Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 6

Ali Smith’s Autumn Is a Post-Brexit Masterpiece

What kind of art will come out of this moment? If Ali Smith’s Autumn is a harbinger of things to come, the work that emerges over the next decade will be extraordinarily rich. The novel, the first book in a quartet inspired by the seasons, considers post-Brexit Britain at the tail end of last summer, experienced through the perspective of a 32-year-old art history lecturer named Elisabeth. But its ambition and craft allude to—and cite—great works of literature, from  Brave New World to The Tempest. Through Smith’s dazzling, whimsical feats of imagination, a news cycle described by Elisabeth as “Thomas Hardy on speed” becomes the backdrop for a modernist interrogation of history.

Autumn, like Smith’s last book, How to Be Both, is a gorgeously constructed puzzle that challenges the reader to solve it, with a narrative that darts back and forth in time and space. Scenes range from absurdly realist (Elisabeth renewing her passport in the post office) to surreal (a man in a coma-like state imagines himself trapped inside the body of a tree). Throughout, Smith’s seasonal melancholy wrestles with her natural writerly exuberance—“Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?” a character wonders. As the novel proceeds, she layers together fragments of books and paintings and song lyrics in an act of literary decoupage, as if to mimic the fragile patchwork of national identity.

The primary relationship in the book is between Elisabeth and Daniel Gluck, a much older neighbor with whom she formed an immediate friendship as a child. In one of the narrative’s many leaps backward, Elisabeth is shown at eight years old, fascinated with the man next door, whom she characterizes as “elegant” and whom her mother dismisses as an “old queen” who collects “arty art.” But neither snub is true: Daniel is a joyful soul, a sprite-like aesthete who recognizes a kindred spirit in the curious, wounded Elisabeth. “The lifelong friends,” he tells her. “Sometimes we wait a lifetime for them.”

In the “present” of Autumn, Daniel is more than a century old and living in a residential care home in a comatose state, and his dreams make up the book’s more mythological and existential wanderings. “How many worlds can you hold in a hand / In a handful of sand?” he ponders in one moment, before watching his body get younger before his eyes, and conjuring a coat for himself made out of leaves. At the same time, Elisabeth visits him to read books by Huxley and Dickens, and recount real-world news that seems stranger than fiction. “Someone killed an MP,” she tells him. “A man shot her dead and came at her with a knife. Like shooting her wouldn’t be enough. But it’s old news now. Once it would have been a year’s worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.”

As Elisabeth mulls the aftermath of the vote, which she observes has left her mother’s English village in “a sullen state,” with graffiti on one cottage that reads “GO HOME,” flashes of Daniel’s life shed light on the cyclical nature of history. In September 1943 in Nice, a young woman later revealed to be his sister is rounded up and placed in the back of a truck from which she makes a bold escape attempt (the book is evasive regarding details, but that same month was when the Nazis rounded up Jews in the south of France and transported them to concentration camps). Later, Elisabeth learns that Daniel and his German father were both interned by the English during the war. In one of Daniel’s dreams, he sees a beach covered with dead, washed-up bodies, while holidaymakers sit under beach umbrellas just along the shore.

The jumps back in time serve both to put modern history in context and to construct the remarkable friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel, who becomes her babysitter of sorts while her mother leaves for possibly unsavory pursuits. Daniel introduces her to the work of Pauline Boty, another central figure in the book, and a real Pop Artist who died in 1966, at the age of 28. Boty’s works, dismissed by many during her lifetime because of their creator’s Bardot-esque glamor, become the life force of the novel, and as her significance in Daniel’s life becomes clearer, she also has a profound effect on Elisabeth’s. Smith also considers Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old exotic dancer who became the central figure of both a 1960s scandal that brought down the Conservative government, and one of Boty’s paintings, although Keeler’s presence is the most atonal note in Autumn, and the hardest inclusion to make sense of.

Despite the tragedy of Daniel’s past and Elisabeth’s future, the delight of their kinship permeates the book.

Perhaps it’s to note that power itself is nonsensical, if a teenager can ruin so many political careers and become a shorthand for scandal. Certainly, Smith has no truck with authority figures, who range in Autumn from Monty Python-esque mini-bureaucrats with unchecked power over the post office to “the usual tiny percent of the people [making] their money out of the usual huge percent of the people.” And Elisabeth’s future is largely devoid of hope: She lives in the same tiny flat she lived in as a student, has no money and no job security, and accepts that she will never be able to buy a house. She laments the fate of her students, “graduating with all that debt and a future in the past.”

But despite the grim state of England, despite the looming shadow of history repeating itself, despite the tragedy of Daniel’s past and Elisabeth’s future, the delight of their kinship permeates the book. The work Autumn seems most indebted to is T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, poems that are also structured loosely around the seasons, and in which nature has a symbolic power. Eliot, like Smith, considers time as a flexible entity, with memory a guiding force that allows people to find divine meaning in the universe. And Four Quartets, like Autumn, was written amid great national turmoil, during World War Two. But Smith has a kind of irrepressible sense of joy that peeks out through the darkness, an awareness that some people, like Boty, are artists capable of “blasting the tragic stuff that happens to all of us into space.”

Autumn finds its lightness in unlikely places—in the paraphernalia of bygone Britishness that Elisabeth’s mother picks through in antique shops, “a sci-fi vision where past and future crash together,” and where, she believes, among the outdated and broken things “there is something of much greater worth than anyone realizes.” Smith, in reckoning with the catastrophe and wreckage of a fraught historical moment, picks through it just as precisely to reveal the beauty and the humanity buried deep below the surface.

Was Obama Too Soft on Russia?

President Trump on Thursday appeared to suggest that his immediate predecessor’s Russia policy resulted in Russian’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during the Obama Administration. Was Obama too soft on Russia?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

As a candidate, Donald Trump suggested he would recognize the annexation—a position his spokesman, Sean Spicer, contradicted Tuesday when he said Trump “expects the Russian government to … return Crimea.” But leaving aside confusion about the current administration’s Russia policy, is Trump right about the previous one’s?

There are two parallel narratives here: one political; the other historical.

First, the political: In 2012, Mitt Romney, who at the time was seeking the presidency, called Russia the United States’s Number 1 “geopolitical foe.” He was roundly mocked for his assessment, including by President Obama, who was then seeking re-election. Just three years earlier, the Obama administration famously “reset” U.S. relations with Russia that had been damaged by Moscow’s conflict with the former Soviet republic of  Georgia. As part of this initiative, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with what was intended to be a “reset” button. A translation error rendered the Russian word on the button “overload” instead—a term perhaps more reflective of the turn U.S.-Russian relations took in subsequent years.

Despite their public displays of working together, Washington and Moscow did not always share the same worldview. Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister in 2011, likened the U.S.-backed intervention in Libya to the “crusades.” Seeing the chaos that followed the ouster of longstanding, brutal dictators decided to throw its weight behind one, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime ally who at one point seemed would go the way of others, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and, to a lesser extent, Hosni Mubarak. [Mark N. Katz breaks down Russia’s view of the Arab Spring protests in different countries here.]

But notwithstanding Russia’s eventual military involvement in Syria, which put it and the U.S. on opposite sides of that country’s conflict, the major point of contention between the two countries was Europe—most importantly which European countries Russia regarded as being part of its sphere of influence were being inducted into the European Union and, worse, NATO.

Obama’s response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea in March 2014, and Moscow’s subsequent support of pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine was economic sanctions. Although the measures had an impact on the Russian economy, they were seen as woefully inadequate by some Republican lawmakers in Congress. Senator John McCain of Arizona, a harsh critic of Obama’s foreign policy, wanted the U.S. to send arms to Ukraine. But Obama viewed the Ukraine conflict through another lens. As Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, wrote in the Obama Doctrine:  “Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.” Indeed, Obama told Jeff: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” Despite their criticism of Obama, the Republican platform ahead of the 2016 presidential election didn’t call for U.S. weapons to be sent to Ukraine to fight Russian-backed rebels.

