Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 45

John Oliver, Activist

During Sunday night’s episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver made an impassioned plea to his viewers.

“We need to stay here and fight,” the comedian said.

For the last eight years, we’ve had a president we could assume would generally stand up for the rights of all Americans. But that is going to change now. So we’re going to have to actively stand up for one another. And it can’t just be sounding off on the internet or sharing think pieces or videos like this one that echo around your bubble. I’m talking about actual sacrifice to support people who are now under threat.

It was a striking monologue—not just because it was distinctly earnest, but also because it was distinctly unfunny. The comedian’s first show since Donald Trump clinched the U.S. presidency (which doubled, as it happens, as the comedian’s final show of the 2016 season) had its laugh-out-loud moments, but for the most part Oliver’s message was sober. It was sad. It largely dispensed with the jokes in favor of some selective Real Talk.

In that, Oliver’s show fit in well with the work of his fellow comedians as they’ve grappled with the upcoming presidency of the man they largely opposed. The past several days have seen comedy, effectively, stop laughing. Election night basically broke Stephen Colbert. Kate McKinnon replaced SNL’s traditional, jokey cold open with a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and then capped the performance off with the exhortation to viewers, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.” Dave Chappelle, directly after that, declared at the end of his SNL monologue that “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck and I’m going to give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one, too.”

But Oliver has long been the resident wonk of late-night comedy. So it was fitting that, nearly a week after the election returns came in, he saw all that seriousness and … raised. Oliver, on Sunday, took the familiar political exhortations of his fellow comedians and insisted that they weren’t enough. This is a moment, he argued, that calls not just for sobriety, but for all-out activism. “We’re going to have to actively stand up for one another,” Oliver insisted. “And it can’t just be sounding off on the internet or sharing think pieces or videos like this one that echo around your bubble.”

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How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals

It was an ironic sentiment, coming from Oliver—a public figure who has benefited, perhaps even more than his fellow comedians, from the public’s love of sounding off on the internet/sharing think pieces/embedding videos/etc. But it was also appropriate. Oliver, from the earliest days of Last Week Tonight, has declared one thing above all to be his enemy: apathy. He has long been dissatisfied with anger and indignation alone; his shows have generally doubled as calls to action. (Remember when, after a segment on net neutrality, Last Week Tonight viewers crashed the FCC’s website?)

In that, Oliver is both unique and in good company. Comedy, these days, tends to be inherently political. Amy Schumer talks about gun safety and women’s reproductive rights by emphasizing what happens when those things are taken away. Trevor Noah imagines what might happen were America to elect itself a despotic president. The line between “politics” and “comedy” has, overall, long been vanishing; just look at the work of Louis C.K. or Sarah Silverman or Whitney Cummings or Key & Peele or Poehler & Fey or Patton Oswalt or Samantha Bee or Leslie Jones or Ali Wong. These comedians are all making political points. They’re all operating under the assumption, on some level, that political ones are really the only kinds of points worth making.

Oliver didn’t just assume complicity among his viewers; he assumed the complicity could be converted, via the alchemy of influence, into activism.

But then there’s John Oliver, whose jokes have long gone beyond even political argumentation. Who’s insisted, again and again, on action. Who, in his final show of 2016, used his large platform to encourage his viewers to donate to organizations that will form a kind of resistance to the policies that will likely be embraced by the Trump administration. Oliver, in all this, didn’t simply assume like-mindedness on the part of his viewers; he assumed that the like-mindedness could be converted, via the alchemy of influence, into activism.

“We’re gonna need to stay here and fight,” Oliver told his viewers on Sunday, taking it for granted that the “we” in question would agree with the sentiment. “And not just in four years, but constantly.”

He added:

If you can afford the time or money, support organizations that are going to need help under a Trump administration. For instance, if you’re concerned about women’s health, donate to Planned Parenthood, or the Center for Reproductive Rights. If you don’t believe man-made global warming is a silly issue, donate to the Natural Resources Defense Council. If you don’t think refugees are a terrorist army in disguise, donate to the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Oliver also recommended making donations to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, The Trevor Project for LGBTQ youth, and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “And do check the box for recurring donations if you can,” he further exhorted his viewers. “Because this is not a short-term problem.”

It was a striking moment—not just in American politics, but in American comedy. It was comedy that insisted, on moral grounds, that there are things more important than being funny. It was comedy not just “with a conscience,” but with a political goal. And, in all that, it was a fitting conclusion to a presidential campaign that had so seamlessly blended the logic of reality television with the logic of reality—and that had so deeply muddled the line between celebrity and politics. Here was John Oliver, performer and public figure, exhorting his loyal viewers to action—and making it very difficult to tell where, precisely, the “comedian” ends and the “activist” begins.

Saturday Night Live’s Post-Trump Blues

The “cold open” of Saturday Night Live is usually the spot for the big political sketch of the evening—a recap of a debate, perhaps, or a presidential address. This weekend, as the sketch show returned for its first episode after the election of Donald Trump, audiences were given something different. A tearful Kate McKinnon, in her Hillary Clinton get-up, sat at the piano and performed the recently departed Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” Afterward, she turned to the camera and said, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.” It was an incongruous moment for the show, but an effective one—an acknowledgement of distress, firm resolve, and a need for solace after the election.

Even more interesting than McKinnon’s piano playing, though, was what it replaced—the traditional political cold open, and more specifically, an appearance by Donald Trump (currently played by Alec Baldwin on the show). Trump was the subject of almost every sketch, but he never actually appeared; he was a specter hanging over the show, waiting to be confronted. But that confrontation will have to wait, it seems, because SNL spent its first post-election episode in a state of shock, giving viewers sketches that seemed more about the defeat of Hillary Clinton than the triumph of Trump. There were moments that undoubtedly resonated, but the episode mostly gave the impression that the show is unsure of how to move forward and satirize a Trump administration.

The episode also drew understandable criticism from multiple outlets, simply because SNL is perceived as having a role in elevating Trump’s candidacy—in normalizing him, early on in his Republican primary run, by letting him host an episode on November 7, 2015. Striking a mournful tone in response to his election just a year later felt odd to some, especially since the show has never really acknowledged making an error by putting Trump on the air after NBC had severed professional ties with him for making derogatory statements about Mexicans during his campaign. The closest it came to a response was Lorne Michaels defending SNL as “nonpartisan” in an interview this past summer, plus the fact that Baldwin’s Trump impression, which replaced one by Darrell Hammond, was notably nastier this season.

In fact, the new Trump impression was scathing enough that it seems to have given Baldwin pause. He had already announced that he wouldn’t appear on last Saturday’s show, telling NPR’s Brian Lehrer that he was “trying to shed the Donald Trump cloak.” Baldwin has spoken on his own podcast about his reservations with playing the role, saying, “To do that effectively, you need to have at least some appreciation of the person ... [with Trump], I have none.” His queasiness shone through in the final pre-election SNL, where he and McKinnon broke character and frolicked in Times Square together, and he said he felt “gross” about the cruelty of his character.

