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“My narrator is starving, both literally and metaphorically”: Teddy Wayne and Alexandra Kleeman on anxiety and alienation in their new books

Teddy Wayne; Alexandra Kleeman (Credit: Kate Greathead/HarperCollins/Graham Webster)

Teddy Wayne (“The Love Song of Jonny Valentine,” “Kapitoil”), author of the new novel “Loner,” and Alexandra Kleeman (“You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine”), author of the new story collection “Intimations,” interviewed each other recently by email about their new books.

Teddy Wayne: The scope and variation of the stories in “Intimations” is broad. There are some more straightforwardly realist stories, like “Choking Victim” (which features a recurring protagonist named Karen); highly experimental work, such as “Weather,” which contains many short, often abstract sections about weather; and then some that split the difference, like “Fairy Tale” or “Fake Blood” or “You, Disappearing,” that use semi-conventional narrative techniques but whose worlds are anything but conventional. Given that you have an affinity for more than one form, what draws you to a particular aesthetic for a given story?

Alexandra Kleeman: Every story I write begins with a different distribution of knowns and unknowns, which I try to assess before I begin writing. I ask myself how much can I know about this world without feeling like I’m making it false, putting things in that I can’t be confident come from the idea rather than my ideas about the idea. This determines the gappiness of the world, how complete or incomplete it is, how much blurriness there is in it — and that gives the story form too! Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun giving myself permission to have limited omniscience, like in the realist Karen stories — because they’re all based in her life, I get to know everything that came before that point in her life, and anything I want to access in the lives of other characters, but I find out more about her in each story I write.

But creating a long-lived, rounded character is something new for me, and only possible because Karen is built off my own fears and neuroses. You’ve done it so well in each of your novels, and the characters are so different — how do you decide what kind of character is going to be at the center [of] a book? Why were you drawn to David Federman, the title “loner” of your new novel?

Wayne: For each of my novels, I’ve had something of a eureka moment of deciding what world I want to set it in — Wall Street, the pop-music industry, Harvard — and what the very vague contours of the narrative might be (which typically get changed a lot through the writing process). The voice of the first-person narrator has then followed somewhat naturally, also subject to revision. I’ve never gone through the paces that writing textbooks sometimes recommend, such as writing out a character’s biography, or determining what his favorite food is, or most traumatic memory, etc. — that’s always seemed like a fraudulent way of assembling a fictional person. It’s through the voice that I tend to figure out the character (and through dialogue that I come to understand other characters).

The previous two narrators were more sympathetic and lovable protagonists. For David, I was drawn to portraying a ruthless, remorseless manipulator, somewhere on the spectrum between Tom Ripley and Humbert Humbert, who nevertheless makes a few, faint claims on readerly sympathy. I also wanted to write about the contemporary white male who perceives that the world is changing around him, that his privileges are slowly diminishing, and who, rather than embrace the progress, is threatened by it and reacts with anger. We see this playing out very conspicuously on the political stage right now, but it felt like more of an interesting challenge to describe this aggrieved phenomenon within David, who could easily pass for a sensitive, enlightened young man.

One of the recurring themes in “Loner” is David’s highly subjective, persecuted sense that he is being silenced by the culture around him (combined with his own timidity and fear of speaking his mind), in part because of his gender. In “Choking Victim,” you write about Karen’s desire to expel and express what’s inside her. Many of your other stories revolve around anxiety over the idea of imprisonment within the body, especially the female body, and notions of domesticity. Is Karen’s predicament simply a historical one, or is there something specific to life as a woman now that you were trying to explore?

Kleeman: I think the way David registers this “silencing” in your novel is so interesting: he tries very casually to assert himself in various college situations, and when his bids at expertise, fluency, whatever are obstructed he’s puzzled or frustrated — he can’t reflect on how he’s behaved, he can’t even see it. It’s so different from the intense, sometimes overwhelming self-awareness that I think of as being a part of femininity, a thing that forcefully shapes the experience characters in my stories. Sometimes it appears as farce, as in “Fairy Tale” (where the narrator negotiates her relationship to a houseful of men she’s never met before who all claim to be her boyfriends, fiancés, paramours, etc.) and sometimes as a more realistic, identifiable thing, like with my recurring character Karen, for whom the everyday processes of living also involve trying to ignore the dozens of different ways others are perceiving her.

Being “trapped in a body” seems like a sad thing to associate with femaleness, so I wouldn’t call it that — though there is a certain sadness to noticing, again and again, that others are finding messages in your physiology that have nothing to do with you. But I feel that being asked to reflect so much upon your physiology — what it says about you, how it looks, how you want it to look, how it feels, whether it feels improved or disimproved since you last checked on it — can make being feel unfluent. So can the idea that your own appearance and presentation are deeply alterable, fundamentally plastic rather than fixed. For me, it gives the physiology a sort of gravity, a presence of its own, which sits alongside consciousness and feels uncanny. It’s like a fish-eye lens, magnifying some things and making others difficult to perceive. Which makes me want to ask you: how would you describe the lens that David views his college surroundings through? What is he sensitive to, what is he unable to see?

Wayne: Maybe the “trapped in a body” question was projection, since it’s David’s concern — not the physical “trappings” of corporeal self-consciousness, but of being locked within one’s self and wanting either to break out of it and connect with another, or become someone else altogether. In his case, his desire to have Veronica is at times continuous with a desire to become her, to merge with her and lose his own identity (an idea you played with throughout your novel with the main character and her roommate).

Yes, David is a little blind when it comes to analyzing his interactions with others, though not completely. He’s skilled at malevolent manipulation for the most part, less so at being charming, which can be a form of benign manipulation. He can sometimes tell when he’s rubbed someone the wrong way (usually when a joke goes wrong), but if the other person is herself masking her real response, he chooses not to see through it. He’s attuned to status and power, and ignores the pain or vulnerability others are showing or trying to conceal.

