Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 48

A Podcast Listener's Guide to the 2016 Election

I’m an avid podcast listener and have been unable to stop myself from devouring pods related to the election. In many ways, though, podcasts are the perfect counterbalance to other media. They’re chiller than the hot-take industrial complex, or the garbage fires happening in your Facebook feed. They’re less anxiety-inducing than the late-night comedy harangues and the 24-hour cable-news surrogate-fest. And for whatever reason, the sound of humans telling stories about themselves and how they see the world tends to be enriching, even if their perspectives or experiences differ from mine.

So if you have some time this weekend that you want to spend doing chores around the house, or going on a long walk, or just lying in bed in your PJs with some instant oatmeal, headphones, and a sleep mask (was that too specific?), here are my recommendations for some fascinating hours of listening, closely or loosely related to the 2016 election. (If you have recommendations to add to this list, please email them our way! I’ll update this post with any new discoveries.)

For thoughtful interviews with fascinating thinkers

The Ezra Klein Show

Time required: ~75 minutes per episode, 40+ episodes

This podcast is my top recommendation on this list. Klein's ideological leanings aren’t a secret (hint: I’m fairly certain he’s voting for Hillary Clinton, who was a guest). But he and his team have done an incredible job of pulling together a demographically diverse cast of fascinating interviewees from all across the ideological spectrum. The best episodes of the show (and the best podcasts on this list, generally) depart from whatever’s leading the news that week and stay away from punditry. Instead, they delve into the lives and experiences of the guests, slowly unwinding each interviewee’s perspectives on our collective political circumstances and how those came about.

I’m biased, of course, but the single greatest dissection of the 2016 presidential race I’ve heard happens in a conversation between Klein and The Atlantic’s own Molly Ball. Klein calls it the best conversation he’s had about the election. So that might be the place to start. Not every interview is likely to satisfy. If I were picking and choosing, I’d skip the interviews with Grover Norquist, Arianna Huffington, Trevor Noah, Neera Tanden, and Robert Reich (which isn’t a criticism of any of them or of Klein, who’s gotten better and better as an interviewer). I’d move the interviews with Heather McGhee, Yuval Levin, Tyler Cowen (who interviews Klein, rather than vice-versa), Alice Rivlin, Cory Booker, and Arlie Hochschild to the top of my list, all for different reasons.

Great stories that speak volumes

Us and Them: “A Confederate Reckoning” and “Islamophobia"

Time required: 70 minutes

The latest season of this West Virginia Public Broadcasting podcast ended in May, and each of these two episodes was released in 2015, but the stories feel deeply relevant to this election cycle. In “A Confederate Reckoning,” two American foreign correspondents based in Nairobi, Kenya, fly to Louisiana to explore the lingering remnants of racial disunity. And in “Islamophobia,” the podcast’s host Trey Kay visits a local mosque and tries to bring a friend along. Neither story is likely to leave you feeling hopeful about our deepest divides. Both are bracing and honest examinations of where those divides manifest.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (audiobook)

Time required: 7 hours

This book has been widely recommended, often as a deep look at the lives and perspectives of poor, white Americans. I think that both oversells and undersells what this book actually is, which is a personal history of one man (J.D. Vance), the place and the people he came from, and the journey he found himself embarking on. The book’s biggest payoff comes in its closing moments, hours after a mix of rollicking, loving, and often difficult stories about Vance's forebears and his family. Having walked his listeners through that world, having talked about the life-changing experience of becoming a Marine, he flips the lens late in the book, and starts telling his people about the world he came to discover: Yale Law School, San Francisco, and the strange conventions and customs of the moneyed elite. The audiobook version is a terrific way to experience it; Vance is an excellent narrator of his story.

(If you do want to listen to some broader, more scholarly explorations of white American identity, I’d recommend Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People, and Nancy Isenkoff’s White Trash, both also available as audiobooks.)

This American Life: “Will I Know Anyone At This Party?"

Time required: 1 hour

Don’t be fooled by the jolly musical opener sung by Neil Patrick Harris. The core of this episode is the story of a rift in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where a faction of residents are dismayed by a recent influx of immigration, and the sense they’re losing their place in the city. As usual, Zoe Chace’s excellent reporting elicits a rare candor, even from folks prone to speaking in euphemisms. And that’s before a tragedy takes the story one notch deeper.

For eclectic insights

Another Round

Time required: ~60 minutes per episode

To hear Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton laugh is to hear the sound of sunlight. They are friends with a gorgeous rapport, so even when they delve into dark corners with their guests, it’s an easy and comfortable listen. Like Klein, they’re up-front about their ideological priors (hint: Hillary Clinton and Valerie Jarrett were both guests), so the conversations are typically bound to the vast political space often called “the left.” But most of their episodes and interviews don’t map neatly to America’s contentious political divides; they range into subjects like mental wellness, the boundaries of comedy, and of course, how President Obama smells. Eps to start with: The Atlantic’s own Ta-Nehisi Coates, Audie Cornish, David Simon, Shani Hilton.

Common Sense

Time required: ~60 minutes per episode

Dan Carlin calls his show “politically Martian,” which is about right. You could fault Carlin for engaging in a merciless critique of modern politics without ever quite articulating how he’d fix it. But the critique is the main event, because it’s almost always surprising, rooted as it is in Carlin’s rich and idiosyncratic interpretation of political history (which plays itself out both in Common Sense and in Carlin’s other podcast, “Hardcore History”). Because it’s often indexed to current events, the episodes might feel weird if you haven’t been listening in real-time. The best part of the show, though, is that the episodes feel weird if you do listen in real-time. After each listen, I always find myself wondering if I’m paying too much attention to the wrong things. Eps to start with: “Disengaging the lizard brain,” “A bodyguard of lies,” and “Revenge of the gangrenous finger."

Planet Money

Time required: ~20-30 minutes per episode

Freakonomics

Time required: ~60 minutes per episode

It’s easy to stereotype these as similar shows with an economic lens, so I hesitate to lump them together. But precisely because they can seem pretty similar, it’s worth juxtaposing what they each do well. Freakonomics is a fun, interview-driven show that usually provides a few counterintuitive perspectives on a provocative, big-think question, such as whether the U.S. presidency is a dictatorship. Planet Money is an equally fun, sound-rich, reporting-driven show that shrinks huge, complex systems, such as the global economy, down to human scale. I listen to Freakonomics to question things I think I know. I listen to Planet Money to understand things I know I don’t. Eps to start with, from Freakonomics: “Ten ideas to make politics less rotten,” "Ten signs you might be a libertarian,” "How much does the U.S. presidency matter?” And from Planet Money: “The no-brainer economic platform,” “Our fake candidate meets the people,” and “Trade show."

For context on the election

On the Media

Time required: 50 minutes per episode, hundreds of episodes

Don’t believe the title. This show is often about much more than “the media” as one might typically understand it. This season, for example, Brooke Gladstone has reported a tremendous series on poverty in the U.S., a subject that feels to me as though it hasn’t really made an appearance in presidential politics since the 2008 primaries. (Presidential candidates love to talk about that middle class, though.) Really, I think of this as a show about how to process everything I hear—when to be skeptical, where to find perspectives I’m missing, how to understand the codes of political language in the U.S. And as both an editor and consumer of coverage, I find OTM’s breaking news handbooks invaluable. Eps to start with: “Personal responsibility,” “After the facts,” and “The system is rigged."

Backstory Radio

Time required: 1 hour per episode

Whistlestop

Time required: ~30 minutes per episode

Both of these can be dry and droning. Both of them are also deeply insightful, often absorbing reminders of the peculiar ways in which history can rhyme, and of the forgotten alleyways of American political life. Backstory Radio is a more conventional radio show; every episode features a few different segments on a different theme. Whistlestop is John Dickerson waxing nerdy about major presidential campaign stories of yesteryear. (After the success of the podcast, Dickerson wrote a book on the same theme, and it has an audiobook version, but I haven’t listened.) Listen long enough to either, and you might come to appreciate their calm, dry tone. Don’t panic, the hosts suggest. Crazier things have happened before, and yet here we still are. Eps to start with, from Backstory: “Islam and the United States,” “You’ve come a long way,” and “The GOP.” From Whistlestop: “Goldwater vs. Fact magazine,” “Andrew Jackson: The Dangerous Candidate,” and “Stand Up for America."