That sketch had an intentionally neutral, hopeful tone, urging voters to get to the polls no matter who their preferred candidate. Conversely, McKinnon at the piano, while also optimistic (“not giving up” is a powerful message), reflects a partisanship many have wanted SNL to display for a long time. The punk spirit of the show’s rebellious early years is sometimes overstated, but SNL certainly carried an angrier tone in the days of writers like Michael O’Donoghue, a huge influence on the original cast. For too much of last season, SNL’s Trump parody was cautious, so the despair after his victory rang somewhat hollow.

Tap-dancing around Trump certainly isn’t going to help Saturday Night Live stay in the zeitgeist.

Still, the episode made a certain amount of sense. Between last season and this one, Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider were announced as SNL’s new head writers, and with them came Baldwin as Trump and a more acidic tone. Kelly is the first openly gay head writer of the show, and McKinnon is its first openly gay actress, and it follows that both would want to explore their emotional reaction to Trump’s victory given the rhetoric of his campaign. It also made sense that the show wasn’t ready to write sketches about a victorious Trump—presumably it sensed many of its viewers wouldn’t be ready to find the humor in that.

Instead, the episode focused on the liberal side of things. Its host, Dave Chappelle, starred in a brutally funny election-night sketch that showed him, and his surprise guest Chris Rock, wincing and sarcastically laughing as their white friends expressed their astonishment that racism still existed in America. The show’s “Weekend Update” segment took a similarly cynical tone, with Colin Jost and Michael Che both still joking about Hillary Clinton’s low likability ratings (as well as Trump’s perceived threat to democracy).

The episode really belonged to Chappelle, a figure rarely seen on TV since he walked away from the third season of his hit Chappelle’s Show in 2005. Outside of McKinnon’s cold open, the most memorable moment was Chappelle’s 11-minute monologue, which touched on the election, his own celebrity, and most importantly, the departure of Barack Obama from the White House, and the pride Chappelle felt in his administration over the last eight years. In his monologue Chappelle argued that Americans should give Trump a chance, as long as the president-elect returned the favor to the people of color, LGBTQ community, and everyone else fearful of his rise to power.

Chappelle won’t be on the show next week, though. With Baldwin’s performance, SNL clawed its way back into the zeitgeist, but now it has to stay there, and tap-dancing around Trump certainly isn’t going to help in that regard. After one of the strangest political weeks in history, SNL spoke to its audience and told them not to give up. With more such strangeness likely to follow, SNL shouldn’t give up either.

Popular Culture's Failed Presidential Campaign

The election of Donald Trump signifies a lot of things—is one of them a rebuke to popular culture’s political influence? Hillary Clinton lined up A-list entertainers for fundraising, endorsements, and performances, from Katy Perry to Lena Dunham to Bruce Springsteen to Beyoncé and Jay Z. Donald Trump, a TV star himself, boasted fewer well-known entertainers in his camp, and in the campaign’s final days made fun of Clinton for relying on celebrities.

David J. Jackson, a political science professor at Bowling Green State University, studies the influence of celebrities on elections. In a 2015 survey of 804 likely general-election voters in Ohio, he asked people whether particular celebrity endorsements would make people more or less likely to support a candidate. In almost all the cases, the net effect of any particular endorsement on a sample of the general electorate was negative—voters were less likely to support the endorsed candidate. But the effect often switched to positive when you just focused on demographics already favorable to any given celebrity.

I spoke with him on Thursday for a post-mortem on celebrity’s role in the election. This conversation has been edited.

Spencer Kornhaber: You’ve studied the intersection of politics and celebrity and popular culture for a long time. What were the things to know about the subject going into this election?

David Jackson: Initially my research focused on looking at the effect of celebrity endorsements on beliefs about particular topics. What that research had shown was that celebrities taking political positions that were popular could make those positions more popular, or celebrities taking positions that were unpopular could make those positions less unpopular. But there wasn’t a tremendous amount of data showing moving from agree to disagree or disagree to agree. In other words, a reinforcement.

Bono said some very positive things about George W Bush’s policies on AIDS in Africa. I’d survey young people, and young people weren’t a fan of Bush, but when Bono said something about him, it didn’t make them more likely to agree with it, it just made them less likely to disagree with it. So that’s something.

More recently, I’ve begun looking at endorsements of particular candidates. In a survey we did on likely voters in Ohio in 2015, we asked about a bunch of traditional endorsers—The Cleveland Plan Dealer, New York Times, UAW, NRA—but a bunch of celebrities as well. The greatest percentage of people said that celebrity endorsements would have no effect. But there were some who said it would make them more or less likely to support a candidate. In every case, if you subtract the less likely from the more, then that effect is negative [on voters’ likelihood to support the endorsed candidate]. The smallest effect is George Clooney, who was only negative by around 9/10ths of a percent. And the two least effective, or more negative, were Ted Nugent and Beyoncé, who became fairly significant towards the end of the campaign.

But in Ted Nugent, if you only look at people who are sympathetic to the Tea Party, [his endorsement] goes from being a negative to a positive. Trace Adkins, a country star who was the winner of The Celebrity Apprentice, if you look at just country and western fans, he becomes positive, whereas overall he’s negative. Oprah Winfrey, among African Americans only, positive effect; over the electorate, overall negative effect.

The suggestion in terms of strategy is that candidates have to deploy their celebrities to the selective, appropriate audience. A lot of the thinking comes from marketing research about celebrity endorsements as well: You want someone who might be influential amongst your target audience if you’re trying to sell ‘em cars or coffee. Same thing is true of if you’re trying to persuade them to vote for a candidate.

Now, towards the end of the campaign, I don’t think Ted Nugent was out there trying to persuade people in Michigan for Trump. Or that Beyoncé, Bon Jovi, Springsteen, Jay Z, Katy Perry, that late in the game were trying to persuade people. They were trying to energize people to go out and vote. And that was quite an uphill battle for the Clinton campaign to begin with, because the energy and enthusiasm gap was in favor of Trump.

“Perhaps celebrities are [now] perceived as part of ‘the establishment.’”

Analysis from less sophisticated places is [going to be] what they said in 2004: Lots of celebrities endorsed Kerry, Kerry lost, therefore celebrities either caused it—which was the worst analysis—or had no effect, which was equally lazy analysis. It’s illogical to say that celebrities cost her the election, though they didn’t win her the election.

Kornhaber: From what you’re saying, though, it is fair to think that celebrities could’ve had a somewhat negative effect overall for Clinton. Especially given that Trump was going around trash-talking the ones who endorsed her.

