Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 15

Escape to the Future With Missy Elliott and Jamiroquai

Two icons of the music-video format have returned this Friday with light-up headpieces and underground post-apocalypse vibes and pretty catchy music. Do not call Missy Elliott and Jamiroquai nostalgia acts—they’re offering colorful and imaginative escape to the future.

From the garbage-bag onesie of “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” to the bee facial of “Work It” to the Terminator goop of “She’s a Bitch” to the boogying marionettes of 2015’s “WTF (Where They From),” Missy Elliott’s knack for memorable music has been equalled by her knack for insane images. Today brings not only a visual smorgasbord in the video for the new song “I’m Better,” but also a trailer for a forthcoming documentary about the rapper that confirms her televisual excellence hasn’t happened by accident. It opens with her saying, “It’s never just making a hot record—I can do that in my sleep. But visually I have to see what I’m going to do with that record when I perform it.”

The “I’m Better” video, aided by her longtime directorial collaborator Dave Meyers and the producer Lamb, features dancers suspended from the back as if they’re puppets, wearing glowing riot masks on their heads, and grooving in white workout gear like cultists doing aerobics. The industrial setting they’re in at the start of the clip turns out to have a liquid portal in the floor; everyone falls through, and suddenly it’s an underwater performance. The song is minimal, tense, and in step with the trap sound ruling hip hop right now. The dancing accentuates the uneasy mood: “I didn’t want them to hit every beat of the track,” Elliott told Fact. “I wanted it to be art.” She raps that her man watches her like he watches Scandal, which is to say totally caught up—a relatable feeling for the viewer.

Less abstract but similarly heady is the new clip from the British funk act Jamiroquai. The band’s 1996 song “Virtual Insanity” made for one of the most famous music videos ever, with frontman Jay Kay hanging out in a room whose floors moved around him, a spectacle that scrambled the viewers’ expectations about gravity and home decor. That clip and others, such as the one for 1999’s “Canned Heat,” also demonstrated Kay really likes to wear things on his head.

For the new song “Automaton,” the advanced single to the band’s first album since 2010, Kay’s hat fetish remains, as does the interest in science fiction and things moving that aren’t supposed to move. The video opens with a mushroom cloud—topical!—and then introduces Kay wearing a prehensile, light-up headpiece. He explores human ruins, first underground and then above ground, and reports back his findings to some researcher-type. His cyborg-scout get-up is cool in a campy way, and it fits right in with the song’s sound: disco rock with heavy amounts of vocal manipulation à la Daft Punk.

Both Elliott’s and Jamiroquai’s videos might be seen as timely thanks to their dystopian vibes. But the creativity on display is exactly of the sort that both artists have shown throughout their careers. If there’s a takeaway message, it’s bedazzled onto one of Missy Elliott’s excellent outfits: “Save the Humans.”

A Marriage Crumbles in the Gripping Iranian Drama The Salesman

The Salesman begins with what seems like an earthquake—the ground starts to shake at a comfortable-looking abode in Tehran, cracks suddenly appear in the walls, and the happily married Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) have to flee into the street. The newest film from Iran’s master of the domestic potboiler, Asghar Farhadi, is as subtly and methodically told as his other works, but to begin, he does allow himself one obvious visual metaphor. Emad and Rana’s life together is going to come apart at the scenes, seemingly out of nowhere, like a cruel act of god.

In fact, it isn’t an earthquake that troubles the couple’s home, but nearby construction. Nonetheless, they have to temporarily move to another, shabbier apartment, where the previous tenant has left many of her possessions. They’re simultaneously playing the lead roles in a local production of Death of a Salesman, that canonical work on the myth of American exceptionalism. But Farhadi is not looking to draw some obvious parallel between Arthur Miller’s play and the lives of this couple. Rather, he wants to explore the terrifying speed with which conflict can disrupt our mundane lives, and the unconscious need we possess to slip into more outsized roles. The Salesman is a typically wrenching film for Farhadi, one that morphs from a quiet family drama to a low-key tale of revenge, and is all the more impressive for how seamlessly it executes that shift.

Farhadi won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2011 for A Separation, which followed a middle-class Iranian couple’s attempt to divorce, and the various familial and courtroom troubles that then besieged them (The Salesman was similarly nominated for an Oscar this year). Farhadi’s cinematic style could kindly be described as sparing—the score is minimal, the camerawork lacking embellishment, the visuals strictly verité. When Farhadi cuts to the couple’s staging of Death of a Salesman, the exaggerated set behind them, decorated with neon signs advertising casinos and bowling, seems all the more lurid and cartoonish—a tightly restrained culture’s view of a shamefully extroverted land.

That notion of extroversion is what begins to eat away at Emad and Rana’s relationship. When rehearsing Death of a Salesman, one of the male actors can barely stay in character at the sight of a female actor in the role of Miss Forsythe, who is implied to be a prostitute. Even the very idea of an actress pretending to be such a person feels like science fiction to him, and he can’t help but laugh at it. But fiction edges into reality for Emad and Rana, who learn that their new apartment’s previous tenant was similarly scandalous. The couple’s new neighbors remember her as “a woman with a lot of acquaintances” and who lived a “wild life,” but Emad and Rana are desperate to avoid discussing the subject. Their lives seem otherwise blissful: Their relationship is happy, and Emad is a beloved teacher at a local high school.

That peace is disturbed when a client of the former tenant calls at the couple’s apartment and scuffles with Rana when he realizes she’s not who he’s looking for. This action unfolds entirely off-screen, while Rana is home alone. She can’t identify her assailant, nor does she want to address it with the police, afraid of the judgment that might follow, unfair or no. It’s an upsetting situation, but not a cataclysmic one—a crack in the wall, rather than a break in the foundation. But it’s enough to send Emad in search of retribution, a quest that will offer no help to his rattled wife (who doesn’t want the matter to spill out into the public eye), but might nonetheless satisfy his own anguish about failing to protect her.

Farhadi is the best kind of political filmmaker—one who focuses his stories on mundane family matters and believable domestic dramas, whose works build to a catastrophe by upsetting the smallest societal norms. In The Salesman, you can feel Farhadi (who wrote and directed) putting his finger on the scale ever so slightly with the film’s big plot twist, then letting Emad’s own fragile masculinity do the rest. The tension in The Salesman all hinges on this one incident of mistaken identity and brief violence, one that can’t be undone or repaired. There is no grander escalation on the way, no confrontation with the former tenant who has inadvertently caused this mess (she remains a character only spoken of, an archetype as easy to imagine as the one the actors in Death of a Salesman snicker at).

