Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 40

The Fault in Stars Hollow

This post reveals plot points about both the Netflix revival of Gilmore Girls and the show’s original seasons .

In the Netflix revival of Gilmore Girls, Rory, it turns out, has a long-term boyfriend. One who is not named Dean or Jess or Logan, but instead Jeffrey. Or maybe Alan. Or Billy? Wait—Pete. Pete, right? Which would actually be pretty appropriate, in a meta kind of way?

Welcome to one of the earliest of many running jokes in the show’s revival, which is that Rory has a boyfriend named Paul—his name, for the record, is Paul—and that nobody, including Lorelai and Luke, can remember his name or, indeed, anything about him. Paul is perfectly nice, if a bit obsequious; he visits Rory in Stars Hollow, and brings not only flowers for her, but also thoughtful gifts for her family. And his kindness is repaid by forgetfulness: Rory forgets that she invited him. She and her mother head out for breakfast at Luke’s without him, simply forgetting he is there. When Paul meets them at the diner, good-natured as ever, they manage to leave him there.

That the new Gilmore Girls would make so many jokes at the expense of kind, forgettable Paul isn’t, on the whole, terribly surprising. While Stars Hollow may embody some of the best aspects of life in a small town—the intimacy, the democracy, the sense of an “us” to be fought for—it can also, at times, embody the worst: the insularity. The exclusivity. The sense of a “them” to be fought against. The mingling of all of those things, in the seven original seasons of Gilmore Girls, led to a show that is deeply concerned with questions of belonging—about who may be counted as “one of us” and who, by implication, may not. The show’s Netflix revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, has only amplified those anxieties: The Stars Hollow of 2016 is place that, though it congratulates itself on its cosmopolitanism, remains deeply provincial. Paul, the outsider, found that out the hard way.

Remember how, when Lorelai married Christopher, “the town” resisted him, and the marriage, on the grounds of his outsider status?

It’s by now a cliché to say that Stars Hollow, much like the New York of Sex and the City, is one of the main characters of Gilmore Girls. But it’s a cliché because Stars Hollow-centrism is something the show itself insists on, again and again. The song that closes out Gilmore Girls’s pilot episode is not the now-iconic one—“where you lead, I will follllllllow”—but rather one that may be even more revealing about the show’s guiding philosophy: Yo La Tengo’s “Welcome to My Little Corner of the World.” And the first scenes of the revival—as befits the circular logic that will drive the new episodes and culminate, finally, in the show’s vaunted “four final words”—find Lorelai and Rory Gilmore doing their traditional tour of the town, this time in winter, through the gazebo and past Luke’s, among twinkling lights and smiling people and freshly fallen snow. The camera swings in an almost dizzying arc as they walk, hinting that what was true in the first seven seasons will remain true in the new one: Stars Hollow is a place that is ruled by centripetal force.

Into all this comes Paul. Poor, sweet, Rory-doesn’t-deserve-you Paul. The show has, in the end, about as much pity for Paul as it has respect for him, which is to say pretty much none. He is there merely for the sake of exposition—it’s in part through him that we first learn of Rory’s recently peripatetic existence—and to serve, again and again, as a kind of human punchline.

All of that puts Paul in league with the many other characters who have tried, and failed, to be truly welcomed into Stars Hollow’s little corner of the world. Remember how, when Lorelai and Christopher got married, “the town” resisted him, and the marriage, on the grounds of his outsider status? Remember how Lorelai tried to enlist Jackson and other residents with TownClout to encourage others to accept her new husband? Christopher was Rory’s father, and thus would seem to have a pretty good in with Stars Hollow’s residents; even that, though, wasn’t enough.

Paul would learn the same lesson: He did nothing wrong except not belong. But that was enough to seal his fate.

So while the new Stars Hollow may have wifi and iPhones and a Kirk-led version of Uber—while its borders may be slightly more porous than they were before—the town, as before, remains definitionally insular. Still, its impulse is to conflate “newcomers” with “outsiders.” Take, in A Year in the Life, the collection of celebrity chefs—Roy Choi, Rachael Ray, Ina Garten in absentia—who are cooking at the Dragonfly and each of whom Lorelai unceremoniously dismisses from their roles. Their fireable offense? Their failure to be Sookie.  

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Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life Is a Rare TV Revival That Works

Take, too, the many patrons of Luke’s whom Luke lies to about his diner’s wifi passwords; had those customers belonged in Stars Hollow, after all, they’d know that Luke’s is not the kind of place you go to check Facebook. They should have known. Had they been insiders, they would have.

And then there’s Odette, Logan’s fiancée, about whom viewers know extremely little except that her soon-to-be husband has been cheating on her, for a long time, with his ex—a pretty sad situation for you to be in even if you happen to be a French heiress. But the show pays Odette, as a character and as a human, very little regard. It treats her, in the end, in much the same way that it treated Lindsay, Dean’s girlfriend-turned-wife, during Gilmore Girls’s primary seasons: as a complication in the main story, which is Rory’s relationship with Dean. As, thus, a catalyst for Rory’s confusion. Lindsay and Odette—and also Jamie, Paris’s Paul-foreshadowing college boyfriend; and also Max, Lorelai’s season 1 fiancé—have existed, in Gilmore Girls’s universe, almost entirely to help the eponymous women to reach important realizations about their own lives.

Which is, as a matter of sitcomic cosmology, a common approach: Gilmore Girls is just one of many series to take for granted that the only characters worthy of empathy are the ones who are primary in a show’s own, arbitrary universe. Ross, in Friends, treated Emily—the woman who had the misfortune of meeting Ross after he broke up with Rachel—horribly, and the horribleness only began when he said another woman’s name at the altar. The show never acknowledged that, though: Friends assumed instead that only the six primary pals deserved consideration and generosity, and made its narrative decisions accordingly. The “happiness” of the ending of How I Met Your Mother was similarly premised on the notion that the mother in question had been, all along, an interloper. Many shows—most shows—operate according to an “insider”/“outsider” logic; that is, for the most part, how storytelling works. It’s just that some shows extend that logic to a kind of cheerful xenophobia.

Gilmore Girls is just one of many series to assume that the only characters worthy of empathy are the stars in its own, arbitrary universe.

Gilmore Girls, to its credit, seems mostly aware of those pitfalls; it seems to understand, better than many of its fellow series, that Stars Hollow presents an implicit panoramic challenge: How do you create a town that is insular in the best ways without being, also, insular in the worst? How do you make a place that is more in the spirit of Capeside, Massachusetts or Cicely, Alaska or Pawnee, Indiana or Springfield, [redacted], than in that of, say, Gopher Prairie, Minnesota? How do you create a place that manages to be small of size but not also small of mind?