Jackson: Sure. Lately there’s been some folks throwing this hypothesis out there saying celebrities now may be perceived not just as wealthy pampered people [to whom] a lot of people say, “Fuck you, I don’t wanna listen to what you have to say.” Now they’ve actually been involved in so many campaigns—since 1992, when [Bill] Clinton went on Arsenio Hall—perhaps celebrities are perceived as part of “the establishment.” Their endorsement of Clinton may have had a detrimental effect in that respect. Trump was perceived and promoted as an anti-establishment candidate.

I argued initially when that hypothesis was presented that Trump was critiquing her use of celebrities because he didn’t have any, that it was just a reaction to [only] having Scott Baio, the soap opera actress selling avocados, the Duck Dynasty guy, and Kirstie Alley but then she changed her mind. I don’t know to what extent that was a strategic choice because they were believing the rhetoric that celebrities were representative of the establishment. That hypothesis remains untested but certainly has some face validity.

Kornhaber: There are a couple different ways celebrities can support a candidate: They can raise money, they can speak out, they can do what Jay Z and Beyoncé did in those final days and perform. What are your thoughts on the different forms of celebrity activism?

Jackson: The classic example of the most effective celebrity endorsement was Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama during the primary of ‘07-‘08. There were some economists who estimate that that was worth a million votes in the primaries, and that’s pretty meaningful. She also hosted a fundraiser which raised a few million bucks. She wasn’t performing for him per se, but her not having endorsed anybody beforehand probably added to the value of that endorsement. Because once you’ve endorsed a hundred candidates you’re just that guy who endorses.

The difference between performance and endorsement, it mostly goes back to persuasion and energizing the base and trying to get out the vote. At the end, who knows what effect it had? I don’t know if anybody measured it. Jay Z and Beyoncé’s performance was in Cleveland: Ohio went 52-44 against Hillary, African American turnout was down. It’s really hard to say, there aren’t a lot of people in political science still who will actually ask these questions. I guess I should’ve been outside the arena in Cleveland giving out surveys.

Kornhaber: I think some people will be surprised that in the survey you did of likely voters in Ohio, Beyoncé was the most polarizing celebrity, having the greatest negative effect on a general sample. What determines a celebrity’s effect on people politically?

Jackson: I can speak in general terms, I don’t necessarily want to say anything about Beyoncé. Certain factors matter in terms of celebrity endorsements. The first threshold is if the person is recognized and well-known. You would think that that’s a given because they wouldn’t be a celebrity otherwise, but there are plenty of people who are celebrities within specific communities that aren’t elsewhere.

The second seems to be, is the person well liked? If not, the endorsement could be very negative. There are plenty of people who are famous, but people don't have positive feelings towards them. The third threshold that seems to matter sometimes is credibility. Is the celebrity perceived of as actually knowing something about the issue they’re talking about? But credibility doesn't seem to be essential, although a guy like Bono has been perceived as knowing what he’s talking about.

In the survey data, we took an actual statement that Kim Kardashian said, a critique of Obama for not referring to the events of 1915 as a genocide against the Armenian people. Her saying that makes people [in general] less likely to agree with the statement. But if we only look at people who know she is, who also have positive feelings towards her, it switches the direction. We look at a bunch of other celebrities and for almost every one of them it works the same way. Which is to say, overall, either no effect or negative effect, but once you add in recognition and positive feelings, the correlation becomes positive.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, and we’re finally getting it down to that granularity. It’s hardly rocket science, but somebody’s gotta prove it the first time.

Kornhaber: What’s the impact on a celebrity when they speak up for a politician?

Jackson: It has an effect. We’re a 50/50 country when it comes to presidential candidates. You pick one and you’ve inherently offended the other 50 percent. I think this time, with Donald Trump’s controversial comments throughout the campaign, the same sort of self-preservation concerns that drove guys like Paul Ryan to vote for the nominee of his party but not endorse him, motivated celebrities too.

“The guys who voted for Trump aren’t going to listen to Bruce Springsteen. They might listen to [his] music, but it’s just another rich guy.”

Kirstie Allie, not exactly an A-lister anymore, initially supported Trump. And then after the comments on the bus, took it back. So our understanding of the celebrity endorsement process is becoming more sophisticated from a scholarly perspective, and I also think it’s becoming more sophisticated from the actual celebrities’ perspective.

Kornhaber: Does the political split in the electorate naturally also mirror the divides in who regards which celebrities negatively and positively?

Jackson: Probably. What I’ve been hearing a lot of intelligent thought about has been this general sorting going on in the country. Some people refer to it as people putting themselves in bubbles, just a critical way of saying people tend to connect with and be with people who are more like them. I think that comes down to partisanship and ideology, and that then is connected with cultural and entertainment preferences.

When I was 15 years old—who gets attracted to Walter Mondale as an inspirational figure? I did. And I worked on that campaign. And I also loved Neil Young. And when Neil Young seemed to endorse Reagan, it broke my heart. I’m like, “I just assumed we’d all agree on everything.” But increasingly that [agreeing on everything] is the case. People encase themselves in echo chambers of preference-and-bias-affirming friends and culture. Going to a Dixie Chicks Concert kind of became a political statement. Republicans don’t go see Michael Moore movies. And maybe that’s why MSBC is so much like Fox News sounded in 2012. Like, “How could this have happened, I don’t know anyone who voted for him!” Exactly.

Kornhaber: Trump is a celebrity. What role do you think that played?

Jackson: [After the election] I was thinking about how people would say, “Celebrity endorsements don’t work.” Well, that’s only if you look at the Clinton side and do so simplistically. That would require ignoring the fact that the winner of the electoral college vote has no public-policy experience, has never held elective office—and probably has the highest name-recognition of any challenger ever because of his experience with New York City celebrity tabloid media and his popular television show. We just elected a celebrity.

It seems like it’s a one-off concept, because how many of him are there? This guy has been in the American mind since the ‘80s and ‘90s right? To build that level of name recognition and brand recognition, I don’t know who else there is like that. Nonetheless it proves that celebrity status matters.

Kornhaber: But some celebrities are seen as establishment and some aren’t.

Jackson: The guys who voted for Trump aren’t going to listen to Bruce Springsteen. What I mean is, they might listen to Bruce Springsteen’s music but if you tell them who to vote for, it’s just another rich guy.  I mean, Chris Christie has seen him a hundred times in concert. He doesn’t agree with him, obviously, but he probably tears up when he hears “Born to Run.” So somebody is simultaneously able to receive a celebrity’s creation positively and still not be influenced by their political positions.

Kornhaber: It’s interesting because Springsteen did perform for Hillary, but only on the very last day of the campaign, whereas he performed for Obama and Kerry with numerous concerts.

Jackson: You’re right. It kind of personifies the way a lot of people in the Democratic or liberal side of things felt about Hillary. They waited, and then when it became too late people started coming home.

I don’t know if this means anything, but he chose to do “Thunder Road” and I thought he would actually change the last line of that song—“it’s a town full of losers and we’re pulling out of here to win.” That’s a bleak little number. And he also did “Dancing in the Dark” and that’s a bleak little song too. I wonder about the song choice. There’s no way to suggest it had any effect.