These are not very laudable traits in a person, and I expect some readers will be turned off by David. Something that impressed me about your characterization of Karen is that, while she’s certainly not monstrous, you also didn’t go out of your way to make her the most “likeable” protagonist of all time, either — she’s pretty ambivalent about being a mother, for instance. This question has come up a lot in the last few years through a gendered lens, where female authors writing female characters seem to have more market pressure to write them with more relatability, and male authors writing male characters largely get a pass, in a reflection of real-life expectations. Because David does such horrible things and thinks such terrible thoughts, I had to consider this and find a few spots where the reader has a chance to empathize with him, lest he become a cartoon villain. Did you sweat over this in your creation of Karen — not so much likeability, which I expect you don’t care about, but empathy, a chance for a wide swath of readers to find an emotional foothold in the character? (I’m assuming that a certain amount of readers will relate to things like the previous example of maternal ambivalence.)

Kleeman: Is it odd that I found myself empathizing with David several times? You write him so convincingly as an underdog, or as somebody who thinks of themselves as an underdog, and when he steps out of that role the first few times it’s difficult to see the darkness for what it is. That and it’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by the nods to the genre of the campus novel — just as it’s easy to be lulled into that same feeling on a college campus, where everything is so nicely kept and looks so collegiate, like nothing truly bad could ever happen there. I love colleges, but I’ve always found it strange how they try to minimize the visibility of physical money with plastic cards and point systems, and tuition funds transferring silently through invisible channels. Resorts are the other place where they do this, immerse you in a fantasy of moneyless existence, and it has always felt very eerie to me.

This is a good segue into one of my Karen stories (“Jellyfish”) that takes place at a beach resort, where she does the unlikeable thing of getting onto a good-looking stranger’s motorbike and going with him to an unknown place, while her fiancé waits in the tropical bungalow. (This, I want to emphasize, is something I have never ever done!) They had gotten engaged earlier that day. I don’t know what people find easy or impossible to empathize with — people are always surprising me. But I think that empathy doesn’t operate as decisively as a faculty like judgment does — we empathize with more than we judge to be acceptable. I feel as though all of Karen’s actions have an emotional logic to them, a coherent emotional structure. She ultimately does a very inadvisable thing because of a whole heap of factors: her bad feeling about the water surrounding their particular resort, her fiancé’s strangely casual attitude to her after an Important Event, his weird eating habits, and the fight they have over her anxiety, which is linked to her felt inadequacy as a vacationer and more generally as a partner.

I don’t think that Behaviorism was wrong to think of people as stimulus-response units — Behaviorism’s mistake was thinking that stimuli and responses were simple . . . and of course to put subjective conscious experience under erasure. I think that people react to stimuli with a response that is the summation of everything they’ve experienced, a very full response, and that it’s only in special situations that they invent an entirely novel way to react. In these Karen stories, Karen is continually funneled toward an action she’ll later regret — but if you know what she’s feeling in each preceding moment, and why, I think it becomes difficult to judge her too harshly. But when I say this, I think of your novel, where the narrator eventually does something that’s impossible for the reader to accept. It’s even difficult to read, and I’ve read “Maldoror.” How, [without] giving anything away, did you calibrate the plot so precisely? Reading it, I felt like the person who turns away first in a game of chicken — I could follow David, up until the point I absolutely couldn’t.

Wayne: I constructed the plot much like Mike goes bankrupt in “The Sun Also Rises”: gradually and then suddenly. I wanted to make David somewhat relatable at the start, as you point out, but with hints of something darker to come, and likewise had to make his actions increasingly hard to stomach. If he were monstrous from the start, there would be no complicity from the reader, who could distance himself too easily from David. I taught a class on plot mechanics as I was revising “Loner” in which we read a number of tightly plotted novels — “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Blindness” being two that especially helped in this regard, as models of portraying an incremental descent into malevolence.

I can no longer think of dining hall “points” without thinking of “Kroll Show”’s use of them in its collegiate-WB-show parody “Madison Chooses.” But it brings up another corollary to both “Intimations” and “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine”: the depiction of consumerism, both metaphorically and literally, in the form of food consumption. Other than the implicit pun on consumption, what attracts you to focusing on food and its connection to consumerism?

Kleeman: I’m fascinated by eating because it seems to me like a perfect example of the entanglement of nature and culture, or nature and capitalism, or the place where a true internal need mixes with the external and becomes difficult to trace. The friction that happens there is interesting to me because it goes unnoticed most of the time, but when it becomes visible it speaks to our status as creatures moving around a system that we can’t change but only choose within. In “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,” my narrator is starving, both literally and metaphorically, and is looking around for something better to desire that will either solve her existing problems or change them completely. Ultimately, the new thing she finds to desire turns out to be an exaggeration of the old thing, eating itself is the problem, in that it’s only a temporary solution to a congenital mismatch between the stuff of the world and the stuff of the entity.

Eating works this way in many of the stories from “Intimations,” too. There’s a story called “Rabbit Starvation” that refers to the fact that a person will eventually die if they eat a diet entirely comprised of rabbits, even if there are plenty of rabbits. And I feel like the same idea is there even in the more realistic Karen stories — her problem is essentially that the emotions she has inside can’t be solved by her surroundings, in fact her surroundings usually make her feelings of loneliness and alienation sharper.

But alienation is a major theme in “Loner,” too, and in your novel it seems deeply linked to intelligence, or a certain type of intelligence. Are there dangerous forms of intelligence? What would you say your novel has to say about pedagogy?

Wayne: David’s alienation doesn’t necessarily stem from the fact that he’s so smart, but that he thinks he’s so smart — smarter than everyone around him, which was academically true in high school, but is no longer the case at Harvard, and certainly not accurate when intelligence is considered as a more holistic set of skills than essay writing and test taking. This sort of intellectual narcissism and grandiosity often afflicts gifted and talented young men before they’ve been dealt any significant setbacks; they are blinkered in both their ability to see outside themselves and to regard themselves with any objectivity.