As tense as Emad’s revenge quest gets, The Salesman still falls short of the devastating heights Farhadi has hit with his best films (along with A Separation, the brilliantly-calibrated About Elly, also starring Alidoosti, is a vital work). The Salesman’s conclusion, while gripping, feels somewhat pat, focusing on a confrontation that wraps things up too neatly and quickly, even if Emad and Rana’s marriage remains deeply troubled. As the film goes on and Emad feels further emasculation and rage, Hosseini plays him as almost physically burdened by the unsolved crime, slightly more stooped over, with a bit of a dejected shuffle. It’s then, finally, that viewers can really see some Willy Loman in him.  

The Book That Bettered America

“May you live in interesting times,” the proverb goes, and it is an open question, still, whether those on the receiving end of the entreaty should consider themselves to have been just blessed, or just cursed. But history itself, at any rate, is biased toward interestingness. It tends to favor, in its selective memory, the moments and the monuments, the stuff of revolutions and paradigm shifts. Its workings tend to sand away the rough edges of small lives, messily lived, to focus instead on singular instants of epochal change: Darwin found his finches, and Newton plopped down under the apple tree, and Galileo peered through glass to see the stars, and nothing would ever be the same again.

But history as it’s made is much more chaotic than history as it’s written might suggest. That is one of the ideas at play in The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation, Randall Fuller’s new exploration of how one particular paradigm shift—the one brought about by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published just before the start of the Civil War—affected the survival of the United States, as a nation and as an idea. Fuller is a professor of English (he is also the author of Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists and From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature), and his latest book is, like its predecessors, especially attuned to the human hums of history. It focuses on a small group of prominent thinkers—Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Charles Loring Brace, Louis Agassiz—as they wrestled with a theory that would help the young nation to struggle and adapt and evolve, finally, into something better than it was before.

In July of 1860, Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist, published a book review in The Atlantic Monthly, a fledgling periodical founded in Boston and “Devoted to Literature, Art, and Politics.” The essay—the first of three Gray would write for the magazine—considered the implications of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life), which, published in England in 1859, had recently reached American shores. Gray’s review would provide many Americans’ first introduction to the theory that would challenge their notions of God, morality, and the nature of the human soul. It began, as such, with a discussion of pants.

“Novelties,” the eminent naturalist began, “are enticing to most people: to us they are simply annoying.”

We cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old suit of clothes. A new theory, like a new pair of breeches, (“The Atlantic” still affects the older type of nether garment,) is sure to have hardfitting places; or even when no particular fault can be found with the article, it oppresses with a sense of general discomfort. New notions and new styles worry us, till we get well used to them, which is only by slow degrees.

Slacks, yes, but also slack: Gray understood the effusive implications of On the Origin of Species, and he framed his review around his conviction that Darwin had written a book that was as much about history’s unsteadiness as it was about nature’s. He foresaw the way Darwin’s deceptively elegant theory would challenge long-standing—and comforting—assumptions: not just about the relationship between the physical and metaphysical worlds, but also about the fixity of the universe, about the forward march of progress. Gray tried, in introducing all that to lay audiences, to offer reassurance alongside all the disruption: New notions and new styles worry us, till we get well used to them. They will chafe and distract, until—slowly and suddenly—they are a second skin.

Gray was careful in his wording not just because he was scientist, but also because he was introducing the incendiary book to the American public during a time that was, itself, particularly prone to fires. On the Origin of Species arrived in the U.S. during the time just before the Civil War became an inevitability—and during a time, as well, when slavery’s evil still resided in the sphere of legitimate debate. Gray’s review of Darwin was delivered to American libraries and living rooms in an era when it was still revolutionary—and, even to the most progressive citizens, shocking—to suggest that humans were part of nature, rather than its masters.

Darwin challenged the idea of the world’s inexorable improvement—the notion that man, created in God’s image, was moving ever Godward.

Today, the cultural anxiety Darwin is most commonly understood to have initiated is the one about God’s place in human existence, and vice versa; we tend to think of him as having provoked a fight that would rage on into the Tennessee courtrooms of the 20th century and the American classrooms of the 21st—a fight that, as it was stirring in the 19th, would lead Emily Dickinson to declare, “[W]e thought Darwin had thrown ‘the Redeemer’ away.” And, certainly, he had done a little of that.

As Fuller demonstrates, though, On the Origin of Species was controversial in its time as much for its biological arguments as for its theological implications. The book was written in a generally genial tone; Darwin largely left the men-and-monkeys and humans-and-God business for others to infer. That style helped him to disguise, Fuller suggests, one of the book’s most explosive subtexts: Darwin’s theories, on top of everything else, challenged the assumption, commonly held in 19th-century America, that humanity was inexorably improving—that man, created in God’s image, was moving ever Godward. If evolution (a word Darwin used sparingly in the book) occurs randomly, without the intervention of divine will and protection—natural selection, after all—then change itself can occur not just for the better, but for the worse. The world, so wonderfully capable of evolution, is just as capable of the opposite.

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It was a troubling idea; it was also, potentially, a liberating one. Asa Gray, for his part—a scientist who also held, like many of his peers, a deep religious faith—adopted an accommodatingly synthetic view of this element of Darwin’s (meta)physics. The botanist read Darwin’s theory not as some of his contemporaries would—as a direct challenge to God’s creative agency—but rather as a scientific explanation of divine power working its will upon the world. Natural selection was simply a mechanism, Gray thought—and, in its way, a manifestation—of the divine.

In this, Gray shared a reaction to On the Origin of Species with Henry David Thoreau, who is best remembered today as the controversial “hermit of Concord,” but who was also a natural scientist in his own right. (Thoreau, Fuller notes, once fashioned a platform that he installed into the crown of his hat, the better to store the samples—flora, fauna, whatever struck his fancy—he picked up during his wanderings.) Thoreau, too, might well have invented the spreadsheet, Fuller suggests; he used charts to obsessively catalogue the wildlife he observed around Walden Pond and its environs. It was his abiding communion with nature that had long led Thoreau to suspect, Fuller also notes, that “humans and animals were part of the same continuum.” Darwin’s theory provided a scientific foundation for that belief.

