Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 991

The New Sensibility of Susan Sontag & Tom Wolfe: The “dark lady” and the man in white were an unlikely pair, but both were looking to liberate American culture

It was 50 years ago, in 1965, in Mademoiselle magazine, of all places, that Susan Sontag announced the existence of a “New Sensibility” afoot in American culture. By 1966, that phrase would reach a more intellectual audience with publication of her path-breaking collection of essays, "Against Interpretation."   Sontag, however, was not the only figure in 1965 to flip that phrase around. Tom Wolfe, in the introduction to his best-selling book "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," had exclaimed: “The hell with Mondrian, whoever the hell he is ... Yah! lower orders. The new sensibility – Baby baby baby where did our love go? – the new world, submerged so long, invisible, and now arising.” Wolfe and Sontag jointly staking out the territory of this new sensibility? Could a more unlikely pair be imagined? Wolfe was the newspaperman given to wearing a white suit, white spats and fedora; he was smart and cynical but capable of enthusiasm, especially if it went against the grain of the mavens of elite culture. His prose hit like a howitzer, full of capital letters and exclamation points. In contrast, Sontag was the emerging “dark lady” of American letters, decked out in black turtleneck and a torrent of dark hair. She was tall and commanding; there seemed to be nothing that she had not read. Her sentences, if not quite sensuous, were beguiling, full and subtle, with a fine eye for aphorism. Which of the pair first came up with the phrase "the New Sensibility"? Probably Sontag, because Wolfe may have been slyly poking fun at Sontag when he quoted the words “Baby baby baby where did our love go?” They were from the song “Where Did Our Love Go?,”  by the Motown Group the Supremes. It had been a No. 1 hit on the pop charts in August 1964. What’s the connection? Although Wolfe might have appreciated the tune’s contemporary rhythm and energy, the group singing it had been singled out by Sontag in her own article on the New Sensibility. While Sontag’s roots were sunk deep in European modernism – and its most recent offshoots – she argued that elite American culture lacked a danceable beat. Why must everything be so heavy and brooding? Why must intellectuals crawl over every cultural expression like ants upon potato salad at a picnic? She famously announced that intellectuals and American culture needed to be liberated, to begin to enjoy the “sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” In sum, she finished the opening essay of her book with the words: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” In 1965, The Supremes were on her mind and record turntable. In a diary entry for November, she admitted to herself, “My biggest pleasure the last two years has come from pop music (The Beatles, Dionne Warwick, the Supremes).” In her book "Against Interpretation," in the essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” the Supremes popped up anew. What was wrong with intellectuals, such as Sontag,  kicking off their shoes and dancing to such lively music? The edifice of high modernism would not tremble or tumble too badly. Maybe some of its imposing doors might even come ajar. Indeed, as the essays in "Against Interpretation" indicated, the saturnine spirit of serious art existed nicely alongside the rhythms of the Supremes. Sontag, as a critic, craved both high and low art. But the films and plays, literature and art that attracted her were not quite popular. She was drawn to works that interrogated madness, bewitched with silence. She adored foreign films, cast in the Nouvelle Vague manner, that were often resistant to understanding, self-referential and anchored in the history of the medium. Her taste in fiction (present in her own novel "The Benefactor") was for prose without metaphor, a flat narrative voice, plots that were more dreamlike than logical. Wolfe’s admiration was for quite a different world of culture, one that Sontag had never experienced – nor sought out. While they might both dig rock 'n' roll, he wanted a culture of energy, bright lights and ha cha cha.  