As for pedagogy, David’s interest in school simply functions as a means for status; he’s not truly passionate about anything he studies. This is its own kind of alienation: to be indifferent to the thing you’re best at, a close second to hating that which you excel at. He does, at least, start tangling with literary criticism quite a bit in “Loner,” and something that’s interested me in your work is its convergence with literary theory. You were previously pursuing a PhD in rhetoric. How much did or does theory have an effect on your fiction?

Kleeman: It has less effect on my fiction that I had initially thought it would: most of my theory interests had to do with post-human theory, science studies, and media theory, and fiction only showed up in these texts as allegory or example. Except for a little Bakhtin, a little Butler, and a little Derrida, I don’t think much strictly literary theory has stayed with me. And where my studies intersected with literature it was focused on experimental poetry and poetics, not fiction — which I sometimes think might have been a protective measure, since I feel there’s nothing more detrimental to the process of writing fiction than being explicitly, consciously aware of the mechanisms that you want to guide your writing. Writing with a firm theory of how fiction works/should work is a guarantee that you’ll get only what [you] already imagine you’ll find in your writing, or less.

But reading Haraway, Latour, Deleuze, have influenced the way I see the world, my body, and my humanity, which yield a deeper but less localizable influence. I think that integrating theory or philosophy into your viewpoint, where it actually becomes organically usable in your work, is a temporally extended and meandering process. When it’s really a part of you in such a way that it can drive the crafting of narration, scene, character, it becomes something you perceive in the physical composition of things, it’s no longer “tagged” to a specific author or reading. I think of this as a sort of deep metabolization of knowledge: an idea is transformed into a new, organism-centered material, it’s built into the body and the senses — but then it’s unextractable, it’s lost in some sense.

That said, I’m working on a new novel now that draws on ideas about ecological disaster, a topic that I taught a class on during my theory years. I’m in the process of reading and researching, trying to remember the right ideas and forget the unhelpful ones. What are you working on now?

Wayne: You put it well — the theory has become the way you see the world, rather than just highfalutin’ jargon. That’s the feeling I get reading your writing: that of someone whose viewpoint is naturally colored by (though not exclusively) the academic texts you’ve read.

I’m working on a novel that — currently — stretches over a couple of decades and follows a couple of people, as opposed to my last three, which all take place in a limited temporal frame (no more than three or so months) and are rendered in the first person. It begins in graduate school, so I guess I’ve progressed from the undergrad setting of “Loner.”

Espionage Insiders: Welcome to the Post-Forgetting World

“I can’t think of any other issue that moved people so quickly.” By security expert Bruce Schneier’s estimation, more than 700 million people* worldwide changed their behavior on the Internet as a direct result of what Edward Snowden’s NSA leak revealed about government surveillance. Even more amazing: they all did it within one year.

What motivated so many private citizens to take action? “They did that because of secrets. The biggest enemy to society, the thing that is most corrosive, is secrecy,” says Schneier. “Edward Snowden started the dialogue.”

The effects of the massive security breach reverberate years later, not just in how often we change our passwords, but also in how we live. “As human beings, the fact that we forget is integral to how we function in society, to how we heal emotionally, and to how we grow. Imagine you can recall every conversation you ever had with your spouse. Is that a world you want to live in? That is what we are moving towards: It’s on email, it’s recorded. There’s a loss of ephemera. We have never before been in a post-forgetting world.”

While others argue that we are making a fair trade for our safety, Schneier starkly objects. “Surveillance-based security invades privacy. If a person says ‘I have nothing to hide,’ I say that privacy is not about something to hide. It’s about maintaining your autonomy in the world.”

Surely, though, surveillance is necessary to protect the homeland from terrorism, right? Not according to Schneier, who argues that in reality the increased invasion of privacy does little to keep us safe. “A trade off is not being made. We have erred too far in the side of security. When you are exposed, you don’t feel secure.” He believes that what keeps us safe—and free—are the tried-and-true elements of investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. “Blunt surveillance of the population doesn’t get you anything except political control. If you want to prevent political freedom, that’s what you use.” Accordingly, Schneier calls for less surveillance and more public process, while acknowledging that the issue is tremendously complex.

The solution, he knows, is not a simple one—in part because the ethos of spying is something we take for granted in our culture today. “The surveillance economy is huge,” Schneier explains. “That’s the fundamental problem. There is an entire economy based on spying on you and using the data against your interests.”

As citizens, Schneier notes that we’re complicit in what we surrender. From the medical information our FitBits offer up to the way our phones track our movements, we need to acknowledge how we expose ourselves. “People keep their heads in sand on everything,” he says. “Climate change, globalization… engaging is hard, and I understand why people don’t want to do it. I don’t think people really understand what we are giving up.”

What’s at stake? Peace of mind, for one thing. “Google collects your data and advertises to you, convincing you to buy things you wouldn’t otherwise,” he says. “It’s psychological.” An example, he says, is that our health data is sold and then “treatments” and cures are pushed on us through aggressive advertising. “All of that is based on your data. You are the product.”

Thinking of it in that way, it’s easy to start to feel like our society is already too far down the rabbit hole. “Yes, we have gone too far—but we can go back,” says Schneier. “Though no time soon. We are too punch-drunk on data.”

There is, however, an empowerment in knowing the truth. “History will judge Edward Snowden as a hero,” he says. “But first, the feelings have to subside. They are too raw right now. He exposed government abuse, and all of these things that weren’t right. He betrayed people because he defended a higher ideal.”

In a world where everything we do is subject to record, does Schneier think it is possible to be truly free? “I don’t believe our experiment in liberty is over,” Schneier says. I just don’t believe that. It’s too ridiculous.”

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. To read his blog, Schneier on Security , click here . Mr. Schneier’s perspective is offered as part of a four-part series by Salon.com on behalf of Open Road Studios in celebration of the film SNOWDEN , in theaters September 2016. To read more in this series, start here.