The show has successfully solved the riddle it set out for itself mostly through a kind of cultural doubling: Life in Stars Hollow has been heavily mediated, in Gilmore Girls, through music and books and movies and magazines and other products of a broader American culture. The show has met its geographical smallness with cultural bigness, and in that has found, for the most part, a happy balance. “I live in two worlds,” Rory said, as she delivered her Chilton graduation speech. “One is a world of books. I’ve been a resident of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina and strolled down Swann’s Way.” The second world, though, is Stars Hollow and its residents and the immediate family the town represents: It is geography and it is humanity, combined into one.

The show’s revival, too, offers a dance between the worlds of fiction and non-, between very of-the-moment references to Lena Dunham and David Carr and trigger warnings and the timelessly soft swirls of a life-sized snow globe. A Year in the Life tries, so hard, to be both expansive and selective in its empathies. Often, though, the revival falls directly into a trap of its own making. So aware of the bigness beyond Stars Hollow’s borders, the new episodes stretch until they lose their balance. They succumb to their own dizzy circularity. The revival finds characters, in a town meeting, acknowledging that “there just aren’t enough gays in Stars Hollow”—and then debating, extensively, how to get more. It finds Taylor organizing an international food festival, in which, of the 195 countries meant to be represented, only 15 show up. It finds Stars Hollow trying to be cosmopolitan; it finds it, too, falling back into provincialism. Again and again, this storybook town tries to be more capacious than it is; again and again, it fails. Paul, who is briefly in Stars Hollow but won’t ever be of it, never stood a chance.

The Lasting Damage From Trump's False 'Voter Fraud' Allegations

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly suggested that American elections might be so tainted by fraud that a victory could be stolen from him. That innuendo raised hackles among critics who worried that Trump was laying the groundwork to shake faith in the foundations of U.S. democracy.

Then two strange things happened: First, Trump beat even his own team’s expectations and won. Second, he’s now questioning the validity of election counts anyway. Over the last few days, Green Party candidate Jill Stein announced she was filing for a recount in Wisconsin, citing suggestions of irregularities in the vote. Hillary Clinton’s campaign then said it would participate as well. That didn’t sit well with Trump:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

He added:

Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016

Trump’s statements are baseless and misleading. It is not just, as many (though not enough) news organizations reported, that Trump provided no evidence for this. There simply isn’t any evidence for it. It isn’t real. Activists who insist there is voter fraud say it’s impossible to prove a negative, which is of course true, but repeated scientific studies have failed to pinpoint anything resembling fraud on the scale that would affect national, or even state-wide, elections. If there were truly millions of fraudulent votes being cast, it would be both detectable and—given the cottage industry around preventing fraud—detected. (Also, if there really were millions of fraudulent votes, wouldn’t that tend to support the case for extensive review of results, rather than detract from it?)

Even if there were not rafts of evidence suggesting that the fraud threat is overblown, one might just look to the likely source of Trump’s claim of millions of illegal votes. The claim was made by Gregg Phillips, who cited his own analysis. He has, however, refused to provide any data to back it up, and since it’s a distant outlier from any other finding, it’s safe to discount it, at least until Phillips produces actual data. But Alex Jones, a conspiracy-theorist radio host, picked up the claim and broadcast it further. We know that Jones has Trump’s ear; the president-elect has appeared on Jones’s show, and told him, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

When asked to substantiate the claim Monday morning, Trump spokesman Jason Miller pointed to a study that was published in The Washington Post in 2014, which has been extensively debunked. The Monkey Cage, the political-science-focused blog that published the original post, has all but disowned it. The author of another report Miller cited tweeted that the report did not say what Miller claimed it did.

While Trump has amassed a track record as an unusually dishonest politician, it is once again tough to know whether Trump believes the lies he’s spreading or if he’s aware of how bogus they are. Neither option is reassuring; either the president is willfully lying to the American people and anyone else reading his Twitter feed, or else he’s incapable of sifting fact from clear fiction.

Claims like this one are, as James Fallows writes, a particular challenge for the press, which is not set up to deal with such disregard for objective truth, and which is also hobbled by the well-intentioned and generally wise caution against simply stating outright that a claim like Trump’s is false, since it’s impossible to prove the negative.

Trump’s tweets map neatly onto the division that characterized his campaign and has emerged even more forcefully during the transition, between the club-wielding Vandals intent on sacking the entire government establishment—including Republicans—and the Republican establishment, which is intent on directing the Trump campaign to achieve conservative policy goals. Before the election, defenders of government worried that Trump’s rhetoric would undermine faith in elections altogether; this might be seen as the goal of the Alex Jones types, who argue that the entire apparatus is corrupt.

But the more immediate effect of rhetoric like this is probably on the partisan debate over voting laws. Despite the lack of any evidence of systemic voter fraud, Republicans around the country have been advocating for tougher voter laws for the last decade or so. The most commonly proposed provision requires voters to present a photo ID for voting, even though there’s practically no evidence of in-person voter fraud. There is, however, evidence that changes like this—as well as reductions in early voting, another common tack—do disproportionately affect young and minority voters, who tend to vote Democratic.

The last few months have not treated those laws well. A series of court decisions, most notably in North Carolina but also in Texas, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, have battered those laws, finding that they are racially discriminatory. In the North Carolina case, a federal appeals court pointed to a long record of evidence that the law was designed specifically to suppress minority turnout.

But the election offers a chance to breathe new life into the battered voter-fraud canard. This is on display in North Carolina, where Republican Governor Pat McCrory, trailing by around 8,000 votes in his reelection campaign, has complained that voter fraud was responsible for handing the race to his Democratic challenger, Roy Cooper. So far, state and county authorities have treated the questions raised by McCrory’s campaign and his allies with skepticism. Republican have alleged, for example, that ineligible felons voted in the election, yet many of the names they have presented are either people with the same name as felons or people who committed misdemeanors but did not forfeit their right to vote. This is a leitmotif in voter-fraud allegations—the smoking guns frequently turn out to be cases of mistaken identity or of similar names.

But the insistence that fraud is responsible for the result, even if ends up being disproven, seeds the idea in the public consciousness that there’s widespread fraud. The same is true of Trump’s suggestion. It doesn’t matter how many articles there are like this one that point out that Trump’s statement is balderdash. In the American system, the press is intended to act as one counterweight on powerful politicians, but it’s not the only one, and this is not a symmetrical fight. Simply by raising the question, the president-elect sows the seeds of doubt. They may yet ripen into an utter lack of faith in the system, or sprout into an attempt to pass stricter voting laws that disenfranchise minority voters in the name of stopping an illusory problem.