For in-the-moment reporting on the election

Each of these shows offers a slightly different spin on news from the 2016 election, so the one you come to like most probably depends somewhat on your sensibility. (I listen to all five because I have a problem.) Because they’re so tied to the news, I omit recommendations for three of the five.

Trumpcast

Time required: ~20 minutes per episode

If you like James Fallows’s Donald Trump time capsule—a moment-to-moment catalogue of the candidate’s departures from American political norms—you’ll probably appreciate Trumpcast, Jacob Weisberg’s audio diary of Trump’s candidacy. This is probably the most nakedly partisan podcast on my list, although the partisanship on display tends to be much more anti-Trump than pro-Clinton. Because of the show’s tight focus on Trump, however, it winds up being a much more thorough, if unloving, exploration of the candidate than almost anything else on offer. Weisberg speaks about the nature and portents of Trump’s campaign with reporters covering it, Trump’s ghostwriter, his supporters and surrogates, the man who started his Twitter account, journalists outside the U.S., and many, many others. Nearly every episode begins with the candidate’s own words on Twitter, read by the suddenly very busy Trump impersonator John D. Domenico, a segment that could be an entire podcast of its own. Because of the partisan nature of the show, each of my recommendations includes a conversation with a Trump supporter: “My mom’s voting for him,” “Where’s my bailout?” and “The talented Mr. Miller.” (Months after “Where’s my bailout?” was released, the Trump supporter interviewed in the episode changed his mind about the candidate and spoke with Weisberg a second time.)

NPR Politics

Time required: ~30-40 minutes per episode

NPR’s my alma mater, so I’m predisposed to love the NPR Politics podcast. And I do! The show is probably the least partisan of the bunch, because the roundtable almost exclusively features NPR reporters and editors covering the campaigns or steering coverage, while other shows tend to cycle in columnists or others who offer commentary on the election. Its best asset is the variety of the journalists who participate. If you want to hear unvarnished reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, high-quality production, and a light, jokey rapport from a motley band of journalists, you’ll enjoy this.

The Run-Up

Time required: ~35 minutes per episode

The New York Times election podcast, The Run-Up, is similar in format to Trumpcast, with a solo host and a different guest lineup each week, but a broader range of topics. Its host is Michael Barbaro, a reporter who’s been at the center of the Times’s efforts to navigate how to adjust its coverage conventions in light of the very unconventional campaign of Trump, which feels like an implicit subject of the podcast many weeks. The best place to start might be Barbaro’s two-part dive into hours of tape of Trump being interviewed for his 2015 biography.

FiveThirtyEight

Time required: ~30 minutes per episode

The FiveThirtyEight podcast is the audio manifestation of Nate Silver’s polling-obsessed site, which operates under the aegis of ESPN. Silver, along with the site’s editor Jody Avirgan, “whiz kid Harry Enten,” and the political writer Clare Malone, refracts each week’s campaign news through the lens of the team’s election forecasts. Among the show’s charms is the way Silver and Enten anthropomorphize their two lovingly crafted forecasting models, “Polls-Only” and “Polls-Plus.” (As Election Day draws closer, and the two models converge toward irrelevance, one can sometimes hear a note of preemptive mourning in Silver’s and Enten’s comments. I sometimes imagine Silver dialing up Polls-Only months after it’s put to rest, feeding it simulated data just to watch it sit up and dance one more time.) Avirgan and Malone provide the anecdotal and reportorial ballast to the empirical wonkery of their counterparts. This might be the least re-listenable show after the election’s done, purely because the results will be known. But I may still revisit it, if only to relive those halcyon days with Polls-Plus.

Slate’s Political Gabfest

Time required: ~1 hour per episode

The most venerable podcast of this set, Slate’s politics show thrives on the rapport of its three regular hosts—David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and John Dickerson. Bazelon bring the lens of a magazine writer with years of experience covering the courts, Dickerson brings his encyclopedic political knowledge and reporting, and Plotz keeps the show moving, peppering each segment with provocative questions, arguments, and jokes. While Dickerson preserves a studied neutrality (in addition to hosting this show and Whistlestop, he also hosts CBS’s Face the Nation), the show has a clear liberal lean. If that doesn’t dissuade you, the election is as good a hook as any to try it out.

The Fascinating, Maddening End of The Fall

The Fall has never been subtle about the fact that its two primary characters, the police detective Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) and the serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), are opposing sides of the same coin. Stella, all crisp white silk blouses and pale-blonde hair, is the yin to Paul’s yang, with his all-black combos, chunky sweaters, and implacable grimaces. Stella swims; Paul jogs. Stella is childless and romantically unattached; Paul is a married man with two young children. Stella hates misogyny; Paul hates, and murders, women.

That these two dueling forces have proven over three seasons to be not so different after all should come as no surprise. Popular culture is riddled with heroes whose antagonists are their perfect match, from Batman and the Joker (“You complete me”) to Sherlock and Moriarty. But The Fall, subverting the formula, has shown what can happen when a truly poisonous villain is paired with a woman, and in doing so, it’s become one of the most fascinating dramas on television. Stella isn’t a brilliant detective in spite of her gender but because of it; both her acuity as a policewoman and her ability to infiltrate her suspect’s psyche hinge on the fact that she’s a woman. The third season, which was recently released in its entirety on Netflix, continues to probe the dynamics of the relationship between Stella and Paul. But for all its psychological, almost literary complexity, it loses much of its narrative steam. It’s that great 21st-century phenomenon: a show that’s more fun to think about than it is to watch.

In the first season, which aired on BBC in 2013, Stella is introduced as a senior detective from the London Metropolitan Police Force brought over to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to oversee a review of the local investigation of a murder. From the very first episode, the audience is aware of the identity of the killer, with Paul shown meticulously stalking one of his intended victims. As a result, the intrigue of the show isn’t in finding out whodunnit, but in the prolonged game of cat-and-mouse that plays out. In one episode, Stella gives a press conference in which she pointedly wears bright red nail polish—a private signal to Paul that she’s noticed how he prepares and poses his victims after killing them. In another, he breaks into her hotel room, rifles through her clothes and intimate possessions, and reads her diary. Both, it’s fair to say, become obsessed with each other.

The third season picks up where the second left off, with Paul now in police custody, but having been shot by the jealous and violent husband of one of his clients. That scene, in which Stella rushed to Paul’s side and shrieked, “We’re losing him” as he gazed up at her, was how season two ended, with the audience left to puzzle whether her desperation in the face of his grave injury was due to a desire for justice, or something more unfathomable. But instead of offering answers, the first new episode is like a hyperrealistic episode of E.R., focusing mostly on the doctors and nurses who are battling to save Paul’s life.

Philosophically, there are interesting things happening here: The show seems to be fixating on the energy and effort that goes into saving a life, just as, in seasons past, it’s shown Paul taking them in similar close-up. But plot-wise, it’s a slog. Paul’s spleen is removed (a metaphor, perhaps) in a scene of impossible precision, while Stella merely wanders around the hospital, seeming lost. In the second episode comes the most absurd twist: Paul is (spoiler) alive, but he’s claiming not to remember anything that happened to him after 2006.

The Fall still has intriguing points to make, but they get completely smothered by all the sensory detail.

Paul’s professed amnesia at least sets up some tension for the viewer, offering the mystery of whether or not he’s faking it to get out of the crimes he’s so obviously committed. But there’s very little else to be interested in, and Allan Cubitt, who created the show and directs all six final episodes, seems to be experimenting with a new fusion of detective procedural and Slow TV. Everything that happens is achingly, maddeningly ponderous; one scene, in which Paul is transported from one building to another, takes more than a minute-and-a-half to play out. That’s 15 percent of a single episode spent watching someone do nothing more exciting than change locations.

The Fall still has intriguing points to make, but they get completely smothered by all the sensory detail—the click of the handcuffs, the slam of the car door, the swoosh of Stella’s silk blouse no. 1,634, the clack of her heels on the hospital floor. It’s easy to miss the fact that the show seems to be, perhaps for the first time, explicitly arguing that Paul and Stella are not so different; that her charismatic personality and ability to attract followers (mostly young women) mirrors his; that her desire to help people comes from the same place as his desire to hurt them—a deep sense of rage and injustice rooted in childhood trauma.