Here’s where the historical narrative comes in: part of it deals with what Russia says it was promised by the West at the end of the Cold War; the other part deals with how Russia views Ukraine, in general, and Crimea, in particular.

At the end of the Cold War, Russia says, the United States promised it that NATO, the post-World War II anti-Soviet military alliance that has been the bedrock of Western security, wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward.” The U.S. denies this is true, arguing there was never an explicit promise. In any event, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia—former Warsaw Pact countries allied with Russia—as well as the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are all now NATO members, which grants them collective protection in the event of an attack by an external actor, presumably Russia.

Additionally, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,  Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia are also members of the European Union. Russia watched unhappily as its once vast sphere of influence dwindled. What brought matters to a head was Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU, which the Ukrainian government was scheduled to sign in late 2013. That agreement would have ultimately resulted in a free-trade deal between the EU and Ukraine, meaning the former Soviet republic would have moved away from its largest trading partner, Russia.

Russia’s cultural and political relations with Ukraine dates back centuries, and Moscow persuaded the Ukrainian government of the time to suspend the signing of the agreement. Massive protests followed, ultimately leading to the ouster of the government. Months later, Russia invaded Crimea. Many Russians maintain Crimea was never Ukrainian in the first place. It was, they say, a historically Russian region that was given away in 1954 by former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to a fellow Soviet republic, who likely believed, as most people at the time did, that the Soviet Union would live forever.

Following the invasion, Russia went on to lend military support to pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine, sparking a conflict that continues to this day—one that Russian has been repeatedly sanctioned over by the U.S. and its allies.

So, could Obama have stopped Russia? Perhaps. After the Cold War, American presidents appear to have believed that Russia should act in a manner reflecting the U.S. worldview. But Russia has consistently defended its own interests—whether it was backing Serbia during the NATO conflict in the Clinton era, invading Georgia during the Bush years, or Ukraine in Obama’s presidency. Russia has shown repeatedly that it’s willing to use its military—and other means—to protect what it sees as its sphere of influence.

George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.

Doug McLean

This week marks the publication of Lincoln in the Bardo, the long-awaited first novel by the acclaimed short-story writer George Saunders. Before I’d read the book, I planned to ask Saunders about the obvious thing: After years of writing only stories (and the occasional novella), why take on longform, and what was difficult about it? But then I started to read—and short versus long stopped seeming like the most meaningful distinction. Lincoln, regardless of its length, is not like anything Saunders has ever written before. It’s not like anything anyone has written before. The author may have set out to write his first novel, but the work he completed is a genre unto itself.

The book reads like a play for voices, with no narrator or stage directions, mixing 19th-century dialogue with descriptive passages cribbed from Abraham Lincoln’s real-life biographers. Since there’s no explanatory voiceover, it takes a few pages to absorb the audacious premise: It’s set in a Civil War-era limbo/purgatory, a twilight world where dead souls linger and converse. These, we learn, are the inhabitants of Oak Hill cemetery in Georgetown, who all cling to the same obvious lie: They are “very sick,” they insist. (Not dead. Never that.) So it is all very perplexing when a tall, angular man in a top hat appears among them, distraught and crying out for his lost son—12-year-old Willie Lincoln, who fell ill and died in 1862. Ultimately, the book explores the ways we are made grotesque by our absurd attempts to deny death; at the same time, the portrait of a grief-wracked president humanizes, even sanctifies, that denial.

As I read, I stopped worrying about  “story” and “novel.” Instead, I wondered: How does a book as singular as this one even come into being? In our conversation for this series, Saunders suggested that fiction is about abandoning everything you think you know—especially ideas about what to write and how to say it. As we discussed Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries,” a story that seems to both assert and undermine the author’s most deeply held beliefs, the author explained how his process requires him to question his intellectual and aesthetic convictions, entering an ambiguous realm where almost anything is possible.



George Saunders is the author of the story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, and The Tenth of December, which won the Story Prize. A MacArthur fellow and Guggenheim recipient, he teaches at Syracuse University’s MFA program in Fiction. He spoke to me by phone.

George Saunders: I was a first-year grad student at Syracuse when I went to see Tobias Wolff, who was our teacher, do a reading at the Syracuse Stage. He was feeling under the weather that night, so instead of reading from his work he said he was going to read Chekhov. He read three Chekhov short stories known as the “About Love” trilogy, and “Gooseberries” is the middle component. It was a huge day for me because I’d never really understood Chekhov at all. I’d certainly never understood him to be funny. But when Toby was reading him, he captured this beautiful range of feelings: beautiful, lyrical sections and laugh-out-loud-funny things.

The story is an extended meditation on the idea of happiness. It’s basically a story of two friends who get caught in a rainstorm while they’re out hunting, and they go to a nearby house of someone they know named Alekhin. After they take a swim, one of the friends, Ivan, tells a story about his brother, who had an obsession with owning a small estate, and with eating the gooseberries that he grew on the porch. As Ivan tells the story of his brother it becomes a kind of a screed about how happiness—especially his brother’s happiness—disgusts him, how pig-like people who pursue their own happiness are.

Ivan’s story builds in intensity, and by the end he’s making this beautiful, passionate case for why happiness is a confusing, undesirable emotion. In his telling, it’s almost a delusion to be mindlessly happy when others are sad. The sentiment is so heartfelt that it’s almost as though it came right out of Chekhov’s journals:

At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of his life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen—and everything is fine.

I always come out of that passage feeling like it’s a beautiful piece of rhetoric, one that articulates something I really believe. I’ve quoted this line on book tours, trying to explain why I don’t mind writing dark fiction: One role of literature, I’ll tell them, is to be the guy with the hammer, saying, “Look, we’re all pretty happy right now, but let’s just not forget the fact our happiness doesn’t eradicate the suffering of others.” It’s a beautiful insight about the lazy nature of happiness—and, for a few minutes, I think we’re meant to think that this stirring speech by Ivan is the whole point of the story. In a way, it is. Except, on the next page, we see that Ivan’s audience is bored and disappointed by the story. They wish that he’d had something better to say, and the whole evening ends on a flat note.

But then there’s this wonderful little reversal at the end, a mysterious and beautiful turn. It happens when Ivan goes up to his room, which he’s sharing with his friend Burkin. They’re both in bed, beds which have been made up by Alekhin’s beautiful maid:

Their beds, wide and cool, made up by the beautiful Pelageya, smelled pleasantly of fresh linen.

Ivan Ivanych silently undressed and lay down. “Lord, forgive us sinners!” he said, and pulled the covers over his head.

His pipe, left on the table, smelled strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin lay awake for a long time and still could not figure out where that heavy odor was coming from.

Rain beat on the windows all night.

Ivan leaves his unclean pipe out all night, keeping his friend Burkin awake. And that’s how Chekhov gets away with putting his real feelings about the oppressive nature of happiness into a character’s mouth. Without irony, without condescension, he just lets the character have his say. But then, here, Chekhov destabilizes the beautiful rhetoric of the previous section by showing another side of the guy who made that impassioned speech: He’s also self-obsessed and thoughtless enough to burden his friend with a smelly pipe. It's a great double whammy. You get the beautiful, articulate case against happiness, and then you get this complicating overtone of selfishness in the person who just made that beautiful speech.

We’re often told not to put our passions and political feelings into a story. But I actually think it’s a good idea. Put them in there, then step away. Imagine that the idea isn’t you, that it’s just an idea that part of you expressed. Then you can use the structure and the form of the story to kind of poke at your own beliefs a little and see if you can get more light out of them.