Turns Out, Rory Gilmore Is Not a Good Journalist

Early on in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Rory gets some bad news: The Atlantic, she learns, has spiked one of her stories.

Rory explains this turn of events to Lorelai as just one of those things: a story bumped for space—a common, if frustrating, occurrence. After watching the Gilmore Girls revival, though, I have come to a different, if totally self-serving, conclusion: Maybe The Atlantic has simply realized what Rory herself has not. Maybe our fictional editors simply discovered that Rory Gilmore, her gleaming résumé notwithstanding … is not a very good journalist. That she might even be, actually, an actively bad journalist.

Most publications have ethics guidelines that their reporters and writers follow. And almost all publications have basic standards that they lay out, which are in turn meant to lend some structure to the day-to-day doings of individual journalists. Here are some of the rough guidelines that Rory systematically violates in A Year in the Life:

When your editor calls you, answer the phone.
If the line, when you do answer, has bad reception because your hometown pretty much exists in 1954, stay in one place when you finally get a decent connection. Do not, once you have found reception, keep walking around.
If you must keep walking, however, calmly explain that you’ll call the editor back. Do not say, “I’m heading to the trees! I’m heading to the treeeees!” as you run toward a random grove. The editor, who cannot see the trees, will only be confused by this.
When you are interviewing a source, it can be nice to converse with that person, in a pleasantly human-to-human fashion, before sticking a (micro)phone in his face.
This one’s pretty important: When you are interviewing a source, do not fall asleep as he’s talking to you.
This one’s even more important: Do not sleep with a source.
Ever.
But especially if that source is dressed as a Wookiee.
Not to belabor the point, but not only is sleeping with a source completely unethical; it also makes you a pretty pernicious cliché.  
Don’t call editors’ cell phones to pitch them stories: Just because you know their numbers doesn’t mean you should use them. Email is best.
When out on a reporting trip, wear comfortable clothes. High-heeled shoes, for example, probably won’t end up being, after a day spent standing in lines and walking the streets of downtown New York City, a terribly good choice.
When you are reporting a story about the group psychology of people who wait in lines, and you happen upon a line in which people are waiting even though they do not know what they are actually waiting for, you should probably actually talk to those people rather than breezing on by.
Do not be discouraged when it turns out that your mother, who is naturally curious and gregarious, might actually be better at reporting than you are.
When you go for a job interview, even if you’re feeling confident about your chances of being hired, it’s a good rule of thumb to come into the interview with some ideas for stories you would want to write for the publication in question.
Condé Nast is a company, not a publication. Meeting with it might not do you a lot of good, landing-a-job-wise.
Don’t feign interest in a story—say, about the group psychology of people who wait in lines—that you actually do not care about. Even if GQ is the publication that wants you to be interested.
If you suddenly take over the editorship of a small-town newspaper, it’s probably a good idea to consult with the readers who look forward to the paper’s traditional front-page poem before deciding that your first move as editor will be to get rid of the paper’s front-page poem.
The Stars Hollow Gazette is not the New York Times.
The Stars Hollow Gazette is not the Hartford Courant.
Do not take David Carr’s image in vain.
Do not try to be David Foster Wallace. Many have tried; only one has succeeded.  

Every reporter has her own methods, of course, and Rory may well be—as a GQ editor reminds her—a witty, erudite writer. But an exceptional journalist? Maybe The Atlantic was onto something. Amy Sherman-Palladino, Gilmore Girls’s creator, writer, and executive producer, once expressed her annoyance that so many of the show’s fans seem to care more about Rory’s romantic fate (Dean? Jess? Logan?) than about her professional one. “It’s just such a small part of who Rory is,” Sherman-Palladino told Time, of her character’s romantic life. “I don’t see people debating ‘Did she win a Pulitzer yet?’”

Spoiler: She didn’t. And the show has now provided a pretty good explanation of why.

Allied Is an Old Hollywood Rarity

Robert Zemeckis is a director who has long been part of Hollywood’s vanguard—pioneering new technology with films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and The Polar Express, winning Oscars for Forrest Gump, shooting the sequels to his Back to the Future franchise back-to-back. But his new film Allied feels like a major blast from the industry’s past. It’s a romantic World War II thriller featuring two glamorous stars (Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard) who play spies who fall in love on a mission in Casablanca. The couple move to London to get married, at which point Max (Pitt) begins to worry that Marianne (Cotillard) is a double agent.

Allied is a fun, tense, good-looking film—but it’s a surprisingly grown-up period piece for a time when studios are looking to please the broadest demographics possible. “I’m very concerned that we don’t make movies that are original anymore,” Zemeckis said in an interview with The Atlantic that touched on his interest in portraying 1940s London with authenticity and his fears about Hollywood’s future as a storytelling industry. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

David Sims: What drew you to this project?

Robert Zemeckis: I thought it was a beautifully written romantic thriller. I can only use a cliché—the characters jumped off the page.

Sims: Did you immediately have actors in mind for these very big, very Old Hollywood roles?

Zemeckis: When I read it, Brad was already hovering around it. But in my feeling, Marion was the only actress who could play this—she was just obvious, obvious for the part.

Sims: You’ve made 18 films in your career over all kinds of genres, but is this your first straightforwardly romantic film?

Zemeckis: I think it is—certainly, it’s the only romantic thriller I’ve done. We never wanted to lose sight of what was important in the screenplay. If there was one bit of direction I gave both actors, it was, “You guys have to always be madly in love.” It all comes down to that one universal theme, that’s really what this is all about.

Sims: But the film does switch modes halfway through; it switches locations from Casablanca to London. How did you denote that move from thriller to a more romantic drama?

Zemeckis: We created a different mood, a different color scheme for what Casablanca was going to be, versus what war-torn London was going to be. It all grows out of the dark turn that the story's taking as well.

Sims: Were there World War II films that you wanted to avoid, or keep in mind, as visual hallmarks? Clichés you thought about going in?

Zemeckis: The thing for me was, I didn’t want to cut to Big Ben. I didn’t want to cut to Big Ben with a barrage of balloons floating around it in the sky. You know, the obvious things that you try to avoid. We looked at a lot of footage, historic footage, of London in the middle of the war. We wanted to know how many cars would be in the streets, things like that, and we had the Imperial War Museum working as our technical advisors.

Sims: The city feels so empty in the film, and there’s a haunting quality to the bombed-out houses and empty streets. But there were all these other details that leapt out to me—like the air force pilots taking amphetamines before they take off, or a party that’s hosted by Marion’s character that is very bohemian and free-spirited.