Hillary Clinton’s Leslie Knope moment: How “Parks and Rec” foretold #PneumoniaGate

Amy Poehler in "Parks and Recreation" (Credit: NBC)

Hillary Clinton’s health is the non-scandal that will never die. Throughout the course of her presidential campaign, the Democratic nominee has been rumored to have a heart condition, Parkinson’s, HIV, asthma, lupus and multiple sclerosis and is allegedly prone to fits of seizures. The fact that Clinton happened to have come down with pneumonia, a highly treatable illness, would then seem to be the least of her problems.

The former Secretary of State appeared at a September 11 memorial on Sunday, despite her condition. Clinton, feeling overheated, left the service early, stumbling as her team of Secret Service agents and staffers helped the candidate walk to her van. A momentary glimpse of the 68-year-old, who would be the second-oldest president in U.S. history, has fanned the flames of fears that she might not be, as  CNN’s Stephen Collinson writes, “fit for the considerable physical demands of the presidency.”

“Her campaign is also confronting new questions over transparency after it kept details of her condition quiet for two days,” Collinson said.

John Dickerson, an analyst for CBS News, claimed that it was another indication the candidate has a problem with honesty. “I think it’s problematic,” Dickerson said.

“There will be a lot of questions about, ‘Let’s see her full medical records,’” he added.

The incident, however, is far from an indication that Clinton is untrustworthy and someone who would lie to the American public about everything, including her own health. Instead the so-called flap is remarkably reminiscent of the determination of Leslie Knope, the fictional small-town version of Hillary Clinton portrayed by Amy Poehler on NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.” Like Clinton, Leslie understands that she doesn’t get a day off, especially when there’s work to be done.

That’s not a portrait of tainted governance. This is what leadership looks like.

“Parks and Recreation” spent six years prepping audiences for a Hillary Clinton presidency. The NBC show follows Leslie Knope, a fictional employee of the parks department in Pawnee, Indiana. When the show debuted in 2009, Leslie was portrayed as driven and idealistic, believing that government can work for the common good. Early episodes also showed her to be aloof and a bit buffoonish. “Parks and Rec” was created by Mike Schur, who served as the co-executive producer of “The Office,” and it showed. Leslie 1.0 was designed in the Michael Scott template, someone who wants to be liked but alienates those around them.

When Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones) meets Leslie for the first time during the show’s pilot, she describes her future best friend as “doofy but sweet.” This point is underlined in the following episode when Leslie proposes that the department canvass to garner support for a planned project—filling in a pit to build a community park. Her co-worker, Mark (Paul Schneider), warns that it’s “too soon” to do so.

The initiative bombs. While campaigning, a Pawnee resident complains that a park near her house would be noisy. Leslie responds, “Would it change your mind if nine out of ten meth users said the exact same thing?” That same woman shows up to the forum and eviscerates the proposal, lambasting the fact that the parks department has pushed the initiative forward “without a single environmental impact study.” “Let’s take a stand,” she says to applause. The takeaway is that because Leslie didn’t listen, her can-do spirit only goes so far.

When the show’s second season debuted, “Parks and Rec” retooled the character, who critics considered one of the weakest parts of the show. Schur and his writers wisely let Leslie be good at her job, even when it meant fighting bureaucratic hurdles or butting heads with her boss, the libertarian Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman). If Leslie works passionately to make the public sector better, Ron wants to tear it apart.

Throughout the show, Leslie’s ambition is portrayed as one of her strongest suits, a quality that makes her willing to go the extra mile for those around her. It makes her a good friend and a great leader, the kind of person who will stay up all night to meticulously color-code the office binders. Her inability to let go sometimes leads to trouble: When a maintenance worker discovers that Leslie has been dating one of her co-workers, Ben (Adam Scott), she gives him a gift certificate in exchange for his discretion. As an ethics committee later scolds, this technically constitutes bribery.

Television often has a way of apologizing for women’s ambitions, couching female drive in a disclaimer. Fox’s “24” is the rare program that allowed a female president, Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones), to get elected to office. On “Veep” and the short-lived “Commander in Chief,” Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis) play Vice Presidents who ascend to the Oval Office after the chair becomes vacant. (One president dies, the other resigns.)

What so special about “Parks and Rec” is that it portrays Leslie’s imperfect ambition to do good without apology—and allows her to succeed. The finest indication of that theme is the Season 3 episode “Flu Season,” one with striking parallels to Clinton’s current political predicament.

“Parks and Rec” revels in showing its characters battling sickness—whether it’s viral or a result of bad decisions. In “The Fight,” Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) throws a party for Snakehole Lounge, the club he co-owns, and the parks department workers get wasted on Snake Juice. “Flu Season,” however, finds the park department battling influenza, after both Leslie, April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), and indestructible million-dollar man Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe) get sick. Leslie, true to form, insists on coming to work anyway. She even locks herself in her office to avoid being sent home by her bosses.

That’s not just Leslie being a workaholic. The department has to prepare for a pitch meeting to local businesses, in order to entice them to sponsor the upcoming Harvest Festival. Ben says that he can handle it, but Leslie knows that if she’s not the one giving the speech, the event won’t happen. “I have to get ready for the Chamber of Secrets,” she says, adding: “If this meeting does not go perfectly, then the Harvest Festival is going to be over before it began.”

Unlike the previous edition of the character, Leslie 2.0 knows what she’s doing. After she’s forced to go to the hospital, she escapes and comes to the meeting against the wishes of her co-workers. Leslie looks the part—dressed in a brown, Clinton-esque pantsuit—but she’s also running an extremely high fever and experiencing hallucinations. She claims that the floor and the ceiling have changed places. But as Leslie explains, she didn’t show up because doesn’t trust Ben to do a good job. “The Harvest Festival is my project,” she says. “It’s my career on the line, and I need to make sure that I’ve done everything I can do make it work.”

The meeting is a stark contrast to the botched town hall in Season One. During that event, a stumbling Leslie asks Mark to take over in order to bail her out. “Mark Brendanawicz knows the answer to every question,” she says. “He’s amazing, and congratulations for hearing him speak.”