He loved the garish and outsized, hence his attraction to Las Vegas. It had “The wheeps, beeps, freeps, electronic lulus, Boomerang Modern and Flash Gordon sunbursts.” Hardly the type of expression associated with some of Sontag’s heroes, such as Samuel Beckett or Simone Weil. Wolfe traveled the United States in search of grass-roots cultural expression. He found it in the unlikeliest of venues, at least as he presumed for a typical New York intellectual. He wrote knowingly, and sympathetically, about Junior Johnson, a race-car driver, “a modern hero.” He marveled at the craftsmanship and culture of auto detailers. He readily stooped to consider the instant celebrity of one Baby Jane Holzer, whose key attribute was tonsorial: “Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face . . . all that hair flowing down over a coat made of ... zebra!” No black turtlenecks for Tom Wolfe. The tastes of Sontag and Wolfe, in that magical year of 1965, rarely overlapped. But each of them was open to a new sensibility that was open to extremes – to pushing things, willing to go too far, ready to offend by over-expression (think here of folks gallivanting around onstage, scantily clad, engaged in some ritual with pieces of meat and fish, as in Carolee Schneemann’s performance piece “Meat Joy,” or Andy Warhol statically filming a friend sleeping, hour after hour).  Such strange, shocking performances were popping up everywhere, also found in the confrontational theatrical experimentation of the Living Theatre, the performative work of Yoko Ono, the creative egoism of Norman Mailer, and the intense fascination in art with madness, breaking boundaries and violence. (Think here of the aesthetics of the bullet-ridden scene in "Bonnie and Clyde.") Sontag and Wolfe named but did not create the culture that was suddenly swirling about them in the mid-1960s. Its roots could be found easily in the work of John Cage, who during a magical summer in 1952, not only debuted his piece of radical composing, "4’33”," with its silence allowing new sounds to be heard, but also orchestrated at Black Mountain College the first happening, a chaotic event that combined poetry reading, snake-dancing, artwork, music and more, all occurring at the same moment. The excesses, the cultural liberation that Sontag and Wolfe were celebrating existed throughout the 1960s, although it ran up frequently against censorship laws (which were slowly but surely losing the campaign) and conservative notions of what constituted art. But the new sensibility, in everything but name, was emerging in the 1950s, in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the photography of Robert Frank, the amoral novels of Patricia Highsmith, the smoldering and ambiguous sexuality of Brando, the artistic mingling of forms and methods in the art of Robert Rauschenberg, and in early sexual energy of rock 'n' roll.  It had simply blossomed by the mid-1960s, hardly needing the British invasion of the Beatles and other groups to strike the chords of cultural freedom and fun. For Sontag, the New Sensibility was a battering ram against academic stodginess and purity. While this drew her to Camp culture (she had first hit the headlines with an essay about this phenomenon in 1964), she did not throw the baby out with the bathwater. She wanted all that culture had to offer, however outrageous. Hence, she wrote with uncharacteristic enthusiasm about the film "Flaming Creatures," with its blurred scenes of nude performers and transvestites in motion – and no discernible plot or raison d’être. But, as she had made clear in her “Notes on Camp,” Sontag was both “drawn” to Camp -- and “offended by it.” Wolfe invariably opted, at least in print, for the outrageous, especially when it allowed him further opportunity to poke fun at the self-inflated egos and pretensions of cultural worthies. Whether he identified with the old or new culture remained unclear, hidden behind his inscrutable smile. Looking back 30 years later, Sontag admitted that her enthusiasm for the excesses of the New Sensibility had a strong element of the “evangelical zeal” of a recent convert. Yet, she remained adamant that the tired distinction between high and low culture needed to be cast aside. She had put her finger on the pulse of the emerging sensibility. The New Sensibility, now 50 years after being labeled by Sontag and Wolfe, remains our cultural configuration. We live is a culture of excess. Divisions between high and low have been largely obliterated, limitations on violence erased, and distance between performer and audience crossed, the division between the mad and sane broached. Sontag had worried in the 1960s that once an analyst applied a name to a phenomenon such as Camp, that entity was in danger of being contained, somehow crushed of energy. Such has hardly been the case for the New Sensibility. The distance from "Flaming Creatures" and the celebrity culture of Baby Jane Holzer to Kim Kardashian and the twerking of Miley Cyrus seem more of a piece than of a different entity entirely. George Cotkin is Emeritus Professor of History, California Polytechnic University, and author of the forthcoming book "Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility" (Oxford University Press).It was 50 years ago, in 1965, in Mademoiselle magazine, of all places, that Susan Sontag announced the existence of a “New Sensibility” afoot in American culture. By 1966, that phrase would reach a more intellectual audience with publication of her path-breaking collection of essays, "Against Interpretation."   