Zemeckis: [The Allied screenwriter] Steven Knight was very adamant about including that, and of course our research proved him right. People were living very fatalistic lives in London. It was wild, it was bohemian, everybody was having sex, everybody was doing massive amounts of cocaine. Because they didn’t know if they were going to die that night, if a bomb would have their name on it.

Sims: No one in the film seems remotely scandalized by what’s going on.

Zemeckis: And you don’t expect that, because you think the English are so proper and buttoned-down. But in wartime London, everyone was going for it.

Sims: You said fatalistic, and that speaks to the film’s overall story. Did you think of these characters as being tinged with doom?

Zemeckis: The thing that makes love stories work, in my opinion, in movies and novels and country & western songs, is the feeling of longing. We have to evoke that feeling of longing, that painful feeling, and that’s what we as humans understand as love. No one can actually define love, but you attempt to, and the closest you can get is longing. And that itself has a melancholy to it. You can say dread, or doom—it’s that feeling we all feel when we fall in love with someone, we have this horrible, fearful feeling that maybe we will never have that person in our life.

Sims: Or even if you do, that there could be some tragedy in the future.

Zemeckis: Exactly, I mean, if you really want to get existential about it, all love affairs will always end in horrible pain.

Sims: It’s interesting, because your last film [2015’s The Walk] was very joyful, a very upbeat celebration of life through the character of Philippe Petit. Were you surprised that you turned toward something darker for your next project?

Zemeckis: Well, Francois Truffaut said every filmmaker’s decision to make a film is always a reaction to the film he just made. I don’t do that consciously, but there may be something in that.

Sims: We don’t see enough of this kind of movie in theaters right now—a straightforward, old-fashioned piece of storytelling.

Zemeckis: Even more importantly, that it’s an original story and not a pre-sold title. You’re 100 percent right when you say you don’t see movies like this.

Sims: Is that something you worry about?

Zemeckis: I’m very concerned that we don’t make movies that are original anymore.

Sims: Obviously Hollywood market forces are such a hard thing to govern, and there’s no easy way to fix these things, but what do you think is a good solution, a way to guide things in the future?

Zemeckis: I think the only thing filmmakers can do is try to make good movies, and make them as long as they allow us to keep making them. But at the end of the day it is a business, and if audiences don’t care, there’s nothing we can do. It’ll just go away, I guess.

A Podcast of Their Own for Women in Music

Reflecting on her involvement in the Surrealist art movement of the 1930s, the British painter and sculptor Leonora Carrington once famously declared, “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse.” On one level, it’s a simple statement: She was too busy focusing on her own work to help inspire someone else. But, given the gendered concept of the “muse,” Carrington was also implicitly rejecting the idea that a woman’s value in the world of art came from whether she inspired men to greatness. Many other creative women in history also confronted the tension between gender—and by extension sexuality and objectification—and creativity in their own work: the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salome, the writer Virginia Woolf, the novelist Toni Morrison, and the musician Patti Smith.

The British singer-songwriter Laura Marling followed in this same tradition, unpacking gender, intimacy, and autonomy in her 2015 album Short Movie. As NPR’s Ann Powers wrote at the time, Marling “add[s] to the literature of women’s liberation through solitude.” Informed in part by her female artistic influences, among them Salome and Carrington, Marling’s latest project is a self-produced weekly podcast aptly titled Reversal of the Muse. The 10-part series, which concluded in late September, stands out from other music podcasts mostly because its host and all its guests have been women—specifically women openly discussing what it’s like to navigate a male-dominated field as artists and how gender has influenced their approach to creativity.

Each episode takes the form of a conversation between Marling and her guests, who include female engineers, producers, performers, and guitar-shop owners. In one episode, Marling talked with the American music pioneers Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton about the improvements they’ve witnessed when it comes to female inclusion in studios. In another episode, the California pop-rockers HAIM discussed the assumptions they’ve face when guitar shopping (including that they’d be interested in pink instruments). Marling started Reversal of the Muse after realizing she had only come into contact with two female engineers throughout her 10-year career.  “I wonder what joys await us when we understand more about feminine creativity,” she says in the second episode. By offering a dedicated space for women to talk about their industry experiences in a more intimate setting, the series is a valuable addition to the current spate of women-centered podcasts, including Another Round, 2 Dope Queens, and Call Your Girlfriend.

Reversal of the Muse’s focus on the structural limitations of the industry comes at a time when women are still a rarity on the technical side of music. It’s estimated that less than 5 percent of music engineers and producers are female, and only six female producers have ever been nominated for the prestigious Producer of the Year, Non-Classical award at the Grammys. The ways in which women’s contributions in general are often overlooked in the music industry come up frequently in the podcast, including in one episode featuring the British musician Marika Hackman. She talked about feeling frustrated when the coverage surrounding her 2015 debut full-length album focused more on her model looks, clothing, and friendship with Cara Delevingne, than on the merits of her music. Elsewhere on Reversal of the Muse, guests dissect the “boy’s club” that is life on the road, which ultimately leads to a discussion of how women are expected to behave, and more specifically challenges the notion that a woman must always be “sweet.”

With five albums and a decade on the tour circuit under her belt, Marling anchors the podcast as its host, providing her own valuable insights into the nuances of the music industry. Each episode of Reversal of the Muse revolves around a different question of Marling’s choosing, beginning with, do women learn better from other women? Outlining what she calls her self-imposed fear of coming off as silly, Marling posits that her music may have turned out differently had she recorded with female engineers and producers. The biggest reason? She says she would have felt freer to make mistakes. Which eventually leads to another question: What would working in an all-female studio be like?                                                                          

Reversal of the Muse has validated the work of women who aren’t content to simply be muses.                                        

Most of the podcast is meditative and conversational, so in order to gain practical insight, Marling recently orchestrated an all-female takeover of Urchin Studios in London, with women musicians, engineers, and producers working together. In an ideal world, Marling said on the DICE podcast, there would be more of a gender balance in studios. But until that time comes, this set-up uniquely explored creativity from the feminine approach that is rare today. It’s a project reminiscent of initiatives like Girls Rock Camps or a Brooklyn-based residency called the Hum. Marling is also looking to start a database of people dedicated to teaching young women engineering or instrument-making.

Unfortunately, Reversal of the Muse hasn’t gained much traction for a podcast started by a renowned musician focusing on an under-explored subject. It has relatively few listeners (the number of listens for a single episode of the podcast peaked at 10,000 on Soundcloud, where the project is hosted), and it has received minimal media coverage, mostly quick posts by music and culture outlets. The podcast isn’t perfect—accessibility, the relatively lack of diversity of its guests, and the more informal production style could all play a role in its small audience numbers.