This time, however, it’s Leslie that saves the day. Seemingly against all odds, she nails the presentation, and Ben is shocked. “That was amazing,” he tells the camera, befitting the fourth-wall breaking, mockumentary-style format Schur patented on “The Office.” “That was a flu-ridden Michael Jordan at the ‘97 NBA Finals. That was Kirk Gibson hobbling up to the plate off of Dennis Eckersley.” Ben realizes, though, that he shouldn’t have been surprised. “That was Leslie Knope,” he adds.

The most important part of Clinton’s stumble on Sunday isn’t her woozy exeunt from the memorial. It’s how quickly she bounced back. After taking refuge at her daughter’s apartment to recover, Clinton was seen smiling and waving for the press—right back to doing her job. “I’m feeling great,” she told reporters.

On one hand, the image of Clinton soldiering on is an indication of the enormous pressure that the candidate is under to appear infallible and camera-ready, so much so that she’s not even allowed to get sick without it becoming a major scandal. On the other, it’s a reminder what a dogged presence she can be more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks showed a more vulnerable side of Clinton than we’re used to seeing. In the years following the tragedy, the Junior Senator would become a “tireless advocate for first responders,” at WNYC reported, incensed that the Bush administration knew that an attack was possible and did nothing.

The Clinton that emerges from these dual portraits—whether in sickness or in mourning—isn’t a profile of a liar and career deceiver who is so crooked that she won’t even tell us when she’s ill. They speak to the character of someone with courage and tenacity, who refuses to give up no matter what.

In its six-year run, “Parks and Recreation” allowed a female politician to be good at what she does, even when it ails her. It seems we have yet to do the same.

The motherhood cure-all: “The Light Between Oceans” illuminates a reckless romance with adoption fallacies

Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender in "The Light Between Oceans" (Credit: Dreamworks)

“You can never tell what the tide’s going to bring in from one day to the next,” says lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) to a solemn crowd of Aussie townfolk. As one of many heavy metaphors flung ashore in “The Light Between Oceans,” the latest feature from Derek Cianfrance, these words refer not only to the fickle nature of Janus Rock, an island off the southwest coast where Tom lives with his wife Isabel (Alicia Vikander) in the aftermath of WWI, but to the film’s central conflict: a baby in a boat appears magically in the tide one afternoon, accompanied by a dead man presumed to be her father. What’s a childless (and virtually marooned) married couple to do?

“It can’t just be a coincidence that she showed up,” pleads the wind-swept Isabel, who has recently suffered not one, but two, late-term miscarriages. “She needs us. We’re not doing anything wrong.”

When these last five words are whispered onscreen from one beautiful face to another, one can conclude with near certainty that the opposite is true — and that’s usually part of the fun in witnessing the drama that unravels. But in a film about the ethical consequences of raising somebody else’s child, such a frothy ploy for pathos soon dissolves.

Based on the novel by M.L. Stedman, barely a blink or close-up clutch goes unaccompanied by plinky piano music or soaring strings, and none of the master actors casted are granted the complexity of character they deserve. But more troubling is how the film suggests, as do so many (implicitly or overtly), that motherhood redeems all and can undo the anguish of the past — whether the battle scars of war or the recent graves of their unborn infants. “She doesn’t belong to us. We can’t keep her,” warns Tom as his wife coddles the babe under lamplight. Unsurprisingly, once little “Lucy” coos her way into the couple’s hearts and Tom gives in to his wife’s demands, their marriage is saved and the waters calmed. The joys of instant parenthood are honored in scenes of swinging under a tree and stacking colorful tin toys upon a white porch.

Life floats on this way for years until, during a visit to the mainland, Tom spots a woman (Rachel Weisz) weeping beside her husband’s grave, the tombstone for a German surname which also reads “lost at sea” — just like the dead guy curled up beside his heaven-sent daughter! Moral tumult ensues. “Light” squanders much of its time on sleepy contemplations of the tide hitting rocks, the sun off the sea and the sky meeting the sun. Were it not for the occasional soulful exchange between varying members of this trio, the movie would resemble a meditation montage. Even Isabel’s wedding-eve deflowering, which should be super-sexy in period-piece terms (if a bit on the nose — losing one’s virginity inside a lighthouse), is woefully tame, as are the portrayals of her lost pregnancies.

Vanity Fair’s Eugenia Peretz recently lauded the movie as “the kind of wrenching adult melodrama Hollywood rarely makes these days,” but I couldn’t help thinking back to “Danish Girl” out less than a year ago, an equally surface-skimming film (perhaps worse by virtue of being based on a true story) for which Vikander won an Oscar playing another ardent wife betrayed. Any depth exhibited by Cianfrance in his 2010 debut “Blue Valentine” (also about a troubled marriage) comes to nought when all it takes to transcend trauma is a sweet little baby and a scenic view. It may be that “[w]hen it comes to the ocean, anything is possible,” but, for as much as we like to believe it in fairy tales and movies, children do not materialize from thin air (or saltwater), and embracing this fable comes with a cost.

Which is to say, for all its maudlin escapism, the film sheds light on enduring concerns about motherhood, biology, and parental rights almost a century after it is set. Twice denied the chance to carry her children to term, Isabel has no doubt that the surprise child that shows up is her divine right after all she’s suffered. That Lucy (ironically “Grace” to her original parents) is eventually torn from her new family and returned to her birth mother Hannah (in one of the film’s few potent, and believable, scenes) says less about the claims of biological motherhood and more for the power of money and influence in the equation. It’s no accident that Hannah is daughter to “the richest man in town” and has the means to press charges, hire a lawyer, and reclaim what has been taken from her. Were the birth mother an impoverished seamstress or working-class shopgirl bearing a love child with a German soldier, it’s doubtful any legal efforts to regain Grace would have succeeded; it would have been more likely seen in the child’s interest to grow up on Janus island with two loving parents, a modest income, and chickens, goats and sea crabs as ever-eager playmates.