Kornhaber: Yeah, it was kind of a solemn performance.

Jackson: It didn’t seem like he had the same glee he had performing for Obama. He was clearly reading the speech he gave in the middle. It was somber. And then one time he turned around and made some extra-loud noise on the guitar to rile up the crowd, and that was it.

Leonard Cohen and Zadie Smith: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye

Carl Wilson | Slate

“[Leonard Cohen’s] poetry, good as it was, was more provincial, torn between classicism and modernism. But when combined with song—with the limited musicality he used to its utmost (founded on some lessons from a passing flamenco guitarist) and his exquisite taste in accompanists and background singers—it became something that vaulted both forms, to produce his own singular genre, a wedding of worship and blasphemy, of sex and sacrament, of politics and privacy.

Zadie Smith’s Memory Tricks

Alexandra Schwartz | The New Yorker

“Smith hangs the moment over her novel like a portent, a warning about memory and the distorting tricks it can play with the sense of self one takes—or makes—from the past. As the book progresses, she interleaves chapters set in the present with ones that deal with memories of college, of home, of Tracey. It is a graceful technique, this metronomic swinging back and forth in time, calling to mind the sankofa bird, one of the African symbols that the narrator’s mother holds dear.”

There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization

Kwame Anthony Appiah | The Guardian

“Culture—like religion and nation and race—provides a source of identity for contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent.”

Donald Trump and Rap Music

Tom Breihan | Stereogum

“During a hellacious, intolerable day like this one, my one little sunbeam mirage of hope: Trump has interacted with rap music without treating it like a blight on humanity. That’s probably nothing, but given that he’s pretty much been elected on a platform of explicit racism, it’s all I’ve got to hold onto today.”

25 Years Ago, Magic Johnson Announced He Had HIV

Justin Tinsley | The Undefeated

“Johnson is the greatest point guard to ever walk the planet. A five-time world champion, three-time league and Finals MVP, and a man who played in the Finals nine of his 12 professional seasons, or for 75 percent of his career. On that autumn day, Johnson announced he had HIV. He stood at a podium in Inglewood, California, flanked by then-NBA commissioner David Stern, Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss, and Kareem-Abdul Jabbar. For a man staring a death-sentence disease in the face, he seemed remarkably at peace.”

There Will Always Be Bookstores

Jeremy Garber | Literary Hub

“We are purveyors of the printed word, champions of free expression and unfettered speech, conduits for ideas and wisdom collected throughout the millennia, curators of bound, stitched, glued, and stapled bastions of thoughts and feelings, arbiters of the profound and profane, and unabashed stewards of culture, knowledge, and progress.”

Stitching Motherhood

Laura Maw | Hazlitt

“We are told our mothers’ stories through the fabrics they wear and pass to us: the bucket-shaped handbag my mother bought at 21 when she made a new life for herself in the city; the scratchy cardigans my grandmother knitted for herself after the war was over; the leaf-print dressing gown passed through three generations. Fragmented anecdotes unfold as we wear them ... these simultaneous histories stretch out across the fabric in palimpsests, a perpetual re-writing of life.”

Inside the 21st-Century Craze for Redesigning Everything

Rob Walker | The New York Times Magazine

“Redesigns fail when they address the wrong problem—or something that really wasn’t a problem in the first place. While progress may entail change, change does not necessarily guarantee progress. But a clever redesign, one that addresses the right problem in an intelligent fashion, improves the world, if just by a bit.”



Queens of the Stone Age

Sarah Marshall | The New Republic

“In the stoner-comedy canon, women have traditionally been visible only as enforcers of social order: shrewish wives, disappointed girlfriends, disciplinarian mothers. Such stereotypical casting persists largely because social norms continue to dictate that women have to keep their wits about them, not just to succeed in the world, but to be accepted or stay safe.”

A War Movie That's Hard to Watch for the Wrong Reasons

More than anything, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a film about authenticity: that strange, special quality that gets assigned to people, or experiences, that meet some indefinable standard of reality. The movie’s titular character (Joe Alwyn) is an Iraq War soldier who was caught on camera committing an act of bravery, defending his commanding officer from gunfire on all sides. Billy Lynn’s moment of heroism has made him a quasi-celebrity, so he and his company have been brought to a football stadium in Dallas to be celebrated, marched on the field at halftime, and held up as an example of the war’s nobility.

Billy and his fellow soldiers are presented as “authentic” heroes. They’re proof of a national strength of character that many Americans were searching for in 2004, the year Ang Lee’s film (based on a novel by Ben Fountain) takes place. The story is a work of Bush-era satire, a subversion of the narrative that administration tried to sell the country about the Iraq War and the country’s appreciation for its soldiers. As a result, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk feels at once dated and essential—an indictment of the cheap exhortations of patriotism that pervaded the nation in that election year. It’s a film about how easily Americans can overlook the humanity of veterans, and suppress compassion for them, in the name of some greater good. And it’s about how easily that greater good can be exploited in the name of authenticity.

Most of the criticism of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk has revolved around Lee filming it in a super high-definition format (120 frames per second, five times the speed of a normal film), an odd approach for a film that largely takes place in a football stadium. There are some flashbacks to Iraq, and moments of far grander spectacle during the halftime show, but it’s still a curious choice given that high-definition filmmaking seems to suit CGI creations and fantasy battle sequences far better than ordinary moments of dialogue. Lee’s filmmaking approach was so unusual that his film mostly won’t be seen in its intended format, since few theaters are equipped with the proper projectors.

Still, it’s worth noting the intent of the 120 frames-per-second photography, which breaks through the fantasy of filmmaking and powerfully removes audiences from the fictional world they’re trying to be part of. In ultra high-definition, actors can’t wear makeup, and they can only do a limited number of takes because of the increased expense of the equipment. It’s easier to pick out incongruous details, or feel like you’re watching something filmed on a soundstage. Lee may have wanted to highlight the inherent unreality of Lynn’s experience at the football stadium, to remind his audience that these soldiers in their dress uniforms are, in many ways, no different from the rest of us. That they’re just as prone to depression, anxiety, and second-guessing themselves and their country.

Still, the high frame rate is just too distracting to work. As with Peter Jackson’s Hobbit series (shot at twice the speed of normal films), you can’t shake the sense that you’re watching a chintzy-looking soap opera. Even in regular definition, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is strangely flat and stagey, too eager to hammer its points home with obvious exchanges of dialogue or clunky, metaphor-laden flashbacks. There’s more to Billy’s act of heroism, of course, than meets the eye, but you could have guessed that from the moment his story begins—this is a film that’s virtually begging its viewers to look beyond the surface.