Sontag, however, was not the only figure in 1965 to flip that phrase around. Tom Wolfe, in the introduction to his best-selling book "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," had exclaimed: “The hell with Mondrian, whoever the hell he is ... Yah! lower orders. The new sensibility – Baby baby baby where did our love go? – the new world, submerged so long, invisible, and now arising.” Wolfe and Sontag jointly staking out the territory of this new sensibility? Could a more unlikely pair be imagined? Wolfe was the newspaperman given to wearing a white suit, white spats and fedora; he was smart and cynical but capable of enthusiasm, especially if it went against the grain of the mavens of elite culture. His prose hit like a howitzer, full of capital letters and exclamation points. In contrast, Sontag was the emerging “dark lady” of American letters, decked out in black turtleneck and a torrent of dark hair. She was tall and commanding; there seemed to be nothing that she had not read. Her sentences, if not quite sensuous, were beguiling, full and subtle, with a fine eye for aphorism. Which of the pair first came up with the phrase "the New Sensibility"? Probably Sontag, because Wolfe may have been slyly poking fun at Sontag when he quoted the words “Baby baby baby where did our love go?” They were from the song “Where Did Our Love Go?,”  by the Motown Group the Supremes. It had been a No. 1 hit on the pop charts in August 1964. What’s the connection? Although Wolfe might have appreciated the tune’s contemporary rhythm and energy, the group singing it had been singled out by Sontag in her own article on the New Sensibility. While Sontag’s roots were sunk deep in European modernism – and its most recent offshoots – she argued that elite American culture lacked a danceable beat. Why must everything be so heavy and brooding? Why must intellectuals crawl over every cultural expression like ants upon potato salad at a picnic? She famously announced that intellectuals and American culture needed to be liberated, to begin to enjoy the “sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” In sum, she finished the opening essay of her book with the words: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” In 1965, The Supremes were on her mind and record turntable. In a diary entry for November, she admitted to herself, “My biggest pleasure the last two years has come from pop music (The Beatles, Dionne Warwick, the Supremes).” In her book "Against Interpretation," in the essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” the Supremes popped up anew. What was wrong with intellectuals, such as Sontag,  kicking off their shoes and dancing to such lively music? The edifice of high modernism would not tremble or tumble too badly. Maybe some of its imposing doors might even come ajar. Indeed, as the essays in "Against Interpretation" indicated, the saturnine spirit of serious art existed nicely alongside the rhythms of the Supremes. Sontag, as a critic, craved both high and low art. But the films and plays, literature and art that attracted her were not quite popular. She was drawn to works that interrogated madness, bewitched with silence. She adored foreign films, cast in the Nouvelle Vague manner, that were often resistant to understanding, self-referential and anchored in the history of the medium. Her taste in fiction (present in her own novel "The Benefactor") was for prose without metaphor, a flat narrative voice, plots that were more dreamlike than logical. Wolfe’s admiration was for quite a different world of culture, one that Sontag had never experienced – nor sought out. While they might both dig rock 'n' roll, he wanted a culture of energy, bright lights and ha cha cha.  