It is here that the film feels both painfully realistic and ridiculous; affluent (especially white) women still hold a decisive advantage in the sheer variety of ways to become mothers (whether via IVF or domestic or international adoption) but at the same time, adoption typically means a class jump up, not down. Children are still treated as veritable commodities in a for-profit adoption industry less regulated than real estate. The moral ambiguities and anxieties around “saving” children through adoption abound, something “Light” touches upon but doesn’t dive into.

“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day,” says Hannah in her decision to grant clemency to the Sherbournes. It’s a powerful claim, but a fatuous one; forgiveness is as often a daily choice as it is a seaside epiphany. That only Hannah luxuriates in the balm of forgiveness eclipses the extent to which her daughter would likely wrestle with the process herself — not only with the fact of being a stolen baby, ripped from one home to another, but also with the trauma five years later when returned to a biological parent she could not remember.

But to follow the romantic narrative of not just restored motherhood, but also the ever-adaptable child who with a little love (and a well-heeled family) turns out just fine (see “Annie,” “The Blind Side,” countless Disney films), Lucy Grace is a vision of mid-century stability in the end, with an adorable tot of her own. When she returns to visit Tom in his old age, hoisting her baby onto his lap, she bears not a trace of grief or loss — a far cry from the real experience of many adoptees for whom questions of identity and belonging haunt much of their lives. The New York Times’s Stephen Holden claims that the film “never wavers in its commitment to examine what it means to raise a child,” and I suppose if raising a child means daisy chains, horseback riding, and tea parties on the beach, then he would be correct. But the complexities of parenting — especially parenting a child who’s lost her mother not once, but twice — are less picturesque than the movie’s screensaver vistas.

“To have any kind of a future you’ve got to give up hope of ever changing your past,” writes Tom to his beloved early in the film. But acceptance of the past doesn’t mean the ability to outright forget about it — something that Tom and Isabel effortlessly do in the presence of their dear Lucy. No mention of their miscarried children, no flashbacks to war for Tom, nor to Isabel’s brothers killed in the trenches. The child saves all, and yet somehow the parents still get to play rescuers, made even more sympathetic once that child is taken away. But outside this cinematic fantasy of parent/child life-raft, neither side really escapes the choppy waves, and stories that imply otherwise leave all in the dark.

The Trump campaign won’t even call David Duke “deplorable”: Mike Pence says he is “not in the name calling business”

When Hillary Clinton told a room full of wealthy donors and reporters in New York that “half of Donald Trump’s supporters” can be described as a “basket of deplorables,” it was hardly a gaffe. Despite later apologizing for overgeneralizing in her use of the 50 percent figure, Clinton appeared to maintain her position that the Republican presidential nominee has a solid core of supporters who openly flaunt their racism, bigotry and homophobia because her use of the controversial term is actually a political ploy meant to ferret out some of the most vile Trump supporters while keeping the Trump campaign on defense.

Clinton first used the adjective deplorable, meaning to deserve strong condemnation, in an interview with an Israeli television station last week. Following up on her campaign strategy to highlight the role the so-called alt-right plays in Trump’s campaign, at the risk of amplifying the fringe movement, Clinton said that some Trump supporters are, “what I call the deplorables; you know, the racists and the, you know, the haters, and the people who are drawn because they think somehow he’s going to restore an America that no longer exists.”

After saying essentially the same thing in front of American journalist on Friday, the group of largely white males that make up U.S. political punditry worked themselves into a tizzy over Clinton’s blunt assessment of some American voters, leading Trump to call the remark Clinton’s biggest political mistake of the campaign.

But on Monday, Trump vice presidential running mate Mike Pence quickly came to realize the masterful strategy behind Clinton’s so-called gaffe.

#BasketofDeplorables pic.twitter.com/SSwM0hA6aY

— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) September 11, 2016

“[Clinton] said, there are supporters, and you know this, there are some supporters of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, who, David Duke, for example, some other white nationalist, who would fit into that category of deplorables. Right?” CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked the Indiana Governor Monday afternoon.

“As I’ve told you the last time I was on, I’m not sure why the media keeps dropping David Duke’s name. Donald Trump has denounced David Duke repeatedly. We don’t want his support and we don’t want the support of people who think like him,” Pence responded, looking to avoid the question.

But Blitzer wouldn’t let up: “You called him a deplorable. You would call him a deplorable?”

“No,” Pence said, refusing to denounce the former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, a Trump supporter, as “deporable.”

“I’m not in the name-calling business, Wolf, you know me better than that,” Pence offered instead.

If you won’t say the KKK is deplorable, you have no business running the country. https://t.co/mFut8Qrz9A

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 12, 2016

J.K. Rowling’s allegory fail: Werewolves are not a useful metaphor for HIV/AIDS

J.K. Rowling (Credit: AP/Dan Hallman)

J.K. Rowling recently published three “Harry Potter” e-books, and in one of them, “Short Stories of Heroism From Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship, and Dangerous Hobbies,” she revealed werewolf Remus Lupin’s affliction was intended as a metaphor for HIV and AIDS. While Rowling stated over the weekend on Twitter that this is not a “retcon,” as she had spoken of it in interviews 17 years ago, now that it’s published in a spinoff book, the metaphor is officially part of “Harry Potter” canon.

“All kinds of superstitions seem to surround blood-borne conditions, probably due to taboos surrounding blood itself,” Rowling wrote in “Short Stories of Heroism.” “The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes.”

Here Rowling lumps HIV and AIDS in with other blood-borne illnesses, which ignores their uniquely devastating history. And Lupin’s story is by no stretch a thorough or helpful examination of the illness. Nor is its translation as an allegory easily understood, beyond the serious stigma that Rowling mentioned.

Successful allegory or extended metaphor can powerfully translate experience and accessibly depict complicated ideas. It can help us empathize and see beyond ourselves without feeling pedantic; it can excite further meaning out of a text.