For a show that’s previously been one of the most compelling dramas on TV, not to mention—as my former colleague Amy Sullivan stated last year—one of the most feminist, it’s something of a disappointing end. Perhaps it could have played out with more urgency in fewer episodes. Possibly a more convincing twist might have carried the narrative along to its inevitable conclusion. It’s uncertain yet whether The Fall will return, although Cubitt has said he’s open to another season. But if nothing else, it’s been a remarkable thing to watch a show that sees misogyny so clearly, through the eyes of a heroine who isn’t afraid to employ emotion just as much as reason. “We’ve chosen to work in a masculine, paramilitary, patriarchal culture,” Stella tells a young acolyte in one of the new episodes. “Let’s not let it beat us.”

The Anatomy of a Leak: How Did a Mistaken Clinton Story Happen?

On Wednesday, Bret Baier dropped a bombshell report on his Fox News show: An investigation into the Clinton Foundation was likely to lead to an indictment. New evidence was pouring in by the day. Fox is a right-leaning outlet, but Baier is one of their news reporters, and generally has a good reputation. A report in The Wall Street Journal, Fox’s corporate cousin, further confirmed the story. The Clinton campaign, wobbling from FBI Director James Comey’s letter to members of Congress announcing new emails pertinent to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, seemed on the verge of collapse.

Then things began to shift. Baier said on Thursday that he had spoken “inartfully” when he mentioned a likely indictment. On Friday, he moved past that to a full apology: “That just wasn’t inartful, it was a mistake and for that I'm sorry.”

Baier’s retraction came after two days of reports from other news organization knocking down his original report. When NBC’s Pete Williams was asked about the investigation, he responded, “There really isn’t one,” adding that while there’d been some poking into the foundation, it didn’t rise to the level of “investigation,” an FBI term of art. ABC also reported that there was practically nothing to go on against the foundation.

What happened? None of this is necessarily an indication of malice or negligence on the part of Baier, or the Journal. His sources seem to have misled him, which is bad but happens to everyone on occasion. But why, and who were they? On Wednesday, before Baier’s story, my colleague Adam Serwer considered the surfeit of leaks dribbling out of the FBI, writing, “It seems clear that key officials at the bureau no longer feel that the rules against politicized disclosures apply to them.”

Since then, a series of stories have started to sketch out who, and why. Reuters’ Mark Hosenball reported that “FBI Director James Comey was driven in part by a fear of leaks from within his agency when he decided to tell Congress the FBI was investigating newly discovered emails related to Hillary Clinton, law enforcement sources said on Thursday.” There’s a peculiar logic to this course of action—the only way to stop an unauthorized leak interfering with the election is to turn it into an authorized annoucement!—but the suggestion that Comey is running scared is disconcerting.

Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian offered one reason why: “The FBI is Trumpland,” in the words of one agent who spoke with him, who added that Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel” and “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.” Other employees told Ackerman that while Trump is not actually that well-liked, Clinton is truly widely reviled.

Meanwhile, Wayne Barrett, the ace veteran New York muckracker,  laid out the close ties between Trump, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Jim Kallstrom, the former head of the FBI’s New York office. Kallstrom has been telling anyone who will listen for months that FBI agents disapprove of Comey’s recommendation that Clinton not be charged, and promising leaks.

One can start to imagine a path: FBI agents who hate Clinton leak to reporters or pass information to people like Kallstrom and Giuliani, who then send it to the media. Pressed on Fox and Friends Friday on whether he was tipped off ahead of time about the recent leaks, Giuliani said, “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.”

There is some irony that even as the Trump campaign is alleging improper communication between the Department of Justice and the Clinton campaign, a top Trump adviser is receiving just that kind of information. Giuliani’s statement has already attracted the attention of Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, who wrote a letter Friday to the inspector general of the Justice Department requesting an investigation into the leaks.

The second wave of leaks, debunking the Baier report, appears to be closer to accurate, given Baier’s apology. The leaks are a little better insofar as they might help voters have a more accurate picture of the truth, but they’re still dangerous. As Serwer wrote:

The point is not that some of these leaks are good and some of them are bad. The point is not that Clinton is innocent or not innocent, or that Trump is pro-Russian or anti-Russian. The point is that a presidential election should not depend on the ability of candidates to successfully intimidate or cultivate favor among American national-security agencies.  

Meanwhile, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was on MSNBC Thursday night, where Brian Williams grilled her on whether Trump would stop employing the now discredited report in his stump speech. “Well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton, that no matter how it’s being termed, the voters are hearing it for what it is, a culture of corruption,” Conway replied. A look at polling suggests Conway is right: The damage is done to Clinton, regardless of what reality is.

Bernie and Hillary Take to the Trail Together

RALEIGH, N.C.—A female presidential nominee, an aging socialist, and a pop star walk into an amphitheater: It sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but it was actually Thursday’s Hillary Clinton rally in this crucial swing state. Politics makes strange stagefellows.

So here Clinton was, alongside her former rival Bernie Sanders and Pharrell, working in the final days of the campaign to get as many young voters and minorities to the polls as possible. If she wins North Carolina, she will likely block Donald Trump’s path to victory on Election Day. With the candidate scheduled to spend the last days of the election in states that don’t conduct early voting, the Clinton campaign is trying to squeeze as many early votes out in the Old North State as possible.

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Obama Sweats Out the Last Days of the Election

As exhausting and disheartening as this campaign season has been, there’s a special feel about going to political rallies, even at this late hour. There’s something magical about being around thousands of people who are, to borrow a phrase, fired up and ready to go about a candidate. They have come out to see someone they afford rockstar status, who could in just a few days be elected the next leader of the free world. It’s a volatile, easily corrupted energy, since thousands of people united in their views can quickly turn into an angry mob if provoked, but at its best, a political rally is an affirmation of democracy.

Americans may generally view the election process and their choices rather dimly, but the people who show at rallies tend to have fewer hesitations. At the Walnut Creek Amphitheatre, which more typically hosts acts like Florida Georgia Line or Snoop Dogg, many parents had brought their kids. College students clustered together. As fans filled seats, crammed into aisles, and leaned over barricades, they gazed on Clinton with fervor, admiration, and a good amount of nerves.

“It waxes and wanes. We were feeling good a couple weeks ago. It’s kind of like the World Series—back and forth. If the Cubs can win, she can do it!”

Especially nerves on this night. Polls show an extremely close race in North Carolina, and around the country. Just how likely you think a Clinton victory is depends on how much trust you put in the polling and whose models you believe, and there was consternation etched on the faces of many attendees. John McDonald had come from Durham, wearing a “Bern Baby Bern” t-shirt. (“I love me some Bernie, but we have to get with the candidate on the ticket,” he said. “If there had been a coalition for Bernie, I would have been there.”) Did he think Clinton would win? McDonald inhaled, and paused.

“I think so,” he finally said, confessing that news coverage was starting to get to him. “I was watching some of the reports, and you get a little nervous. She might squeak it out, but she’ll do it.”

Kris McCulloch of Raleigh wasn’t wearing political clothing: Her shirt and hat bore the logo of the newly minted World Series champion Chicago Cubs, the club Clinton has rooted for since her girlhood. McCulloch was fretting about the continued currency of stories about Clinton’s emails, which she thought were overblown but still damaging to confidence, including her own.

“It waxes and wanes. We were feeling good a couple weeks ago. It’s kind of like the World Series—back and forth,” she said. But she too Wednesday night’s ball game as a hopeful sign. “If the Cubs can win, she can do it!”

The amphitheater was full of children and adolescents—not unlike Sanders rallies back in the Democratic primary—many of them seeming mature beyond their years. Addie Esposito, 15 years old, and Adithi Sundaram, 14, waited for more than four hours, having left school early to be there, in part because “we’re so dedicated, but also because we got the time wrong,” Esposito confessed.

Although she couldn’t vote, Sundaram had gotten involved in the campaign, working at phone banks for Clinton. She was concerned about how the 2016 race would color her cohort’s views of normalcy in politics. “A lot of people in our generation look at this as what it’s like, and it’s not,” she said. “This is like a reality show. It’s like the Kardashians.”

Esposito was more focused on an urgent concern: who would win. “You don’t know what to expect. That makes it scary,” she said.

“I have friends who support Trump. I tried really hard to see it from their perspective. I’ve got nothing.”

If the duo were uncommonly mature in their analysis, they were comparatively cheerful. Dalia Place had brought her son Hayden, who is almost six, to try to cut into his pessimistic view about the election, cultivated by seeing endless campaign advertisements on YouTube.

“He doesn’t have a lot of trust in our future leaders,” she said. “I wanted to bring him here to inspire him and show him why I voted for Hillary Clinton.” Unlike Hayden, Dalia saw a clear difference between the two contenders. “I’m very nervous,” she said. “We’re almost in the Twilight Zone. I have friends who support Trump. I tried really hard to see it from their perspective.” She paused a beat. “I’ve got nothing.”

It was up to Pharrell and Sanders and Clinton to try to raise these voters’ spirits. Pharrell, sadly sans hat, warned that he wasn’t used to speaking as a politician, but then gave a totally competent, if somewhat hippyish speech. (“It makes me angry when people say she can’t lead our country because she’s a woman. How dare anyone question a woman’s ability. Every person on this planet was brought into this world by a woman. Women carry so much every day, including us for nine months. Don’t we call the planet Mother Earth?”)

Then it was Bernie’s turn, and suddenly it felt like January again; thousands of young people, ecstatically excited for the Vermont senator. He was in mid-primary form, too, gesticulating, hectoring, pleading, and joking, only now in service of his old rival.

“Let me give you something radical: I think a campaign should be based on issues,” he said. He had more sarcasm on tap. “I try not to be too hard on my Republican colleagues, because many of the suffer from a serious illness called amnesia,” he said. “And unlike Mr. Trump, we do not make fun of people with disabilities.”

After watching them spar over policy during the Democratic primary, it was striking to watch Sanders deliver a stump speech for Clinton. His influence certainly helped pull her platform leftward, but even so, there’s much they agree on. The difference lies in emphasis. Sanders talked about some issues Clinton often discusses on the stump, like women’s pay equity. He talked about others in ways she does not. Clinton pledges to try to roll back Citizens United, but she is unlikely to do so while warning that “the country is slipping into an oligarchical form of society.”

Sanders likes to be an attack dog, and he turned his anger at voter-ID laws, restrictions on early voting, and the like. “When we talk about democracy, we have cowardly Republican governors all over this country trying to suppress the vote,” he said. “If you don’t have the guts to participate in a free, open, and fair election, get out of politics and get another job.”

“If you don’t have the guts to participate in a free, open, and fair election, get out of politics and get another job.”

He reserved his harshest words for the Republican nominee. “I disagree with Donald Trump on virtually all of his policy positions,” he said. “But what upsets me the most—what upsets me, it’s beyond disagreement—is we have struggled for so many years to overcome discrimination. And he is running his campaign, the cornerstone of which is bigotry … We are not going back to a bigoted society.”

Then it was Clinton’s turn. She stuck close to her standard stump speech, with a few additions. One was a forced, painful pun about Pharrell’s mega-hit: “Tell me this North Carolina, are you really, really, really happy that we’re here tonight?” She spoke at length about Trump’s record on race, discussing the Department of Justice’s housing discrimination suit against the Trump Organization in the 1970s, which was settled out of court. Clinton also noted Trump’s history with the Central Park Five, the young men wrongly convicted in a brutal rape in 1989. Although they were exonerated, Trump recently argued they were still guilty. “If he wants to keep exonerated people in jail, how can we trust him to fight for the right for the rule of justice, and fairness, and criminal-justice reform in America?”

She asked the crowd if they’d already voted. Nearly every hand not belonging to a child went up. That wasn’t good enough: “You’ve got to get everyone you know to get out and vote,” she said. “You cannot get discouraged. Do not get weary while doing good, right?” She’ll get her answer sometime Tuesday night.

How Disappointment Became Part of Fandom

Late last month, Amy Schumer released her own video version of Beyoncé’s “Formation.”

Whether the video was a wacky homage to Lemonade and its themes, as Schumer has said, or whether it was instead an extremely tone-deaf parody of an already canonical piece of art, as many of its viewers concluded, making it in the first place was, all in all, a very bad decision. Here was Schumer, a white woman who’s been on the receiving end of very legitimate questions about her stand-up act’s treatment of race, taking it upon herself to remake a video that is, on top of so much else, a celebration of black womanhood. The whole thing was actually pretty baffling. It was also, for many of Schumer’s fans, extremely disappointing.

It was not, however, fully surprising. Schumer, engaged every day in the work of being human in public, has made missteps before. And she has had many chances to do that: While she is, yes, a creator of TV and film and literature, she is also a creator of tweets and posts and grams. She is constantly making stuff, in part because the laws of celebrity relevance demand that she constantly be making stuff. And: She is making stuff that is designed, specifically, to be talked about. There’s a lot that could go wrong in that basic premise—not just for Schumer, as a star, but also for the people who have followed her, and who have wrapped their appreciation of her work into their own identities. Being a celebrity may be more demanding than ever; so, though, is being a fan.

In public as well as in private, stars, just like us, contain multitudes.

We still call them “stars”; contemporary celebrities, however, are decidedly earth-bound. They may still, as they did for so long in the past, populate the pages of flimsy supermarket rags and dominate the chatter of those soda-sucking journalists on TMZ. But, now, enabled in large part by their platforms on social media, they also talk. And talk back. And opine. And sell. On screens that are no longer silver, there is Kylie, selling her lip plumper. There is Beyoncé, selling her yoga pants. There is Gwyneth, selling her sex dust. There is Jessica Alba, founding a billion-dollar business empire. They sell ideas, too: There is Kanye, remixing Obama. There is Sarah Silverman, stanning for Bernie. There are Louis and Lena and America and Cher and many, many more, proudly declaring that “I’m with her.”

It’s a cliché, at this point, that celebrities double as brands. But one consequence of that doubling is the constancy of the effort that goes into the brand-building itself. The commercial pressures on stars mean that they’re engaged not just in being people in a complex world, but also in a great cycle of creation and distribution, one that incorporates not just celebrities’ artistic output, but also their views of the world.

And fans are trained, product by product, to approach them not just as “celebrities”—bundles of aspiration and ideals—but rather as full, complicated people. Take Beyoncé’s (self-written, directed, and produced) autobiographical documentary. Take Justin Bieber’s extended mash note to himself. Take the fact that being a fan of Angelina Jolie, at this point, may involve appreciating her movie work, but will also likely involve an appreciation of her humanitarian efforts. Or that Jennifer Aniston is beloved not just because of her acting, but also because of Angelina Jolie. Opinions about skin serums, thoughts about immigration, convictions about equal pay, preferences about chocolate, indignation about the refugee crisis—they’re all entangled, now, into the concept of celebrity. In public as well as in private, stars, just like us, contain multitudes. And they are weaving those complexities into our lives. There they are, in feeds and streams, their humanity converted, via the soft alchemy of the internet, into media.

In that environment—as will happen, really, in most any relationship that is both intimate and prolonged—disappointment becomes almost inevitable. Schumer (who, in addition to everything else, lobbies for gun safety, campaigns for Hillary, gives inspiring talks about body positivity, and stars in politics-themed Bud ads) is not fully alone in making an artistic decision that has made people mad. Most celebrities will, at some point in their long public lives, say something that annoys people on Twitter. Or perhaps they will share an icky anecdote in their weekly newsletter. Or publicly defend a friend who is not, all things considered, worth defending. Or star in an ad that makes fun of the gendered wage gap. Perhaps they will make a comment that reveals their ignorance about Hollywood’s diversity problem. Perhaps they will be revealed to have posted tweets, before they got famous, that were really pretty cringey and sexist. Perhaps they will make light of rape. Perhaps they will go around wearing a t-shirt that unthinkingly equates women’s right to vote with African Americans’ right to live.

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The likelihood of them doing any of those things—or one of the approximately 65,000 iterations of those things that might, in the end, let down at least some of their fans—is much greater than it is for most of us, purely because celebrities are operating in a commercial environment that rewards volume. The more Schumer tweets, the likelier it is that bloggers will analyze—and amplify—those tweets. The more weird videos she makes, the more she will remain in “the conversation,” and the likelier it is that she will stay relevant. “The only thing worse than being talked about,” Oscar Wilde observed, not about Hollywood but also totally about Hollywood, “is not being talked about.”

Oh, but it’s hard. Not just for celebrities, but for fans—us mortals who want, so desperately, to have heroes. Fandom, in this brave new age of commercialized identity, isn’t (usually) just about liking someone. It is also about embracing someone as part of who you are. One may like Amy Schumer, but the more salient thing is that one is an Amy Schumer fan. And a Beyoncé fan. And a Kanye fan. In exchange for feeding their fame, celebrities give people a sharper sense of who they are, helping to etch, just a little bit, the contours of their own identity. But then: When they do something you don’t agree with—when they support a different candidate, or make a comment you don’t agree with, or break the law, or make a video that manages to be both extremely silly and extremely offensive—what then? Do you ignore it, and focus on the good stuff? Do you abandon your longstanding fandom? Do you, deflated by Deflategate, un-fan Tom Brady? What about when he reveals that he is supporting Donald Trump?

And then: How do you deal with stars’ mistakes when the dynamics of contemporary celebrity make them seem—just a little bit, but still—like your own mistakes? If you’re a fan of Schumer but definitely not a fan of her take on “Formation,” do you remove Trainwreck from your Facebook list of favorite movies, or Inside Amy Schumer from your list of favorite TV shows, or The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo from your list of favorite books? Do you delete the approving tweets you’d posted about that “12 Angry Men” sketch? Or do you give her a pass, appreciating her in all her complex and inconvenient humanity?

One of the big and open questions in pop culture right now is how we should, collectively, treat great—or, at least, perfectly good—works of art that are created by people who are in varying and urgent ways … un-great. Should we, in the wake of everything that emerged about Nate Parker earlier this year, boycott The Birth of a Nation? Should we stop watching The Cosby Show? Should we abandon the Patriots, or choose a new binge-watch other than Crisis in Six Scenes, or click away to Fallon when we realize it’s Mel Gibson who is, after all this time, sitting on the Late Show’s cushy easy chair?

We haven’t come up with satisfying answers to any of those questions, really, and that frustration has a corollary: Just as we’re not quite sure how to resolve the immorality and criminality of celebrities, when they are brought to light, it’s also very hard to know how to treat stars’ relatively small, relatively quotidian offenses. What if we don’t like their politics? What if they say something hurtful? What if they just, as people are so wont to do, screw up?

Amy Schumer is on the one hand an icon of contemporary feminism, celebrated for her ability both to point out and to puncture the ways American culture punishes women for their failure to be men. But she is also, it seems ever more obvious, a person who is grappling, publicly and extremely awkwardly, with her own status as a white woman within that culture. And so it’s hard to know, as a fan, how to think about her at this point. It’s hard to know how—whether—to appreciate her. What is clear, though, is that Schumer is demanding a lot of her fans, just as they are demanding a lot of her: She is asking not just for commercial support, and not even just for love, but for a come-what-may kind of loyalty. Fandom, in the world of the multidimensional celebrity, requires not just love; all too often, it also requires forgiveness.

The Gloriously Hammy Potential of The Hamilton Mixtape

The Roots’ remix of Hamilton’s “My Shot” sounds like a Linkin Park song, and Kelly Clarkson’s take on “It’s Quiet Uptown” would fit in at a hip new megachurch. They’re grand and chill-inducing and uncool, schmaltz of the highest order, testaments to the ridiculous miracle that is Hamilton.

This year has been an extended coronation for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Broadway musical about the founding fathers, racking up Tonys and a White House gig and a PBS documentary. Soon comes the ultimate prize of its cultural domination: The Hamilton Mixtape, largely a collection of covers and remixes from real-life pop and hip-hop stars. When the album’s released on December 2, the world will experience Usher as Aaron Burr and Jimmy Fallon as King George and Sia as the Schuyler Sisters and some of the rappers who inspired Miranda in the first place—Nas, Queen Latifah, Common—re-interpreting his re-interpretation of the American Revolution.

For now, though, there are these two teaser singles, unalike in tone but not enthusiasm. The romping mission statement “My Shot” has been amped up in intensity with booming drums, electric guitar, and new lyrics from the rock singer Nate Ruess and the rappers Black Thought, Joell Ortiz, and Busta Rhymes, whose rambunctious flow was the basis for the sound of Hamilton’s Hercules Mulligan. Meanwhile, the tragedy ballad “It’s Quiet Uptown” has been made yet-weepier with soft-focus keyboards and America’s first Idol letting you hear her every gasp between her every note. Both tracks highlight how Hamilton’s sugary songs have pirouetted on the line between sweeping the audience up and tiring them out. When taken off the stage and turned into radio-ready pop, they don’t have to modulate for storytelling—so they become the sentimentality mainline that Hamilton threatened to be all along. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The new “My Shot” is additionally fascinating in that it inverts the entire conceit of Hamilton. Miranda’s first insight was that Alexander Hamilton’s life is a “hip-hop story”; now, Black Thought shows up to un-submerge that narrative, spelling out exactly what it means. He opens the song describing schoolkids being told their choices in life are between “mugshots, gun shots, dope shots, jump shot” before getting to the memorable couplet, “When even role models tell us we're born to be felons / We're never gettin' into Harvard or Carnegie Mellon.” “Rise up” still means something very real, you’re reminded, for lots of Americans.

“It’s Quiet Uptown,” meanwhile, has shifted from a movingly specific tale into something fuzzier and more universal. I’m not really thinking about two grieving parents in 1801 when listening; I’m thinking about that cozy little depression common to many cultural products about Christmastime. Clarkson’s performance may be too much for some people, but the song’s power is such that by month’s end it’s sure to be in a movie trailer or telethon commercial or maybe just the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100. In fact, we might be at the start of a process by which it and some other tracks about the inner lives of the founding fathers unmoor from their original contexts and becoming something more akin to folk standards, an outcome that, like so many things pre-Hamilton, would have once been in the ranks of the unimaaaginable.

Loving and the Ordinary Love That Made History

The pivotal moment of the new historical drama Loving isn’t the Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws against interracial marriage in 1967. Rather, the big scene comes earlier in the film, when Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga), a black woman driven from her home state for marrying a white man, decides to fight for their right to return. Her grand gesture is simply calling an ACLU lawyer and telling him she’s on board for a legal battle.

Despite its profound subject matter, Loving steers clear of unfairly romanticizing its central, history-changing couple: Mildred and her husband, Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton). So it wisely opts instead to portray their union as powerfully ordinary, their love for each other as a settled fact. Mildred’s act of bravery is her quiet decision to have her ordinariness weaponized in the Supreme Court case, Loving v Virginia, to strike a blow against institutional racism.

But Loving lives in the tiny moments that precede the court’s decision and leans heavily on its actors’ subtle performances: A shudder of fear passes across Mildred’s face when she picks up the phone to call the attorney, and there’s a flicker of triumph once she hangs up. Loving is restrained to a fault, but entirely because it doesn’t want the Lovings’ triumph to feel like anything but a certainty. These were regular folks called upon to be symbols for equality because their union was as mundane as anyone else’s; the power of Loving is precisely in that mundanity.

The film is the latest in a series of interesting choices from the director Jeff Nichols. Through his career, he’s veered wildly between genres, from the sci-fi road trip Midnight Special to the backwoods coming-of-age drama Mud to the religious-fanaticism thriller Take Shelter. In all these films, however, Nichols takes care never to zoom out too far from his characters and carefully builds to every emotional twist and turn. Loving is no different. It’s a film about a sweeping court case that echoed through American history and undid a crucial strand in the South’s Jim Crow laws, but Nichols’s focus remains trained at all times on the two people at the heart of it.

As Richard Loving, Edgerton has the affect of someone who would prefer never to talk about his feelings. His bond with his wife is unwavering, but Richard isn’t one to acknowledge how unusual their marriage is. Even though he drives Mildred to Washington D.C. for the ceremony, in an effort to circumvent Virginia’s laws, Richard says it’s just to avoid “red tape.” When cops burst into their home and demand to know why Richard is in bed with Mildred, he points wordlessly at their marriage certificate, framed and mounted on the wall. After pleading guilty to miscegenation, the Lovings are ordered to leave Virginia for 25 years. They relocate to nearby Washington, but the film emphasizes the trauma of losing their home and immediate communication with their families.

Mildred and Richard feel real, rather than like characters in a sepia-toned history lesson.

Though Washington isn’t an unwelcome environment for the Lovings and their children, it’s still not home. Nichols’s camera drinks in the wide open farmland of Virginia every chance it gets, while the scenes in D.C. are almost always confined to the Lovings’ home, often to their kitchen, where Mildred makes the bold move of calling the ACLU lawyer Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) and having him pursue their case. Loving is a biopic covering an important moment in American civil rights history, and thus feels like a Oscar contender. But because Nichols avoids stirring speechmaking or teary confrontations, Mildred and Richard feel all the more real, rather than like characters in a sepia-toned history lesson.

Kroll, a stand-up comedian and sketch comedy actor best known for his work on FX sitcom The League and his self-titled Comedy Central show, seems an odd choice at first to play Cohen, and his work in the role is certainly on the broader side. But he gives Loving some energy when it desperately needs it, sowing some necessary tension when he encourages the couple to move back to Virginia in violation of the law so that the case can begin again. He’s the spur Richard and Mildred need to expose themselves to the world, even if it’s much to the intensely private Richard’s dismay.

Viewers barely see a moment of the legal proceedings and hear only snippets of Cohen’s arguments. As the court case progresses, the movie returns to the home the Lovings eventually find for themselves in the Virginia countryside, mostly isolated from racist judgment, but finally free—surrounded on all sides by open air. The power of the film’s final act, where the Lovings finally have created a safe place for themselves and their children, cannot be exaggerated, and so Nichols doesn’t exaggerate. By that point, the director’s subtlety, and Edgerton and Negga’s commitment to their characters’ emotional truth, has already conveyed the true heart of Loving.

The Crown Is a Sweeping, Sumptuous History Lesson

The opening titles of The Crown are everything you’d expect from a sumptuous period drama about the British royal family, not to mention one billed as Netflix’s most expensive TV project ever. Rivers of glistening, molten gold flow together, eventually forging themselves into St. Edward’s Crown, the daunting item that sits atop the monarch’s head. This, surely, is the crown jewel in Netflix’s expanding stable of original content, storytelling on an epic scale, charting one of the world’s most famous families through Elizabeth II’s postwar reign.

The Crown is epic, often opulent, and certainly expensive-looking, but it’s light on soapy backstabbing and scandalous romantic twists. This is no Downton Abbey replacement—it’s a surprisingly granular, methodical look at British political life in the 1950s, filtered through the eyes of Queen Elizabeth and her family. The royals have been the one constant in British politics throughout the post-war period, ceremonially presiding over the deconstruction of the country’s colonial empire and decades of social and economic change. The Crown is sometimes too somber, and slow-moving to a fault (it intends to cover Elizabeth’s entire reign over six seasons). But if you’re looking for an immersive history lesson with all the royal trimmings (ermine and purple velvet among them), it’s an extremely engrossing watch.

The show’s creator Peter Morgan is an expert hand at dramatizing recent history on stage and in cinema. He’s dabbled with presidents (Frost/Nixon), British prime ministers (The Deal), Idi Amin (The Last King of Scotland), soccer coaches (The Damned United), and racecar drivers (Rush). But his chief obsession seems to be Elizabeth II, upon whom he first cast a sympathetic glance in his 2006 film The Queen (which dramatized her reaction to the 1997 death of Princess Diana), before considering her career in the 2013 play The Audience. This project promises to be even more sweeping—but it’s also more content to take its time.

As this first season begins, Elizabeth (Claire Foy) is a young princess in her mid-20s; her marriage to Prince Phillip (Matt Smith), and their surprisingly real passion for each other, is the only major thing on her mind. But her father, King George VI (an affecting Jared Harris), is already ill with the lung cancer that eventually takes his life at the age of 56; her investiture as the symbolic leader of her country is rapidly approaching. The early episodes focus on the stuttering, chain-smoking George, and Harris does a wonderful job giving a more brittle, nervy quality to the man without losing grasp on his underlying kindness.

George, who had the crown thrust on him by the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII (Alex Jennings), is a stoic, reluctant, dutiful figure, a model of tradition whom Elizabeth will eventually replicate. Much of The Crown’s early episodes are concerned with those qualities—the strangely apolitical nature of the British monarch, who is present for the country’s biggest parliamentary debates and has a direct line to its elected leaders, but little real influence. As Elizabeth becomes queen and grows into the role, Morgan stokes fascinating tension exploring the limits of her power, and the pushback she gets every time she brushes up against them.

The Crown is sweeping, but it lives in its details, and it should prove catnip to history buffs and Anglophiles alike.

Her chief adversary and advisor wrapped up into one is Winston Churchill (John Lithgow, a curious casting choice given the number of aged British thespians suited to the role). If the first season of The Crown is about young Elizabeth’s early years on the throne and the growth of her influence, it’s also about Churchill’s postwar decline; the wartime Prime Minister, legendary for his leadership against Hitler, returned to office in 1951 for a much less successful term that saw him battling ill health while seeming grossly out of touch with Britain’s expanding middle class. Lithgow is good, if hammy, in a role that’s hard to overplay, but the show does well to strike a balance between the man’s legendary status, which he milked for all it was worth, and his flaws as a leader later in life.

This political history is the most fascinating part of the show, digging into stories that feel a little fresher than the usual royal infighting. One whole episode of The Crown is devoted to the Great Smog of 1952, an environmental crisis in London that led to the banning of coal fires. Another charts the ongoing tensions surrounding Edward VIII (known as David), the former king who abdicated the throne in 1936 because he wanted to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson (Lia Williams). The political career of Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam), who was groomed for power by Churchill and eventually succeeded him, is another slow-burning story arc that plays out in fascinating ways (research his career as Prime Minister if you’re looking to spoil yourself).

A major plotline through all the episodes is the irascible Philip’s distaste at his diminished role in the royal household, and the complex sexual politics Elizabeth had to navigate being a queen first and a wife second. But Elizabeth and Phillip’s marriage (which, of course, has lasted to the present day) is presented as stable. Although there are some scandals on the fringes of the series, the biggest of them involving Elizabeth’s sister Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), this is not a particularly salacious show.

Morgan’s chief focus is on historical accuracy, and blending that with a behind-the-scenes look at leadership for a country that was trying to shed its past as an empire without losing its pomp and circumstance. The Crown is sweeping, but it lives in its details, and it should prove catnip to history buffs and Anglophiles alike. Whether its slow, occasionally ponderous approach will find it a wider audience is tougher to guess—but the big budget, and the handsome window dressing it provides, should serve to draw people in for a glance at the very least.

Trevor Noah's Eventful First Year

How do you lampoon an election that already routinely veers into absurd territory? That’s the challenge that Trevor Noah, the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, faces nightly, as he discusses an election cycle of scandals, leaks, bigotry, and fear-mongering—a cycle where even the most unprecedented happenings have become mundane.

Noah has barely hosted the show for a year now, but it’s been as eventful a year at the intersection of politics, commentary, and humor as there’s ever been. When Jon Stewart stepped down from The Daily Show after 16 years as its host—during which time many Americans came to accept it as a legitimate institution of political news and commentary—Noah was abruptly thrust into the lead role on the show, kicking off a well-publicized adjustment period in the late-night commentary landscape. But since then—and perhaps aided by the wellspring of Donald Trump—Noah’s vision of The Daily Show has found its footing as an incredulous outsider’s look at the 2016 political meltdown.

I sat down with Noah to discuss his first book, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood; what he’s learned in his first year from his unique perch at the show about Trumpism; race; the connection between South Africa and America; and writing jokes in interesting times. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Vann R. Newkirk II: So, how does it feel for your first election with The Daily Show to be the worst election ever?

Trevor Noah: I think it was meant to happen. Obama had to be in a place where America had gotten to a point where they were like, “Alright, we’ll give you a chance.” Bush was the only way Obama could win. And Trump is the only way Hillary could win. Who is she gonna beat? There are people who go, “I hate Hillary so much, I wish she were in prison.” And the only reason people aren’t voting for Trump is they think, “I don't want the world to end, but I would have voted for Jeb.”

Newkirk: The end of the world? What’s it like for you when those are the kinds of stakes people are talking about?

Noah: It's fun. Essentially, I've always felt like that with comedy. I always felt like comedians would be the people making the jokes until the end of the world. If they said the world was ending in a week, I'm willing to bet that comedy shows would be sold out. Because it's like, “Well, it's done. Might as well go and hear this person make me laugh.” So, if anything, this time feels more normal than most days would in my life. Being in a place where people are coming to hear what you have to say about the possible end of the world as we know it feels natural. It feels like this is where I'm supposed to be.

Newkirk: We’ve been talking so much over the past couple of years about how comedy and especially The Daily Show have become actual legitimate news source for lots of people. Do you feel a special burden now?

Noah: I used to see it as a burden. I now see it as an opportunity. I realize that I'm in a place where I can speak to issues that maybe not everyone is speaking about, and to share a point of view that maybe isn't the most common point of view. And more than ever I realized how crucial a show like this is, not for speaking truth to power or anything like that, but having a place where ironically we are more newsy than the news sometimes.

Newkirk: How’s that work for you? Trump might be a windfall for news. But that impacts what you do, too, right? Because he naturally brings the absurdity of things closer to the front. Do you even have to write jokes about Trump?

Noah: Trump is probably the hardest thing to write jokes about. When he started, he wasn't, but now what's happened with Trump is he does the joke escalations that we think of doing. A couple days ago with the scandals, I said as a joke, “Billy Bush made Trump do it.” And then we laughed. And then two days later, the Trump camp comes out and says, “Trump was not the person, Billy Bush put him up to it.” And I'm like, are you serious? And then once we said as a joke about people getting punched at his rallies, we said, “Yeah at this rate, Trump's gonna start fighting with a baby at one of his rallies.” And within that week, Trump said “Get that baby out of here!”

Now what do you write? What do you write as a joke? It's like trying to write jokes about a comedian. The comedian already told the joke, so what is your joke gonna be?

When I got here I said, “Oh, that Trump guy is gonna go far.”

Newkirk: You often talk about your perspective as an outsider from South Africa. Does this all shock you from that perspective?

Noah: Well to me, everything is normal. That's probably my greatest gift. I thought it was a curse when I first came, but then I realized everything is normal. I actually wasted time listening to people when I first started the show, because when I got here I said, “Oh, that Trump guy is gonna go far.” And everyone in the office said “Oh, what are you talking about? Oh man, we gotta explain American politics to you.” They said “There's a little thing that happens to us in the summer. We go a little bit crazy. And then what happens is by the autumn it calms down, and then by the primaries the people fall out.”

But I saw that the guy's charismatic, he's funny, and he's crazy. I want to watch that person. And because it seems like a reality show, I'd vote for him to stay. For me, because I didn't have the experience of the Sarah Palins and the Herman Cains, I was only operating from that view. That is still how I operate, and I realize that that's my advantage now. And I lean into that and talk about how I see things, because I'm seeing things for the first time. So I will speak to them from that point of view because a lot of the time, people have accepted things as being normal. I'll ask the question, and then people will say, “That's just how we've done it.” And I ask, “Why? Why do you do it like that?”

Newkirk: As a person who’s seen all this as an outsider, what does 2017 look like?

Noah: I've given up predicting anything. What I do know is, it all depends on the American election. I do think Trump losing will send a huge message to the world. Germany has that story now of right-wingers succeeding. Australia has that rising story. Austria has that story. Britain has that story. For America to say, “Oh no, that story failed here,” that just adjusts the course of everything. It's like winning a key battle against ISIS. All the sudden things shift and actually not all is lost. The one thing I do know is the West can't continue the way it's going. One thing I envy about Africa is there's all the room to grow. It's not an easy road, it's a very rocky path. We still have the ills that have been left behind for us by our colonizers, but there's all that room to grow. And once that starts, the sky's the limit.

Newkirk: You've got your first book coming out. How's the rollout on that feel?

Noah: Man, it's cathartic. It's a tough experience, but it's one where if you open up and if you're honest and you live within it, I found it really liberating. Sharing fears, ideas, past, and present. Going back sometimes helps me understand why I am here. Realizing that everything in my life is something that has brought me to this point. Even realizing how hard I've worked to be here, which sometimes I forget and people even make you forget. We live in the world of the now, and people will tell you, “Oh, you're a bad writer, or a bad comedian,” or whatever, but you forget how much you've gone through to get to that point. So writing the book was really special for me. It was also special because it made me appreciate the people in my life. Having to go back and remember good stories and moments and lessons that I've lived, I was like, “Wow.” I've lived quite a life and there are some amazing people in it.

Newkirk: I saw the title [Born a Crime], and I thought it was a James Baldwin quote. I saw it and was looking for the reference in some of the black lit I read. Where'd that come from?

Noah: Just from my mind. It came from my stand-up, I said that line, which was just telling people a true story. Born of an African woman and a European father during apartheid, and it wasn't even a joke. I was born a crime.

In America, it seems like the hope is at a different level. Black people hope to be seen as people, and that still blows my mind.

Newkirk: The reason why that got my mind working is because it sounds like the same kinds of things people are saying about the black youth experience here, and how that's connected with the experience in South Africa interests me. It seems like that's something that's stuck with you as well.

Noah: When it came to how the connection between Americans and South Africans affected my work, I realized very quickly how similarly our struggles have been, and how similar our struggles are. The only difference is the fork in the road, in that South Africa is now black-owned and black run, but you still have these talks about reparations and these conversations about the value of a black life, you still have the same feelings and ideas that people struggle and grapple with. Young black people saying, “We see no future for ourselves.” Self identity. Hair. You connect it on so many levels. We're separated by so much distance, yet our stories are almost exactly the same. We've been cooked in the same pressure cooker that was racism, and so even though the dishes were prepared on different continents, the end product ended up being the same thing.

Newkirk: What are some of the differences you see between the African American experience and the South African experience?

Noah: I think the biggest difference has been that there's a difference in the type of hope that I see. There's a difference in the type of future that that hope envisions. That is, in South Africa, people hope to be more, people hope to be at a place where they feel they rightly deserve to be, and people hope to reclaim what was once theirs. In America, it seems like the hope is at a different level. Black people hope to be seen as people, and that still blows my mind. African Americans are just asking to be treated as people.

Don't shoot us, policeman. Give us jobs, don't see us as a threat in the streets. It's crazy to see how different that part of it is. Whereas South Africans are in a place where we're saying, “I want to own that company, and we want the stock exchange. How can the stock exchange be 95 percent white when the country is 90 percent black?” It's crazy to see how much further that hope has gone on the other side, whereas here people still have to hope for what shouldn't even be a thing you need to hope for. That should be a basic human right. That should be base-level. We're all equal, we're all treated the same. Alright, cool. What do we hope for now?

Newkirk: Well what’s it like to be playing a pretty big role in that dream? People are looking for black anchors and hosts of late-night shows. And The Daily Show, damn.

Noah: I'm honestly glad I didn't realize how important the position was until I was in it, because had I known I don't think I would have taken it. Because my fear would have consumed me, and the burden would've been too much to bear. After taking the job, I realized that it's not a burden, it's a platform. It's an opportunity. And that's when I thought, “Oh, this is fantastic.” This is not something that's on my shoulders. I am on its shoulders.

Every time I meet a guest who’s of color, it’s someone saying, “We're rooting for you.” I see people in America who sometimes make it seem like it’s a “reverse racism” thing. They ask, “So you want your black things, why can't we have our things?” And I say it's because in America the norm is white. People take that for granted. America was the first time where I heard someone say “black jokes.” I'd never heard that before. “Oh yeah, you tell a lot more black jokes than used to be on The Daily Show.” Well, what does that mean? And then I said, “Did Jon [Stewart] tell white jokes?” So there's jokes, and then there's black jokes, but there's no white jokes.

Newkirk: There's history and black history, but no “white history.”

Noah: There's just “history,” because the white part is the default. That was the biggest mind-shift for me in America where I realized that here the norm is white. Why is there no white history month? Because it's all white history month. Why don't we get a white museum opened up in Washington? Because all of them are. Why don't we get a white show? Because everyone already is. Now I see why there is so much pride and hope from black people, and I'm honored to be a part of that because when you are in a world where you are told that you are not normal, you will always seek out some validation of yourself.

Trump is gone, but the Trump phenomenon is not going anywhere.

Newkirk: Over your first year at The Daily Show, what's changed most for you? What's the biggest adjustment?

Noah: I think the biggest adjustment was letting go of fear. I was so afraid, man. I was afraid to crash the white man's car. A friend said to me, “I was afraid to watch your show for the first month because I was just waiting for it to crash. And I was like, man if this guy crashes, we crash with him.” I felt that with a lot of people, where it was just, “Jesus, don't crash.” Because you crash, and now black people have crashed with you. They say, “Well, we gave it to a black guy, and you saw what happened so we're going back to white guys and it's safer that way.”

That pressure was huge from Americans, and that pressure's huge from Africa. I enjoy it, but that's also a scary thing where they say, “That's our guy. And that's our guy unapologetically. He's not in America doing an American accent and faking it. No, that's our guy. He still talks the way he talked when he left here. That is our guy in your world.” So that fear was just like, oh Lord. It was like driving the white man's car and I was shit-scared. Just don't crash, just don't crash. I didn't want to adjust the seat, I didn't want to adjust the steering wheel, I didn't want to adjust any of the mirrors. I just thought, “Just drive this car from point A to point B and don't scratch it.” And then you're driving and you've got journalists honking at you saying “Why don't you drive faster? Why don't you drive like this?” And you're still just trying not to crash right now.

But then you get to a point where you just can't drive like that forever. I needed to either crash or get where I'm going, but I couldn't drive like that forever. And over time I got more and more comfortable. I also connected more with the country. I couldn't fake that. I wasn't gonna be angry when I just got here. What am I angry about? That's all artificial. Now I see this as an opportunity to do something more, and I feel that fulfillment when I do it right.

Newkirk: So what happens after the election and we have to reset? What's the Daily Show hangover from all of this?

Noah: Oh, I don't think there'll be a hangover. That's when I breathe. I'm excited for that. I was just thinking about that last week. I was thinking, man, are we still talking about this guy? Is there a thing that he can say now that will change your mind? Is there a thing that he can do that can all of a sudden erase an entire campaign? On Hillary's side, what would she have to do to surpass this level of rhetoric?

So, as a person I'm done. Now I'm interested in why America's bombing Yemen. I want to know why they're launching Tomahawk missiles when they don't even know who struck at them. So there's a chance we can go into another war? This world cannot carry on like this. I'm looking at schools in America. We cannot continue teaching children like they've just come out of the industrial revolution; there's got to be a better way. I'm looking at mass incarceration and asking how is this still a thing? How is America's system so penal? Are you not trying to rehabilitate people, or is it really just a ruse for you to keep the black man enslaved?

I'm looking at police shootings. Yes, black men are being shot, but also these police are being trained to become these things and are trapped in a system that they cannot escape. It was President Obama who said it so eloquently at Mandela's funeral, he said, “Nelson Mandela showed me that you can free not only the prisoner, but also the guard.” That's what I think about with police shootings. Sometimes you forget that when they see a black person, they see a threat. How do we free that mind? This person's mind is broken, how do we fix that? There are so many other things that I feel like we can begin to explore. Right now though, Trump fever is the only thing. It's like an Ebola epidemic and now people can’t stop talking about the flu.

But after, I look at that as room to breathe. Let's try and move forward. And don't get me wrong; we're still going to be dealing with the after-effects of Trump. Trump is gone, but the Trump phenomenon is not going anywhere. It's on. Those people who've had a taste of blood in racism and misogyny, they're not gonna go away now. Their xenophobia has been ignited. Look at what happened with Brexit. After Brexit, homophobic and xenophobic attacks went up by hundreds of percentage points in England. Why? Because it ignited what was inside of people. So we're gonna deal with that in America. It’s gonna be a slog.

There's Little Magic to Be Found in Dr. Strange

Superhero movies are rather silly by design, and some are designed sillier than others. To date, Marvel Studios, the foremost purveyor of the genre, has shown a remarkable knack for getting away with a great deal of silliness. Back in 2011, Thor, a movie about an intergalactic Norseman swinging a hammer seemed like a (rainbow) bridge too far. Instead, the husky Asgardian has become a central building block of the Marvelverse. Two years ago, Guardians of the Galaxy, which featured a talking raccoon and an ambulatory tree, appeared a potential disaster in the making. But no, the movie turned out to be a gas, and its outré flora and fauna were the best things about it.

Alas, with Dr. Strange the Marvel magic seems largely to have run out—which is unfortunate, given the movie’s titular protagonist is himself a magician.

For those unfamiliar with the saga of Stephen Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), he was a world-class neurosurgeon with a world-sized ego until an automobile accident left his precious hands damaged beyond medical repair. So he sets off for the Himalayas, where a bald mystic called the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton, demonstrably non-Asian) teaches him that his hands are good for more than just wielding a scalpel. Specifically, he learns spells to transport himself across space and between dimensions; to conjure weapons out of thin air; to stop and reverse time; and (of course) to zap bad guys.

The principal bad guy in Dr. Strange is a former acolyte of the Ancient One named Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) who, in keeping with Marvel tradition—see, for example, the wildly forgettable Thor foes Laufey the Frost Giant and Malekith the Dark Elf—is a rather dull figure. Alas, this time around there’s no Loki lurking around to bail us out.

Though the cast of Dr. Strange is first-rate—in addition to Cumberbatch, Swinton and Mikkelsen, it features Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, and Michael Stuhlbarg—no one in it is given terribly much to do. There’s a sorely underdramatized tension among the sorcerors over whether or not it is a bad thing to extend one’s lifespan by tapping energies from the “Dark Dimension.” (When, at one point, Ejiofor’s character solemnly intones “You have no idea the things I’ve done,” the only possible response is no, no we don’t.) McAdams is given the thankless role of Strange’s sometimes-girlfriend and E.R. helpmeet. Benedict Wong is intended to get laughs by being unflappably Asian. And pay close attention or you may miss Stuhlbarg’s character altogether.

Equally disappointing is Cumberbatch’s central turn as Dr.—don’t you dare call him “mister”!—Strange. Affecting an American accent, the actor seems to have swallowed his voice altogether, denying himself the use of one of cinema’s genuinely remarkable instruments. (Was the accent really necessary? I mean, c’mon, the guy’s a sorcerer. You don’t get any more British-y than that.) Moreover—and perhaps relatedly—Cumberbatch simply doesn’t seem to be having much fun with the role.

Indeed, Marvel seems to have forgotten its own operating theory (demonstrated most tangibly in Guardians) that the sillier a superhero movie’s premise, the more it needs to have a healthy sense of humor. Apart from a few overbroad comic flourishes (Dr. Strange’s “levitation cloak” has a playful personality that will be familiar to anyone who remembers the flying carpet in Aladdin), the film is among the darkest, dourest offerings of the Marvelverse, and it’s not a look that suits the studio (or, to judge from recent DC Comics-Warner Bros. collaborations, any studio). This is presumably in large part due to director Scott Derrickson, who cut his teeth directing horror films (Hellraiser: Inferno, Sinister) and a shockingly inert remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

It bears noting that the special effects are top-flight.

The movie does have its moments. But for every clever line—as when Strange asks the Ancient One “You’re talking about cellular regeneration … Is that why you’re working here without an authorizing medical board?”—there are multiple clunkers, such as the ham-fisted tie-in, “While heroes like the Avengers defend the world against physical threats, we defend it against mystical ones,” or Strange’s awkwardly triumphant boast, “The mirror dimension! You can’t affect the real world in here. Who’s laughing now, asshole?”

In addition to Thor, there are echoes of Hellboy (which is never a bad thing) and of Green Lantern (which always is). And it bears noting that the special effects are top-flight, in particular when the dueling sorcerers are bending time-space upon one another, as if our world were merely an elaborate pop-up book whose pages could be flipped at will. But over time even the fight sequences and Dali-esque visions of alternate dimensions develop a stale sameness.

Cumberbatch is a terrific actor, and perhaps now that the arduous chore of establishing his super-backstory is out of the way, he’ll have a little more fun in future outings as Stephen Strange. But his debut is, at best, a minor Marvel.