And yet it feels like a deeply necessary project considering how single-mindedly Reversal of the Muse is dedicated to the subject of gender in the music industry and creativity. Other podcasts, such as The Talkhouse and Turned Out a Punk, have only touched on the issue in specific episodes (plus, nearly all the top podcasts in iTunes’s “music” category are hosted by men). It’s currently unclear whether Reversal of the Muse—a project unabashedly interested in the stories and professional experiences of women—will see a second season. Regardless of whether Marling continues the podcast, the musician’s efforts have been a crucial reminder of the often invisible work being done by women in an industry that has consistently undervalued them. In just 10 episodes, Reversal of the Muse has enriched the ongoing conversation about gender and creativity—and validated the work of women who aren’t content to simply be muses.

Remembering Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro, whose death was announced Sunday, outlasted a Cold War and 10 American presidents, and remained, until the end, defiant of the United States. He presided over dramatic improvements in health and other human-development indicators in his country, but crushed dissent and repressed human rights.

Castro led Cuba from 1959, when his Communist rebels toppled the regime of then-dictator Fulgencio Batista, until 2006, when he stepped down due to ill health; two years later, he formally handed the reins of power to his brother, Raul Castro. To put that in perspective, Castro took power during the Eisenhower years, and remained Cuba’s leader during the tenures of U.S. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush, and he nearly outlived the Obama administration. In that time, he fended off the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, urged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to use nuclear weapons on the U.S., survived several U.S.-backed attempts to kill him, directed his country’s involvement in civil wars across Latin America, as well as in Mozambique and Angola, saw from afar the U.S. quagmire in Vietnam, and presided over a period of economic despair when his biggest patron, the Soviet Union, collapsed.

But he defied the odds, and expectations that his regime would collapse, surviving well into the 21st century, even as he watched Cubans flee to Miami and barely survive under what was euphemistically dubbed the “special period”— U.S. sanctions did not help. To his friends, Castro was the defiant leader of a little nation, 90 miles off the coast of Florida, who was a consistent thorn in the side of the U.S.; a man who with his marathon, hours-long speeches, trademark cigar, and military fatigues, challenged the might of Washington. But to his detractors, and he had many, Castro was another Latin American strongman who oppressed his people, stifled human rights, and imprisoned dissidents. Cuba had near universal literacy, but its citizens couldn’t freely read the books they wanted to.  

Castro had been ailing for some time. He was hospitalized in 2006 with diverticulitis, a condition that afflicts the digestive tract, and reports of his imminent demise have appeared several times in the media since then. But he re-emerged each time. As my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg noted in 2010 when he met and interviewed Castro, “the allegedly ailing Fidel drank and spoke extemporaneously for hours—his prolixity did not surprise me, but his self-awareness, and humor, sometimes did.”

Ultimately, times changed, but Castro did not. Raul Castro, his brother, opened up the country’s economy, and undertook a historic rapprochement, brokered by Pope Francis, with the U.S. President Obama visited Cuba in March, a trip that was unimaginable when Fidel Castro was in power. Indeed, after Obama’s trip, Castro wrote a scathing letter, criticizing the American president’s remarks urging Cubans to look to the future. “We don’t need the empire to give us anything,” Castro wrote at the time. Last month, John Lee Anderson, in The New Yorker, wrote of the resistance among some in the Cuban establishment toward the rapprochement with the U.S. Indeed Castro’s own complex response to that historic achievement was perhaps reflected in some of the reactions that emerged following his death Saturday. In Miami, home to a large Cuban American community, there were celebrations. President-elect Donald Trump called him a “brutal dictator” while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called him a “remarkable leader.” Obama himself seemed to suspend judgment.

“History,” the American president wrote, “will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.”

Sharon Jones and Speaking Gilmore: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Remembering the Transformative Sharon Jones

Geoffrey Himes | Paste

“It was only when you saw Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings live on stage that you understood their immense appeal. Like her role model [James] Brown, she created a performance that linked the sound of her voice to the movement of her body to the mood of the moment. That created an experience that could only be approximated by recordings or even by videos. The sheer physicality of being in the same space with her was transformative.”

Don’t Look Now, but 2016 Is Resurrecting Poetry

Lexi Pandell | Wired

“Amid the trolls and politicians blasting out 140-character broadsides, poets and their readers have embraced Twitter as a vehicle for higher language. The premium Twitter places on brevity and emotional honesty is uniquely well-suited for an artform that so prizes not just candor and exhortation, but verbal economy.”

Anaïs Nin and Third-Rail Erotica

Laura Frost | Los Angeles Review of Books

“Sure, fantasy is the realm of escape, and yes, conflating erotica with reality is an error, but fantasy fiction can reveal what we are drawn to, anxious about, trying to overcome or disavow, not to mention what gets us off, both in the real world and in the private, no-holds-barred realm of the erotic imagination. News flash: These two do not always coincide for women.”

Long Before Hamilton Brouhaha, Theater Was Anything but Polite

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon | The New York Times

“People attended the theater to be seen and to be heard. They went to make themselves visible as the ‘people’ of a democratic nation, and they went to debate, enact, and imagine political issues concerning class relations, immigration, federalism, policy, and the future shape of the nation.”

They Speak Gilmore, Don’t They?

Soraya Roberts | Hazlitt

“The one arena in which equality is not prized is gender—women clearly dominate Stars Hollow. Sherman-Palladino was inspired not only by the Borscht Belt but the brisk nimble banter of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy screwballs in which censorship-approved verbal tension supplanted sex. Women were the alphas in these comedies, and this is doubly true of Gilmore Girls, in which the heroines prioritize work over romance and wit is no longer just for flirting.”

The Dark Side of the Presidential Turkey Pardon

Claire McNear | The Ringer

“This much is undeniable: The turkey pardon is a weird thing for the leader of the free world to do. Obama has acknowledged as much in past years. ‘It is a little puzzling that I do this every year,’ he said in 2014. It is a strange simulacrum of one of the highest privileges of the presidency, the presidential pardon. Should Obama make no further additions, birds will have made up 20 percent of his total pardons during his time in office.”

Mourning Through Horror Movies

Aaron Orbey | The New Yorker

“In my own experience, horror movies provided not an example for actions but an outlet for empathy, a chance to see characters contend with a kind of fear that my own peers could not fathom.”

The Hamilton-Pence Incident Was More Than Just a Distraction

Mark Harris | Vulture

“One can embrace politically conscious pop culture and still realize that while it’s very good at some things—gradually expanding people’s vision of the world, slowly normalizing the misunderstood or marginal—it is not direct activism, no matter how performatively satisfying it can feel, no matter how viral it can go. Activism is activism; pop culture is the drip-drip-drip of water regrooving a rock so gradually that you’ll never pinpoint the moment the landscape changed.”

François Fillon: The Man Who Could Be France's Next President

François Fillon, the former prime minister, shocked the French establishment Sunday when he won the Republican primary, upsetting his former boss, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as Alain Juppé, another former premier. Now, he’s slated to be the center-right’s voice in France’s upcoming presidential election—one that could pit him against a yet-to-be-named Socialist candidate as well as Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate of the National Front.

Fillon’s 15-point victory margin was a surprise. Compared to Sarkozy and Juppé, both of whom enjoyed widespread media attention, Fillon, 62, was seen as a little-known conservative—so little known, in fact, he was dubbed “Mr. Nobody” by Le Monde.

But Fillon is no political outsider. He has worked for more than 30 years in French politics, having served as labor minister in 2002, education minister in 2004, and, most notably, prime minister in 2007 under Sarkozy. Dr. David Lees, a researcher on French politics at Warwick University in the U.K., told me it was Fillon’s behind-the-scenes role that may have helped propel him to the head of a primary many polls suggested he’d lose.

“People have talked Juppé up over the last year in France, saying he was going to be the savior of the French right,” Lees said. “By the same token, a wider spectrum of people in the north were talking up Sarkozy as the savior of the right. So they’ve both been in the spotlight and they’ve both been under scrutiny. The only difference with Fillon is that he’s been under the radar a little bit more since 2014.”

While Fillon’s first-round win him at an advantage to lead the center-right ticket (the second round of voting, in which he faces Juppé, is Sunday), his politics are emphatically conservative. On economic matters, Fillon, known to some as the “French Margaret Thatcher,” has campaigned on a number of business-oriented platforms, chief among them his promise to abolish France’s infamous 35-hour work week. Vowing to reduce the size of the public sector, Fillon campaigned to cut as many as half a million civil-service jobs, as well as slash public spending by 110 billion euros ($116 billion).

Internationally, Fillon is a proponent of rapprochement with Russia, whose fraught relations with Europe he attributes to “huge errors” made by the Western powers after the fall of the Soviet Union. He also hasn’t ruled out working with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, arguing that France should consider all partners to fight the Islamic State. This position is likely to endear him not only to Moscow and Assad, but also Donald Trump, the U.S. president-elect, who holds a similar view of how to fight ISIS.

Socially, Fillon appeals to France’s traditionally conservative Catholic base. He is a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage and laws allowing same-sex couples to adopt, though he has said he would not repeal them. While promoting his book, Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism, Fillon told Le Figaro he supports the existing ban on religious symbols in public spaces, and that while he does not believe there is a religious problem in France, “there is a problem with Islam.” In August, Fillon condemned school curriculum that taught students to be “ashamed” of their country, likening France’s colonial past to a “cultural exchange.”

Fillon’s first-round primary victory is telling not only of where France’s center-right stands, but where the country’s electorate stands overall. Last Sunday’s primary marked the first time a conservative candidate was chosen in an open primary, meaning French voters could cast their ballot regardless of political affiliation, as long as they pay 2 euros and pledge that they share Republican values.

“The 44 percent of people backing Fillon says a lot of how people view his chances,” Lees said. “It shows that there are people who might not necessarily be minded towards the right in general,  but who do see Fillon as the best chance toward maintaining a more consensual politics in France.”

Some polls suggest a number of traditionally liberal voters cast their ballots in the conservative primary to prevent a victory for Sarkozy, who they feared would be unable to defeat Le Pen, the far-right leader who has made common cause with Western anti-immigration figures. Violette Lacloche, a left-wing voter voting in the conservative primary, told Politico: “In 2002, we voted for Jacques Chirac to stop Jean-Marie Le Pen (Le Pen’s father) from becoming president. It’s the same thing this time around, just much sooner. … We all know that the presidential election is being played out now.”

Whether those voters will come out again to vote in Sunday’s runoff, which pits Fillon against Juppé, remains to be seen. Polls suggest Fillon would only need a third of Sarkozy’s supporters to clinch the nomination.

Gilmore Girls’s Kirk Is the Man-Child America Needs

“How old is Kirk?” Paris Geller asks, when she visits Stars Hollow and meets the town’s quirkiest denizen. Rory Gilmore shrugs in reply. “You’d have to cut him open and count the rings.”

It really is hard to tell. The defining feature of Kirk—other than the fact that he has had so, so many jobs—is that he does not, strictly, have an age at all. At least, not in any of the meaningful ways that most people have, and indeed are, ages. When was Kirk born? Who were his cohorts in school? Does he identify with Generation X, or My So-Called Life, or Reality Bites? Does he know about Oregon Trail? Does he, when his birthday comes around, simply celebrate? Or does the day, rather, plague him with the vague but nagging feeling that he hasn’t achieved all the things he’d thought he would have by now, when he was younger?

Once again, it is unclear. Gilmore Girls is, for the most part, an airy fantasy of a TV show: From the gazebo in Stars Hollow’s central square to the witty banter of the town’s residents to the number of calories that Lorelai and Rory Gilmore are able to consume seemingly sans aesthetic consequence, the whole series sparkles, over its seven primary seasons, with a certain sheen of magic. About some things, though, Gilmore Girls is quite serious, and one of them is the thing Kirk so obviously lacks: age. Which is, in the show’s conception, not just a thing someone can be, but also a force that can be by turns acquiesced to and denied. Gilmore Girls, for a show about the friendship between a mother and her daughter, might be a nicely alliterative title; it is also, however, a philosophy revealed.

Who better to embody the challenges of adulthood than a grown-up who is decidedly not an adult?

And, so, Kirk. Kirk, who functions in the show as a kind of mythic man-child. Kirk, of whom every adult in Stars Hollow seems to share a kind of joint custody. Kirk, whose rings are invisible, most of all to himself. He could be, by the looks of things, anywhere—and, more meaningfully, anything—from 20 to 50. And in that delightful Peter Panniness, Kirk is Gilmore Girls’s best embodiment of its own, pervasive ambivalence about age—and about the frustratingly fuzzy lines that, both within the show and beyond Stars Hollow’s borders, divide what it means to be a child from what it means to be an adult.

Gilmore Girls first aired in 2000, during a time that found many of its viewers contending with the advent of an unprecedented phase of life: emerging adulthood, the period that comes after the teenage years but before one, as it were, “settles down.” The period that came, historically, with the delay, and the increasing rejection, of married-getting and kid-having—and that is defined, above all, by wandering and wondering and waiting, by being at once “grown” and not yet “grown up.” It’s a phase of life that gave rise, in turn, to cultural anxieties about Bobos and Grups and the consequences of generations tangling with and possibly even merging into one another.

Gilmore Girls explores and largely embraces those tensions: The show begins, after all, just as Rory turns 16—the same age Lorelai was when she got pregnant with her daughter. Throughout its seasons, its broad premise has been that Rory acts older than her years, while Lorelai acts, generally, younger than hers. And the show is at its best when it finds the two characters—their physical ages and their behavioral ones—meeting, Benjamin Button-style, in the middle. All of that has helped to make Gilmore Girls a culmination of a pop-cultural moment that would lead the critic A.O. Scott to claim, a couple of years ago, “Nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable.”

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http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/gilmore-girls-a-year-in-the-life-review/508580/

Well. Who better to embody the conceptual challenges of adulthood than a grown-up who is, in ways both petty and profound, decidedly not an adult? Who better than a gangly, gleeful man-child? Kirk—his last name is Gleason, but he is, as children usually are, known only by his first name—still lives with his mother. He still has “night terrors.” He still isn’t sure what “manliness” means, exactly. He is “still,” in pretty much every sense of the word.

Kirk once started a business to compete with children who were selling wrapping paper to raise money for their school; it never crossed his mind that the kids were neither his equals nor worthy of being competed against. He once played Tevye in Stars Hollow Elementary School’s production of Fiddler on the Roof, and he gave that role, as is his wont, everything he had—blissfully, if awkwardly, unaware of how different he was from his fellow thespians. He does jobs, but does not have a career; he has a girlfriend, but has very little idea how to be a partner to her. He seems to have no father figure in the traditional way, so turns instead—repeatedly—to Luke and, to a lesser extent, to Taylor and Jackson—for advice.

Kirk is also, in the way so many children can be, a bundle of contradictions. He is arrogant and easily wounded. He can be by turns sweet and cruel. He wants, so much, but he isn’t quite sure how to go about the getting. Played with mastery by Sean Gunn, Kirk can sometimes, in his affect, suggest the morals and aesthetics of Claymation: He is at once hard and pliable, at once superficial and sage, at once 2-dimensional and 3-.

“Mrs. Kim, my name is Kirk,” he announces.

“I know who you are, Kirk,” she replies. “I’ve known you since you were 2.”

“That’s no guarantee that people remember me.”

So Kirk will amuse you and anger you and, just when you get distracted by those things, break your heart a little. He will seem a cartoon, until he reveals himself to be so undeniably human. (“I took a lesson,” he says, of his stint as a skydiver. “The guy said I was a natural at falling.”) He is an emerging adult in the most anxious sense of the term: unsure, figuring things out, fundamentally in-between. Kirk is a person who is not yet, fully, a self.

All of that might make Kirk, in the end, the most still-relevant character in a show that is, to its vast credit, so full of them. More than Lorelai, who “stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink”; more than Rory, who is so wise beyond her years; more than Paris, who is so ambitious beyond hers. Age may, in Gilmore Girls as in the world beyond, follow the Aaliyah theory: It may be, in the end, nothing but a number. But there’s a difference, still, between having an age and being an age—and Kirk is a weird and wacky and wonderful reminder of that. He is a man, but in another way, he is not. He is still looking. He is still working. He is still dreaming about what he will become, when he grows up.

The Evolution of 'Like'

In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn’t sit still. It can’t. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber. You may have heard that Icelanders can still read the ancient sagas written almost a thousand years ago in Old Norse. It is true that written Icelandic is quite similar to Old Norse, but the spoken language is quite different—Old Norse speakers would sound a tad extraterrestrial to modern Icelanders. There have been assorted changes in the grammar, but language has moved on, on that distant isle as everywhere else.

It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like. So deeply reviled, so hard on the ears of so many, so new, and with such an air of the unfinished, of insecurity and even dimness, the new like is hard to, well, love. But it takes on a different aspect when you consider it within this context of language being ever-evolving.

First, let’s take like in just its traditional, accepted forms. Even in its dictionary definition, like is the product of stark changes in meaning that no one would ever guess. To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.” The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like. Gelic over time shortened to just lic, which became like. Of course, there were no days when these changes happened abruptly and became official. It was just that, step by step, the syllable lic, which to an Old English speaker meant “body,” came to mean, when uttered by people centuries later, “similar to”—and life went on.

Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly. To the extent that slowly means “in a slow fashion,” as in “with the quality of slowness,” it is easy (and correct) to imagine that slowly began as “slow-like,” with like gradually wearing away into a -ly suffix. That historical process is especially clear in that there are still people who, colloquially, say slow-like, angry-like. Technically, like yielded two suffixes, because -ly is also used with adjectives, as in portly and saintly. Again, the pathway from saint-like to saint- ly is not hard to perceive.

Like has become a part of compounds. Likewise began as like plus a word, wise, which was different from the one meaning “smart when either a child or getting old.” This other wise meant “manner”: Likewise meant “similar in manner.” This wise disappeared as a word on its own, and so now we think of it as a suffix, as in clockwise and stepwise. But we still have likeminded, where we can easily perceive minded as having independent meaning. Dictionaries tell us it’s pronounced “like-MINE-did,” but I, for one, say “LIKE- minded” and have heard many others do so.

The new like is associated with hesitation.

Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’” Think of a cold, limp, slimy squid splayed wet on a cutting board, its lifeless tentacles dribbling in coils, about to be sliced into calamari rings—in comparison to the brutally fleet, remorseless, dynamic creatures squid are when alive underwater—like as “(preposition) ...” is wet on a cutting board.

There is a lot more to it: It swims, as it were. What we are seeing in like’s transformations today are just the latest chapters in a story that began with an ancient word that was supposed to mean “body.”

Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse. After all, how often should a coherently minded person need to note that something is similar to something rather than just being that something? The new like, then, is associated with hesitation. It is common to label the newer generations as harboring a fear of venturing a definite statement.

That analysis seems especially appropriate in that this usage of like first reached the national consciousness with its usage by Beatniks in the 1950s, as in, “Like, wow!” We associate the Beatniks, as a prelude to the counterculture with their free-ranging aesthetic and recreational sensibilities, with relativism. Part of the essence of the Beatnik was a reluctance to be judgmental of anyone but those who would dare to (1) be judgmental themselves or (2) openly abuse others. However, the Beatniks were also associated with a certain griminess—why would others imitate them?— upon which it bears mentioning that the genealogy of the modern like traces farther back. Ordinary people, too, have long been using like as an appendage to indicate similarity with a trace of hesitation. The “slow-like” kind of usage is a continuation of this, and Saul Bellow has thoroughly un- Beatnik characters in his novels of the 1950s use like in a way we would expect a decade or two later. “That’s the right clue and may do me some good. Something very big. Truth, like,” says Tommy Wilhelm in 1956’s Seize the Day, a character raised in the 1910s and ’20s, long before anyone had ever heard of a Beatnik. Bellow also has Henderson in Henderson the Rain King use like this way. Both Wilhelm and Henderson are tortured, galumphing char- acters riddled with uncertainty, but hippies they are not.