That’s exactly what happens, structurally, in “Gooseberries.” Ivan starts to tell his story right on the first page, but he’s interrupted by the rainstorm. And while they get in out of the rain, meet their host, and bathe, a full third of this nine-page story goes by. I always ask my students: What’s the point of this digression? Because the short story form makes a de facto claim of efficiency—its limited length suggests that all the parts are there for purpose. If there’s a structural inefficiency that never comes home to roost, or never produces beauty later, we note that as bad storytelling. And so whatever ultimate meaning “Gooseberries” has, it has to have something to do with what's contained in that digression—or else it’s a flawed piece.

You’ve got to let yourself write freely, with a lot of joy and conviction.

Looking at what happens during the digression, then, you start to realize that the story is a reflection on different forms of happiness. There’s a beautiful scene where they’re all taking a sensuous bath—“Oh my God, Oh my God,” Ivan keeps repeating, so completely moved by the feeling of the water. Then, later, this woman Pelageya waits on the men—and she’s so beautiful that they can only turn and stare at each other with their jaws on the floor. Why are these things here? Why are they worth giving space to in this extremely short piece? It’s because they’re both manifestations of beauty in the world, celebrating the things that make us pointlessly happy, and they complicate the dark vision of happiness that Ivan spells out later.

That’s one of my favorite things about Chekhov: his ability to embody what I call “on the other hand” thinking. He'll put something out with a great deal of certainty and beauty and passion, absolutely convincing you—and then he goes, “On the other hand,” and completely undermines it. At the end of this story you ask, “Chekhov, is happiness a blessing or a curse?” And he’s like, “Yeah, exactly.”

Now, who knows how Chekhov did this. It could be that he was there on page one, with Ivan about to tell his story—but something in him was just saying quietly, “Too soon. It doesn’t feel right yet.” Then, his genius produced this rainstorm, and the rainstorm produced this house that suddenly appeared on the horizon, and then his curiosity followed the characters there, and got them into the pond. Or it could be that Chekhov created this whole digression just following the thrill of the language—and that he invented the rest of the story only to justify the digression. We don’t know how he wrote—I have a feeling that Chekhov wrote in a different way than any other mortal. But I would guess that writing this story required him to be flexible, to let the story’s form wander away from his original intentions.

When I write, I’m just hoping that the story will surprise me in some way. You’ve got to let yourself write freely, with a lot of joy and conviction. Then, having done that, step back a little and see what you’ve done. See if that thing you’ve expressed is actually iron-clad. Just poke at it somehow, or let another character poke at it. And see how it’s asking you to challenge it, this object that you’ve made. As Einstein said, “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.” Whatever lame-brained notion I had about the story, I’m praying to god that it gets overturned and turns into something more intense.

A writer’s stance is basically to suss out the energy: Where does the story want me to go? That’s complicated, because I think everybody goes into a story with some notions of what they hope to accomplish. You need to be willing to renegotiate the things you thought you knew for sure. And so the question for any writer is: On what basis am I renegotiating?

For me, it’s usually about sound. If I think I want to go in Direction A, but in going there the prose I’m creating is no good or is bland or doesn’t pop, that’s when I start looking for ways to renegotiate. You think the story is about this nervous mailman, but when he goes to his first house, there’s a much more interesting guy there—and you know he’s more interesting, because you can write him better. Well, that’s the story telling you that the mailman isn’t actually the point.

I often find my way forward by finding the right voice. If I can find one that’s urgent, somehow, I just start writing—and the overflow of that mode always produces so much, it produces all the things we need, it produces theme and character and plot and all that. For me, to be able to throw that switch and have a voice that really comes naturally and is a lot of fun, is the best way into a story.

I never read my own stuff aloud as I’m doing it, but … I don’t know how to even explain this. There’s a little thing in my head, sort of at the base of my skull, a kind of voice generator. As I’m trying to write something, I can feel it kick in, and in my head there’s a sound, there’s an accent, there’s a pace. Whatever this thing is, it’s the same thing you use in improv—something I used to goof around with. It's that same thing: You throw a switch, and suddenly you're “doing” somebody. I use that all the time in writing. In fact, that was a big breakthrough for me—when I finally let that thing, whatever it is, come to the table.

Fiction can allow us a brief residence in the land of true ambiguity, where we really don’t know what the hell to think.

This book is tricky because I was working with 19th-century voices. That offset my process somewhat, because the voices that I can do naturally are all contemporary voices, often working-class voices. For this book, I had to make allowances for the fact that I’m trying to convince the reader that this is taking place in 1862. That was almost like running with leg weights a little bit because I couldn’t necessarily do the voices that I would naturally create. But it was fun.

I think at any stage in your career but maybe especially later, it's really important to keep putting hard shit in front of yourself and stuff that you could fail at in front of yourself. Because the tendency—in terms of career, and also in terms of just basic biology—is to kind of hunker down and do what you did before. That’s dangerous. In writing, maybe like in life, the worst setting is auto-pilot. If, as a writer you say, “I do it this way,” you’re already about half-dead—there are going to be situations where, if you didn’t do it that way, you’d find more life in your work.

I did a reporting piece about the Mexican border. I drove from Brownsville to San Diego and saw all kinds of stuff along the way. Everyday, I kept making new theories about what we should do on the border, and by the time I got to San Diego, I had a pretty good working model. I ran my theory by these two border patrol guys as I crossed back into the States. They were real nice guys, but they just dismantled it. Everything that I had come to believe, they just went: “No.” And they had that terrible weapon, facts.

They were just laughing, by the end of it. They had taken my theory and pulverized it. They were both on horseback, and as they rode off it was like my concept-demolition team had come in, reduced everything I thought I knew to rubble, and left me with nothing—nothing except all the pain and confusion I’d seen along the border. I had to walk three miles back to my car, completely befuddled, not sure of anything. But I think that’s a holy state, one we’re not in very much anymore with social media. Somebody posts a picture of their dog and you’ve got to weigh in on it. Literature is a useful counterweight to that kind of very shallow, very certain sort of thinking.

Fiction can allow us a really brief residence in the land of true ambiguity, where we really don’t know what the hell to think. We can’t stay there very long. It’s not in our nature. You can be truly confused by something and then ten minutes later you're grasping for your opinions like somebody going for a life jacket. But that brief exposure to the land of ambiguity is really, really good for us. To be genuinely confused about something for even a few seconds is good because it opens us up to the idea that that which we know right now is not complete. Just to know that for ten minutes a day is unbelievable.

A Cure for Wellness Is a Malevolent Thrill Ride, With Eels

A Cure for Wellness opens with a foreboding shot of a nightmarish edifice looming over the viewer at a canted angle. It’s not the creepy Swiss sanatorium where most of Gore Verbinski’s demented new film is set. No, it’s a Manhattan skyscraper, where a stressed-out office worker (Craig Wroe) takes a drink from the water cooler, then violently keels over and dies from a heart attack as the score thuds and groans furiously. Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring) has never been a subtle filmmaker, but even by his standards A Cure for Wellness is bold—an epically long, giddily violent piece of Gothic storytelling, crammed to the gills with beautiful camerawork, obvious symbolism, and lots and lots of eels.

That Manhattan office is also the workplace of Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a young executive who seems well on his way toward collapsing at his desk. The pale, drawn employee constantly chewing on nicotine gum is a role suited to the twitchy DeHaan, who has the look of someone in need of a serious spa day. With his co-worker dead, Lockhart is tapped to travel to Switzerland and retrieve the company’s CEO, who has retreated to a mysterious sanatorium and promised never to return to the empty life of big-city business.

Who can blame him? Verbinski shoots New York as a bleak, drab underworld. The “wellness spa” that Lockhart travels to—nestled in the Swiss Alps, conveniently located miles from any proper civilization (or cellphone signal)—is a comparative paradise. But, of course, all is not well atop the mountain, despite the stunning vistas. Like everyone else there, Lockhart is a person of means, summoned by some unspeakable force, to be “cured” of his modern woes. Though Verbinski and his co-writer Justin Haythe take plenty of time to unravel the dark secrets of the spa, they are not coy about its overall malevolence. From the second he walks in, the trap is sprung.

