Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 325

The Leftovers: Nobody's OK

Each week following episodes of season two of The Leftovers, Sophie Gilbert and Spencer Kornhaber will discuss new characters, old visitors, and whether smoking really is the best way to express profound nihilism.

Kornhaber: Is everyone okay, after watching that episode in which people kept talking about whether they’re okay? Count ‘em: Tom said “nobody’s okay,” but sister Jill insisted—smiling through tears, not the first time someone did so this hour—the new Garveys really are fine; Nora and Kevin told each other they were okay with each other's insane secrets about buried bodies and prostitute markswomen; Kevin told Nora he felt totally okay, just tired, after the birthday BBQ. Of course, seconds later he threw a tantrum about the fixer-upper they purchased for $3 million, and hours later, he woke up in a riverbed with a cinderblock tied to his foot. Not okay.

What does “okay” mean anyway, in a world like The Leftovers’? At first, Nora seemed to think it’d be enough to try and embrace new life after tragedy, which is no small task in itself. But when the MIT research team showed up at her house and suggested the Departure may happen again—“why wouldn’t it?”—she looked shattered. On some level she probably realized that the world could re-end, but until little Lily showed up that possibility wasn’t even worth worrying about—she had nothing left to lose. Now though, told that safety might simply be—like the atheist adage says about religion— “a matter of geography,” she expensively, enthusiastically committed herself to what’s supposedly the safest place on earth. Of course, as Kevin pointed out to Jill, Jarden’s safety may just be a wristband-assisted illusion.

The situation with Kevin’s okayness is yet more complicated. When a dead lady keeps taunting you, when you black out and do catastrophic things, when your ex-wife and missing son are hanging out (and leaving burgers uneaten!) without telling you, happiness is not something you can simply opt into. Still, Kevin, bless him, is trying to get better. By digging up Patti and cutting off a cop, it felt as though he was asking for absolution through justice. But the rest of the world cares about his emotional need to be punished just as much as he cared about his interrogating officer’s eye patch. That she said good riddance to Patti and let Kevin walk free might have been a commentary on real-world establishment attitudes toward disempowered people; it also, though, further suggested a government conspiracy to kill the cults before the cults kill everyone.

Last week, I wrote that I hoped the show wouldn’t rely too much on Kevin’s hallucinations and amnesia for its drama this season. Split-personality disorder and psychosis are powerful metaphors, theoretically, but they make for unrelatable storylines that increasingly feel clichéd (I compared Kevin to Mr. Robot’s Elliot already, but jeez: Both of these shows have now winked at their Fight Club influence by featuring the Pixies song most associated with modern Jekyll & Hyde stories). Alas, though, Kevin hasn’t found mental stability; he hasn’t even made like his dad and found a way to fake it.

Still, it’s nice that Ann Dowd’s deliciously judgmental scowl will remain a staple of the show. And while Lindelof has said The Leftovers will never answer the question of what happened to the vanished two percent, I do hope to find out whether the Garvey men are really loco or actually do have a Sixth Sense. That random guy at the Visitor’s Center (last seen praying with assistant pastor Michael Murphy) saying he’d help Kevin with his “situation” seemed to hint at the supernatural. Then again, so did the looks in the eyes of the various characters with epilepsy and paralysis—and The Leftovers, thus far, has mainly been about the human tendency to read meaning into the meaningless.

One thing that’s clear is that the showrunners are working on a high level, from a pure competency standpoint. I loved the efficiency with which this hour’s story unfolded: the way that the Garveys’ decision to start a new life was explained in a few bold, brief scenes, and the way that the script and direction constantly juxtaposed the optimism that accompanies a new beginning with the dread that accompanies dark memories. I also was mostly impressed by the use of diagetic music, with Kevin’s clamorous playlists simultaneously drowning out his fears and amping tensions in the narrative. Every scene manages to make Jarden feel more recognizable and more mysterious, and the puzzle at the end of the first episode gained a nice, cliffhangery complication with the reveal of Kevin in the riverbed. All in all, very nice setup. For what?

Gilbert: After reading what you said last week about this show and comedy, Spencer, it’s pretty much all I can see now. The scene where Kevin confessed to Nora that he’d been sleepwalking, which had led to his kidnapping Patti, which had led to her killing herself and Kevin and Matt burying her without anyone else knowing was hysterical, especially the coda: “And I smoke.” Followed by Nora’s admission that she hires prostitutes to shoot her, and Jill’s baffled reply: “Do I have to say something crazy now?” LOL.

And I agree totally on the competency part—returning to this show after True Detective makes you appreciate a thousand times more how tight everything is, and how controlled. After the first episode moved so swiftly away from Mapleton, I’d almost forgotten about Laurie and Tommy and Lily and the Guilty Remnant, so it was an unexpected pleasure to go back to town, and back to the very end of the first season, when Nora found the baby by Kevin’s front door. Then came the unspooling of what happened in the months between Jill almost burning to death in the Remnant house and the newly minted family moving to Miracle: the efforts to adopt Lily; Nora’s comical, “I’m sorry, no, we’re good,” when the gruff family-services official asked her if she wanted another baby as well (it apparently being adopt one get one free week); Jill’s meeting with Tommy while Laurie stayed in the car; the MIT researchers; Kevin; Patti.

“Very interesting family, those Murphys,” Patti said. “Hard to tell if they’re part of your story or if you’re part of theirs.”