Billy and his company are on a “victory tour” sponsored by the Bush government, trying to boost American morale as the Iraq War begins to sink into quagmire. They’re led by Sergeant David Dime (a sardonic Garrett Hedlund), who constantly reminds them that they’ll be returning to the front lines soon. Billy’s sister Kathryn (Kristen Stewart), the lone anti-war member of his family, is urging him to seek an honorable discharge. Meanwhile, Billy’s company has an agent, Albert (Chris Tucker), who is trying to sell their story for Hollywood and earn them some easy money. If the film has a villain, it’s Norm Oglesby (Steve Martin), the owner of the football team who is eager to use Billy as a prop in his halftime show to gin up support for a war he believes in; if the movie has a hero, it’s Shroom (Vin Diesel), Billy’s fallen comrade, a gentle, poetry-spouting soldier who died the day Billy became a national icon.

There are moments where Lee’s ideas connect, but they’re all dialogue-free.

Each of these characters is approaching Billy’s story from a different angle and trying to mold it into something easy. Albert wants to inflate every moment of drama from Billy’s life, to turn it into a tale fit for the big screen. Oglesby wants Billy and his men to march around the field for him in the name of “the greater good,” the same abstraction he believes drives every soldier to enlist in the first place. Billy has a flirtation with a cheerleader (Makenzie Leigh) at the stadium and entertains the thought of running away with her. But he knows part of the appeal for her is the idea that he’s shipping off tomorrow—that she can love the idea of him, not the actual person.

Separately, these elements are all fascinating. Together, they don’t add up to a great movie, since they’re undone by Lee’s staid visuals and the wooden, rehearsed quality of most of the performances (outside of the terrific Hedlund). There are moments where Lee’s ideas connect, but they’re all dialogue-free—like when the vapid, glossy showmanship of the stadium’s halftime show blends together with the horrifying memories of violence in Billy’s mind. The film may well serve as a reminder of troubled times ahead in the U.S., and of how brazenly the government has tried to sell its citizens a false narrative before, but any relevant insight feels coincidental rather than prescient. In the end, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime is best enjoyed as a curio: as a bizarre effort by Lee to tell a story of artifice in the most artificial way possible.

Will Trump Help Make The Daily Show Great Again?

Trevor Noah tends to be at his best—as a comedian, and as a political observer—when he can apply his perspective as a non-American to the assorted antics of the American political system. Noah’s extended riff on candidate Donald Trump’s resemblance to an African dictator might have been the most culturally enduring observation he made during his first year at the helm of The Daily Show; his other, smaller observations, though—his unique ability to question not just the whats, but also the whys and the wtfs of American politics—have also helped him to stand in contrast to his fellow late-night comedians.

So far, however, that perspective hasn’t helped Noah to gain viewers. He hasn’t been righteously angry, in the manner of Samantha Bee, or indignantly wonky, in the manner of John Oliver, or impishly cheeky, in the manner of Stephen Colbert and Jimmys Fallon and Kimmel. He has been, instead, for the most part, measured, affecting a kind of wondering awe at the idiosyncrasies of American politics. He has come off, at times, as a little bit cold, even about the most searing of hot-button issues, with a take on the world that has often prioritized the anthropological over the purely comical. Noah is arch rather than angry; this is his biggest gift, but also his biggest challenge.

Thursday’s Daily Show, however—the one that aired on the day that found many Americans becoming slightly more used to the term “President-Elect Trump”—hinted at the ways Noah’s particular perspective might, during a Trump administration, prove particularly valuable. Noah, in a segment about the day’s incredibly awkward meeting between the current president and the future one, first went for the low-hanging comedic fruit: I mean, the awkwardness of the whole thing! No but, really: THE AWKWARDNESS. Noah aired the news conference that followed the closed-door meeting between rivals-turned-reluctant frenemies Barack Obama and Donald Trump. And then: “That is one hell of a performance,” he said of the men’s insistence that their meeting was mutually respectful and cordial—“especially by president Obama. Which means at least one black person should get nominated for an Oscar this year.”

“It’s like if your dad dies, and your mom starts dating at the funeral.”

It was funny, but it was also much more. Because the meat of the segment found Noah pointing out not the social awkwardness so much as ... the meeting’s more systemic awkwardness. The timing of the whole thing. The whiplash of it. The general fact that the current U.S. election schedule mandates a nearly two-year-long presidential campaign that will manage to be simultaneously leisurely and frenetic … and then follows the whole thing up, just hours after the election itself, with an immediate and urgent need for governmental transition. It all happens so quickly! Noah noted. Literally overnight, for the good of the country, President Obama and President-Elect Trump went from sworn enemies to hand-shaking pals. “It’s like if your dad dies,” Noah said, “and your mom starts dating at the funeral.”

And then Noah went even more macro. “I feel like this whole process is backward, people,” he said. “The American election takes two years—two years!—when really it should only be like 12 weeks. But then the transition, taking over the entire American government—which should take two years—takes like 10 weeks. Meet the guy, sign the thing, ‘Nukes are over there,’ ‘Alright, don’t fuck it up. Thank you. Good luck. Good luck.’”

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It was an extremely valid point: The timeline is skewed. The process is jarring. Elections, definitely, take too long; the transitions, probably, take not long enough. Noah’s comment, here, was designed not necessarily to provoke guffaws or even outrage, but rather to provoke … thought. Critical assessment. It was wonkery in the guise of comedy. It was good.

The critical narrative that has risen up around Noah—the one that attempts to explain his fallen ratings, compared to the high-flying tenure of Stewart—has two prongs. On the one hand, the explanation goes, The Daily Show’s progressive audience has had (comparatively) less to rage against during Obama’s presidency than it had during the Bush years. And on the other, there’s the fact that Noah seems to be, much like Obama himself, constitutionally calm: His perspective is more observational—and more antiseptic—than that of his perma-angered predecessor. And late-night audiences, the argument further goes, haven’t been looking to comedians to explain the world so much as they’ve been looking to them to channel its many outrages. They’ve been seeking catharsis, not analysis.

The Trump presidency, however, may well change both of those dynamics. On the one hand, it may give Noah himself more fodder for righteous anger. But on the other, it could well make audiences more appreciative of Noah’s unique capacity to put the American system in its global context. Trump’s victory has been called, by Trump himself, “Brexit plus plus plus.” And it has, as any presidential victory will, widespread implications for the stability of the world. It has also occasioned, however—for all Americans, but particularly for the young progressives who have traditionally formed the core of The Daily Show’s audience—some deep soul-searching. The Trump transition is, and will continue to be, into January and likely beyond, a moment of shake-up and disruption and strategic thinking about what the United States has been and should be. Assumptions will be questioned; conventions will be abandoned; convictions will be doubted; very few things, it seems, will be held entirely sacred.

As all that happens, Trevor Noah—the man who locates himself both outside the American system and within it—may be poised, as is traditional, to help his viewers rage at the world, and to help them laugh at it. Just importantly, though, he may also be poised to help them re-imagine it.