Making a monster who can maintain some control of his monstrosity does little to address stigma and in fact does much to create and protect it. That Lupin is a danger to others could not more clearly support an attitude of justifiable fear toward him, one that is an abject disservice to those actually struggling with a disease that does not make them feral with rage. In this way Rowling’s metaphor attacks itself in the ironic fashion of her character, who is a danger to those close to him during his transformed periods.

This metaphor is obvious enough in the telling so as to be apparent to some on a first read. But the allegory’s availability is not actually the news here to me; it’s that Rowling did not draw from the experience of the very specific stigma she mentions in order to raise some cogent awareness.

Instead, the intended metaphor very simply renders stigma itself on the page in Lupin’s isolation and shame. The metaphor does not fully or cleanly transpose; allegory is not created because there is no accessible narrative intent, no symbols through which to see it. Because it fails to clearly articulate how the ubiquitously evil werewolves operate or the implications of the circumstances of transmission, and lacks clarity about the meaning of werewolf transformation and the advanced stages of an illness, it is essentially inoperative. And when only stigma is left on the page, there is only stigma to see.

Other popular writers have made revisions to their texts and issued statements of critical narrative interest. Lincoln Michel discusses George Lucas’s fondness for revis(it)ing “Star Wars” over at Electric Literature, where he also considers Rowling’s tendency to amend her texts. Why these revisions are necessary and what purpose they even serve is worth examining, too, as it seems many of the admissions operate on the level of confirmed fan theory and seem at times to only cheaply refocus the public eye on the brand. But when the revisions and Twitter decrees get messy enough to verge on offensive, it is time to stop.

I think this situation gives rise to several important discussions and questions to which I have no certain answers, which of course do not apply only to Rowling — who created more a Universe than she did a few books or characters.

Do we try too hard to be important in all directions? And when we do, so stretched thin, don’t we do a disservice to the very experience we purport to uphold and validate?

Why isn’t a good story enough?

Chelsea Manning goes on hunger strike to protest U.S. gov’s “high tech bullying,” lack of treatment

Chelsea Manning (Credit: AP/U.S. Army)

Imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning has gone on hunger strike to protest her treatment by the prison system and the U.S. government.

“I am no longer going to be bullied by this prison — or by anyone within the U.S. government,” she said.

Manning released a moving statement on Sept. 9 explaining why she is on hunger strike.

“I need help,” she said. “I am not getting any.”

Manning, who is transgender, accused the government of failing to provide care for her gender dysphoria.

“In response to virtually every request, I have been granted limited, if any, dignity and respect — just more pain and anguish,” she said. “I am no longer asking. Now, I am demanding.”

Manning added that she is demanding “minimum standards of dignity, respect and humanity.”

A press release accompanying Manning’s statement explained that she “is demanding written assurances from the Army she will receive all of the medically prescribed recommendations for her gender dysphoria.”

Manning also revealed in her statement that the lack of care drove her to attempt suicide.

In July, Manning tried to take her own life. She later confirmed that she is okay and that she is “glad to be alive.”

U.S. authorities subsequently threatened to punish Manning for her suicide attempt, potentially with indefinite solitary confinement. The proposed punishment inspired widespread outrage. On Aug. 10, Manning’s supporters delivered a petition with more than 115,000 signatures to Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning.

“Chelsea’s access to mental health care has been inconsistent,” explained Chase Strangio, Manning’s attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, after her suicide attempt. “It is an ongoing concern of her attorneys and supporters that she is not getting adequate mental health care, particularly in light of the external forces that are destabilizing her mental health, like the service of these administrative charges against her and the ongoing investigation of those charges.”

“It seems like the government is doing everything in their power to make her physical and mental condition worsen,” Strangio added.

Since her suicide attempt, Manning said she still has not gotten the help she requested.

Manning is incarcerated in the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks in Kansas.

She is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking more than 700,000 classified documents to whistleblowing journalism organization WikiLeaks. Among the leaked materials were videos that show U.S. pilots killing more than 100 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2014, Manning sued the government for access to transgender medical treatment. In 2015, she was allowed to begin hormone therapy. The military, however, has made her adopt male grooming standards.

In her statement, Manning called for an end to the U.S. government’s “high tech bullying,” which she described as “the constant, deliberate and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials.”

Look Again: The day’s most compelling images from around the globe

A demonstrator looks at a riot policeman during a protest marking the country's 1973 military coup in Santiago, Chile September 11, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Vera FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVE. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY - RTSN9Z3 (Credit: Reuters)

 

Washington, DC   Chip Somodevilla/Getty

A truck with a digital billboard parks in front of the newly opened Trump International Hotel

I appreciate the relentlessly juvenile character of this Trump protest. As a writer, I struggle with the Donald Trump presidential candidacy and the urge to respond in kind to its debasement of political and media culture (I also admit to having succumbed to this urge on several occasions). But one is forced to make choices when protesting Trump and his new hotel at the Old Post Office building in Washington, DC. You could point out the many lawsuits circling the project and the fact that the anti-immigrant candidate employed undocumented construction workers to finish the project. Alternately, you could render Trump’s face as a butt in the style of the iconic Obama “Hope” poster and have him fart an expletive. These protesters have opted for the latter, and I can’t bring myself to fault them.

–Simon Maloy, politics writer

 

Jerusalem   Hazem Bader/Getty

A Palestinian man plays with a kid outside the Dome of the Rock as they mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha

This week, Muslims all over the world are celebrating Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice. In this photo, we see a Palestinian man tossing a young boy into the air outside of the Dome of the Rock in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, located in Jerusalem’s Old City. How weightless the boy appears in this photo — he looks as light as a feather. How exhilarating that feeling is of flying through the air. And the man’s face trained on the boy, concentrating on the literal and figurative gravity of this act. It’s a kinetic reminder of the joy and the terror of surrendering to faith of any kind, and what it feels like to know that your fate isn’t necessarily in your own hands.