But it’s hard not to root for his comeuppance. It’s why Verbinski begins with the big scary city, and it’s why he’s decided to make a film in which the protagonist is an irritable jerk, barking at orderlies and demanding that his boss be produced at once, so that he can be dragged by his ear back to New York. Lockhart only half-listens as his driver tells him the history of the spa, built on the site of a castle that was destroyed by angry villagers when its lord was caught kidnapping people for nefarious purposes. Lockhart absentmindedly signs any form that’s put in front of him, and when offered a tall glass of the spa’s famed water by the ominous Dr. Heinreich Volmer (Jason Isaacs), he happily sucks it down.

Lockhart is like a wayward teen wandering into an abandoned house at the start of a slasher film, then inexplicably deciding to walk upstairs when he hears a creepy noise. You want to scream “don’t sign any paperwork!” at the screen, but you’re also rooting for his just deserts all the same. Soon enough, Lockhart finds himself trapped at the spa, after getting in a car accident when he tries to leave. He begins to delve into the institution’s deeper mysteries—where his boss is, what’s so special about the water everyone’s drinking, the origins of the “illness” he and every other patient have been diagnosed with, who the odd girl (Mia Goth) moping around the grounds is, and whether all those eels he keeps seeing are real or imaginary.

In case you haven’t seen any of the promotional materials for A Cure for Wellness, eels play a major part in the film. The slithery creatures are in the sensory-deprivation tanks the patients chill out in, they’re in the strange visions Lockhart keeps having at night, and, yes, they’re rustling around in his toilet tank (quite a lot of them, in fact). There are plenty of other mysteries, most of them obvious, but Verbinski is having more fun with the dizzying imagery than with the unfolding plot. Lockhart’s investigations are just a series of unsettling set pieces, almost all of which end with doctors and nurses, dressed in white, escorting him back to his room or strapping him down for some new, terrifying form of treatment.

A Cure for Wellness is unbelievably expensive-looking considering how violent and intense it is—there’s one scene of impromptu dental work that genuinely shocked me by not cutting away at its most horrifying moment. It’s also, thematically, a truly dark and depressed work. The film seems to argue that the only real fix for our capital-obsessed society is genuine madness and that dull depression can be transformed through brutal torment. Not all of it makes sense, but as Hollywood grows more homogenous and risk-averse, it’s a delight to see Verbinski scare up a giant budget for his grandly realized Lovecraftian visions.

The film’s climax doesn’t quite do enough to justify the 145-minute running time; in some ways, it’s annoyingly pedestrian, with Verbinski abandoning his most surreal visuals to conclude on a note that feels pat. But A Cure for Wellness isn’t arresting because of its story—it’s a simple haunted-house tale, just realized on a larger scale, crammed with attention to detail and charged with a jolting, unnerving atmosphere. This is a movie where a drink of water feels sinister, where a walk through the sauna becomes a descent into hell. And don’t forget the eels.

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Did Trump Aides Speak With Russian Intelligence Before the Election?

If the leaks that doomed Michael Flynn were a signal from the intelligence community, perhaps the message they intended to carry was: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The national security adviser’s abrupt resignation Monday night, which the White House says was a firing, came after it became clear that Flynn had lied to the public and to Vice President Mike Pence, alleging he had not discussed sanctions against Russia’s ambassador to the United States. On Tuesday evening, The New York Times added a set of new, if in some cases merely suggestive, information about further contacts between the Trump team and the Russian government—some of it directly contradicting statements made by Trump aides.

The newspaper reports that four current and former intelligence officers say that Trump political and business associates “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” The contacts came in the context of Trump repeatedly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin on the trail, as well as what intelligence officials and the Obama administration say were Russian efforts to boost Trump’s presidential hopes with hacks targeting Hillary Clinton and her political allies.

The report directly contradicts statements made by Trump aides. In early November, just after the election, the Russian deputy foreign minster said the government had been in touch with the Trump team. Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks, who is now at the White House, said then, “We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any foreign entities before yesterday, when Mr. Trump spoke with many world leaders.”

In January, Vice President Mike Pence—whom Flynn also misled about his discussions with Kislyak, leading Pence to give misinformation in a CBS News interview—was adamant there had been no communication.

On Tuesday, during a perplexing press briefing at the White House, Press Secretary Sean Spicer once again said he did not believe that any Trump team members had been in touch with the Russian government before the election. “There’s nothing that would conclude me… that anything different has changed with respect to that time period,” Spicer said.

The Times says the NSA began intercepting conversations because they involved Russian intelligence operatives. Intelligence officials were curious to see if Trump’s associates were colluding at all in the hacks, which targeted the Democratic National Committee. They didn’t find any evidence they were. But they have looked closely at Flynn; Roger Stone, a flamboyant political operative who left the Trump campaign early on but continued to advise Trump; Carter Page, who left the campaign amid scrutiny of his relations in Russia; and Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager for a time, and previously did business in Russia, at one advising a Kremlin client who was president of Ukraine.

Manafort denied any knowing contacts, but his response to the Times acknowledged that he may very well have been in touch with Kremlin agents.

“I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today,” Manafort said, but added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”

The Times also reports that the FBI continues to investigate a controversial dossier of allegations about Trump, prepared as opposition research by a former British intelligence official, revealed in a CNN report in January, and then published by BuzzFeed. The report’s author, Christopher Steele, seems to be held in high esteem by some intelligence figures, and FBI officials have made contact with some of his sources—but they have not, as yet, managed to confirm the dossier’s more salacious allegations.

The new report breaks serious new ground, but it also leaves a great amount unknown, and many questions unanswered. It’s unclear how closely the conversations reached to Trump, or what their substance was. Furthermore, intelligence agencies often investigate leads but find they lead nowhere, or find nothing prosecutable—a lesson highlighted by the inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Then again, the American public may not have to wait long to learn more. If the leaks continue at this pace, despite provoking Trump’s fury, the picture should grow clearer over the coming days.

What The Young Pope Preached About Love

In the final moments of The Young Pope’s first season, the elusive Pope Pius XIII finally showed his face to the world for a sermon in Venice that addressed one question: “Who is God?”

This is a central question of religion, but it is not the central question of The Young Pope. Over 10 episodes, Paolo Sorrentino’s daring and hypnotic HBO series instead asked: Who are people? Why is anyone the way they are? Or more specifically in this show, and perhaps more urgently in this era: What drives someone who acts erratically and cruelly in a position of power? Why would someone use their charisma and influence to exclude and degrade? Are the most inscrutable people born or are they made?

The show’s answer is that they are made. Nurture, not nature, is destiny—but it can be tamed.

Lenny Belardo, the young pope, may or may not be a miracle worker chosen by God, but first he is a human caught up in his own history. The same can be said for the doting but unsparing Sister Mary, the grandiose Cardinal Spencer, the pedophile Archbishop Kurtwell, the timid Monsignor Gutierrez, and on down the list of faithful. A church is made up of leaders wrestling with their own pasts, but so is a congregation—it is the leaders’ jobs to overcome the pain that has shaped them so as to ease the pain that has shaped others.

Sister Mary dispensed that very wisdom in the first episode of the series, telling her de facto son Lenny that “your personal aches, your enormous sufferings, your terrible memories ... must take a back seat” for the good of the church’s one billion congregants. Lenny did not heed this advice, not at first. As Sorrentino then unspooled intrigue-ridden and hilarious plotlines about an insurgent pope, he also threaded in reveries about Lenny’s childhood, mostly centering on his parents having abandoned him. The pope himself constantly referred to his orphanhood in conversation.

All of this was not just biographical information. We were meant to understand that Lenny’s obsession with mystery, his hardline take on abortion, his angst towards faith, and his general disinterest in providing comfort for others all stemmed from his sad childhood. He wanted to make the people of the world feel like orphans so that they would ache for God as he ached for his parents.