He loved the garish and outsized, hence his attraction to Las Vegas. It had “The wheeps, beeps, freeps, electronic lulus, Boomerang Modern and Flash Gordon sunbursts.” Hardly the type of expression associated with some of Sontag’s heroes, such as Samuel Beckett or Simone Weil. Wolfe traveled the United States in search of grass-roots cultural expression. He found it in the unlikeliest of venues, at least as he presumed for a typical New York intellectual. He wrote knowingly, and sympathetically, about Junior Johnson, a race-car driver, “a modern hero.” He marveled at the craftsmanship and culture of auto detailers. He readily stooped to consider the instant celebrity of one Baby Jane Holzer, whose key attribute was tonsorial: “Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face . . . all that hair flowing down over a coat made of ... zebra!” No black turtlenecks for Tom Wolfe. The tastes of Sontag and Wolfe, in that magical year of 1965, rarely overlapped. But each of them was open to a new sensibility that was open to extremes – to pushing things, willing to go too far, ready to offend by over-expression (think here of folks gallivanting around onstage, scantily clad, engaged in some ritual with pieces of meat and fish, as in Carolee Schneemann’s performance piece “Meat Joy,” or Andy Warhol statically filming a friend sleeping, hour after hour).  Such strange, shocking performances were popping up everywhere, also found in the confrontational theatrical experimentation of the Living Theatre, the performative work of Yoko Ono, the creative egoism of Norman Mailer, and the intense fascination in art with madness, breaking boundaries and violence. (Think here of the aesthetics of the bullet-ridden scene in "Bonnie and Clyde.") Sontag and Wolfe named but did not create the culture that was suddenly swirling about them in the mid-1960s. Its roots could be found easily in the work of John Cage, who during a magical summer in 1952, not only debuted his piece of radical composing, "4’33”," with its silence allowing new sounds to be heard, but also orchestrated at Black Mountain College the first happening, a chaotic event that combined poetry reading, snake-dancing, artwork, music and more, all occurring at the same moment. The excesses, the cultural liberation that Sontag and Wolfe were celebrating existed throughout the 1960s, although it ran up frequently against censorship laws (which were slowly but surely losing the campaign) and conservative notions of what constituted art. But the new sensibility, in everything but name, was emerging in the 1950s, in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the photography of Robert Frank, the amoral novels of Patricia Highsmith, the smoldering and ambiguous sexuality of Brando, the artistic mingling of forms and methods in the art of Robert Rauschenberg, and in early sexual energy of rock 'n' roll.  It had simply blossomed by the mid-1960s, hardly needing the British invasion of the Beatles and other groups to strike the chords of cultural freedom and fun. For Sontag, the New Sensibility was a battering ram against academic stodginess and purity. While this drew her to Camp culture (she had first hit the headlines with an essay about this phenomenon in 1964), she did not throw the baby out with the bathwater. She wanted all that culture had to offer, however outrageous. Hence, she wrote with uncharacteristic enthusiasm about the film "Flaming Creatures," with its blurred scenes of nude performers and transvestites in motion – and no discernible plot or raison d’être. But, as she had made clear in her “Notes on Camp,” Sontag was both “drawn” to Camp -- and “offended by it.” Wolfe invariably opted, at least in print, for the outrageous, especially when it allowed him further opportunity to poke fun at the self-inflated egos and pretensions of cultural worthies. Whether he identified with the old or new culture remained unclear, hidden behind his inscrutable smile. Looking back 30 years later, Sontag admitted that her enthusiasm for the excesses of the New Sensibility had a strong element of the “evangelical zeal” of a recent convert. Yet, she remained adamant that the tired distinction between high and low culture needed to be cast aside. She had put her finger on the pulse of the emerging sensibility. The New Sensibility, now 50 years after being labeled by Sontag and Wolfe, remains our cultural configuration. We live is a culture of excess. Divisions between high and low have been largely obliterated, limitations on violence erased, and distance between performer and audience crossed, the division between the mad and sane broached. Sontag had worried in the 1960s that once an analyst applied a name to a phenomenon such as Camp, that entity was in danger of being contained, somehow crushed of energy. Such has hardly been the case for the New Sensibility. The distance from "Flaming Creatures" and the celebrity culture of Baby Jane Holzer to Kim Kardashian and the twerking of Miley Cyrus seem more of a piece than of a different entity entirely. George Cotkin is Emeritus Professor of History, California Polytechnic University, and author of the forthcoming book "Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility" (Oxford University Press).

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There are rules in my bar — Yes, even you, who called yourself the Angel of Death

BE NICE There’s a sign taped to the mirror behind the bar where I work in Brooklyn that says, “Be nice or you’ll get the boot.” (To animate its message, the sign is in the shape of a boot.) Some customers notice it, point it out, have a laugh. Others don’t. Still, it’s as good a declaration of this particular bar’s ethos as any—and once in a while, when I sense intimations of aggression, if someone starts getting out of line, I point to it, smile, and repeat aloud what it says. It usually breaks the tension in the room. This is a good-natured, friendly place, this little neighborhood bar in a gentrifying but still relatively modest part of Brooklyn, in the fuzzy borderlands between Park Slope and Sunset Park near Green-Wood Cemetery. We don’t want any trouble here. We want everyone—and that includes you—to make nice, to make friends, and have an easygoing, no-pressure $3 Miller High Life, $3 shot of Evan Williams good time. And the happy truth is: Most people here are nice. I love my job. In my four years behind this bar, only a few incidents have given me real grief, and those have been extreme, anomalous cases. Once, a raving madman, jacked up to his eyeballs on speed, sweating through his T-shirt, came in, ordered a shot of whiskey, didn’t drink it, and proceeded to pace the length of the almost-empty bar enumerating, in a loosely coherent monologue, the many conspirators arrayed against him: The Bloods. The Crips. The Hollywood establishment. Old friends who’d betrayed him. The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Then he became eerily still for a moment, as if finding the quiet center of his self-made storm, looked me right in the eye, and told me that he was the Angel of Death. “You were kind to me when I walked in,” he said, “and you will come to regret that kindness.” Suddenly, it felt like a siege. It took a long, tense time to get him out of the bar. But he was wrong: I don’t regret whatever kindness I showed him. That’s what I expect of all bartenders, and what I wish for from all customers. Like many bartenders, I’ve been propositioned from time to time in uncomfortable ways. I’ve had to intervene more than once when male customers have bothered uninterested women customers. And, sure, sometimes I’ve had to cut people off and give them the boot—but nicely. There are innumerable ways to be not nice in a bar, and mostly they’re not extreme. They’re about manners, assumptions, and ways of asserting power and control. It’s everyday stuff: seemingly small, constant reminders that there are two kinds of New Yorkers: those who work in service, and those who do not. SO, WHAT ELSE DO YOU DO? I had a friend in college whose dad, an Italian immigrant, tended bar at a beloved old-school Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s East Side for decades. Many of his regulars were character actors, some regularly seen in the films of John Cassavetes. (Maybe that’s irrelevant, but I just like Falk and Gazzara and Cassavetes.) Anyway, the man, my friend’s father, made a good enough living behind that bar to buy a nice house in a nice New Jersey suburb, and put two children through college. I like to think those actors tipped well. Something makes me suspect they did. But good tips alone don’t pay mortgages and tuition. It may seem as though bartending is now a more respected office than ever before, but I don’t think that’s true. As taste in drinks has become generally more sophisticated, tending bar may require special skills, and it may have acquired some cultural cachet, but my sense is, for all that, it used to be more professionalized, and pre-tip wages reflected that. Tending bar was once regarded as a real job, a way to make a living without having to make a living many different ways, as so many bartenders do now. I doubt that anyone ever asked my college friend’s father what else he did, or what his real job is, but I’ve come across very few bartenders now who haven’t been interrogated in this way. Most weeks, I’m asked at least once what else it is that I do. In the years since I returned to bartending after a long absence, I’ve had some good luck as a writer. My memoir was published. I write a column for a newspaper. But I still bristle at the question, and hesitate before answering. Partly because I think “What do you do?” is never the most interesting question one might ask someone they’ve only just met. Partly because I’m as surprised as anybody that I wound up with another career that’s working out OK, and that wasn’t always true for me, and it hasn’t been true for many other bartenders I know, irrespective of their talent and ambition, so it’s a matter of solidarity. Partly because I think bartending is an excellent occupation in itself, and I’m uneasy with the assumption that it can’t possibly be enough. (Sometimes I do tell them that I’m a minister, which is also true—I was ordained as an Interfaith minister in 2002, and have served as a Red Cross chaplain—even though I hardly consider it my job, because it generates pretty spectacular reactions, and because it pleases me to consider the ways in which bartending so often feels like a kind of ministry.) My friend Susan, who was possibly the greatest bartender I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching, learning from, and being served by, probably handled it better than I did. She’d just make shit up, and have fun with it. “When people asked me, ‘what do you really do?’ I would laugh so hard.” I can just hear that laughter—it was one of the many joys of drinking when she was behind the bar. “I would say things like, shshsh, but I work on the corner of 43rd and 9th. I was a sheepherder by day. I was a nun. A ditch digger—just for the exercise.” Other bartenders’ responses and reactions sound more like my own. I returned to bartending at forty, after more than fifteen years away from it. I’d never really thought about getting behind a bar again. But when the owners of a then-new, cozy, unfussy bar in my neighborhood asked if I’d give it a shot, it felt like a blessing. I was recently widowed, still mourning. That loss—and the two sad and stressful years during which my husband had been sick with a very rare type of cancer—had made me retreat, close ranks, and isolate myself. I think the bar’s owners knew that, and offered me a shift as a kind of mitzvah, an act of kindness, a way to get me out of my apartment and out of the worst depths of my sadness. It couldn’t put an end to grieving—nothing can, save time—but it helped. At least one day a week, I had to wake up, shower, brush my hair, and talk to people. I hadn’t been doing much of any of that since Frank died. Doing work that was physical and social—unlike writing, which is sedentary and solitary—turned out to be just what I needed. But that felt like more story than any customer wanted to hear when they asked what else I did. What was I going to say? Write and mourn? * We all have our reasons for winding up on the working side of the bar, and a certain kind of customer always wants to know what they are. Christy left a career in advertising in Boston because she’d always dreamed of living in New York. Advertising jobs weren’t easy to find after 9/11. Instead, she got a gig at a bar in Tribeca, and discovered that she liked it, a lot. (It was at my favorite place, the much missed Liquor Store bar. I remember it largely as a peaceable drinking kingdom, with a great mix and range of regulars, where fun and politesse reigned.) “I looked back only when pegged by a shitty conversationalist—a suit wandering in accidentally or some other arrogant overachiever —with the question, ‘So, what else do you do?’ That would send me reeling into a shift-long panic attack, or self-doubt. Over and over again.” But mostly it isn’t arrogance or self-importance that compels bar patrons to ask this question. Evan, another former bartender, hated “the assumptions people made about my life—that I must be in school, or had been laid off from a real job, that I was nomadic.” But he quickly adds: “The curious were well intentioned, I assume.” And I believe that, too. I recently had an argument about this with a curious, well-intentioned friend. We’d just had lunch together, and agreed that our waiter was funny and charming. “I wish I’d asked him what else he did,” my friend said. I told her that it’s probably best she didn’t. That the question, regardless of how kindly one asks it, is often unwelcome, and sometimes even makes people feel bad. Would you ask a teacher what else she did? A banker? An editor? It’s a question only asked of those of whose jobs seem to many others to be transient, temporary, somehow less than substantive. Excerpted from "Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York" edited by John Freeman, published Sept. 8, 2015 by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright by Rosie Schaap, 2014. All rights reserved.

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“‘SNL’ is still the center of his universe”: “Live From New York” author goes deep on Lorne Michaels’ legacy and the future of “Saturday Night Live”

When James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” came out in 2002, it was heralded as the definitive behind-the-scenes look at the legendary late-night institution. Containing interviews with hundreds of writers, cast members, hosts and NBC execs, spanning from the hedonistic heyday of the Not Ready for Primetime Players through the troubled "Saturday Night Dead" years into the new golden age of Ferrell and Fey, the book is a rich, densely-populated tribute to the show's legacy and its enduring impact on entertainment, politics and American culture at large. On Oct. 6, Miller and Shales are releasing the paperback version of the updated edition, with its 200 new pages covering the last 10 years of "SNL." While the show has always gone through ups and downs, this past decade has been a particularly tumultuous one, as the show has fought to forge a path for itself in the rapidly changing digital world and to remain relevant in an increasingly competitive and fragmented viewing landscape. In the new pages, we hear the show's recent history described by the people who were there in the trenches: Andy Samberg discusses the rise of "SNL's" now-omnipresent digital shorts; Tina Fey and Sarah Palin reflect on the political impression that defined the 2008 election; while Kenan Thompson, Sasheer Zamata and other cast members weigh in on the diversity casting crisis that engulfed the show last season. But, as ever, the most important figure is producer Lorne Michaels, the enigmatic visionary who reshaped the entire entertainment industry in his own image, and to whom the book serves as testament and tribute. Ahead of the show's 41st season premiere this Saturday, we sat down with Miller to talk about the show's evolving history, its current challenges, and his hopes for the future of an American institution. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed. I was really impressed by how candid the cast members and writers were, and how open everyone was about their dislikes and their grudges. How did you get people to open up? I don't mean to be pretentious about this, but the goal is to make a book of record. In terms of how certain things really happened, you want it to be in that book. So I think that people understand that this is their chance to really speak the truth, and speak honestly about what they did and what they felt, and who was problematic. Was there anyone who particularly surprised or impressed you during the interview process? Well, it's funny because you see these people on TV, and you always wonder going into an interview: Are they going to be like their persona on TV or not? Take somebody like Chris Rock, for instance, who's incredibly funny – but he winds up being so smart too. I mean, the guy was so smart. I remember leaving that first interview with him and thinking: Whoa, yes, his stand-up is great, and he's fun in the show, but there's so much more going on. There were some amazing anecdotes that came out, like when Bill Murray talks about carrying Gilda Radner around a party just before her death, the sort of amazing little moments that you were able to elicit.  When you hear something like that you just realize how special that is, how really incredible. At that moment, you almost stop being an interviewer and you're just a fan of the show. Gilda, Belushi, Phil Hartman: These are people that you wish you could have interviewed. But it was so incredible to hear [Murray] talk about that moment, and to hear people talk about her. Because the truth is that there were other people that were part of "SNL," and then people would say, “I couldn't wait for him to leave” or “I couldn't wait for her to leave.” So when somebody like Gilda comes along, you realize how deep-seated the love is. When people in the book talk about it, it really does seem that there was sort of a magic happening in those legendary first five years of the show. Absolutely. Look, there were a couple of things. One, it was new. So just the fact that it was new and it was breaking down so many barriers, and we'd never seen anything like that. And there was no expectation that it was going to work. I think Lorne understood it, but certainly a lot of the members of the cast didn't. So there was just so much new about the first five years. And then the incredible talent, and the fact that they were, week after week, still messing around with convention, and being really disruptive in the most delicious way. So I think I totally understand when cast members after those first five years looked back with envy or intimidation. It was just inevitable given the weight and the import, the magnitude of those first five years. Can “SNL” still do that sort of risky, ground-breaking comedy, given how long it has been around and all the new competition it faces? I think it can still push boundaries. But the problem is that our world has changed, so some of the stuff that they do Jon Stewart was doing, and now John Oliver is doing, and Stephen Colbert was doing, so they're not the only game in town. [These other shows] may not be doing sketch comedy, but just in terms of sensibilities and being really satirical about what's going on, the landscape is a little cluttered, frankly. Do you think that "SNL" can stay relevant in the current political landscape when pitted against John Oliver, and Colbert, and all those guys? This is what I was trying to say at in my recent Vanity Fair piece. They’ve always had a special place and this year they need to keep that place. They need to not be conflated with other shows that are doing satirical, political humor. That means the sketches have to be very distinctive and noteworthy and the writing has to be as sharp as ever. I think it’s going to be an exciting year for them, because there’s a lot of material. [Longtime writer] Jim Downey was a very prominent figure in the book, and he is pretty harsh when speaking about the show’s politics in recent years. He says that the show hasn’t done anything surprising in recent years and that “SNL” has become “an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment.” The thing I love about Jim is that he's so genuine. He doesn't pander, and he's just one of my favorite people to interview because you really get to understand how he feels. The 40 years of "SNL" kind of run like an EKG. There are triumphant times, there are downtimes, and there are transition years. And I think that some of that is mirrored also in terms of political years. 