–Erin Keane, culture editor

 

Paris   Eric Feferberg/Getty

A model has her hair dressed during the International Hairdressing Show

More often than not, when I tell people I work for Salon, they think I write about hairstyling and wonder why I don’t have a better haircut. I cannot afford a better haircut.

–Brendan Gauthier, assistant editor

 

Santiago, Chile   Carlos Vera/Reuters

A demonstrator looks at a riot policeman during a protest marking the country’s 1973 military coup

It’s easy to dismiss the humanity of the opposition, to view those on the other side of the most strongly felt issues as a faceless entity. But in this moment in which a protestor and policeman lock eyes, their antagonism may be evident, but their purposeful determination to truly see and been seen by each other is as well.

–Mary Elizabeth Williams, culture writer

Hillary has pneumonia, so let’s talk about Trump’s awful health care plan

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik/Reuters/Eduardo Munoz/Photo montage by Salon)

Hillary Clinton has pneumonia. That’s unfortunate for her, and it’s also frustrating for me as a politics writer, given that the entire political world is now consumed with determining the broader significance of the fact that Hillary Clinton has a common lung infection. I just don’t have it in me to strain to connect a medical diagnosis to broader campaign narratives. I’m not especially good at armchair medical diagnosis. And for the life of me, I can’t look deep into the soul of Clinton’s infected lungs and tell you what it all means.

But still, I have to write about politics, even if the political issue of the day is driven by infectious bacteria. So my solution to this is to crudely shoehorn in a policy angle, which goes like this: Under President Trump, you would not want to get sick with pneumonia or any other disease because his health care reform plan is an incoherent disaster.

OK, now that we’re past the awkward setup, let’s talk health care policy.

The health care plan on Donald Trump’s campaign website isn’t so much a “plan” as it is a series of vague talking points, but that puts it squarely in line with pretty much every other Republican health care proposal of the last six years. The key points in his plan are the complete repeal of the Affordable Care Act, removing barriers to the sale of health insurance across state lines and changing the funding structure for Medicaid. (Remarkably the plan says nothing about pre-existing conditions.)

What would these changes mean for a pneumonia patient? Well, if Hillary Clinton contracts another case of pneumonia during the Trump presidency, then she’ll probably be OK because she’s a rich person who can easily afford to pay for the best medical care. Not only that, she would be able to deduct the costs of her premiums from her taxes. Trump’s health care plan, like most of his other plans, is a good deal for rich people.

But health care reform isn’t supposed to help the rich. It’s supposed to be for the people who can’t afford health insurance. So let’s say you’re one of the estimated 18 million Americans thrown off their coverage once the Affordable Care Act is repealed in the early days of the Trump administration, and you come down with a case of pneumonia. What happens then?

Well, maybe you’re one of the stoic types who can gut it out or who has the luxury of taking several sick days to rest at home and recuperate. Perhaps you’ll be fortunate and get one of the lower-grade pneumonias that don’t require hospitalization. You could be unlucky enough, however, to get a severe case that lands you in the emergency room. Or maybe one of your kids will come down with the disease and require hospitalization. Pneumonia is the most commonly diagnosed reason for inpatient hospital stays for people 17 and younger.

Whatever the circumstances are, a stint in the hospital to treat a lung infection could cost an uninsured person dearly. In 2011, the average cost of hospitalization for a case of pneumonia was $9,500. One 2013 study found that the mean “total healthcare cost for an inpatient [community-acquired pneumonia] episode ranged from $11,148 to $51,219 depending on risk stratum and age group.”

Obviously not all pneumonia cases require hospitalization, and the total treatment cost varies by region and depends on the health profile of the patient. (One Florida woman apparently racked up just short of $1 million in hospital charges for a particularly bad case.) Without insurance to defray the costs of hospitalization, a severe pneumonia diagnosis could be financially ruinous.

And that would be the case for really any major medical issue under Trumpcare. Trump’s plan would do away with the ACA’s premium subsidies, eliminate regulations mandating minimum-coverage standards and bring back discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. Low-income people on Medicaid would be put at risk by Trump’s proposal to rely on “block grants” for the program, which would likely result in a massive overall funding cut.

Trump’s proposal to let people to deduct their premium payments from their federal income taxes won’t do anything for low-income people who already have no federal income tax burden, and his plan to incentivize spending on health savings accounts won’t do much for people who don’t make enough money to spend using such accounts.

The cumulative effect of the Trump plan would be fewer people with health coverage, more people shut out from access to health coverage, plans that cover fewer conditions and chaos in the insurance market. The Affordable Care Act was designed to reduce the risk of financial ruin that accompanies unexpected illness and hospitalization. Trump’s plan would bring that risk roaring back.

So let’s not worry too much about Hillary Clinton or her pneumonia. She’s rich, so she’ll probably be fine no matter what happens. Instead, let’s worry about the many millions who, under the Trump health care plan, would be stuck with no medical options beyond praying that they don’t get sick.

Meet “Saturday Night Live”‘s three new featured players

Melissa Villasenor as Bjork (Credit: YouTube)

“Saturday Night Live” announced Monday the addition of three new featured players who will make their debut on the October 1st season premiere.

Mikey Day, Alex Moffat, and Melissa Villasenor will be replacing outgoing cast members Taran Killam, Jay Pharoah, and Jon Rudnitsky. Day has been a writer on the show since 2013, and is also a member of The Groundlings — the comedy troupe also responsible for “Saturday Night Live” alum Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig.

Moffat also has a connection with the show, as he was head writer and a cast member on the Lorne Michaels-produced “Maya & Marty,” which starred two other former featured players, Maya Rudolph and Martin Short.

Villasenor was a semifinalist on “America’s Got Talent,” and her particular talent is similar to that of one of one of the players she’s replacing — Jay Pharoah — as both of them are masters of impersation. Watch Villasenor impersonate Owen Wilson and others below via YouTube:

Here’s Moffat on in the “Firemen” skit on “Maya & Marty”:

Watch Day impersonate street magician David Blaine with The Groundlings below: