margaritas, and a Chivas Regal on the rocks to go with his ice cream. He said that he’d recently visited Washington, intending to write about Reagan; however, “we got there and said, ‘What the hell?’ I don’t give a damn … To be in Washington—jeez, what a horrible way to live.” He had depleted his capacity for outrage: “To keep writing angry, damn-you stuff can drive you mad.”
I described that dinner to Denevi. He replied, “I can understand Thompson’s exhaustion. That’s why he couldn’t continue to write the way he had.” He was disillusioned by what he perceived as the chasm between America’s promise and performance, “his perspective was eroded by his alcoholism,” and, ultimately, “he became a caricature of himself.” Indeed, when Trump briefly flirted with launching a 2000 presidential bid, Garry Trudeau contrived for cartoon Trump to hire cartoon Thompson as a backstage fixer.
But Denevi always thinks back to Election Night of 2016, when Trump’s flirtation finally came to fruition: “That moment—the emotion of it—put a fresh lens on Thompson … He was a patriot who wanted America to live up to its ideals.” Which is why Denevi believes that what Thompson chronicled in his inimitable way during the Nixon era—“America acting on its worst impulses”—still resonates today.
As Thompson once riffed, “Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.” That’s either wise or incoherent. Perhaps a new generation of scholars will parse it.
Khalil was shopping in the Hasakah marketplace in Syria when Kurdish military police arrested him last March. He was 19 and had papers that showed he was in high school, but that didn’t matter. The Kurdish militia, which feeds troops to the U.S.-led war in Syria, was way short of volunteers. They ordered him into a minibus and drove through the northeast Syrian city, abducting others along the way.
The force that conscripted Khalil calls itself the People’s Protection Units, or YPG in Kurdish. The militia it supplies calls itself the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, a mixed Kurdish-Arab formation. But conscripts quickly learn who is really in charge in the proxy war against Islamic State extremists. It’s the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Marxist guerrilla movement that’s been at war with neighboring Turkey for 35 years.
Khalil’s boot camp lasted six weeks, one-third of which was political indoctrination about the Kurds — including the works of Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the PKK, which is the Kurdish acronym for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — and the rest was weapons familiarization. His cohort was 15 Kurds and about 350 Arabs, all conscripted at gunpoint, he told me. The course was taught in Kurdish with translators for the Arabs. (Khalil, who’s from Syria’s Yazidi minority, speaks Kurdish).
When the training ended in May, Khalil received orders to deploy to Deir Ezzor on the frontline near an ISIS-held pocket of territory. Instead, he fled with his sister to Kurdish territory in Iraq. He was lucky, for his parents are refugees in Europe — if his family had lived in the area, he wouldn’t have been able to quit, knowing that military police would seize a brother, a cousin, or even their father in his place.
U.S. reliance on the PKK and its Syrian affiliate has driven these militias to conscript at gunpoint and stirred ethnic tensions. The PKK may be sorry to see the Americans go, but a lot of Arabs are not.This is everyday reality for the force that the U.S. military, politicians, and pundits have lionized as the most capable and reliable ground partner the U.S. could find in Syria. It’s run by a group that the State Department has declared to be terrorists; it conscripts at gunpoint and utilizes police state methods in its operations and governance that are completely antithetical to U.S. values, according to deserters interviewed by The Intercept.
This is also the force that will soon be left hanging and exposed to retribution if President Donald Trump carries out his apparently impulsive decision last week to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria as fast as possible. Turkey, which views the PKK as an existential threat, says that it will go on the offensive against fighters from the PKK and its Syrian affiliate, the YPG, in key areas of its border with Syria. ISIS may also target them, and the Assad regime will no doubt try to regain control of lands the Kurds now control. A bigger foe may be Syrian Arabs from areas formerly controlled by ISIS, who bitterly resent the Kurdish militia bossing them around.
“They are not able to do anything today,” Khalil said of the Arabs who constitute the majority of the population in the provincial capital. “But if they come to power in the future, they will do everything they can against the YPG.” Also, a large number of Kurds have fled north Syria rather than live under the YPG and the economic hardship of war, and more will leave with the YPG, especially in Manbij, where they’ve been given special privileges by the YPG.
The U.S. military first linked up with the Kurdish militia in Syria in late 2014 when ISIS was attacking the town of Kobani, but the U.S. ground partner has not had close scrutiny until now, just as U.S. presence is about to end. In part, it’s because the Kurds run what a State Department official told me is a “mini-totalitarian state,” where criticism isn’t allowed; in part, it’s because the U.S. military has refused to discuss PKK practices, insisting that its partner is the Syrian Democratic Forces, not the PKK or the YPG. One way to circumvent this closed circuit is by seeking out deserters, who’ve been fleeing to territory controlled by Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government for several years. With KRG assistance, I interviewed four deserters in the northern Iraqi town of Dohuk last month. I have changed their names to protect them from PKK retribution.
My overall conclusion is stark: U.S. reliance on the PKK and its Syrian affiliate has driven these militias to conscript at gunpoint and stirred ethnic tensions between Arabs and Kurds. The PKK may be sorry to see the Americans go, but a lot of Arabs are not.
Desertions are the bane of the PKK, according to Ali, a senior officer who defected in October and spoke to me in Dohuk. “We know this is a big problem. What can we do?” he said. “If someone wants to leave, all I can do is threaten to throw him in jail.”
Draconian rules provoke many desertions. To join the PKK or its Syrian affiliate, the YPG, is to enlist for life; to be conscripted, according to three of the deserters I interviewed, is a ticket to frontline duty. It’s no surprise that tens of thousands of young Kurds have fled to the KRG rather than serve in the guerrilla force, nor that dozens of PKK members flee into KRG every day, according to KRG officials.
A spokesperson for the YPG said conscription of youths over 18 is authorized by a law passed by Kurdish civil authorities. But he refused to discuss conscripting registered students at gunpoint, underage recruiting, sending conscripted youth to the front with minimal training, and desertions. “These are questions from Erdogan,” said spokesperson Nuri Mahmoud, referring to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “These are unrealistic questions.”
In the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq, where the PKK has its main base, members spend the winter in caves, tunnels, and bunkers to avoid Turkish air force. Except for senior officers, members have no cellphones or cars and no access to media and films other than those produced by the PKK. Sexual relations with women, who are recruited, trained, and deployed as a separate force, are prohibited.
Violations of the social code, deserters say, occur a lot more on the flatlands of Syria, where civilians around them date, marry, and have families, than in the highlands of Iraq, where conditions are spartan. But in either location, punishment is decided by “platform,” a court martial where there’s no due process, no legal representation, no law, and no appeal.
Deserters also say the PKK has lost its way politically and cannot deliver on its promises to unite Kurds from Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria into one state — or to promote Kurdish cultural rights and spread democratic rule.
The movement may have missed its political moment three years ago in Turkey, when the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, headed by Selahattin Demirtas, a charismatic leader, achieved a major breakthrough in parliamentary elections.
Instead of capitalizing on the political opening, the PKK unilaterally ended a ceasefire with Turkey— and in Syria, buoyed by American backing in the fight against ISIS, declared that it would set up a contiguous Kurdish entity along the border with Turkey. Turkey views that as a threat to its territorial integrity and intervened twice in Syria to prevent it, seizing ISIS-occupied in 2017 and 2018. That dream is now dead, and as the result of a Turkish crackdown following the PKK’s abandonment of the ceasefire, Demirtas sits in a Turkish jail.
Ali deserted the PKK after 20 years of service. He’d commanded 3,500 SDF forces in the Deir Ezzor area of Syria — where Khalil was to be sent — but had a run-in with the PKK leadership over his private life. “I had fallen in love with a woman in the YPJ,” the women’s branch of the YPG, he said. “They put me in jail for four months” and then ordered a “platform,” in which the accused is charged before a gathering of his peers, who then call for punishment. There is no defense.
“Do you know what the main aim of a platform is?” Ali said. “Just to insult and abuse the person in front of the people. Everyone gives an opinion. One will say, ‘Let him be killed.’ Another says, ‘Hang him.’ Another says, ‘Jail him for life.’”
“They used to call it a people’s democracy. In reality, they don’t uphold democracy. They don’t care about human rights.”Ali was released from jail, suspended from the PKK for six months, and later reinstated to his command position. But the experience scarred him.
“They used to call it a people’s democracy,”Ali told me. “In reality, they don’t uphold democracy. They don’t care about human rights.”
Ali joined the PKK at its redoubt in Qandil and said he was based there for 15 years until he was deployed to Syria in 2013. He had joined “to protect our nation” and support Kurdish self-rule, but now he sees no prospect of that happening.
“Reality has appeared,” he explained. “We know we have gone the wrong way.”
The armed interventions by Turkey, in particular the capture of the Afrin region in northern Syria last spring, punctured the dream of setting up a Kurdish political entity that would have autonomy in a weakened federal Syrian state. “What the PKK lost in Afrin was the federalism project. There’s no way they can force the Syrian regime to accept the project,” he said.
Photo: Cagdas Erdogan/Getty Images
The malaise goes still deeper, according to Osman Öcalan, 60, a co-founder of the PKK. He’s the brother of PKK founder Abdullah “Apo” Öcalan who’s being held in an Istanbul jail. Osman Öcalan broke with PKK leadership in 2003 and now lives in Erbil, in the northern part of Iraq controlled by Kurds. He criticizes current leaders for seeking a military solution to the Kurdish nationalist issue. He calls their ideology “Marxist-Stalinist,” because like the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, they refuse to accept any other political parties.
Most grating is the absence of human rights.
“They are against all freedoms for the people. They don’t let fighters lead their own lives,” he said. And he criticizes them for opposing the political negotiations with Turkey that his brother had advocated. He also criticized their forced conscription. If young people fight to defend their country, “that’s OK,” he said. “But kidnapping people is not a good idea.”
Osman Öcalan said he quit the PKK for two reasons. One was his insistence that the PKK decentralize and devolve decisions to its national units. In Syria, the PKK “gives all the orders, sets all the policies, decides the training,” Osman said. He believes that Syria’s YPG should become independent of the PKK and shed itself of the PKK’s worst tendencies. “If the YPG would become a democratic group, no one would desert,” he said. “The main reason people desert is because of the policy of the PKK.” He added that Cemil Bayik, a Turkish-born PKK leader, “doesn’t agree with this idea. … He wants to rule Rojava as well” — a reference to the Kurdish name for northern Syria.
The second reason Osman left the PKK was because Bayik “was against human rights. He didn’t agree if someone gets married and has a personal life.”
Osman welcomed the U.S. offer early last month of a $4 million reward for information on the locations of Bayik and a total of $8 million for two of his senior-most colleagues, Murat Karayilan and Duran Kalkan. Osman said the U.S. move would be “perfect” if it leads “to a political solution to the Kurdish issue.” But is there a broader strategy or was this a gesture to ease tensions with Turkey? The State Department, when asked by The Intercept, said only that the rewards program was “one tool, among many” that the U.S. uses to aid Turkey in its fight against the PKK.
Abductions in broad daylight are not the only recruitment issue for the PKK.
Hilas was 14 when she ran away from her home in Qamishli in April 2016. “I was influenced by the lyrics of their songs,” she said of the PKK. She’s the third of the four PKK deserters I interviewed in Dohuk. After three months of training, two-thirds of it devoted to political doctrine, the PKK transferred her to its base in Iraq’s Gara mountains.
She missed her family. “I tried to escape,” she said. “But they wouldn’t let me.” She was transferred across KRG territory to Makhmur, a Kurdish refugee camp, where she did guard duty for 18 months. In March, she saw the opportunity and fled to the Peshmerga, the KRG’s defense force. She was 16.
The U.S. military says it strongly disapproves of underage recruiting.
A “stringent vetting process” includes “purposefully screening for underage recruits and denying them the ability to join if found to be under the age of 18,” said Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesperson for Central Command. He said the U.S. military is “not aware of any incidences of the Syrian Democratic Forces recruiting underage soldiers.”
But Geneva Call, a Swiss-based group monitoring the deployments of child soldiers, said the SDF this past September had acknowledged “a number of violations” of its signed obligations not to recruit child soldiers. On December 3, the Swiss group reported that the SDF had “recently” sent 56 underage boys back to their families.
Asked about forced recruitment, Urban said the U.S. is “partnered with the vetted multiethnic Syrian Democratic forces in northern Syria” but “not partnered with the YPG or the PKK.”
That’s a dodge, because the YPG rebranded itself as the SDF at the behest of Gen. Raymond Thomas, head of the U.S. Special Forces Command, who told the tale in mid-2017 at the Aspen Security Forum. “You have got to change your brand,” he urged them in late 2015. “What do you want to call yourselves besides the YPG? With about a day’s notice, they declared that they are the Syrian Democratic Forces.” He commended them for “a stroke of brilliance to put ‘democracy’ in there.”
The State Department says the U.S. has worked with the YPG in eastern Syria as part of the larger SDF and expects U.S. partners to abide “by the highest standards of conduct,” a spokesperson told me by email. “Any allegations regarding possible human rights violations would be of concern.”
In fact, the Kurdish militia has force-recruited underage fighters. Take the case of Ibrahim, a 20-year-old Kurd who defected to Iraq in mid-2017. He was forcibly conscripted in March 2017 and taken to Tal Baydar, a base in north-central Syria, where he joined a cohort of 600 young conscripts, he said in an interview in Dohuk last month.
After six weeks of training, he was sent to the front in what was then the battle for Raqqa. He and a buddy came under attack by ISIS, damaging the truck he was driving, and they drove off. Later, his commander gathered the 40 or so young men in his unit and read the riot act. “Every one of you should fight to the death to liberate the position we want to retake from ISIS,” Ibrahim quoted the commander as saying.
After seven days at the front, he deserted and fled to Iraq. Military police then went to his home and took a married older brother, age 27. After a year, when he was released from military service, they came for a younger brother, age 15. That brother wasn’t in school when the police came. Parents often don’t send their sons to school because, Ibrahim said, the PKK goes into the schools to proselytize “and then takes them into the mountains.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Update: December 28, 2018
This story has been updated with comment from a YPG spokesperson that was provided after publication.
The post In Syria, U.S.-Backed Kurdish Fighters Face Trump’s Withdrawal — and the Legacy of Their Own Mistakes appeared first on The Intercept.
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