Thoreau is also remembered, today, as an intellectual forerunner of the civil rights movement—an early advocate, with work that would later inspire Dr. King, of passive resistance in the face of institutional immorality. (A staunch abolitionist, Thoreau refused to pay taxes—and was briefly jailed for the refusal—on the grounds that he preferred his money not abet a government that abetted the evil institution.) On the Origin of Species first arrived on American shores, as it happened, just after the radical abolitionist John Brown was executed for his failed attempt to initiate an armed uprising of slaves, at Harper’s Ferry. The notion of natural selection, then, came to the United States as the nation was passionately debating whether Brown had died a traitor or a martyr. The theory helped, Fuller suggests, to crystallize Thoreau’s thinking, and that of many of his fellow intellectuals, about slavery—the most divisive, and in some sense the only, topic of the day.

Social Darwinism and its unsavory implications would come later. Those early readers of On the Origin of Species, Fuller argues, interpreted the book as compelling evidence for abolition. The book’s theories implied, after all, that humans are indeed members of one species (this was, at the time, another matter of legitimate controversy). Many slave-holders had clung to the notion that different races were also different species—an attempt to justify themselves to each other and to history. Darwin’s theory adroitly refuted their arguments. And the abolitionists exulted in the refutation. “On the Origin of Species swept through Boston like a choice bit of gossip,” Fuller writes; that was in part because the book afforded slavery’s opponents the spark they needed to set fire to the era’s most looming of straw men.

The biologist Louis Agassiz wrote in the margins of his copy of Darwin’s book, “This is truly monstrous!”

Which is not to say that the book was universally accepted, even among the small group of East Coast intellectuals Fuller focuses on. Many of the early readers of On the Origin of Species, he suggests, rejected Darwin’s findings outright. One of them: Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May and a committed transcendentalist. Alcott mistrusted science, in general, on the grounds that its practice failed to account for divine will. He deemed Darwin, despite the naturalist’s ingenuity, to have presented a vision of the world’s workings that was “destitute of spirit.” It was one of the worst insults Alcott could think of to aim at a fellow philosopher.

Another critic of Darwin was Louis Agassiz—who was, like Gray, a Harvard biologist, and who is, unlike Gray, The Book That Changed America’s unofficial villain. Agassiz was brilliant: He was one of the first scientists to suggest that Earth had undergone an ice age. He was also a devoted racist who believed that God had placed humans and animals—as fixed and separate species—into specialized “Zones” for which they were best suited. To Agassiz, Fuller notes, “it was inconceivable that whales and lions could be linked by anything other than their mutual conception in the mind of the creator.” Agassiz thus informed Gray, to the latter’s evident amusement, that Darwin’s work was “poor—very poor!” In the margins of his copy of On the Origin of Species, Agassiz was blunter still: “This,” he wrote, “is truly monstrous!”

Humans are small until they are big. Revolution happens gradually, until it happens suddenly. Ideas appear, and evolve, until they die away or become part of the air we breathe. The Book That Changed America is, as a title, as compelling as it is sweeping; its post-colon, however—How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation—is more descriptive of the book’s accomplishments. Fuller’s tale is of Darwin and abolition and moral battles that led to literal ones; it is also, more simply, the story of humans wrestling with insights that would change the world and their place in it.

The story is evocatively told: Fuller is an excellent writer, with an eye for irony and a unique ability to inject suspense into a story that is, at its core, about the mercurial nature of chromosomes. The book is also, in some ways, as limited as it is sprawling. It focuses on the intellectual elites—and on their pettiness, and their idealism, their humanity. As for the broader “America,” though—its everyday denizens, among them wide swathes of people who were not yet afforded the dignity of citizenry—Fuller offers less detail. The Book That Changed America is an intellectual history that reads as a drama; drama is not something that easily scales.

But determined humanity is a value much more than a drawback. And while The Book That Changed America may be an entry in the history of ideas, its primary concern is the people who are at once ideas’ creators and their recipients. Before Darwin’s theories could shift their paradigms—before, indeed, they could help to Change America at all—they had to prove themselves within the lush and harsh environs of the human mind. Darwin found his finches; the ideas they sparked in turn ignited debate between Emerson and Thoreau, between Alcott and Gray, between Gray and the far-flung readers of The Atlantic Monthly. The ideas struggled. They adapted. They inspired. They lived and breathed in the most tumultuous of times. They helped to ensure that those times—and the many that would follow in their path—would be occasionally blessed, occasionally cursed, and either way deeply interesting.

Why Christo Cancelled an Epic Public Artwork

Christo, the artist famous for wrapping the Reichstag, erecting orange gates in Central Park, and running miles of fabric fence through Sonoma County ranch-land, has thrown in the towel. He told the New York Times this week that he is abandoning Over the River, his plan to drape a canopy over 6 miles of Colorado’s Arkansas River, as a protest against President Donald Trump.

“I use my own money and my own work and my own plans because I like to be totally free,” Christo told the Times. “And here now, the federal government is our landlord. They own the land. I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord.”

Rags Over the Arkansas River sounded a prompt triumphant note. The organization, which exists exclusively to oppose the artwork planned by Christo and his late-partner, Jeanne-Claude, declared their 18-year mission accomplished. The end of Over the River means the end of the road for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, at least in the U.S.: It was the couple’s last work planned here, their final collaboration in a career of public, socially engaged artworks stretching back 50 years.

Christo’s decision to renege on this final work is the most dramatic example yet of an artist action against President Trump. Earlier this month, the mercurial photographer Richard Prince disavowed a portrait he made of Ivanka Trump (based on a selfie from the First Daughter’s own Instagram account), claiming that he had returned the $36,000 he received from Trump for the piece. Dozens of artists, curators, and cultural workers joined a strike on January 20, the day of President Trump’s inauguration.

Christo’s strike may stand alone, however, as an example of an action that truly redacts an artwork from the world, not just notionally. Over the River was a work in progress: One federal lawsuit remained in the way of the artist’s plan to suspend 1,000 silvery fabric panels in stretches over a 42-mile span of the Arkansas River. The work had overcome several obstacles, most recently in January 2015, when a federal district court upheld a U.S. Bureau of Land Management decision to allow the project to proceed.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, pictured with a drawing for Over the River in Germany in 2006. (Thomas Haentzschel/AP)

In the divisive world of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the civic debates were always the locus of their art. Running Fence, a 1978 film by Albert and David Maysles—documentarians who chronicled the artists’ works—showcases the many community hearings that served as the pair’s secret medium. The film showed the absurd lengths to which the artists went to persuade skeptical (and sometimes hostile) California ranchers to let them hang 24.5 miles of white nylon fabric in an undulating line drawn inland from the Pacific Ocean. Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent 4 years convincing the ranchers why they should bother; the final consummation of the project, Running Fence, ran its course for just two weeks in 1976.

Over the River was grander in its ambition. The piece, conceived in 1992, required significant buy-in from the U.S. Department of the Interior. As part of the approvals process, Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced in 2011 a 1,686-page Environmental Impact Statement, a preparatory document usually reserved for large-scale infrastructural projects. The Sierra Club condemned the artists’ plans; the Phillips Collection, a museum in Washington, D.C.,  exhibited the draft federal document.

By withdrawing from Over the River, Christo has done more than cancel an ongoing project. He has walked away from the fight that made the artists’ work so compelling. For nearly half a century, he and Jeanne-Claude generated hundreds if not thousands of hours of community hearings, op-ed arguments, and public harangues over the meaning of art. The pair identified public debate as vital to art—much more so than the installations themselves, which were always rendered in industrial materials and never lasted much longer than a fortnight. The purpose of The Gates was not to festoon Central Park with thousands of orange curtains, but to force the government of New York City to talk about art for more than 25 years. The permitting debate over The Gates, which were raised to great fanfare for a few weeks in February 2005, started way back in 1979, under Ed Koch’s administration.

Christo’s Over the River protest, then, comes as a decisive statement. After spending most of his life arguing with people, trying to convince ordinary citizens of the virtue of submitting their consent and their property to the absurd, the artist is saying that the other side cannot be reached. Christo and Jeanne-Claude often fought in vain against NIMBYism, but sometimes, they broke through in epic fashion, reaching across the aisle, in a sense, and finding common ground. Christo is far from the first artist to say that common ground no longer exists, but with Jeanne-Claude, he spent a lifetime proving otherwise.

Trump's Plan for Refugees

The Trump administration plans to severely curtail the number of refugees accepted to the U.S. to levels not seen since 2007, according to a draft of the president’s executive order.

The plan would stop all refugee admissions for 120 days and suspend until further notice all refugee admissions from Syria, where a nearly six-year-long civil war has created a massive humanitarian crisis. Once resumed after 120 days, the U.S. refugee program, the draft said, will accept 50,000 people. The U.S. has accepted between 56,000 and 85,000 refugees during each of the eight years of the Obama administration that ended last week. The U.S. was scheduled to accept 110,000 refugees in fiscal year 2017. The 50,000 figure would be the lowest since 2007, when the U.S. accepted 48,282 refugees, according to data maintained by the the federal Refugee Processing Center.

Syrian refugees will be denied entry into the U.S. until further notice. Last year the U.S. accepted about 10,000 Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war—far fewer than other Western countries. Donald Trump, when running for president, had sharply criticized the entry of Syrian refugees to the U.S., calling them a security threat, pointing to attacks committed by refugees in Europe.

“The U.S. refugee and asylum-screening processes are very thorough and effective, and are very different from the processes in place in Europe,” Eleanor Acer, the senior director of refugee protection at Human Rights First, said in an interview. “It’s a totally different system.”

Indeed, refugees are more rigorously vetted than any category of travelers who enter the United States. The U.S. can reject asylum-seekers on grounds such as health, criminal activity, and links to terrorism. As I’ve previously reported, the process involves three agencies: the State Department, which leads the program, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) at the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services. It takes anywhere from 18 to 24 months or even longer to process a case from referral or application to arrival in the U.S. It’s unclear what the 120-day suspension is meant to achieve beyond the existing vetting procedures. The draft order says that during this time the State Department and DHS will work to ensure “those approved for refugee admission do not pose a threat to the security and welfare of the United States.”

“The order would totally derail U.S. refugee resettlement for some time to come,” Acer said. “The resettlement process is a complicated, multistep process. Because of the suspension and other provisions of the order, refugees would not even be referred into the front end of the process for quite some time.”

Acer compared the potential situation with the impact on the U.S. refugee program after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when there was a halt on resettlements in the country. The U.S. program, she said, took “years to recover.”

The draft order also appears to realign the U.S. refugee policy toward claims by “individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of any individual is a minority religion in the  individual’s country of nationality.” This would have the effect of excluding the overwhelming majority of people in the Muslim world, some of whom are persecuted for reasons other than religion.  

National security experts, such as General David Petraeus, the former CIA director, and Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, who have served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, in a letter to Congress, pointed out that accepting refugees “support[s] the stability of our allies and partners that are struggling to host large numbers of refugees.” Restricting their numbers, they added, would “undermine our core objective of combating terrorism.” Indeed, Turkey, a NATO ally, has borne the brunt of the Syrian refugee crisis, hosting nearly half the 4.8 million Syrian refugees. More than 1 million others are in EU countries.

Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, said in an interview that the draft order is going to be read in the Muslim world “for what it is.”

“We’ve already seen it in ISIS commentary [that] the Americans are out to do in the Muslims everywhere,” he said. “So it sets the stage for the next generation of terrorists. Imagine some kid out there, a 12-year-old now in a refugee camp; that gets played and replayed, and replayed. He knows he doesn’t have a viable economic future. And ISIS or its successor is there with money and a gun.”  

The draft executive order also severely restricts immigration from some Muslim countries, suspending for 30 days the issuance of visas from certain unspecified countries. Advocacy groups said, and news reports added, the countries are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The seven countries account for an insignificant number of people entering the U.S.—though they account for about 40 percent of the U.S. refugee intake.

Muzaffar Chishti, the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at the NYU School of Law, said in an interview the draft executive order appears to suggest President Trump is “keeping up his electoral promises to stay true to his campaign theme.” But Chisti said Trump appeared to be moving away from his campaign vow to ban on all Muslims coming to the U.S. and “more into [banning] … the entry of people from certain countries. … So in many regards, this may sound nationality based. It doesn’t sound religion based.”

There’s precedent for such action, most recently in the form of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) that was put in place after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Twenty-five nations were placed on that list, all but one, North Korea, with Muslim majorities. The program subjected the nationals of those countries to enhanced questioning upon their arrival in the U.S.—but didn’t bar their arrival. Citizens of those countries already in the U.S. were questioned at immigration offices.  

“That’s the closest parallel we’ve gotten to this,” Chisti said.

Crocker, the longtime diplomat who is now dean of Texas A&M University’s George Bush School of Government and Public Service, recounted a conversation from last August that, he said, reflected the goodwill Americans public traditionally enjoyed in the Muslim world.

“One comment I got in Jordan sticks with me, along the lines of ‘We Middle Easterners have always made a distinction between U.S. government policies, which we don’t like, and the American people, who we see as a force for good in the world,’” Crocker recalled. “This is going to come down as what the American people want, and it'll wipe away that distinction.”

The executive order could be signed as soon as this week.

Trump's Hollowed-Out State Department

When and if Rex Tillerson is confirmed as secretary of state, he’ll arrive to a Mahogany Row that is unusually quiet. On Wednesday, as the Associated Press and Josh Rogin of The Washington Post report, several top officials at the State Department resigned their posts.

They include Patrick Kennedy, who had been the undersecretary of management since the George W. Bush administration, as well as Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond, and Gentry Smith, who directed the Office of Foreign Missions.

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Trump administration sources told CNN that the officials had been fired rather than quit. State Department spokesman Mark Toner, meanwhile, presented the departures as routine changeover.

Longtime AP diplomatic correspondent Matt Lee points out that it’s not unusual to have top appointees resign at the change of administrations. Rogin fills in some context: Kennedy had been working closely with the Trump transition team and had been seeking to keep his job, though his hopes were fading. The abrupt resignations at this stage in the transition seems to have come as a surprise. They are made all the more important because Trump has not made any nominations for State positions beyond Tillerson, to say nothing of hearings of confirmation votes.

Early on, rumors suggested that John Bolton, the superhawk and former ambassador to the United Nations, would be named as Tillerson’s No. 2, to assuage fears about the former Exxon CEO’s lack of diplomatic experience. But the Bolton trial balloon seemed to sink over concerns voiced most loudly by Senator Rand Paul. The need has perhaps lessened, as Tillerson’s nomination, once viewed as somewhat shaky, has firmed up, with Senator Marco Rubio’s support effectively clinching his confirmation.

The resignations are not, primarily, a political story. They will further the impression among Trump’s critics that his administration is a chaotic mess staffed, when it’s staffed at all, by greenhorn newcomers. But the mass of voters don’t tend to get all that excited about internal managers at the State Department, especially since Trump and other Republicans have spent years railing against bureaucrats, and particularly bureaucrats who served under Hillary Clinton. If you think Foggy Bottom has been a disastrous mess, then house-cleaning might be a good thing. Kennedy’s name is not a household one, but he did come in for harsh criticism in the House report on the September 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, arguably coming in for worse censure than Clinton herself.

But someone has to run the State Department, to keep the gears of diplomacy turning, and Rogin reports that the latest resignations are part of a “mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” In early January, The New York Times reported that Trump’s team would not grant grace periods to any outgoing ambassadors, a break with tradition. A source dismissed concerns about their departures to Fox News, pointing out that many ambassadors are political appointees whose major qualification for their jobs was raising lots of money for Barack Obama: “The number twos are career foreign service officers and more than capable of stepping into the roles.”

The question is what happens when the number twos start leaving, as well as the top career appointees in Washington. Several top State Department employees were on a list of officials asked to stay on during the transition period who refused to do so, Reuters reported on January 19. Tillerson’s business experience is expected to serve him well in marshaling an organization the size of the State Department, but learning the in and outs of administration will take time, and that will be harder without top officials like the ones who resigned on Wednesday around to help show the workings.

The need for a professionalized, career staff to handle foreign affairs was clear nearly a century ago when the U.S. Foreign Service was created to grapple with the nation’s more ambitious global aspirations, and the faster pace of diplomacy in a world of modern communications. “The machinery of government provided for dealing with our foreign relations is in need of complete repair and reorganization,” Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in 1920. “As adequate as it may have been when the old order prevailed and the affairs of the world were free from the present perplexities it has ceased to be responsive to present needs.”

Despite Trump’s diminished global goals—he has suggested pulling back from the U.S.’s global commitments and focusing inward—the situation is far more complicated now.

If these four officials were pushed, then Trump seems to have taken a cavalier attitude toward the State Department’s ability to run itself without institutional knowledge. If they jumped, it’s tempting to view their departure as an example of official Washington’s resistance to President Trump.

There are more pressing unanswered questions at the moment. Who will Trump, and Tillerson, tap to fill the newly opened spots? Will more career Foreign Service agents depart, hollowing out the department’s operations? And will the State Department be prepared if a crisis strikes before those vacancies are filled?

The Month in Music About Loving Your Fellow Human

Katie Stelmanis of the electro-pop band Austra is tired of dystopia. Donald Trump’s election has spurred quick-turnaround art about unraveling social bonds and authoritarianism, but civilizational decline was a hot topic even before: city-smashing Marvel movies, end-times fantasies like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, doomsday as a muse for musicians from Radiohead to Britney Spears. Yet Stelmanis decided to make her third album, Future Politics, precisely the opposite of apocalypse porn. Says Austra’s press materials, “The future won’t look like the past: Dystopian dread takes this for granted, but utopian imagination is just as valid.”

Much of popular music has always been, on some level, about utopia—whether a small-scale, temporary one between two people (The Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) or a larger vision of deliverance (the protest standard “We Shall Overcome”). Some of January 2017’s standout albums envision more perfect realities at various scales, a fact that’s especially notable because of the fraught moment in which we’re listening. The sociopolitical synth jams of Austra’s Future Politics, the expansive bar rock of Japandroids’s Near to the Wild Heart of Life, and romantic short stories of The xx’s I See You all, in their way, offer comfort and escape as they do pop’s eternal work of communicating love for your fellow human.

Austra’s brilliant 2011 debut, Feel It Break, introduced the Canadian act’s template: synths-’n’-stomping from the school of Depeche Mode, an ear for classical-music composition, and Stelmanis’s extremely distinctive voice. She sings plaintively and from-the-throat, producing a sound that’s removed yet vividly emotional. This time, the primary emotion is a sense of yearning—both for  a society that has radically reinvented itself, and for smaller personal victories.

The slow-building electronic earthquake of the opener “We Were Alive” imagines what would happen if everyone were cured of the fatigue caused by the capitalist grind. On page you might get the sense that she’s waxing didactic—“Doctor, what’s the cure for apathy?”—but on record, what stands out is the clarity of her central question, asked again and again: “What if we were alive?” The tenderness of the melody and her delivery makes the slogan portable, multi-purpose—it could be a call to rethink a relationship, or an entire civilization.

The album turns more uptempo from there: The title track, the lead single “Utopia,” and the eco-anthem “Gaia” are all ornate, modern disco numbers featuring snatches of heady lyrics (“The system won’t help you when your money runs out”). In interviews, Stelmanis has mentioned the Accelerate Manifesto and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, both calls to push technology forward so as to achieve super-egalitarian ends. That idea echoes in these songs’ bustle, but so does an underlying notion of empathy for all. The great “I Love You More Than You Love Yourself,” for example, could be a pep talk to a society that’s given up on itself but it more readily sounds like encouragement to a depressed lover. The song’s steady, warm pulse breaks down in the middle, as if letting the darkness in, but then builds itself back up.

Most pop utopias aren’t overtly political at all, of course. The Canadian drums-and-guitar duo Japandroids delivers a more typical rock-and-roll feeling of escape, memorializing the bliss of abandon enabled by drugs or love. For their third album, they apply a few new colors—electronic touches, acoustic guitars—to their cult-beloved blend of shoutalong choruses, punk economy, and epic ambitions. At least one reviewer has framed the blast of uplift as inadvertently out-of-step with the times, but the alternative reading is that the band now sounds as vital as it ever could.

Near to the Wild Heart of Life is a travelogue, devoted to finding moments of ecstasy on the road but also pining for someone back home. The high point comes on “Arc of Bar,” a seven-and-a-half minute epic built over a guitar loop that recalls a sputtering Tesla coil and a drum part that sounds like it could crack the foundation of any concert venue. The vocals lock into a hypnotic litany of descriptions about a scuzzy New Orleans nightlife spot, just the kind of place that has littered classic-rock lyrical history. It’s “a flesh bazaar of diamonds, dust, and drink,” a utopia for the night, meant to be left for another once the sun rises.

An urgent portrayal of love threads through the album, with the band refreshingly unafraid of being called corny. The gauzy, interlude-like “I’m Sorry (For Not Finding You Sooner)” says it all in the title; the wistful gallop of “No Known Drink or Drug” declares, for not the first time in music history, that love is better than chemicals. But the song that hits me the most with full-bore inspirationalism is the closer, “In a Body Like a Grave.” As with Austra’s album, the drags of life are in the foreground: “Christ will call you out / School will deepen debt / Work will sap the soul.” But when a later verse offers that “there’s heaven in the hellest of holes,” the thunderous accompaniment makes it impossible to feel cynical.

If Austra imagines utopia on a mass scale and Japandroids as moments within a lifetime, the phenomenal new release from The xx narrows the lens even further. Since their band arrived in 2009, Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, and Jamie “xx” Smith have made some of the most intimate-seeming rock on the market, with Sim and Croft finishing each others’ lines like lovers do over spare, R&B-indebted arrangements. Their third album brings in some brighter textures from the rave-music history that Jamie xx mined to critical acclaim on his 2015 solo album In Colour; the resulting vision of romantic tension and release is all the more transporting for it.

Throughout, love is made to feel like shelter—a sometimes shaky one, but shelter nonetheless. The opener, “Dangerous,” is a two-step shuffle brimming with the sound of horns and the thrill of new, conspiratorial love. The singers’ friends don’t think they’re good for each other—but “they must be blind.” The devastating “Say Something Loving” uses a sample of an ooey-gooey 1970s pop song to stress the need for reaffirmations of affection once the initial rush of a relationship has worn off. Later, the warm and midtempo “I Dare You” returns to the early stage of love with a narrative of two suitors circling each other, infatuated with visions of a shared future.

Most remarkable is the lead single, “On Hold,” an instant classic and a rare celebration of forgiveness. The chopped-up voices of Hall & Oates (yes) echo around as Croft and Sim sing of making peace as a lover moves on with someone else. The sentiment isn’t exactly triumphant—“When and where did we go cold?

I thought I had you on hold”—but the sound of the music is. It, like so many great songs, is about the logic of love: the idea that harmony can only come about with intention, thought, honesty, and negotiation—as must be the case with any vision of a better world.

Indie Films to Look Forward to in 2017

The list of must-see movies in 2017 is long enough if you only include major studio films. It’s also rife with sequels, reboots, adaptations of long-dead television shows, and an endless parade of superheroes. It seems only fair, then, to devote some attention to the smaller-scale movies hitting our shores in the coming months—projects that have run the film-festival circuit (Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, Cannes) over the last year and have finally carved out a 2017 release date.

These days, seeing an acclaimed independent film is easier than ever. Though they often don’t play in cinemas outside of big cities (unless they are surprise box-office hits), they’re quickly available to rent on demand, or to view on streaming services. So if you’re looking for an escape from the oppressive sameness of big-budget Hollywood in the next few months, here are some indie efforts to watch out for.

I Am Not Your Negro (February 3)

Magnolia Pictures

This searing documentary from the Haitian director Raoul Peck was nominated at this year’s Academy Awards. Peck takes James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House, entrusted to him by the author’s estate, and fleshes it out into an exploration of both Baldwin’s life and career, the progress of the civil-rights movement from the 1960s to the present day, and how the state of being black in America has changed (and, more importantly, how it has not). Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I Am Not Your Negro is a deeply, tragically relevant investigation of race in America.

A United Kingdom (February 17)

BBC Films / Fox Searchlight

Another stately biopic from Amma Asante, the director of 2013’s Belle, A United Kingdom follows the romance between Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), the Prince of Botswana, and office clerk Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), and the controversy their eventual marriage faced when he returned to lead his country’s independence movement. As she did with Belle, Asante is once again examining the tensely calibrated racial politics of British colonialism. The film came out in Britain last year, and while reviews were mixed, one critic called it a “stirring interrogation of British identity.”

Lovesong (February 17)

Strand Releasing

A hit from last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Lovesong is the fourth movie from the Korean American director So Yong Kim, whose three previous features In Between Days, Treeless Mountain, and For Ellen all showed significant promise (playing to fairly small audiences). Lovesong stars Riley Keough as a mother in her 20s and her fraught, romantically charged relationship with a good friend (Jena Malone) that plays out over several years. Kim’s films tend to subdued and pensive, but not without tenderness, and Lovesong looks like it will follow suit.

Raw (March 10)

Focus World

Every so often, there comes a film whose release is accompanied by stories of audience members passing out in shock, running out of the theater screaming, or vomiting; by that metric, Raw was the success story of last September’s Toronto Film Festival. A teen coming-of-age drama mixed with a cannibal horror thriller, Raw is the debut feature from the French director Julia Ducournau; it follows a vegetarian college student (Garance Marillier) who becomes, well, a cannibal. Critics are boasting that they “didn’t faint,” which is always the buzz you should be looking for.

Personal Shopper (March 10)

IFC Films

The newest effort from Olivier Assayas (the French master behind films like Irma Vep, Summer Hours and Clouds of Sils Maria) is a strange, haunted odyssey starring Kristen Stewart, who plays a young American woman in Paris going through a sort of personal crisis. Part horror movie, part muted workplace drama, Personal Shopper divided critics at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is likely to baffle viewers with its elliptical ghost-story plot. But Assayas is one of cinema’s most fascinating artists, and in Stewart (who gave a dynamite performance in Sils Maria), he may have found a new muse.

Free Fire (March 17)

A24

This anarchic action comedy comes from Ben Wheatley, the brilliant, if confounding British director behind indie horror delights like Kill List and Sightseers and last year’s more ambitious, dystopian epic High-Rise. The latter was an impressive adaptation of a challenging J.G. Ballard novel. Free Fire is a more stripped-down tale, following a group of arms dealers and gangsters who meet in a dilapidated warehouse, come to blows over a gun-running deal gone wrong, and spend the rest of the movie, well, shooting at each other. Brie Larson stars, the cast includes Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley, and Noah Taylor, and the entire film is topped off with a garish ’70s aesthetic.

Song to Song (March 17)

Broad Green Pictures

Take that release date with a grain of salt, because although Terrence Malick’s next film finally has a title and an official plot synopsis (it’s a “modern love story set against the Austin, Texas music scene” that features “a rock ‘n’ roll landscape of seduction and betrayal”), it has been gestating for a long time. Filmed in 2011, and originally given the title Weightless, it has the all-star cast Malick typically attracts—Ryan Gosling, Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender, Rooney Mara—as well as musicians like Iggy Pop, Florence and the Machine, and Patti Smith. Why it’s taken six years to reach our screens (its release has been pushed back multiple times) is unknown, but Malick likes to take his time editing, and his dreamy, poetic movies, even if they’re more minor-key efforts like last year’s Knight of Cups, are always unique experiences.

Wilson (March 24)

Fox Searchlight

A hot ticket at this year’s Sundance, this is an adaptation of Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel, adapted by the author (who also wrote Ghost World and Art School Confidential). Woody Harrelson stars as the titular Wilson, a neurotic, unfiltered middle-aged man trying to reunite with his estranged wife (Laura Dern) and daughter (Isabella Amara), the latter of whom he’s never met before. Clowes’s surreal, aggressively uncomfortable work is often difficult to translate to screen, but the director Craig Johnson (The Skeleton Twins) is taking up the challenge.

The Discovery (March 31)

Netflix

The writer-director Charlie McDowell’s first film The One I Love, a tiny-scale sci-fi romance tinged with unsettling horror, was a surprise success in 2014, especially once it hit Netflix. So the streaming company has acquired his next film, which premiered at this year’s Sundance and stars Jason Segel, Rooney Mara, Jesse Plemons, and Robert Redford. Set in a world where the existence of the afterlife has been scientifically proven, The Discovery sees Segel and Mara’s characters fall in love while confronting the idea that there could be something better awaiting them in death.

Colossal (April 7)

NEON

This Anne Hathaway-starring sci-fi monster satire premiered to very divided critical reception at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Directed by Nacho Vigalondo (who made the 2007 cult hit Timecrimes), Colossal follows a woman (Hathaway) who realizes she’s somehow connected to a giant, Godzilla-esque monster rampaging through Seoul. It’s really a sharp, dark comedy about abusive relationships, but whether Vigalondo lands the tricky allegory is a matter of debate.

A Quiet Passion (April 14)

Music Box Films

A long-gestating project for the English director Terence Davies (the Malick-esque master behind works like The House of Mirth, The Deep Blue Sea, and Sunset Song), A Quiet Passion is a biopic about the life of Emily Dickinson, played here by Cynthia Nixon. The movie received some rapturous reviews on the festival circuit last year, and the New Yorker critic Richard Brody said it would have been his favorite of 2016 had it gotten a U.S. theatrical release, calling it a “drop-dead masterwork.”

The Lost City of Z (April 14)

Amazon

This Amazon Studios production premiered at last year’s New York Film Festival to overwhelming praise. Based on David Grann’s 2009 book, it follows the real-life British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), who disappeared in the 1920s trying to find a fabled ancient city in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil (perhaps that’s what attracted the online retailer to this tale). Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, and Tom Holland co-star in a film that the director James Gray described as “David Lean, but with a slightly more hallucinogenic feel.” Critics have called it an excellent piece of throwback cinema, reminiscent of epics from Hollywood’s golden age.

The Dinner (May 5)

The Orchard

The director Oren Moverman has racked up three interesting indie dramas in a row—the Oscar-nominated Iraq War drama The Messenger (2009), an exploration of corruption in the LAPD in Rampart (2011), and Time Out of Mind (2014), a touching exploration of homelessness in New York City. His newest film, The Dinner, was originally planned as Cate Blanchett’s directorial debut—but Moverman, who wrote the script, eventually came aboard as a director as well. A thriller based on a Dutch novel by Herman Koch, the movie stars Richard Gere, Steve Coogan, Laura Linney, Chloe Sevigny, and Rebecca Hall, and will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival next month.

Paris Can Wait (May 12)

Sony Pictures Classics

Eleanor Coppola, the wife of the legendary director Francis Ford Coppola (they’ve been married 54 years), has not made a movie since 1991, when she chronicled the difficult production of his film Apocalypse Now in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Now, at the age of 80, she is making her feature debut with Paris Can Wait, a road comedy starring Diane Lane and Alec Baldwin, about a woman who abandons her husband to travel through France with a “rakish bon vivant” (played by Arnaud Viard). After a successful debut at Toronto, the film was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics, and will premiere in the midst of summer movie season, a month before her daughter Sofia’s new film The Beguiled.

Remembering Mary Tyler Moore

Mary Tyler Moore was a sitcom star who redefined what a sitcom could be, both onscreen and behind it. She was an actress who became a producer, a Hollywood mogul who worked hard to change her industry. Moore, who died Wednesday at the age of 80, was a TV icon in the 1960s and ’70s whose on-screen persona radically changed with the times she lived in and helped set new benchmarks for America’s image of the working woman. She died of cardiopulmonary arrest in Greenwich, Connecticut, after contracting pneumonia.

Born in Brooklyn in 1936, Moore began her Hollywood career as a dancer in television commercials in the late ’50s, before landing bit parts on various serialized dramas. In 1961, she was cast as Laura in The Dick Van Dyke Show, Carl Reiner’s showbiz sitcom about Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke), the head writer for a TV variety show. Moore was the definitive image of the harried, though supportive, sitcom wife of the early 1960s, a restrictive role that she nonetheless managed to stand out in. The Dick Van Dyke Show emphasized slapstick physical comedy; Moore and Van Dyke, who both came up in Hollywood as dancers, were rare comic talents who invented many of the vaudevillian aspects of the sitcom pratfall.

Moore was 24 when she was cast in The Dick Van Dyke Show, which ended in 1966 after 158 episodes. In 1964, when she won her first of two Emmy Awards for her performance on the show, she joked in her acceptance speech, “I know this will never happen again.” (She would go on to defy that prediction a total of five times.) In 1969, Moore and her second husband Grant Tinker formed the TV production company MTM Enterprises, and hired James L. Brooks and Allan Burns to create a sitcom focused on her. The Mary Tyler Moore Show launched on CBS in 1970 and ran for seven seasons, and to this day remains a foundational work for the medium, establishing comedic (and dramatic) tropes that helped revolutionize what the still-young medium could accomplish.

As Mary Richards, Moore was an unusual female character for America in the early ’70s: a single woman who, at the age of 30, moves to Minneapolis for a job at a local TV news station after being jilted by her longtime boyfriend. It was seen by studios as a gamble—that an actress so ensconced in the public eye as a married woman could play a single, independent one (in the initial pitch, Mary Richards was divorced, which was altered to satisfy nervous executives).

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a hit, the jewel of CBS’s Saturday night programming, winning three consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series as well as three trophies for Moore, and many more for the ensemble that included Ed Asner, Ted Knight, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, John Amos, and Betty White. Beyond its success, it was a show that was unafraid to talk about topics long considered off-limits for television, such as pre-marital sex, equal pay for women, homosexuality, infidelity, and divorce. In a famous fifth-season episode, Mary is jailed for refusing to reveal a journalistic source in court.

Mary was a liberated woman in an era of television where such characters were scarce. Moore was similarly powerful behind the scenes, using her clout to hire a revolutionary number of female writers for the show (including the legendary Treva Silverman, who won an Emmy in 1974) and to spin off some of its best characters into similarly progressive sitcoms. Rhoda Morgenstern (played by Harper) became the star of Rhoda, which ran for 5 seasons on CBS; Leachman’s character became the star of Phyllis; and Asner’s grumpy boss character was the lead of the great Lou Grant, one of the unusual examples of a sitcom spinning off a realistic, gritty drama.

Moore ended the show in 1977 as ratings began to flag, then struggled to re-establish her foothold, with her variety series The Mary Tyler Moore Hour flopping in 1979 and a new sitcom titled Mary bombing after 13 episodes in 1985. She appeared infrequently in films, largely rejecting the industry after appearing in the 1969 Elvis Presley drama Change of Habit (in which she played a nun who falls for the musician). Her next film role came in 1980, where she played the stiff, repressed matriarch of Robert Redford’s Oscar-winner Ordinary People (she was nominated for an Academy Award but lost to Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner’s Daughter). It was an uncommon sighting of her serious side—one she could employ with devastating effectiveness— and a glimpse of a weighty film career that could have been.

In her later years, Moore rarely acted and instead focused on charity work, especially seeking to secure funding for diabetes research (Moore was diagnosed with the disease at the age of 33) and campaigning for animal rights. She went public about suffering from a drinking problem in the 1980s, bringing further awareness to an under-discussed problem of the era. In the ’90s and onward, she acted only occasionally: She played Ben Stiller’s mother in an incredible two-scene performance in 1996’s Flirting with Disaster, and was a memorable guest star on That ’70s Show in 2006, but such appearances were few and far between. In 2011, Moore had brain surgery to remove a meningioma, which further reduced her public appearances. In announcing Moore’s death on January 25, her representative Mara Buxbaum praised a staggering legacy:

A groundbreaking actress, producer, and passionate advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research foundation, Mary will be remembered as a fearless visionary who turned the world on with her smile.

On Pitying Melania

Did you see the gif? The one that features Melania Trump, the newly installed first lady of the United States, radiantly smiling as her husband gazes upon her … and then, as he turns away, allowing the grin to melt into a frown? Grin-grimace, grin-grimace, grin-grimace, looping into eternity.

Call it a Kinsley gif: The image seemed to reveal, in its frozen fluidity, an unspoken truth—about Melania, about her marriage, about all of us. During a time of Much News, it quickly became conversation fodder. Slate offered “A Detailed Forensic Analysis of Melania Trump’s Creepy, Devastating Inauguration Smile/Frown.” Jezebel shared it with the sardonic declaration that “Melania Trump Definitely Loves Her Husband and Is Very Happy to Be Here.” New York magazine did a fact-check of the video the gif came from to assure us, finally, that “That Awkward Clip of Donald and Melania at the Inauguration Is Definitely Real.” (Snopes agreed, but warned that the video is inconclusive when it comes to its ability to reveal Melania’s emotions.) #FreeMelania trended.

And not just online. The gif went viral during the same time that found Trump’s inauguration, his first actions as president, and the Women’s March on Washington forcefully colliding within the space of a weekend; during that last event, many marchers used their protest real estate—the signs they thrust in the air, to be photographed and otherwise shared—to offer messages like “MELANIA: BLINK TWICE IF YOU NEED HELP” and, more plainly and more plaintively, “FREE MELANIA.”

Call it a Kinsley gif: The image seemed to reveal, in its frozen fluidity, an unspoken truth—about Melania, about her marriage, about all of us.

This professed sympathy for Melania Knauss Trump—the projecting, the concern-trolling, the presidential fan-fiction-ing—is part of a long-standing narrative in pop culture: the cheeky but also insistent assumption that the new first lady is the sad and sleepy heroine of a decidedly modern fairy tale. Saturday Night Live, in its several parodies of Mrs. Trump during the campaign, portrayed her as a Rapunzel figure, her body and her dreams trapped within her gilded tower, her hair never quite long enough to allow her to reach the ground and its freedoms. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert painted a similar picture, tapping the Broadway star Laura Benanti to portray Melania as maybe-or-maybe-not-sending-‘HELP ME’-messages-in-Morse-code. Super Deluxe’s stump-speech remix, my colleague Spencer Kornhaber noted, painted Melania as alternately “a robot or hypnosis victim.”

Blink if you need help @MELANIATRUMP

— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) January 25, 2017

Everyone was wondering what was in the Tiffany box that Melania handed Michelle Obama... We were hoping it was this