Sorrentino’s psychoanalytical vision of character—the assurance that childhood inputs have symmetrical outputs in adulthood—came through most clearly in  the finale, a buffet of revelations about past traumas. Gutierrez revealed he’d been abused as a child. Mary’s parentlessness was openly discussed. And the monstrous Kurtwell tearfully recounted molestation at the age of 12—on the way to confessing that he in adulthood preyed on boys.

There was a moment when it seemed that Lenny might forgive Kurtwell based on his horrifying past. Instead he exiled him to Ketchikan, Alaska—the spot where the innocent Cardinal Ozolins had been grievously suffering thanks to Lenny’s earlier casual cruelty. Finally, the pope was acting not out of capriciousness but out of justice. Finally, he was saying that being a victim is no excuse for being a monster, and that the role of the church lies not in the perpetuation of the past but in the transcending of it.

How did he come to this revelation? The Young Pope’s ninth and tenth episodes read mysteriously, with many explicit references to Lenny having changed—even revising his intolerance against homosexuals in the clergy—but few clear explanations for why. One factor, though, must have been that his past had become a source of salvation rather than of suffering. Love letters he’d written long ago, squirreled away as blackmail material by Kurtwell, ended up boosting Lenny’s popularity when released to the world. This development brought to life a prophecy he once made about congregants returning in droves, but it did so through a display of affection, warmth, and availability of the sort that he longed spurned.

And so, the power of those positive attributes suddenly came to the fore. In the finale, a cardinal listed the pope’s various supernatural-seeming feats that could qualify him for sainthood. They were all about helping others. When meeting a group of third-graders touring the Vatican, Lenny made one of his typical out-of-nowhere efforts at intimidation, and the sight of kids bursting into tears seemed to genuinely disturb him. The reminder of his childhood misery, the specter of him causing pain by withholding love just as his parents did, felt like a turning point: Why terrorize rather than comfort?

Lenny located another source of unconditional love, and he realized that his role is to be such a source for others.

Throughout, children have always seemed the key to Lenny’s spiritual development. In one shocking scene, he lovingly held a newborn and then accidentally dropped it—a sign of a complicated relationship with innocence and caring if there ever was one. Many of his most concrete papal actions were to protect kids: prosecuting Kurtwell, defeating the corrupt Sister Antonia, sending Mary to open more children’s charities.

Lenny’s final act of the season, his sermon in Venice, was an overture to the church’s children: its congregants. He held the speech in that particular city because that is where he believes his long-lost parents to be, and as he looked into the audience with a telescope, he even saw a couple who might have been his mother and father. But he had come not to find them but to say farewell to them, just as he recently said farewell to his father figure Cardinal Spencer and his mother figure Sister Mary. For he had located an alternate source of unconditional love in faith, and realized that his role is to be such a source for others.

His sermon recounted a saintly woman on her deathbed, peppered with existential questions by children: “Are we healthy or are we sick? Are we good or are we bad? Do we still have time or has it run out?” Replied the woman, “It doesn’t matter.” “Who is God?,”the kids asked. The answer: “God smiles.” The pope then asked the assembly to smile—a remarkable request from a pope who has spent so long scowling.

The very final moments of the season posed one more mystery as Lenny declared his faith to the audience and then doubled over in pain. As cardinals attended to him and his eyelids flickered, an image of the Virgin Mary appeared in the clouds. Was this Pope Pius XIII dying to be with God? Was he being struck with the Holy Spirit? The camera panned out and out and out until it encompassed the entire Earth. A possible takeaway: One person on the globe has conquered himself, so as to make way for the divine.

Flynn's Calls With Russia's Ambassador: Who Knew What, and When?

Updated at 6:08 p.m. ET

Mike Flynn resigned Monday as President Trump’s national-security adviser, capping a tumultuous few weeks that began with revelations he had discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., before Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

The nature of the conversations, what Flynn told Vice President Mike Pence and others who denied sanctions were discussed, and a steady trickle of leaks to the news media on the matter ultimately became too much of a distraction for the administration, prompting Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, to reportedly ask for—and receive—Flynn’s resignation. But Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, said Tuesday it was Trump who sought—and received—Flynn’s resignation because the “level of trust had eroded to a point” Trump had to act.

But who exactly knew what about Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak and when? Here’s a timeline of what’s been publicly reported:

November 8, 2016: Donald Trump is elected the 45th president of the United States. Flynn, a former Army general who was an early and ardent supporter of the Republican nominee, is expected to get a senior position in the Trump White House.

November 18: Trump names Flynn as his national-security adviser.

December 29: President Obama announced measures, including sanctions, on Russia for its interference in the U.S. election. The sanctions are in addition to those imposed on Moscow following its invasion in 2014 of Ukraine’s Crimea region. Flynn and Kislyak speak that day, The Washington Post reports, citing a Trump transition official. The official says sanctions weren’t discussed. Additionally, CNN reports the Russian ambassador texted Flynn on December 28.

December 30: Russian President Vladimir Putin says Moscow will not retaliate. The Post says that prompted U.S. intelligence analysts to look for reasons why Putin declined to impose his own measures against the U.S. They found, the newspaper reported, Kislyak’s communications, including the phone call, with Flynn. Sally Yates, then the deputy attorney general, found Flynn’s comments in the call “highly significant,” the Post reported.

January 12: David Ignatius, the Post columnist, wrote that Flynn and Kislyak spoke several times on December 29, the day the sanctions were announced. “What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?” Ignatius wrote. He added a Trump transition official told him the calls, which occurred before the U.S. sanctions were announced, did not cover that topic. Ignatius added:

This official later added that Flynn’s initial call was to express condolences to Kislyak after the terrorist killing of the Russian ambassador to Ankara Dec. 19, and that Flynn made a second call Dec. 28 to express condolences for the shoot-down of a Russian plane carrying a choir to Syria. In that second call, Flynn also discussed plans for a Trump-Putin conversation sometime after the inauguration. In addition, a second Trump official said the Dec. 28 call included an invitation from Kislyak for a Trump administration official to visit Kazakhstan for a conference in late January.

January 13: Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, told reporters in a conference call that Flynn and Kislyak only discussed a post-inauguration call between Trump and Putin. “That was it, plain and simple,” he said.

January 15: Pence, on CBS’s Face the Nation, said Flynn “did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”

January 19: Yates, the deputy attorney general, and senior intelligence officials debated what to do with the information they had on Flynn. The Post reported that FBI Director James Comey argued against notifying Trump administration officials of the communications.  

January 20: Trump was inaugurated; Flynn officially became national-security adviser.

January 23: Spicer told reporters he spoke with Flynn about the issue the previous night (January 22). He said Flynn and the Russian envoy spoke once. They discussed, he said, the Russian plane crash, the Syrian civil war, Christmas, and a call between their two leaders. Yates raised the issue again with Comey, who the Post said dropped his initial opposition to briefing the administration.

January 26: Yates briefed Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, about the conversation, Spicer said Tuesday. (The FBI interviewed Flynn immediately prior to this briefing, the Times reported Tuesday, but it’s unclear what date that interview occurred. The Times added the bureau believes Flynn wasn’t completely forthcoming during the interview.)  The Post reported earlier Tuesday that Yates told McGahn that Flynn had misled Pence and others about the content of his conversations with Kislyak. Flynn, Yates reportedly said, was consequently vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Spicer said McGahn immediately briefed Trump and other senior officials. Trump ordered McGahn to look into whether there was a legal issue, Spicer said. After several days, Spicer said, McGahn concluded there was none. Spicer said the nature of the conversation between Flynn and the Russian envoy was not unusual, but “the president [then] evaluated the trust issue” and concluded there had been an erosion of trust. Explaining the time difference between the time Trump was briefed and the time Flynn resigned, Spicer said he didn’t understand how that was “due process.” Yates, he said, “didn’t come in and say there was an issue. She said, ‘Wanted to give you a heads-up there may be information.’ She could not confirm there was an investigation.”

February 7 and 8: Flynn told the Post he did not discuss the sanctions with Kislyak. A day later, his spokesman told the Post the national security adviser “couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

February 9: NBC News reported Tuesday Pence was only informed of the Justice Department’s warning about Flynn 15 days after Trump and others were told.  

February 10: An unnamed Trump administration official told the Post Pence either misspoke or was misled by Flynn. Further, The New York Times reported that transcripts existed of the conversation. While the alleged content of the conversations was a likely breach of protocol during a presidential transition—and could be a breach of the law—it’s unlikely to lead to any charges against Flynn.

February 11 and 12: When asked about it en route to Mar-a-Lago, Trump replied he was unaware of the controversy. Spicer said Trump was referring only to the Post’s article on the conversation.  Here’s the exchange that took place:

Here is Trump's Air Force One exchange where POTUS says he didn't know about reports re: Flynn and Russian sanctions. (h/t @gregorywallace) pic.twitter.com/03Ls2U0vQV

— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) February 14, 2017

Still, Flynn went to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida retreat, with the president and the Japanese prime minister. He appeared to enjoy Trump’s confidence, and even huddled with the president when news broke of North Korea’s missile launch. Still, there was no public word from Trump over the reports about his national-security adviser.

February 13: Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s counselor, said on MSNBC Flynn enjoyed the president’s confidence. Hours later, Flynn resigned.

February 14: Conway said it was Flynn’s decision to resign; Spicer said Trump asked for Flynn’s resignation.

On Not Saying His Name

Last fall, after America learned about a videotape featuring the Republican presidential candidate bragging about groping women, Michelle Obama delivered a fiery speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, seemingly condemning his behavior. “This wasn’t just locker-room banter,” Obama said from behind a podium while campaigning for Hillary Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine. “This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior ... And to make matters worse, it now seems very clear that this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s one of countless examples of how he has treated women his whole life.”

The pointed takedown became one of the most memorable moments in a memorable election cycle. But of the 3,309 words the First Lady spoke, “Donald” and “Trump” were not among them. Trump’s name was also notably missing from many of her husband’s speeches on the campaign trail for Clinton. When the late Gwen Ifill asked President Barack Obama why he had been avoiding saying “Trump,” he replied, “He seems to do a good job mentioning his own name. So, I figure, you know, I will let him do his advertising for him[self].”

Like the Obamas, many of Trump’s critics have become rather skilled at speaking about him without ever saying his name. In his January State of the State address, California Governor Jerry Brown didn’t utter “Trump” once, even though the politician had been vocal and explicit about his opposition in the past. Nor was the name said by Representative John Lewis when the civil-rights leader responded to attacks Trump lobbed at him via Twitter. Meryl Streep’s viral Golden Globes speech took aim at the new president while never acknowledging him by name, and “a coarse blowhard who has boasted about assaulting women” was the closest the humorist Calvin Trillin came to naming the man in a recent piece in The New Yorker. Last week, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice King shared a widely circulated list to her Facebook page offering tips for resisting Trump. The top suggestion: “Use his name sparingly so as not to detract from the issues.”

In all of these instances, it’s what’s missing that is loudest. “Absences can be significant,” James Sias, an ethical theorist and assistant professor of philosophy at Dickinson College, told me. “What stood out to most people about Michelle Obama’s speech is what she didn’t say.”

For some, the refusal to name Trump amounts to denial or dissociation. But for many of the tactic’s adoptees, it’s a signal of resistance—an indication that the speaker rejects Trump’s legitimacy. This approach didn’t seem to hurt Trump’s momentum during the campaign, but now that he’s in office, it’s one way that his opponents appear to feel able to challenge his standing.

Given the influence Trump’s name wields, snubbing it is an attempt to withhold some of that power while staking out higher moral ground, said Jenny Lederer, an assistant professor of linguistics at San Francisco State University. “In his case, especially, people feel like not repeating his name is [a way of] not speaking to the brand and the value system that goes along with his political ideology.” Lederer, whose research focuses on the way people talk about controversial political issues, told me that a refusal to name on this scale is only possible because “Trump” is already so omnipresent that discussion of him doesn’t require any reference.

Along the way, “Trump” has become more than a word for reality-star fame.

“The fact that you can not name somebody signals the conceptual salience that person has in the minds of your listeners,” said Lederer, who used Streep’s Globes speech as an example. Viewers would not have known whom the actress was talking about if she had gotten on stage and started commenting on something Brad Pitt did without mentioning him by name, despite the star’s massive fame. Meanwhile, “the already defined links between Donald Trump and his egregious behavior allows [Streep] to not name him,” Lederer said.

Trump may be the only person for whom this nameless reference is currently possible. For decades, his name has been plastered across the physical (high-rises, hotels, golf courses, wineries, airplanes) and cultural (steaks, vodka, an embattled “university”) landscapes. It’s become synonymous with wealth (Forbes reports a net worth of $3.7 billion, though the amount has been questioned elsewhere) and with success, at least in the eyes of Trump and his millions of fans. It has reached ubiquity since he entered the race for president, peppering front pages and homepages, airwaves and Saturday Night Live episodes. It was the third most searched term on Google in 2016, behind Pokémon Go and the iPhone 7. For comparison, “Obama” was the sixth most Googled term in 2008; “Sarah Palin” was the first.

Along the way, “Trump” has become more than a word for reality-star fame. For many, that one syllable is now so loaded with echoes of “build the wall” and “grab them by the pussy” and “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims” that some have come to view it as a grenade of ideology. When conservative students chalked “Trump” across the Emory University campus last spring, it prompted a debate over whether the name itself was an expression of hate. Meanwhile, even those associated with him pulled back from using it: Texas Senator Ted Cruz was for not saying it while stumping for the Republican nominee last fall, and Trump Hotels has rolled out a new hotel brand that the name.

These connotations are another motive for some to refuse to say “Trump.” The word can be seen as a kind of trigger, or, as Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, prefers to call it, post-traumatic stress. “During the campaign, some of the things he said produced post-traumatic stress for people who had experienced predators,” Aptheker told me. As an example, she pointed to a video made by survivors of gender-based violence titled “We Will Not Be Silent,” in which different speakers describe the ways the president (referred to as “this man”) is a painful reminder of their traumas.

It’s for this reason that All Saints Church in Pasadena, California, won’t pray for Trump by name. “Whereas before we prayed for ‘Barack, our president,’ we are now praying for ‘our president, our president-elect, and all others in authority,’” wrote the church’s rector, Mike Kinman, in an open letter posted to the church’s website in January, before Trump took office. “This practice will continue for at least the near future. We are in a unique situation in my lifetime where we have a president-elect whose name is literally a trauma trigger to some people—particularly women and people [for whom], because of his words and actions, he represents an active danger to health and safety.”

Perhaps the most prominent pop-culture example of a refusal to name is the Harry Potter villain Voldemort, who was referred to as “He Who Must Not Be Named” and “You Know Who” by fearful wizards. “It’s not consistently that saying Voldemort is the brave thing and not saying it is the cowardly thing, but rather that it depends on the political situation and your personal history,” said Vanessa Zoltan, a chaplain at Harvard University and a co-host of the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast. “The big thing we learn [from Voldemort’s name] is the impact of different traumas on how we handle something.” (For the record, the series’s Professor Dumbledore advised, “Always use the proper name for things.”)

When it comes to the current president, the refusal to use his name may be uniquely subversive.

The Trump/Voldemort comparison has at this point been exhausted, and drawing parallels between the two runs the risk of trivializing the actions of the former. “If we turn [Trump] into a caricature, we may miss what is real,” said Zoltan’s co-host, Casper ter Kuile.

A refusal to use the president’s name isn’t so much about demonizing Trump, said Sias, who added that he’s reminded of the rivalry between the Michigan Wolverines and Ohio State, which is so bitter that fans on both sides will only refer to the other as “the school up north” or “the school down south.”

This is, of course, one of the preferred means of criticism and derision on Twitter, where “subtweeting,” or calling someone out without naming them, also abounds. Trump is now such a regular target of subtweeting that The Washington Post offers a running list of examples. (Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review of an Adolf Hitler biography, which describes Hitler’s rise while seemingly—and namelessly—making Trump comparisons, is another of the most talked-about cases.) In communication theory, this is known as the “rhetoric of agitation”—not naming or misnaming as a way of dislodging someone’s position of power. “We can express contempt or disrespect just as much by misnaming as we can by refusing to name,” Sias said.

During last year’s campaign, the Last Week Tonight host John Oliver tried to get Trump’s ancestral name, Drumpf, to catch on with the promise to “Make Donald Drumpf Again!” (A cornerstone of the push is a Google Chrome extension that swaps all instances of “Trump” out with “Drumpf.”) And Trump dissenters have invented like “Cheeto Jesus,” the Bernie Sanders-approved moniker “Tweeter-in-Chief,” or the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s preferred descriptor, “short-fingered vulgarian.”

Plenty of insulting nicknames were used for Obama, as well, and conservatives had their own way of linguistically conveying their feelings. “Eight years ago it was really common to hear Republicans refer to President Obama as Barack Hussein Obama,” Sias said. An insistence on using Obama’s middle name was an attempt at framing him as foreign—a way to both otherize him and exploit the connotations most Americans had with the name Hussein (chiefly, Saddam Hussein). “There’s some sense in which it’s the mirror opposite of refusing to name Trump at all,” Sias added. “Not only am I naming Obama, I’m using his whole name, but for a clearly political purpose.”

When it comes to the current president, the refusal to use his name may be uniquely subversive because of the degree to which Trump has wrapped his entire worth, wealth, and fame up in those five letters. “You’ve got a perfect storm of elements here,” Sias said. “Somebody whose biggest soft spot would be his name, and all of these particularly sharp and pointed acts of political resistance or political disrespect aimed at it.”

5 Questions Raised by Michael Flynn's Abrupt Departure

An abrupt resignation, like Michael Flynn’s announcement Monday night that he would leave his post as national security adviser, is a beginning masquerading as a conclusion. His departure resolves one straightforward question—Can Flynn survive, having admittedly misled the vice president and the American people?—but raises a host of more important, and more complex, questions. In most cases, it’s far too early to guess what the answers might be, but here’s a rundown of some of the most pressing mysteries Tuesday.

Who replaces Flynn?

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Flynn's Calls With Russia's Ambassador: Who Knew What, and When?

On a mechanical level, the question of who becomes the president’s top aide on security now is an important, urgent one. Not only has Flynn resigned, but his deputy, K.T. McFarland, is expected to leave the White House too, The New York Times reported. (McFarland, whose main credential was her frequent media commentary, would have been a surprising pick to be elevated.) Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, who had been serving as chief of staff of the National Security Council, has been named as Flynn’s interim replacement, and is reportedly a candidate for the permanent job. Other candidates include David Petraeus, the retired general and former CIA director, who interviewed for other positions in the administration, and retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward, who was Defense Secretary James Mattis’s deputy when Mattis led U.S. Central Command. Petraeus would be an interesting pick, since he is a veteran of the Obama administration but was forced to step down and later convicted for sharing classified information with his mistress-biographer.

What did the White House know, who knew it, and when did they know it?

It’s clear that Flynn was not forthcoming with Vice President Mike Pence, as he acknowledged in his resignation letter: “Unfortunately, because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the Vice President Elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian Ambassador.” The question is how long that was clear. The Washington Post broke the story that Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. prior to inauguration, contrary to his statements. But the Post now reports that then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates informed the White House counsel, Don McGahn, in January that Flynn was not telling the whole truth about his phone calls, warning that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. She also discussed it with FBI Director James Comey, who was initially resistant to informing the White House but later came around, the Post says. (Yates, an Obama appointee, was later fired for announcing the Justice Department would not carry out Trump’s executive order on immigration.)

McGahn has not commented on the report, but if it’s true, that means a high-ranking White House staffer was aware of Flynn’s duplicity long before the public learned of it, late last week. Who, then, did McGahn inform? Did Chief of Staff Reince Priebus know? How about presidential aides Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Kellyanne Conway? Did Trump know? (When asked on Friday, Trump claimed to be unaware of the Post report in which Flynn admitted he may have misled Pence.) Did Pence? If not, why did McGahn not see fit to inform them? If so, what actions did the others take? As late as Monday afternoon, top Trump aides were saying that Flynn had Trump’s full confidence, and hours later, he was out.

Why was Flynn finally pushed, and who goes next?

Much analysis of the White House has adopted the lens of two competing teams—an establishment squad, centered around Priebus, and an insurgent platoon, led by Bannon. Flynn was close to Bannon, but Politico and the Times report that Bannon wanted to fire Flynn as early as Friday, and eventually asked for his resignation. (Bannon’s old outlet, Breitbart, however, blames “establishment forces” for Flynn’s ouster.) The president, meanwhile, was happy to wait and see if Flynn could survive, reports Phil Rucker of The Washington Post. One interesting takeaway is that it was the Bannon team that pushed out one of its own when he became a liability. It’s also somewhat surprising that even when it became clear that Flynn has misled Pence, and allowed him to mislead the American people, he had a chance to survive—a sign of Trump’s reluctance to fire aides, and a curious statement about Pence’s position in the scheme of things.

It’s highly unusual for a high-level official to leave an administration so quickly, within just three weeks. (Sometimes appointees are forced to withdraw before taking their jobs, but effectively never is one installed and then pushed out as rapidly as Flynn.) Last week, I suggested that the Trump administration had begun to look a little like a reality-TV show—Survivor: West Wing. If so, Flynn was the first to fall, but of course there’s always the next round of elimination. So who will be the next to leave the chaotic White House, and will be part of the post-Flynn shakeup, or for different reasons?

Is the FBI still investigating the Trump administration’s ties to Russia?

Once it became clear that Flynn had discussed sanctions with Russian officials, there was speculation that he might have violated the Logan Act, which bars unauthorized citizens from negotiating U.S. policy. But the prospect of a Logan Act prosecution was always highly remote—the bigger story is about the nature of Trump administration contacts with the Russians more generally, and whether Russia interfered with the presidential election to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

It’s known that the FBI has been investigating these ties: CNN reported in January that the bureau was looking into Flynn’s calls. The Post reports that this was part of a broader investigation. So, is that investigation still ongoing? What else is it considering, and when might the contents become public? And why was Director Comey, who was so quick to publicize developments in the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, reportedly so reluctant to confront the White House about Flynn’s dissembling? The Army is also, according to the Times, investigating whether Flynn received money from the Russian government for a 2015 trip, which could break the law.

How will the rest of the Republican Party respond?

Between the FBI and Army investigations, it’s clear that there are important unanswered questions about Flynn’s dealings. Yet the Trump administration’s line, somewhat implausibly, is that the “real story” is not the president’s top security aide misleading the vice president and the American people, but instead the leaks that have fed the story—the news about Yates’s call to McGahn, the fact that the FBI was investigating Flynn’s calls, the sources who said Flynn was lying. Breitbart has also taken this line.

How will other members of the president’s party react, though? So far, many of them seem unwilling to get anywhere near the story. Representative Jason Chaffetz, who leads the House Oversight Committee, suggested Tuesday that with Flynn’s resignation, the story was coming to an end. On Monday, Representative Devin Nunes, who leads the House Intelligence Committee, staunchly defended Flynn and said there was no need for him to resign. On Tuesday, Nunes said that his committee would not investigate Trump and Flynn’s conversation, citing executive privilege, but said he wanted the FBI to explain the leak of transcripts of Flynn’s calls. On the Senate side, where GOP members have been more eager to investigate Russian interference in the election, Senator Roy Blunt called for a committee to examine Trump’s ties with Russia “exhaustively” and to question Flynn. It might not be wrong that the intelligence community was out to get Flynn, argues Eli Lake, who points to Flynn’s rocky relationship with spies over time. But whether Republicans in Congress are more interested in Flynn’s dubious dealings with Russia or with the question of leaks that pushed him out will say a lot about their priorities, and whether they are willing to stand up to the White House.

ABC Has Finally Cast a Black Bachelorette

In the first episode of the second season of UnREAL, Lifetime’s dark satire of The Bachelor, Rachel and Quinn, reality producers and reality’s puppeteers, are celebrating. They have just given their Bachelor-esque reality show, Everlasting, its first black Suitor—Darius Hill, an NFL quarterback who, like most of the show’s Suitors, agrees to take on the role because he is in need of some light image rehab. Everlasting, at this point, has gone 14 seasons without casting a star of color—and Rachel, having fought to update her show’s regressive monochromism, is now exceedingly proud of herself for having won the battle. “It was meeeeeee!” Rachel yells. “The first black Suitor, it was me! We’re gonna make hiiiiistory!”

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UnREAL and the show it mocks have, for the past couple of years, been engaged in a particularly ripply kind of feedback loop: Since the satire entered the scene, The Bachelor and the other shows that circle in its gauzy orbit have offered viewers, even more than they did before, teasing plot twists and low-hanging conspiracy theories and, in general, a posture of inviting knowingness when it comes to the interplay between reality and “reality.” So it was fitting that, on Monday—when The Bachelor announced that it had cast the Texas-based lawyer Rachel Lindsay to be its next Bachelorette, the first person of color to star in the 21 seasons of The Bachelor/ette—the show neatly channeled that other Rachel. The Bachelor, at once so real and so UnREAL, was very, very proud of itself. It had, after all, made hiiiiistory.

Here’s Mike Fleiss, The Bachelor’s creator, stirring rumors about Rachel’s elevation to Bachelorettehood via a series of impishly enigmatic tweets—suggesting, in their brevity, that the powers-that-B had made a selection for the show that was so “historic” and “history-making” as to be, indeed, possibly “the most-historic in the history of #thebachelor”:

I have just received approval to make an historic announcement in the coming days regarding #TheBachelor !!!

— Mike Fleiss (@fleissmeister) February 7, 2017

This history-making, historic announcement could be the most-historic in the history of #thebachelor !!!

— Mike Fleiss (@fleissmeister) February 8, 2017

This historic, history-making announcement regarding #thebachelor actually doesn't involve #thebachelor ...

— Mike Fleiss (@fleissmeister) February 11, 2017

We've decided to let our friend @jimmykimmel make the historic announcement during tomorrow night's show. #thebachelor

— Mike Fleiss (@fleissmeister) February 12, 2017

Tonite's the night!!! #thebachelor #historic

— Mike Fleiss (@fleissmeister) February 13, 2017

Was Fleiss joking with all this “most-historic thing in the #history of history” stuff? Was his commentary self-congratulatory, or self-deprecating, or something in between? It was all, as with most things that get caught up in reality TV’s particularly buoyant brand of gravity, unclear. And that, of course, only served to add to the drama of the revelation—made on Monday, as was foretold, on Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC show (and reiterated, on Tuesday morning, on ABC’s Good Morning America, under the chyrons ‘BACHELORETTE’ BOMBSHELL and ‘BACHELORETTE’ MAKES HISTORY).

The announcement was also made, in another #historic move, while Rachel remains as one of the final four women vying for Nick’s heart on the current season of The Bachelor. So the franchise, on Monday, spoiled itself.

But the franchise also, on Monday, spoiled itself. All that high-five-ing to #history may have been enigmatic, but it was also decidedly ironic, especially considering the length of time it took Fleiss and his fellow realitymongers to cast a person of color as a star of their show. There’s a statute of limitations for such self-congratulation, and it’s one The Bachelor long ago surpassed. As Deadline summed it up: “There have been 21 editions of The Bachelor since it launched in March of 2002, including the edition now on the air. There have been 12 editions of spinoff The Bachelorette. That’s more than 30 missed opportunities over about 15 years to cast an African American in a lead role….”

Rachel is both way, way better than the show and yet game, nonetheless, to be part of it.

More than 30 missed opportunities. Fleiss’s smugness in spite of those, and ABC’s more generally, was precisely what UnREAL was satirizing, with varying degrees of success, in its “black Suitor” plot line. The Bachelor franchise is regressive in many ways, from its marriage-plot-centrism to its vaguely Darwinian premises to its cheerful sidestepping of its cast members’ jobs and lives and intellects. (The Bachelor once identified a woman contestant as a “Chicken Enthusiast” and two others as, simply, “Twin.”) The show’s track record with race, however, has been the most cringe-worthy element within a show that offers many reasons to cringe. The Bachelor, vaguely aware of its obligations to reflect the world beyond its borders, has long paid lip service to an extremely superficial notion of diversity; it has also long established that the contestants who make it to the hometown dates and the Fantasy Suites and the golden-houred, Neil Lane-assisted proposals of marriage—the contestants who, in The Bachelor’s moral universe, are Here for the Right Reasons and, thus, Deserving of Love—will be monochromatic.

During Ben’s season of The Bachelor, the show’s 20th, many fans were hoping that Jubilee Sharpe, who stood out from her fellow contestants not just because she was a war veteran, but also because she was funny and awkward and authentic within a show that doesn’t always prize those things, would become the first Bachelorette of color. It was not to be, for the reasons that all things, within Fleiss’s franchise, will or will not be: The producers decided against her. They chose, instead, JoJo Fletcher.

WATCH: @TheRachLindsay in studio after becoming the first African-American 'Bachelorette:' https://t.co/FjxO19SzFH #TheBachelorette pic.twitter.com/N5M3OZINoY

— Good Morning America (@GMA) February 14, 2017

And now, finally, it’s Rachel. And she will be, very likely, a fantastic Bachelorette: She is gorgeous, as all the women who take that role will be, but she is also smart and driven and funny and compassionate. She has, perhaps above all, adopted an attitude toward the show’s proceedings that manages to be at once aware of The Bachelor’s varied absurdities and, also, embracing of them. Rachel is both way, way better than the show and game, nonetheless, to be part of it, which is, for a Bachelorette star, a very good combination. Plus, her dad is a federal judge, and, she has told Nick, a man who expects that her dates will refer to him as “sir”—so next season’s hometown dates, you can fairly predict, will be amazing.

So the show’s producers deserve to be proud of themselves for casting Rachel, the person, as their next Bachelorette. But for casting Rachel, the black woman? No. They took far, far too long to deserve any plaudits for that. “I’ve heard appalling things about race all the time,” Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, a former producer for The Bachelor and the co-creator of UnREAL, told Variety of her behind-the-scenes experiences of the ABC show. It will take more than one casting decision to undo the effects of those appalling things. It will take more than one season for The Bachelor to legitimately claim to have Made History.

Fleiss’s framing of things did offer one good insight, though, into The Bachelor’s 15-years-in-the-making casting choice: Hollywood producers finally allowing a person of color to take on a starring role—and, then, congratulating themselves for the progress they have allowed to have been made—hews, it turns out, extremely well to history. The history not just of Hollywood, but of the world it claims to reflect. It was Rachel, unsurprisingly, who summed up her situation far better than the reality producers did on her behalf. “I’m honored to have this opportunity and to represent myself as an African-American woman,” the new Bachelorette said, after her casting was announced. She added: “Even though I’m an African-American woman, it’s no different than any other Bachelorette.”