More on Kevin and Patti in a moment, but first Jill, who seems to be possessed of an inordinate amount of optimism and composure for a kid who last season ran away to join her mother’s cult nonverbal smoking cult just to be close to her. Yes, she tore up the letter from Laurie that Tommy passed to her while a silent tear rolled down her cheek, but she also seemed totally unfazed by Miracle and all its manifold weirdnesses: The godlike figure in the town square, the loudspeakers, the beyond-creepy welcome videos. To me, it felt absolutely terrifying—a cross between an episode of Black Mirror and a visualization of life at the Mexican border wall President Trump’s going to build. The buses! The wristbands! The scores and scores of hippies and families and religious people and smiling-but-fierce security guards. Jill’s obviously savvy enough to realize what this means to Nora—that it’s a place where she can feel safe with her new family—but maybe also traumatized enough by what happened in Mapleton that she can appreciate the stability of being with Kevin, Nora, and Lily in what feels (at least at this point) like a prison.

But presumably it won’t always be this simple, and Jill being the straight arrow to Kevin’s spinning wheel of crazy is just a necessity at this point given that they can’t all fall apart this early on in the season. I’m with you, Spencer, in feeling a little burned out by Kevin’s off-the-wall antics, but obviously it would be too much to expect the happy ending of season one/the beginning of this episode to last for the Garveys. It’s in Kevin’s blood, after all: “I’ve watched you for years yelling at shit that wasn’t there,” he told his father. But the best part of the show is that it makes us, the audience, complicit in Kevin’s visions, and doubt along with him that what he sees is as simple as a hallucination. When Kevin hit his head on the gas stove, it certainly looked like someone else was there slamming his forehead into it. So does that mean Patti’s real? (Off topic, I had the same sense of foreboding when Kevin held his head over the stove that I did last week when John Murphy held his hand above the garbage disposal. Lovely symmetry.)

It’s also becoming apparent that geography is going to be important this season, given the MIT researchers’ interest in Nora’s house, the statistical anomaly that is Miracle, and whatever happened to Evie and her friends down by the lake. And maybe this echoes back to the title of last week’s episode, “Axis Mundi,” meaning the place where heaven and earth intersect. Humans have believed in (and fought over) sacred places for millennia, so the idea that location could have significance when it comes to the Departure isn’t totally out of left field.

All in all it’s a reminder that the storytelling in this show is never straightforward. Repeating the events of episode one from the Garveys’ perspective could have felt exhausting, but in the end only a few key scenes and objects intersected: the pie (we still have no clue whether anyone ate it), Evie’s epileptic episode, the man from the cabin in the woods, the fish flopping in the bottom of the lake, the disappearing girls. “Very interesting family, those Murphys,” Patti said. “Hard to tell if they’re part of your story or if you’re part of theirs.” At this point in season two, I couldn’t agree more.

The Walking Dead: Still Staying Alive in Season Six

Each week following episodes of season six of The Walking Dead, David Sims and Lenika Cruz will discuss the adventures of Rick Grimes and his group as they try to rebuild in the zombie apocalypse.

Cruz: The premiere of The Walking Dead’s sixth season opens with Rick’s blood-splattered face and the sound of a gunshot, a crunch of bone and flesh, and muffled screams. As the light flickers out, the shadows leave his face looking like a skull, and then comes a voiceover of words he’ll speak later in the episode: “I know this sounds insane, but this is an insane world. We have to come for them before they come for us. It’s that simple.”

There’s a lot to unpack in those first 20 seconds, which offer a neat encapsulation of the best and worst of the entire series thus far. The best: the cinematic moodiness, the moral heft, the high dramatic stakes of survival, a bit of gore. The worst: the overwrought dialogue, the unrelenting grimness, the preoccupation with Tyrant Rick. Not to mention that it’s irritating when a show you’ve been following for 68 episodes reminds you for the umpteenth time that its fictional world is, in fact, insane. No wonder the title of the opener is “First Time Again.”

If that seems harsh, it’s probably because The Walking Dead set a high bar for itself with a stellar season five, which ended with Rick and the crew at Alexandria, struggling between their instincts to survive at all costs, and their desire for stability and community. “First Time Again” attempts to catch up with the entire group as they deal with the aftermath of multiple scrapes and betrayals and simmering grudges; it also introduces a new threat to get the new season on track.

The gunfire at the start reminds viewers of Rick’s decision to execute Jessie’s husband, who had just killed the peaceful husband of Alexandria’s leader, Deanna. It then skips ahead to Rick and the Alexandria crew standing near a gully filled with hundreds of walkers separated from them by just two big rigs. This scene is meant to pack a punch, but the disorientation of jumping ahead, the slew of new faces, and the messy camera direction don’t get the full gravity across. Rick begins shouting (well, everyone begins shouting) about an elaborate plan they have to move the walkers with the help of flares and various motor vehicles. Why are they doing this? How did the walkers get there? Who are these new people? What time is it? Unfortunately, these questions are answered too slowly to be totally invigorating.

“First Time Again” itself moves back and forth in time, indicated by badly rendered black-and-white scenes (the episode’s big visual dud). Rick is forced to rejustify his authority after his violent spell in season five, but Deanna’s newly restored confidence in him helps. Glenn is slowly forgiving his rival Nicholas (who got Noah killed and Tara injured). Tara is better now. Maggie doesn’t fully trust Nicholas. Abraham seems to have gained a death-wish while Sasha has finally lost hers. Everyone hates Father Gabriel. A new guy named Carter threatens Rick, has a change of heart, and gets bitten seconds after shaking his hand—true to The Walking Dead’s style of redeeming terrible characters just to have them die. And then there’s the horde of undead—the result of a few trapped walkers attracting others into a big pit with their noise. Rick concludes they need to act fast before the reinforcements collapse and send the walkers straight for their homes. All doesn’t quite go as planned.