So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population. The seeds of the modern like lay among ordinary people; the Beatniks may not even have played a significant role in what happened later. The point is that like transformed from something occasional into something more regular. Fade out, fade in: recently I heard a lad of roughly sixteen chatting with a friend about something that had happened the weekend before, and his utterance was—this is as close to verbatim as I can get: So we got there and we thought we were going to have the room to ourselves and it turned out that like a family had booked it already. So we’re standing there and there were like grandparents and like grandkids and aunts and uncles all over the place. Anyone who has listened to American English over the past several decades will agree that this is thoroughly typical like usage.

Like has morphed into a modal marker of the human mind at work in conversation.

The problem with the hesitation analysis is that this was a thoroughly confident speaker. He told this story with zest, vividness, and joy. What, after all, would occasion hesitation in spelling out that a family was holding an event in a room? It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.

Understandably so, of course—the meaning of like suggests that people are claiming that everything is “like” itself rather than itself. But as we have seen, words’ meanings change, and not just because someone invents a portable listening device and gives it a name composed of words that used to be applied to something else (Walkman), but because even the language of people stranded in a cave where life never changed would be under constant transformation. Like is a word, and so we’d expect it to develop new meanings: the only question, as always, is which one? So is it that young people are strangely overusing the like from the dictionary, or might it be that like has birthed a child with a different function altogether? When one alternative involves saddling entire generations of people, of an awesome array of circumstances across a vast nation, with a mysteriously potent inferiority complex, the other possibility beckons as worthy of engagement.

In that light, what has happened to like is that it has morphed into a modal marker—actually, one that functions as a protean indicator of the human mind at work in conversation. There are actually two modal marker likes—that is, to be fluent in modern American English is to have subconsciously internalized not one but two instances of grammar involving like.

Let’s start with So we’re standing there and there were like grandparents and like grandkids and aunts and uncles all over the place. That sentence, upon examination, is more than just what the words mean in isolation plus a bizarre squirt of slouchy little likes. Like grandparents and like grandkids means, when we break down what this teenager was actually trying to communicate, that given the circumstances, you might think it strange that an entire family popped up in this space we expected to be empty for our use, but in fact, it really was a whole family. In that, we have, for one, factuality—“no, really, I mean a family.” The original meaning of like applies in that one is saying “You may think I mean something like a couple and their son, but I mean something like a whole brood.”

And in that, note that there is also at the same time an acknowledgment of counterexpectation. The new like acknowledges unspoken objection while underlining one’s own point (the factuality). Like grandparents translates here as “There were, despite what you might think, actually grandparents.” Another example: I opened the door and it was, like, her! certainly doesn’t mean “Duhhhh, I suppose it’s okay for me to identify the person as her . . .” Vagueness is hardly the issue here. That sentence is uttered to mean “As we all know, I would have expected her father, the next-door neighbor, or some other person, or maybe a phone call or e-mail from her, but instead it was, actually, her.” Factuality and counterexpectation in one package, again. It may seem that I am freighting the little word with a bit much, but consider: It was, like, her! That sentence has a very precise meaning, despite the fact that because of its sociological associations with the young, to many it carries a whiff of Bubble Yum, peanut butter, or marijuana.

We could call that version of like “reinforcing like.” Then there is a second new like, which is closer to what people tend to think of all its new uses: it is indeed a hedge. However, that alone doesn’t do it justice: we miss that the hedge is just plain nice, something that has further implications for how we place this like in a linguistic sense. This is, like, the only way to make it work does not mean “Duhhhh, I guess this seems like the way to make it work.” A person says this in a context in which the news is unwelcome to the hearer, and this was either mentioned before or, just as likely, is unstatedly obvious. The like acknowledges—imagine even a little curtsey—the discomfort. It softens the blow—that is, eases—by swathing the statement in the garb of hypotheticality that the basic meaning of like lends. Something “like” x is less threatening than x itself; to phrase things as if x were only “like,” x is thus like offering a glass of water, a compress, or a warm little blanket. An equivalent is “Let’s take our pill now,” said by someone who is not, themselves, about to take the pill along with the poor sick person. The sick one knows it, too, but the phrasing with “we” is a soothing action, acknowledging that taking pills can be a bit of a drag.

Like is not just a tic of heedless, underconfident youth.

Note that while this new like cushions a blow, the blow does get delivered. Rather than being a weak gesture, the new like can be seen as gentle but firm. The main point is that it is part of the linguistic system, not something merely littering it up. It isn’t surprising that a word meaning “similar to” morphs into a word that quietly allows us to avoid being bumptious, via courteously addressing its likeness rather than the thing itself, via considering it rather than addressing it. Just as uptalk sounds like a question but isn’t, like sounds like a mere shirk of certainty but isn’t.

Like LOL, like, entrenched in all kinds of sentences, used subconsciously, and difficult to parse the real meaning of without careful consideration, has all the hallmarks of a piece of grammar—specifically, in the pragmatic department, modal wing. One thing making it especially clear that the new like is not just a tic of heedless, underconfident youth is that many of the people who started using it in the new way in the 1970s are now middle-aged. People’s sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality, and the person of a certain age who claims never to use like “that way” as often as not, like, does—and often. As I write, a sentence such as There were like grandparents and like grandkids in there is as likely to be spoken by a forty-something as by a teenager or a college student. Just listen around the next time you’re standing in a line, watching a talk show, or possibly even listening to yourself.

Then, the two likes I have mentioned must be distinguished from yet a third usage, the quotative like—as in “And she was like, ‘I didn’t even invite him.’ ” This is yet another way that like has become grammar. The meaning “similar to” is as natural a source here as it was for -ly: mimicking people’s utterances is talking similarly to, as in “like,” them. Few of the like-haters distinguish this like from the other new usages, since all are associated with young people and verbal slackerdom. But the third new like doesn’t do the jobs the others do: there is nothing hesitational or even polite about quotative like, much less especially forceful à la the reinforcing like. It is a thoroughly straightforward way of quoting a person, often followed by a verbatim mimicry complete with gestures. That’s worlds away from This is, like, the only way to make it work or There were like grandkids in there. Thus the modern American English speaker has mastered not just two, but actually three different new usages of like.

This article has been adapted from John McWhorter’s latest book , Words on the Move: Why English Won’t—and Can’t—Sit Still (Like, Literally).