Leonard Cohen’s Dark Wisdom

Anyone despairing about the world, humanity, and evil can turn to Leonard Cohen’s catalogue for the comfort of confirmation. He sang of dark beating light, of human attachment as flimsy and breakable, of deep fears being validated inexorably, of the greatest temptation being the embrace of defeat. He cracked jokes and sang of romance, but as part of the larger, grimmer project we’re all engaged in: “There’s a lover in the story / But the story’s still the same,” he explained in song this year. This unflinching worldview underlay his many virtues—his cutting poetic sensibility, his cracked and ever-deepening voice, his flair for flamenco, and his melodies that became an unending source of inspiration across the musical landscape.

He has died at age 82, shortly after he said in interviews and song he was ready to die, shortly after he’d written a farewell note to his ailing ex and lyrical muse Marianne Ihlen offering, “it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon.” Immediate comparisons between his passing and David Bowie’s are fair; like Bowie’s Blackstar, Cohen’s October release You Want It Darker is a very moving late-in-life work that sounds preoccupied by death. “I’m leaving the table,” he announced in the magnificent grumble his voice had become. “I’m out of the game.”

That album, though, was not unique in its themes of surrender. Surrender has in fact been the preoccupation of Cohen’s career, a career that began in poetry, saw him move to New York City’s folk scene in his 30s, and continued until death save a few hiatuses, including a years-long stint at a Zen monastery where he practiced the kind of personal abdication he always sang about. “If you want a lover, I’ll do anything you ask me to / And if you want another kind of love, I’ll wear a mask for you,” he began on 1988’s “I’m Your Man,” going on to offer a bottomless list of concessions to a woman: “If you want to work the street alone, I’ll disappear for you.”

This view of love as imprisonment and identity theft gave his breakup songs their edge. Many of his best works are wry, smug farewells that darkly anticipate a return of agency. There’s the extraordinarily intimate “Famous Blue Raincoat,” a friendly resignation letter to the man who has made him a cuckold: “If you ever come by here for Jane or for me / Your enemy is sleeping / And his woman is free.” There are also the classics “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” and  “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” all relishing in the transitory: “Let's not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie.”

The same fascination with submission carried over into his songs about God and humanity and society, though in a bitterer fashion because the relationship between controller and controlled was more permanent and more cruel. The Holocaust recurred as a motif, as in the deceptively jaunty “Dance Me to the End of Love,” inspired by string players at the death camps, or in “You Want It Darker,” a frank indictment of God. He had a habit of giving melody to prayers, too, as on “Who By Fire,” where he extended a Yom Kippur chant about divine-ordained manners of death to include barbiturates and “high ordeal.”

In the current American political moment, many listeners may want to turn to Cohen’s late ’80s and early ’90s work, whose unhinged and synthetic-sounding airings of modern disaffection offer not comfort but understanding. There is “First We Take Manhattan,” which opens, “They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom / For trying to change the system from within” and goes on to hint at the kind of rebellion we may now be witnessing by resentful workaday masses. There is “The Future,” where Cohen embodies the panic of wanting to opt out of history’s march: “I've seen the future, brother / It is murder.” There is “Everybody Knows,” whose dread hit me in the stomach last night tabbing between news of Cohen’s death and political headlines:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows



Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied

Everybody got this broken feeling

Like their father or their dog just died

And there is “Anthem,” which David Remnick keyed upon in his recent revelatory New Yorker profile of the singer. As the arrangement sways and builds, Cohen sings of war and death and peace as unending cycles, but he also offers this: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” The hope in his catalogue is in that idea of light through the cracks, in the notion of the holy and the broken Hallelujah, in prostrating before indifferent forces but also raging against them. In “Suzanne,” the song that began his career, he suggested that religion’s promise was that freedom lay only in death. But still in life, like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, Cohen tried in his way to be free.

The Epic Intimacy of Arrival

Arrival, the remarkable new film by Denis Villeneuve, begins aptly enough with an arrival—though perhaps not the kind you would expect. A baby is born, and her mother, played by Amy Adams, explains in voiceover, “I used to think to this was the beginning of your story.” We see the girl’s life, in flashback—games of cowboy, arguments, reconciliations—as her mother continues, “I remember moments in the middle ... and this was the end.” We see the girl, now a teenager, in a hospital bed. Then we see the bed empty.

The sequence—a brief life encompassed in still briefer summary—is surely among the most heartbreaking since Michael Giacchino’s magnificently versatile waltz carried us through the “Married Life” segment of Up. And while at first it appears to be mere backstory for Adams’s character, it is in fact much more, perhaps the most crucial thread in Villeneuve’s intricately woven film.

Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a world-class linguist whom the Army once asked for help with a Farsi translation. “You made quick work of those insurgent videos,” a Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) reminds her; “you made quick work of those insurgents,” she rebuts. The Army needs her help once again, although this time the work is decidedly more esoteric: Aliens have arrived on Earth in a dozen giant craft scattered across the globe, one of them in the wilds of Montana. Colonel Weber would like Louise to come with him, learn the aliens’ language, and ask them why they’re here. On the flight to Big Sky Country, she is introduced to her partner in this endeavor, a genial physicist named Ian Donelly (Jeremy Renner, looking relieved that no one expects him to lug around a bow and quiver).

Villeneuve clearly knows his Godzilla, and like Ishiro Honda he takes his time before revealing his leviathan. As the chopper bearing the scientists skims over the plains, the alien craft emerges, literally, from the mist: a 1,500-foot edifice of what looks like black rock floating weightlessly just above the ground, like a giant skipping-stone poised on one tip.

Accompanied by soldiers and technicians, Louise and Ian enter the craft by means of a square shaft in its base. Once inside, however, gravity releases them and then shifts 90 degrees, such that the shaft is now a corridor and one of its walls the floor. It is a dizzying moment for Louise and Ian, and no less so for the audience, like when Fred Astaire danced his way up the wall in Royal Wedding. As Ian responded to the sudden inversion with “holy fuck,” I was right there with him.

The aliens’ arrival has enveloped America in a sense of dread and anxiety not seen since—well, this entire political season.

At the end of the corridor they meet their hosts, two giant, squid-like beings that float on the other side of a transparent barrier. Louise and Ian call them “heptapods” owing to their seven symmetrical tentacles, and name the two “Abbott” and “Costello,” because, well, why not? Efforts at verbal communication are unsuccessful, but written language proves more promising. From their starfish-like hands, the heptapods can emit swirling circles of inky gas, each one of them—as Louise concludes—a fully formed sentence with neither beginning nor end. Communication with the creatures moves slowly, but it at least begins to move.

Like Villeneuve’s recent films Sicario and Prisoners, the movie is at once evocative and mysterious. As events unspool, we can sense that—like Louise with the heptapods—we do not entirely comprehend them. (We are correct in this.) As she and Ian try to decode the creatures’ language, they are constrained in their efforts by Colonel Weber and, especially, a CIA agent named Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg). Until we know more of the aliens’ intentions—conquest? tourism? cup of sugar?—there is much concern that we do not accidentally teach them more about ourselves than we learn about them.

Moreover, there are geopolitics to consider. Eleven other craft hover elsewhere on Earth: Shanghai, Siberia, Sudan, Sierre Leone, and even a few places not starting with “s.” What if China or Russia makes a breakthrough with the aliens first and uses what it learns against the United States? What if shots are fired, bringing alien wrath down upon the whole globe? Already their arrival has enveloped America in a sense of dread and anxiety not seen since—well, this entire political season. Looting breaks out in the cities; Pentecostals self-immolate; talk-radio tough guys demand “a show of force, a shot across their bows.”

The look of Arrival is stately and elegant; its pace, sober and deliberate. This is Villeneuve’s first collaboration with the cinematographer Bradford Young, who shot my two favorite films of 2014 in A Most Violent Year and Selma. The score, by the frequent Villeneuve contributor Jóhann Jóhannsson, is multifaceted and occasionally spellbinding, not least when its low horns boom with menace, almost like an alien voice themselves.

Arrival is Amy Adams’s movie from the first frame to the last.

The script is by Eric Heisserer, who cunningly adapted and expanded it from a short story by Ted Chiang. It’s tempting to describe Arrival as “thinking person’s science fiction.” And while I will not descend to such hokey nomenclature, there’s a reason you’ll probably see that phrase plenty in conjunction with the film.

It would be a disservice to describe how the plot unfolds any further, as Villeneuve releases information gradually and viewers will likely clue into the film’s true meaning at different points in its evolution. Suffice to say that Arrival is a “twist” movie, but the twist is more than a mere gimmick. Like Christopher Nolan’s Memento, it is central not only to the film’s narrative but also to its moral architecture—which, like Memento’s, concerns itself with questions of time, memory, and human choice. This is precisely the kind of science-fiction movie, at once epic and intimate, that Interstellar tried (and failed) to be.

The entire cast is strong, but Arrival is Adams’s movie from the first frame to the last. I confess that I initially thought that her gifts might be wasted on such space-invader fare, but the performance she gives is mesmerizingly open, by turns uplifting and sorrowful. If you are unmoved by the film’s conclusion, then you are made of considerably harder stuff than I.

As awards season gets under way, there are several promising movies visible hovering on the horizon. But for now, the best film of the year, ambitious in conception and extraordinary in execution, has arrived.

What Europe's Far Right Sees in Trump's Win

The congratulations began even before it was clear Donald Trump would triumph in the American presidential election, and they continued the next day as leaders of the European far right, who’d made common cause with some of the Republican presidential nominee’s stated policies, reveled in what they predicted would be their own victories next year.

There was Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France, who called Trump’s election a “great movement across the world.” Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who in the 1970s revived an ideology discredited in Europe by World War II and transformed it from a minor embarrassing irritant into a real contender against the dominant center-left and center-right ideologies in France, said: “Today the United States, tomorrow France.” In the U.K., Nigel Farage, the head of the U.K. Independence Party who had championed Brexit and campaigned alongside Trump, said, he “couldn’t be happier.” In the Netherland, Geert Wilders, who heads the Party for Freedom, called Trump’s win “historic.” In Germany, Frauke Petry, the head of Alternative for Germany (AfD), said Trump’s victory “changes the USA, Europe, and the world.” And in Austria, which is on the verge of electing a far-right leader to its highest, but largely ceremonial, position of president, Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of the Freedom Party, said voters had punished “the political left and the aloof and sleazy establishment.”

We don’t yet know whether a President Trump would govern the way candidate Donald Trump said he would. Many of the more controversial elements of his policies--a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico to keep away immigrants, a total ban on Muslims entering the U.S.—were dispensed with in the last days of his campaign against Hillary Clinton. But after his victory, Trump reiterated a consistent theme from his campaign, tweeting: “The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again.” It’s both those elements that Trump’s admirers on the European far-right find the most attractive.

Describing his own role in popularizing an anti-globalization view that is sweeping the Western world, Farage, the UKIP leader, told the BBC: “I'm the catalyst for the downfall of the Blairites, the Clintonites, the Bushites, and all these dreadful people who, working hand-in-glove with Goldman Sachs and everybody else, have made themselves rich and ruined our countries.”

And while UKIP’s immediate prospect of winning a general election in the U.K., or even emerge as a major opposition party, is limited, the same is not true of its ideological allies in the rest of Western Europe. France, Germany, and the Netherlands all hold elections in 2017 and their current leaders, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and Mark Rutte, face re-energized far-right oppositions.

The Netherlands, which votes in general elections next March, is the first place we’ll likely whether the emergence Trump (or, indeed, Brexit) can be emulated in continental Europe. Rutte, the prime minister of the center-right Liberals, governs in a coalition with the center-left Labour party. Polls show Wilders’s Freedom Party running neck-and-neck with the Liberals, but it is unlikely to be able to cobble together a coalition government even if it emerges as the single-biggest party in parliament.  

France votes in its presidential election in April and May of next year. Hollande, the president from the Socialist Party, is deeply unpopular, and it’s unclear he’ll run. In any event, a Socialist candidate is likely to face off against a center-right candidate as well as Marine Le Pen, whose National Front is polling at about 30 percent. That’s likely to get her into the second round of voting, but possibly insufficient to vault her into the presidential palace. The National Front, despite a four-decade presence in French politics, has no seats in the National Assembly.

Germany votes next fall. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s approval ratings are at a multi-year low, but they are still above 50 percent, higher than her European counterparts and comparable to President Obama, who’s enjoying a relative honeymoon in the waning days of his presidency. Merkel, who has been chancellor for 11 years, has been hurt by her decision to open Germany’s borders to Syrians fleeing the civil war, as well as several terrorist attacks in the country over the summer. She hasn’t said whether she’ll seek re-election, but her Christian Democratic Union has lost ground in regional elections, including in her home region; among the big gainers is Petry’s AfD, which will hope to use its growing popularity amid skepticism among Germans toward immigration to be elected to Parliament for the first time.

Whether the AfD—or any of its Euroskeptic, anti-immigration allies—are able to upend expectations and form a far-right Western alliance isn’t known, but what is clear is that they see Trump’s victory in the U.S. as a roadmap for their own across Europe.

Still, Poetry Will Rise

When it was announced, early on Wednesday morning, that Donald Trump is now, also, President-Elect Trump, a poem went viral on social media. “Differences of Opinion,” the British poet Wendy Cope’s sharp evisceration of mansplaining, spoke, in its spare nine lines—eight of them rhyming couplets—to a political moment that has been defined in large part by a tense relationship both with women and with facts.