With all this going on it’s easy to forget a big thrill of the season-five finale: the return of Rick’s old friend Morgan (Lennie James), who almost lost his mind over his son’s death, and who’s since morphed into a humane, stick-wielding model of calm and competence. With the split narrative and time spent dawdling on minor characters, the moments of reconnection between him and Rick never feel as meaningful or cathartic as I wanted. Instead their dialogue boils down to some variation of “I’m a killer, Rick,” and “That’s not who you are” and “I know you, Morgan”—weighty, grumbled pronouncements recycled from the weighty, grumbled pronouncements the show has abused from its start.

Again, I realize this all sounds perhaps unfairly negative, but the show last year proved to viewers that it could balance the straightforward and the ruminative, the high-octane action and the emotional slow-burn. This episode didn’t manage quite as well, but it didn’t dull my excitement for the rest of the season either. Though I wasn’t fully swept away with “First Time Again,” it did have some memorable moments: Rick shutting Father Gabriel out of their plan with comic brevity (“I’d like to help.” “No.”); Glenn telling a new friend, “I was supposed to be delivering pizzas, man”; Abraham cackling insanely while covered in blood next to Sasha in the car; the walkers banging their heads open on corrugated metal siding; and Morgan asking Michonne if she stole one of his peanut-butter protein bars. Which is to say, the best moments of the episode to me were the ones with a bit of levity to them, however morbid. Let’s hope season six will bring more of those—judging from that swarm of walkers heading toward Alexandria, and the W-carvers still out there, we’ll need a few laughs.

Please, David, tell me I’m being overly judgmental.

Sims: I understand all your fears, Lenika. We’re six seasons in with The Walking Dead, and it’s pulling one of the most overdone tricks in the TV writing book—the in medias res opening, flashing forward to some crazy chaotic situation and then flashing back to explain how everything came together. It’s especially annoying because the answer behind the main set-piece in “First Time Again” isn’t remotely interesting. Rick seized control in Alexandria, got the deference he wanted from Deanna, and incorporated the haunted Morgan into the group. Then, one day, they found a big weird pit full of zombies, and decided to deal with it.

It’s leading with the set-piece first and finding some bits of story to justify it second, which is not the best approach, although it makes sense for a season premiere, since it starts with a bang. Still, this is one of the most-watched shows on TV: Viewers will give it a little leeway if it starts slow. They certainly have in the past. But despite the laziness of the setup, I really liked the set-piece. It’s fun watching the Walking Dead crew work like a well-oiled machine, guiding those zombies away from threatening range like some well-oiled Ocean’s Eleven team. And it’s just as fun watching it go horribly wrong, and I can’t deny being immediately drawn to the cliffhanger of the mysterious horn that undoes their plans. Who’s making that zombie-calling noise? Is it these “Wolves” we keep hearing so much about?

It’d be heartbreaking to lose anyone—and that’s a tension the show should exploit as much as possible.

The black-and-white, as you briefly mentioned, was unforgivably bad. If you’re going to do that, make sure it looks good—otherwise what’s the point? The show needed some way to delineate between flashbacks and the present, I suppose, but the black-and-white was grainy and washed-out, even less palatable than the usual Walking Dead color schemes. More unforgivable was the fact that the flashback scenes did next to nothing to contextualize the rest of the plot. Yes, Morgan has some new kendo skills and is generally haunted by his past—that’s already been made abundantly clear. Yes, there’s some newcomers to the ensemble, but that’s fine, there’s plenty of ways to establish who they are. And yes, Rick is still establishing his supremacy among the Alexandrians, but that was last season’s plot, so why rehash it with Ethan Embry?

Still, there was enough excitement in the whole elaborate zombie chase to forgive those weaker flashback elements. With this special 90-minute episode, The Walking Dead has hopefully gotten all the season five remnants out of its system. As good as last year was, the show needs to find new territory to explore, and the “Dictator Rick” stuff can’t be the spine of yet another season. We understand the compromises he’s made as a leader, but the show is also clearly endorsing his viewpoint as a proven way to survive. He won that battle, so hopefully these horn-sounding villains can provoke a new one.

Season five was also fascinating in the full spectrum of human villains it gave us, and what a challenge that will be to top. There were the abjectly evil cannibals of Terminus, the morally compromised mirror-image survivors of Slabtown, and the coddled fools of Alexandria. That was a hugely underrated component of what made season five so good: The Walking Dead had struggled so much with its big bads, like the Governor, in the past. What the show does boast now, however, is a truly outstanding group of actors. Before, half of the cast of The Walking Dead felt expendable, and when a character died, you barely shed a tear for them. Now, it’d be heartbreaking to lose anyone—and that’s a tension the show should exploit as much as possible. There’s few things on TV that possess that real sense of danger, but The Walking Dead has proven time and time again that it is happy to sacrifice its sacred cows. The only question with season six is who will be first on the chopping block.

Amy Schumer Tackles Guns on SNL

Amy Schumer’s first-ever gig hosting Saturday Night Live was widely anticipated for a number of reasons: Few comedians this year have had more success with the topical, incisive, irreverent sketches SNL has pioneered. But her debut might be best remembered for one particularly timely short above others.

In a sharp, unsettling video skit, Schumer played a woman waiting in a restaurant alone, as the camera cut to scenes of other cast members going about their days. A grandfather (Kenan Thompson) went through an old photo album next to his distracted grandson (Jay Pharaoh); a woman (Kate McKinnon) stretched before going for a run; a man (Kyle Mooney) and a woman (Sasheer Zamata) made eyes at each other across a crowded room; another woman (Vanessa Bayer) about to give birth headed to the hospital in a cab with her anxious husband (Bobby Moynihan). The thread tying all these lives together: guns.