The planet goes on being round. pic.twitter.com/Yd2BgX8abG

— Courtney Enlow (@courtenlow) November 9, 2016

“Campaign in poetry; govern in prose,” the old adage goes. This moment, though, has in many ways flipped that idea: The 2016 presidential campaign was decidedly lacking in poetry. Yet in its aftermath, as Americans consider the contours of their new government, they are, often, turning to poetry. To Cope and her gallows humor. To Toni Morrison and her soaring vision of a better world. To Adam Zagajewski. To Adrienne Rich. To Riz MC. Vox, on Wednesday afternoon, published a post headlined, “Feeling terrible right now? Maybe some poetry will help.” The Huffington Post, for its part, offered “18 Compassionate Poems To Help You Weather Uncertain Times.”

There are logistical reasons for all that, certainly. Poetry’s form often means that it lends itself especially well to being screen-shotted and retyped into digestible nuggets, and then shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. But there are deeper reasons, too, why poetry is having, as it were, A Moment. I spoke with Don Share, the editor of Poetry magazine, about the role that poems have been playing for people across the political spectrum as they have wrestled with the results of the 2016 election—and of the one they might continue to play for us as we move forward. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Megan Garber: Why do you think it is that poetry seems to be resonating so deeply at this particular moment?

Don Share: Well, it’s always been speaking to people—and it’s always been speaking to people about the kinds of things they’re taking about now, because one of the things poetry is really good at is anticipating things that need discussion. Poets are kind of like—it’s a bad metaphor, but—canaries in a coal mine. They have a sense for things that are in the air. Partly because that’s what they do—they think about things that are going on—and partly it’s because they take their own personal experience and see how that fits in with what they see in the world. So a lot of people might think that poetry is very abstract, or has to do with having your head in the clouds, but poets, actually, walk on the earth. They’re grounded, feet-first, pointing forward. They’re moving around and paying attention at every moment.

And a poet wakes up and thinks, “You know, anything is possible.” They imagine things before they’re possible. The reach and power of the imagination means that poetry will always be with us, that it will always be important, that it will always be part of what goes along with our culture, our politics, our personal feelings and relationships. And, at the same time, when people are under pressure of any kind, they turn to poetry. That’s why poetry is with us at the most important occasions: weddings, funerals, anniversaries. When Kobe Bryant retired, the first thing he seems to have done was write a poem. That didn’t surprise me one bit: Sooner or later, we’ll find that poetry has been waiting for us. You get this feeling that people can call on the poets when they need to, and that’s a great moment for poets—when they have an audience because we need to know how to go about reaching the next day of our lives. And that’s something the poets spend all their time thinking about.

Garber: Do you think, given all that, we’ll see a continued rise in the public’s general interest in poetry—as people keep trying to make sense of the world’s turbulence?

Share: I do, except that I think all times are turbulent—it’s just that they’re turbulent in different ways, and for different people. So poets are always swirling around in the maelstrom, whenever there is one, and in a way we know there always is one. Take everything going on, for just one example, in Syria. The poets have been writing about that forever. And our problems in this country, before they entered the debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton—the poets were writing about what goes on in Flint, and in Detroit. A poem we published a couple of years ago, Jamaal May’s “There Are Birds Here,” was saying that what the media show us is often the bad side of something, and poets are here to say, “There’s beauty here, there’s life here, there’s brightness, redemption, love for the landscape here, there’s potential here.”

“Poets have an audience because we need to know how to go about reaching the next day of our lives.”

Garber: Are there any particular poems that seem especially relevant to you right now?

Share: The work of Danez Smith has been shared a lot in the past couple of days. And the work of Ocean Vuong. And of Javier Zamora: He’s writing about how his family, basically, crawled through a river, on their hands and knees, to get to this country, to get work, and to become citizens, and to become documented. But are there so many more poets. And they are all coming from many kinds of backgrounds, and in a way they are the fabric of the country. And they’re being heard from. And that’s in part because they’re speaking to what’s going on right now—and they’re good at it.

Garber: It’s strikes me how fluid, in all this, the lines are between “politics” and “everything else.” We have a habit, in our discussions and in our thinking, of segmenting politics off from the other realities of the world: Politics here, Art there. Politics here, Culture there. This isn’t a question specifically about poetry, but I’m curious: Do you think those categories offer a valid way of approaching things? Or do you think, given the world’s messiness, that it might be better to talk about political life in more holistic terms?

Share: I think we should. And it’s interesting that you have that feeling, as so many people do, because it actually applies to poetry. Because if we think about politics as its own realm, as so many people do, and assume that it doesn’t affect us—we’ll soon find out that we are mistaken. And poetry is like that, too. Obviously, for people who don’t spend a lot of time reading poetry, they might think of it as something that exists in a kind of corner of experience—and that’s okay, it’s natural. But the reality is that it isn’t somewhere else. That’s kind of why it exists. And poetry and politics are inevitable, yet strange, bedfellows. Because they’re both trying to address this basic human question: Why are things the way they are? Why aren’t they different? Why aren’t they better?

Poetry puts us in touch with people who are different from ourselves in a way that isn’t violent.

People who are poets are often very political; they’re often activists. We talk about political poetry as if it’s a kind of effusion about something going on, but the truth is, the heritage of poetry includes politicians. I mean, Yeats was a politician. Our greatest poets, really, have been active in what goes on in the world. And great or unknown, poets are participating in what makes a difference in the world. And if you perceive that politics is a way of making a difference, and you engage in it—and the same can be said of poetry—I mean, if it makes a difference by reaching people, then you can get something done.

I think that’s why the Obama administration had Inaugural poets. It was very important for Obama to put a poet in front of millions of people. Because politics is one way for him to express his worldview, but he was aware that poetry is a worldview in a different kind of language, one that gets through to people in places that politics can’t always reach. Sometimes we feel alienated from our politicians, and that becomes itself a political issue. And poetry works through and around that—poetry gets to us without our even realizing it’s happening. But it also feels immediate. And that’s, I think, why it means something to people.

Garber: I’ve been thinking a lot, in the past months, about the basic idea of empathy, and the way it factors into (and also, sometimes, has explicitly failed to factor into) the American political system. I figure I know the broad answer to this, but: What role do think poetry can play when it comes to encouraging empathy?

Share: What poetry does is it puts us in touch with people who are different from ourselves—and it does so in a way that isn’t violent. It’s a way of listening. When you’re reading a poem, you’re listening to what someone else is thinking and feeling and saying. It’s not a debate, where somebody punches back at it. You have to think before you speak. You have to think before you write. You have to think while you’re reading. And poetry keeps the intensity and the passion of a point of view, but in a forum where people aren’t hurting each other—it says, “Here’s what it’s like from my point of view.” All you have to do is listen to the poet.

And, in that, you don’t have to be anything other than what you are. The poem is a catalyst where you’re bringing two different kinds of people together. And at its best, when it works, there’s a kind of spark, and everyone comes away illuminated by what the spark has ignited.