Schumer unwrapped a gun, a gift from her boyfriend, tenderly touching it to his face. McKinnon brandished her pistol while jogging. Bayer gathered her shotgun before walking into the hospital. Moynihan presented his newborn baby with a tiny revolver. Mooney and Zamata played Spin the Bottle over a rotating gun. Thompson finally got his grandson’s attention by bringing out a vintage handgun. This was all accompanied by the bland, piano-heavy music favored by antidepressant ads, and a woman’s voice describing how guns bring people together. The final slogan, hammered home by the sight of guns becoming an ever more-normal presence in people’s lives, was “Guns: We’re Here to Stay.”

The sketch was notable because SNL wading into the gun debate is something of a rarity. In 2011, the then-Weekend Update host Seth Meyers joked about the very different technology that made guns considerably less deadly during the time the Second Amendment was ratified, and imagined the Founders’ horror if they could see the reality of guns today. In Saturday’s episode, Weekend Update hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost tackled the topic once again in a debate about gun control. “I know the forefathers said you have a right to own guns, but they also said you had a right to own people,” Che joked.

It’s also noteworthy that Schumer was featured: In July, the star was horrified after a mass shooting in Lafayette, Louisiana, during a screening of her movie Trainwreck left three people dead and nine wounded. “My heart is broken,” she wrote on Twitter. After an open letter posted online pleaded with Schumer to “demand change” and “be a voice for our generation and for women” in terms of advocating for gun control, Schumer replied, “Don’t worry. I’m on it. You’ll see.”

As mass shootings become more of a daily reality in the U.S., they’re almost certainly a topic that comedians—in their roles as the new public intellectuals, as my colleague Megan Garber has written—will increasingly tackle.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the Rise of the TV Musical

It’s a common lament that, on TV in general and on network TV in particular, there is nothing new under the sun in the queue: Pretty much everything, it seems, is hackneyed and derivative, almost every new show presented to us is merely some version of what has come before. How to Get Away With Murder is Scandal Redux; Quantico is 24 Redux; every new sitcom is, in its way, a remake of every other sitcom. It’s Turtle, basically, all the way down.

So it’s a wonderful and rare thing to be presented with a show—a network show!—that is truly original. Allow me to spend a few moments singing the praises of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

First, sure, a caveat: In its story and its characters, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would seem to be yet another victim of the endless churn of reboots. It treads a well-worn path, and not just in its tired repetition of “crazy” as a gendered epithet. (The show’s creators have insisted that “crazy” is a universal burn—that we’ve all, whether man or woman, girl or boy, had our minds addled by love.)

Anyhow, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is about a woman, Rebecca Bunch—a successful, single lawyer, as convention pretty much dictates—who has perhaps, the show suggests, leaned in just a tad too far. She’s unhappy; she’s overworked; she’s lonely. In an early scene in the show’s pilot, we see Rebecca being offered a promotion to junior partner—“I’ve never seen anyone work that hard,” her boss explains, marveling—and then (inspired by a butter ad whose slogan is “When Was the Last Time You Were Truly Happy?”) abruptly declining it. And then, even more abruptly, she quits.

Rebecca does all that because she’s just run into the show’s semi-eponymous ex-boyfriend, Josh, who dumped her after summer camp 10 years ago, and whose loss she has continued, somewhat inexplicably, to mourn. (Josh is cute; beyond that, though, from the evidence at hand, he’s pretty much a dullard.) The run-in has informed her that Josh lives in New York, too (yay!), but also that he’s soon leaving (boo) to return to his hometown of West Covina, California (“two hours from the beach, four in traffic!”). He’s looking, he explains, for a simpler, slower, easier way of life.

So when Josh gives Rebecca the old “if you’re ever out in there, get in touch” line, Rebecca—who has degrees from Harvard and Yale, but who’s never been great at human signal-reading—decides that this is fate’s way of telling her that she, too, should move to West Covina. So … she does.

So, yes. This is story line, certainly, that is as unoriginal as it is absurd. Woman moving, in search of a better life! It’s the stuff of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gilbert, an age-old plot inflected today by the happiness industrial complex and its bland belief that satisfaction can be, for a woman of sufficient means, a mere plane ride away.

But here’s the thing about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the thing that saves the show from cliche and from itself: It’s a musical! A full-blown, Broadway-esque musical! The show takes the tropes of musical comedy—catchy tunes, clever lyrics, splashy dance numbers, jazz hands both literal and figurative—and translates them, cleverly and delightfully, to the small screen. The show isn’t all musical, to be clear; the numbers here are interspersed with more traditional sitcomic fare. But a musical it is, overall. Characters on the show have a wonderful propensity to burst out in musical numbers, without warning and without shame. If you’ve ever wondered what a Broadway musical would look like, ported over to TV … Crazy Ex-Girlfriend offers an answer. And things look pretty awesome.

Take “West Covina,” the song Rebecca sings when she first moves to California, a song that is heavily influenced by Annie’s “NYC” but that is much, much more sarcastic. (Think 30 Rock’s “Flee to the Cleve,” the show’s musical ode to Cleveland.) The song begins like any hopeful gal-new-to-town song would:

See the sparkle off the concrete ground
Hear the whoosh of a bustling town
What a feeling of love in my gut
(I’m falling faster than the middle school's music program was cut!)
People dine at Chez Applebee’s
And everyone seems to smile at me…

And then, as Rebecca sings, “It’s all new, but I have no fear,” a bus drives by. The lawyer advertising his services on its exterior sings the word on his sign: “¡Accidentes!”

Later, as Rebecca warbles, in a vaguely Disney princess-y way, that “It’s my destiny, that much is clearrrr!” the camera cuts to her sitting before the stage at a strip club. The announcer booms, “Please welcome Destiny!”

This is a story not just with a heart—that traditional requirement of the musical form—but with a brain, also.

The song goes on like this, layering on the irony and the sarcasm and the, yes, messaging. It is followed up, later on, by another number: “The Sexy Getting Ready Song.” Rebecca, preparing for a date with a bartender she’s met in West Covina (a friend of Josh’s), spends the song—a quintessential slow jam—tweezing and waxing and, courtesy of her backup singers and dancers, being rolled into a pair of Spanx. (At one point a rapper appears, surveying a bathroom full of apparent torture devices. “I’ve got to apologize to some bitches," he says, adding solemnly: “I’m forever changed by what I’ve just seen.”)

The song ends with a note that “body rolls are real hot.”

If this reminds you a tad of Amy Schumer’s “Milk Milk Lemonade,” there’s good reason. The song and its performance are meant to highlight the double standards of the “getting ready” process. (At one point, the camera cuts to Rebecca’s date engaging in his own getting-ready ritual: snoozing on the couch, remote balanced on his belly.) It’s meant to be a sly piece of criticism, made even sly-er by the fact that it’s delivered in the form of a musical number. As the show’s star and co-writer, Rachel Bloom, told The New York Times, the songs here are meant to tease out all the paradoxes that women, in a world of Lean In and rom-coms, are meant to navigate. “You’re supposed to have it all,” she said, “but also you should give everything up for love. But also know what’s your zodiac sign. But also you should be substantive.”

In that sense, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a televised cousin of Broadway shows like Hamilton and The Book of Mormon—shows that owe their cultural power not just to great performances and clever songs, but to the critical sensibility they bring to the musical as a form. The show may owe itself taxonomically to series like Glee and Smash, which have suggested that musicals can indeed have a life on the small screen. But the musical numbers in those cases are written into the narratives of their respective shows.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is something newer and bolder: It’s A Musical, the kind in which characters burst into song and dance without warning, in which extras spontaneously transform into backup dancers, in which characters treat sets not as locations for action, but as props. (A number set in a mall culminates with Rebecca perched, sassily, in the hollow of an enormous, Auntie Anne-style pretzel.) And it’s Musical Criticism, too. This is a story not just with a heart—that traditional requirement of the musical form—but with a brain, as well. It’s music with a message. But also with, fortunately, jazz hands.

The Timely Anxiety of Linda Gregerson’s Prodigal

Linda Gregerson’s new volume of selected poems, Prodigal, gathers work from nearly 40 years of a career as remarkable as any in contemporary American poetry. The pleasures of such a retrospective are the pleasures of long acquaintance, and with Gregerson, those pleasures are both sensual and intellectual. The poems’ gorgeousness of sound and image is checked by a ferocious, sometimes acerbic, always morally demanding intelligence, at once plangent and analytic. Her characteristic poems make use of diverse materials—the story of a current event, a recounting of literary or historical antecedent, the emotional ballast of private life—yoked together through associative leap and juxtaposition. Gregerson’s interests range from Saint Augustine to the genome; she is one of only a few poets working in America today with a genuine interest in science. Rather than strict meter or rhyme, it’s argument—what she calls “the longing-for-shapeliness”—that gives her poems their form.

Gregerson was born in 1950 in Elgin, Illinois, and the landscape of the Midwest and the lives of the farming communities that formed it are constant presences in her work. After graduating from Oberlin College, she spent three years in Herbert Blau’s experimental theater group, Kraken, an experience to which she credits both her desire to accommodate multiple voices in her poems and her eagerness to capture a sense of improvisation—of being “at risk in the present tense”—on the page. After earning an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she did her doctoral work at Stanford. From 1982 to 1987 she was a staff poetry editor at The Atlantic. She is a respected scholar of Renaissance literature, and her poems are steeped in the sensibility of the great 16th and 17th-century English poets, taking from them both a remarkably elastic sense of the English sentence and a conception of the lyric poem as at once a mode of intimacy and “a form of public speaking” able to address civic concerns.

Gregerson’s first book, Fire in the Conservatory, appeared in 1982; her second, breakthrough collection, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, came in 1996. In the interim, she had two children, and she discovered in parenting the dominant theme of her subsequent poetic work. “I knew nothing before those children were in the world to tell me what really matters,” Gregerson has said. From her second collection on, a sense of the vulnerability of children becomes one of her dominant interpretive frames, coloring all of her thinking. “I’d sometimes feel,” she says in “Target,” “with the child in my arms, / as I’ve felt looking down on the live / third rail.”

Her poems are haunted by victimized children. In “Target,” a meditation on Euripedes’s Medea leads to the pronouncement that children “just make a bigger / target / for the anger of the gods.” This is terrifyingly instantiated by the voice with which the poem ends, a Serbian sniper who shoots children to see “something so fantastic on the mother’s face.” In “For the Taking,” she recounts childhood abuse her sister suffered at the hands of a relative; “Pass Over” and “Her Argument for the Existence of God” feature brutally abused children; “Bunting” begins with television footage of Kurdish children killed by a chemical attack.

“The world can be measured by how it treats its children,” Gregerson has said in interviews. “It makes me wild with grief.” But much of the incisiveness, even the severity of Gregerson’s intelligence lies in the speed with which she turns on her own sentiment, especially in her suspicion of the way sympathy is often manufactured and always subject to manipulation. The scene of murdered children in “Bunting” is followed by a condemnation of “what brought them here”—here meaning both the classroom in which they were killed and the living room in which Gregerson and her daughter, Emma, watch the evening news. They were brought, she says,

                                                            by lunatic cal-
                                                culation
                                    or malevolence, which launched the gas,

                        by money, which made it
                                                and made as well
                                    the sumptuous ground rhythm

                        that supplants the children on the screen,
                                                lures Emma
                                   full front now and wants her to want

                        with the whole heart of childhood what
                                                money
                                    will buy.

To what meaningful use can outrage and grief be put, the poem asks, when both are so tainted by the same capitalist enterprise that enables atrocity, with the “sumptuous ground rhythm” of the news-report soundtrack cutting seamlessly to commercial? In “Font,” one of the best of the 10 new poems included in Prodigal, an online news story about a newborn child rescued from a sewage pipe in China—the mother attempted to flush it down the toilet—is accompanied by an advertisement for a company that offers to “solve my underground drainage woes.” What is the point of the news, except “to pull / the cords of sentiment // and commerce,” Gregerson asks, putting horror and grief to mercantile ends.

One might expect the poem to end here, on this irreproachable and fairly familiar note. Instead, as often happens when these poems reach possible endings, another voice enters the poem. This is Gregerson’s second daughter, Megan, whose disability and medical struggles have been the subject of other poems. “Don’t make the poem / too sad,” she says,

                        thinking at first (we both of us
                                                think) the child
                                    must be a girl or otherwise

                        damaged, thus (this part she doesn’t
                                                say) like her.

The poem’s sudden turn brings suffering home, the passing sentiment orchestrated by for-profit news gaining purchase in the figure of Gregerson’s daughter, whom Gregerson calls “the ground // of all I hope and fear for in the world.” “Font” continues by taking on, just for a moment, the point of view of the rescued infant. For the child, Gregerson writes, “the whole of it—commotion, cameras, / IV needle in the scalp— / is not more strange // than ordinary daylight.” The poem ends as the poet implicates herself in the scene, taking a place among the child’s caregivers, offering it, in the poem’s final line, “a nearly // human hand.”

Since The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, Gregerson has used a distinctive form for the majority of her poems, a three-line stanza in which two longer lines enclose one very short one. Her rhythms are nearly always iambic, and her phrases often fall into five-beat units that are spread over several lines, line breaks sometimes falling in the middle of a word. Even as they take unconventional shapes, then, the poems are haunted by the cadence of the traditional English line. Gregerson’s line breaks help to parse her extremely complicated syntax, and in many of the poems they create a powerful forward momentum. In interviews, she’s spoken of turning to this form as a way of allowing “air” into the poems, of making them “porous somehow.”

While the poems dip occasionally into contemporary American demotic—from teenage exclamation (“Mom in orbit!”) to California’s “luminous / vernacular”—more often Gregerson’s diction hovers somewhat above everyday speech, often reclaiming words that have fallen out of favor. On a run-down farm, ferns growing over abandoned farm machinery are said to  “euphemize an un- / regenerate / combine”; a cancer medication is an “elixir.” Gregerson frequently interleaves her lines with fragments of other texts—phrases from Shakespeare, Biblical verses—sometimes exactly quoted and sometimes modified.

“Lately, I’ve taken to,” from her most recent collection of new poems, The Selvage, shows Gregerson at her most virtuosic, linking wildly disparate materials as a way of leaping from the domestic to the political. The poem begins again with the news: The poet, who has grown hard of hearing, is sure she’s misheard a terrifying figure about ozone loss above the arctic. (Climate change and environmental degradation loom ever larger in Gregerson’s poems.) But no: It seems,

                        the stratospheric ice
                                               does something
                       with the sunlight that’s inim-
                                    ical. Unfriendly

                        in the long run to the cold.
                                                So cold
                       against itself. Which we
                                    have done.

In the next stanza, the tipping-point mechanics of arctic ice melt are linked—“if // I may compare great things to / small,” the poet apologizes—to the autoimmune disorder destroying the speaker’s hearing. And this is linked in turn to Anders Behring Breivik’s 2012 terrorist attack in Norway, which he claimed was motivated by the need to defend the national body from foreign threat. (Breivik’s attack on the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League, Gregerson reminds us in a note, was motivated by his belief that the party was “too friendly to immigrants.”) “Obsession / at the barricades,” Gregerson writes, “which when / it goes wrong in the body // we label as autoimmune.”

“We badly need an intelligent political poetry in America.”

“We badly need an intelligent political poetry in America,” Gregerson declared in 1984, and the poems in this volume have done much to supply it. If T.S. Eliot, quoting the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, believed the work of poetry was “to purify the language of the tribe,” Gregerson has long contended the opposite. Her language resists any notion of purity, as her roving sympathy calls into question any homogeneous construal of social bodies. In “Good News,” Gregerson calls ideology a “frictionless // story that washes us clean. / Words dis- / encumbered of contingency, // of history, of doubt.”

Gregerson’s language, to the contrary, insists on reminding us of the history through which it has passed. Her poems, with their mixtures of voices, registers, and texts, their wide-ranging juxtapositions, their “difficult conversions of scale,” emphasize impurity and heterogeneity. They work not to suppress but to worry doubt, ever conscious both of the human propensity to harm and of our obligation to implicate ourselves in the suffering of others. They provide us, that is to say, with an example we very much need. “See,” Gregerson writes in “Bicameral,” “the world you have to live in is / the world that you have made.”

The Last Jews of Cuba

Before Castro’s revolution, there were roughly 15,000 Jews living in Cuba. Today, there are just about 1,500. For the decades in between, there was no rabbi on the island and just one kosher butcher. “To be Cuban and Jewish is to be twice survivors,” historian Maritza Corrales explained to The New York Times. It was that determination that attracted photographer Jonathan Alpeyrie, who has travelled the world documenting distant Jewish enclaves, to visit Havana and capture what remains of the community many believe landed with Christopher Columbus. On commission from the Anastasia Gallery, he spent much of his time at the Beth Shalom Temple, one of the largest on the island, as well as the Sefaradi Synagogue, photographing the traditions of the local congregations.

A Bombing in Turkey's Capital

Two bombs ripped a large crowd during a peace protest on Saturday morning in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. Turkish Health Minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu said at least 86 people died in the twin blasts and another 186 were wounded, according to The New York Times.

Video footage of the attacks shows protesters chanting and dancing outside Ankara’s central train station as the bombers struck. Hundreds had gathered to demonstrate against violence between the Turkish government and Kurdish militant groups in the country’s east. The bombings also occur less than three weeks Turks go to the polls for a snap parliamentary election on November 1.

“I strongly condemn this heinous attack on our unity and our country’s peace,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “No matter what its origin, aim or name, we are against any form of terrorist act or terrorist organization. We are obliged to be against it together.” The BBC reported that Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu claimed two suicide bombers had carried out the attack. Their allegiance, if any, is currently unknown.

Militant Kurdish groups and the Turkish government abandoned a ceasefire in July, with Turkish forces carrying out airstrikes soon thereafter. In addition to its own internal turmoil, Turkey increasingly finds itself surrounded by international crisis. Millions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees live in vast camps on the country’s porous southern border, straining the government’s resources and manpower.

This article will be updated as the situation develops.

Ryan Murphy and the Year of Identity: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

The Year We Obsessed Over Identity
Wesley Morris | The New York Times Magazine
“After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not.

Dear Ryan Murphy: Please Stop!
Sonia Saraiya | Salon
“Murphy’s method of grabbing the audience is either caustic, ‘ironic’ humor or horrifically awful sexualized violence. And it appears that each time you deploy a shock missile, your next one has to be twice as shocking. The result is a body of work that exploits as a prop and then quickly disposes of any number of actual social ills and real issues of oppression: rape, racism, homophobia, disability, eating disorders, murder. It’s possible to make art out of narratives of violence, offense, and horror. I am really not sure if art is what we’re watching, though.”

The Problem With Cereal
J. Wesley Judd | Pacific Standard
“When a cereal café moves into a traditionally poor or minority community, the problem isn't necessarily that locals will suddenly begin eating Froot Loops for dinner, but instead that these places work to slowly fragment the local culture, to replace tradition with privilege, to create a new norm.”

How ESPN’s Fear of the Truth Defeated “Black Grantland”
Greg Howard | Deadspin
“Even now, there is nothing stopping ESPN from having the best black site in the world. Instead, ESPN brass is searching for an editor to keep the site safe, inoffensive, and mainstream.”

The Price Is Right
Emily Nussbaum | The New Yorker
“Advertising is TV’s original sin. When people called TV shows garbage, which they did all the time, until recently, commercialism was at the heart of the complaint. Even great TV could never be good art, because it was tainted by definition. It was there to sell.”

First, Let’s Get Rid of All the Bosses
Roger D. Hodge | The New Republic
“After wandering through a hip collection of retail establishments, including a vinyl record shop, an independent bookstore, and several restaurants, we arrived at the large open courtyard of the Zappos headquarters, a squat, almost Brutalist, building. A petting zoo had been installed for the afternoon.”

How Tom Wolfe Became … Tom Wolfe
Michael Lewis | Vanity Fair
“I’d never really stopped to ask who had written any of those books, because … well, because it didn’t matter to me who had written them. Their creators were invisible. They had no particular identity. No voice …  I asked a new question: Who wrote this book? Thinking it might offer a clue, I searched the cover. Right there on the front was a name!!! Tom Wolfe. Who was Tom Wolfe?”

Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels
Barrett Brown | The Intercept
“Characters will sometimes think clever thoughts or even say them out loud, but not so often that this becomes unseemly. Now and again we are even presented with snippets of real insight. One can see how Franzen could have written a much better book 15 years ago.”

The New York Film Festival Grapples With the Death of an Icon
Mark Harris | Grantland
“I wonder, now, what moviegoers will make of one of its final moments — a twist, in a way, in which suddenly it is Chantal Akerman who we see, far from her mother, in her own space. It’s a room of her own but also a room that seems not to belong to her, and that will eventually be defined by her absence. She draws a curtain, and we are left, now permanently, looking for an answer in the emptiness of where she used to be.”

Where Are the Female Thrill Killers in Fiction?
Melanie McGrath | Aeon
“Which is not to say that women who commit crimes of violence aren’t ever victims too, but our willingness as a society to default to the idea of women as victims both of their own and others’ frailties (principally men’s) is open to exploitation­—not least by women themselves.”

Here Come the Republican Moderates

It has taken nearly five years and the resignation of a speaker, but moderate Republicans in the House have taken their most aggressive step to undermine the influence of hard-right conservatives in the party.

A group of more than 50 GOP lawmakers joined nearly the entire Democratic caucus to force a vote on legislation reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, the 80-year-old federal lending agency that shuttered when Republican leaders refused to renew its charter. The bipartisan coalition on Friday introduced the bill through a discharge petition, a rarely-used procedural mechanism that allows lawmakers to bypass both committees and the leadership to call up legislation signed by a majority of the House. It’s a maneuver that was last executed 13 years ago and only five times in the last eight decades, lawmakers said.

“This is a once-in-a-generation thing,” Representative Denny Heck of Washington state*

Box-Office Boomers: The Encouraging Greying of Hollywood

Once upon a time, the average moviegoer heading to see an action film or a romantic comedy could expect the stars to be, above all, young. In cinematic stories about midnight dalliances in Paris or high-speed chases, the leading men and women were overwhelmingly fresh faces—or faces that hadn’t yet hit 50, or even 40. But if the last decade is any indication, Hollywood has become increasingly comfortable with making films about older characters with complex, interesting lives. They’re in every genre: action films like RED, serious dramas like Amour, and romantic comedies like Hope Springs. They play everyone from transgender septuagenarians (Transparent) to mercenaries (The Expendables 3).

This year in particular, examples abound: Lily Tomlin starred in Grandma as a lesbian poet bonding with her pregnant granddaughter, Liam Neeson reprised his role as a father out for revenge in Taken 3, Al Pacino played an aging rock star in Danny Collins, Meryl Streep played a similar role in Ricki and the Flash, and Robert De Niro outshone his younger counterparts in the new generation-gap comedy The Intern. On the one hand, the trend is a sign that Hollywood is responding seriously to the growing power of older audiences at box offices. But it also reflects a broader cultural shift: These new works are exploring the ways in which growing older has changed, while challenging stereotypes about aging that have been long perpetuated by an industry that loves youth and novelty.

The enormous success of the comedy-drama The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which featured an ensemble cast playing British retirees, seemed to kickstart the recent upswing in 2011. (That film, and its sequel, which was released this year, earned a total of $221 million worldwide.)

Well before then, classic movies and shows tackled the joys and pains of growing older, from Grumpy Old Men to The Golden Girls to Cocoon. But this new wave of shows and films is different. Those were comedies about older characters trying to live like college students, says John S. Baick, a professor of history at Western New England University. The recent spate of works, by contrast, show actors “who don’t deny their age but rather seek to redefine what it means.” One outcome is that midlife-crisis films are skewing older—to characters in their 60s and 70s instead of their 40s.

This shift is playing out in other ways as well. Once upon a time the standard bachelor-party film would star 30-to-40-year-olds (the Hangover trilogy, for example). But in 2013 came Last Vegas, starring Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, and Kevin Kline as a group of childhood buddies in their late 60s and 70s who are dissatisfied with their lives and reunite to celebrate Douglas’s wedding. Other buddy films about self-discovery feature older characters: This year’s A Walk in the Woods showed Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, both in their 70s, hitting the Appalachian Trail to renew their friendship.

These recent works show actors “who don’t deny their age but rather seek to redefine what it means.”

And the buddy stories aren’t just for men: The Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie tackles later-in-life reinvention from a woman’s perspective. The series stars Jane Fonda and Tomlin as two characters in their 70s who become reluctant roommates and eventual close friends when they’re dumped by their gay husbands. Grace and Frankie sets out deliberately to challenge some of the stereotypes about women growing older, without dodging uncomfortable realities such as death and illness. As the show’s executive producer Dana Goldberg told The Hollywood Reporter, “One of the things Jane Fonda loves to say is, ‘You’re not looking at the last chapter of your life. It’s a staircase. You should keep just moving forward.’ And that’s the story we wanted to tell.” There’s an audience, it seems for that story: The show’s been renewed for a second season.

These films and shows are taking aim at another lame ageist cliché: the pervasive May/December relationship trope, in which an older male star dates a love interest half his age. Enter a spate of age-appropriate romantic pairings: In Danny Collins, Pacino’s character loses interest in nubile groupies and pursues Annette Bening, a witty 50-something. Similarly, Streep’s love interest in Ricki and the Flash is an attractive guitar player her own age played by Rick Springfield. In the The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Richard Gere’s character falls for the proprietor’s mother, who’s also in her 60s, while Douglas’s character in Last Vegas drops his 30-something fiancée for Mary Steenburgen, who was 60 at the time of filming.

Carole Lieberman, an author and psychiatrist based in Beverly Hills, attributes the age-appropriate love-interest trend to the failure of marriages between Hollywood power players and their much-younger trophy wives. “After their second or third divorce they start recognizing the appeal of women their own age,” Lieberman says.

“One of the things Jane Fonda loves to say is, ‘You’re not looking at the last chapter of your life. It’s a staircase. You should keep just moving forward.’”

Whether or not you subscribe to this theory, it’s indisputable that top box-office action heroes today are sporting wrinkles along with their pumped-up physiques. Neeson, now 63, is still avenging the bad guys who kidnapped his daughter in the Taken franchise, and regularly appears in other action films such as Non-Stop and Run All Night. Tom Cruise, now 53, is still making Mission Impossible movies, whose marketing hypes up the fact that Cruise performs his own dangerous stunts. Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Harrison Ford—all action stars in their youth—starred in 2014’s The Expendables 3 as the mercenary team that goes up against the bad guy, who’s played by Mel Gibson.

No recent movie about older characters has managed to rival the box-office success of the Marigold films, but their frequency will likely hold as the U.S. aging population grows, and as long as a healthy chunk of 60-something and older viewers consider themselves frequent moviegoers (last year, that number hovered at 14 percent). And the market extends beyond the theaters to video streaming and home video. Boomers, at 25 percent of the population, are a huge audience for post-theatrical releases, says Sam L. Grogg, a film producer and the dean of the college of Arts and Sciences at Adelphi University. “These are films that make their money from the long tail of home video and streaming.”

If there’s one area where older faces have yet to find a foothold, it’s advertising. Commercials featuring seniors tend to be directly marketing products to seniors: life insurance, denture creams, diabetes drugs, Viagra. But you don’t see older people in everyday commercials for cars, dish detergents, and TVs—all products Boomers buy in as great or greater quantities than Millennials. “Ironically, we did it to ourselves ... we grew up with a cultural emphasis on youth, which we passed down to our children,” says Chuck Schroeder of Senior Creative People, a consulting firm that’s trying to get advertisers to feature more older actors. While film producers tend to be more advanced in age, Schroeder says, product managers tend to skew in the opposite direction and harbor a blind spot for older audiences—ironically, the very group that has more money to spend.

It seems likely though that with the help of Hollywood, Boomers may finally start breaking down barriers in all kinds of media beyond films and television, including commercials. This year saw at least one promising instance: Liam Neeson’s Super Bowl commercial for the video game Clash of Clans—one of the most youth-oriented popular games out there.