2008 was incredible, with Tina playing Sarah Palin. But I think Jim was trying to say that they'd become a victim of their own success – boy, they don't take as many chances as they used to. And I think that's what he was really speaking to, and I think that kind of frustrated him. Whereas Horatio Sanz, in the book, refers to Downey as “the Karl Rove of SNL,” and he expresses the concern that Lorne leans too much on Downey instead of relying on more liberal writers like Seth Meyers. And that the show hasn’t been tough enough on the GOP in recent years. One of my favorite indoor sports is at a dinner party or when you're just sitting around with friends, and people will say, “Oh, you know, 'Saturday Night Live' is a really a Democratic show.” And then somebody will say, “Oh no, no, no. Its a really conservative show. Jim Downey's a really big conservative, and you should see the way he skewered Hillary.” In a way, the show's been incredibly successful in the sense that you don't think it's an arm of MSNBC or Fox News, or something like that. I think that they're an equal opportunity offender. They like messing around with everybody who's on the stage. And I think that's really important because if there was a de facto branding of their political philosophies, that would be really detrimental. Do you think that Lorne has become more afraid to go after the left, or to do humor without thinking about the political consequences?  Somebody once tweeted to me: “I just saw Lorne at a restaurant with the Clintons. And you have to write about this, because how can he make fun of them now if he's hanging out with them socially?” And I wrote back, “You don't know Lorne.” Lorne's got a big world, and there's lots of interesting, famous people in there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're out of bounds. There has always been this debate about the extent to which “SNL” actually influences politics on the ground. There are people who say that because Will Ferrell's Bush was so lovable, that it turned the tide of the 2000 election. And there's also the viewpoint that Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression is really what ruined her. How strong do you think “SNL’s" political impact is, ultimately? I'm not sure if there's somebody who goes into a voting booth and votes a certain way because of an “SNL” sketch. But I will say this. The Will Ferrell-George Bush thing was really interesting for me because my Republican friends said, “I can't believe how 'SNL' is killing Bush. They're making him out to be this idiot, and he's so stupid, and he's under Cheney's control.” And my Democratic friends were saying, “I can't believe how ‘SNL' is helping Bush, because at the end of the day, they make him out to be the kind of guy you'd like to go out and have a beer with.” And studies show that that's partly how [people] calculate who they're going to vote for. So I don't think it's directly linked to how somebody votes, but I think there's a kind of subconscious branding you have in the back of your mind. I think that there were things with Sarah Palin that may have been more deleterious to her than Tina, like the Katie Couric thing. Let’s talk a bit about the coming election: In your recent  Vanity Fair piece, you point out that the Donald Trump impression is quite difficult because he's already such a larger-than-life character, and someone in the book described Obama as an impression with a “10.10” degree of difficulty. I think the Trump thing is like, when the Lord wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. Because there's this unbelievable character in the race, right? So just to jump into the writers’ room: Everybody is throwing out ideas like, “What if Trump says something about Carly Fiorina’s face. Y’know, ’look at that face! You can’t be president with that face!’” And someone else will say, “No, he actually said that!” Or “What if he gets on a riff about John McCain, and just says like, ‘I don’t even think he’s a hero.’” “No, no, he already said that.” So it’s like, where do you get stuff? It’s a little tricky. And Jay Pharaoh is back doing Obama. Can you talk a little about the notoriously difficult Obama impression? This has been the case since 2007. Obama is, without a doubt, the most difficult president in the history of "Saturday Night Live," in part because he doesn’t have tics. He doesn’t have — Jim Downey calls them ‘handles’ — almost like this port of entry where you get in there and mess around with his mind or his affectations. One of the great defining sketches of the Bill Clinton era was Phil Hartman jogging and he makes a campaign stop at a McDonald’s. He’s talking to everybody about policy and he says, “Hey, can I have a bit of your burger? Can I have a sip of your shake?” You saw that Clinton boyish id there and it was just perfect. Obama doesn’t have something like that. It’s much harder for him. In the update of the book, you write a lot about the new digital culture surrounding "SNL" — how everything gets picked up and dissected online nowadays. It seemed that a lot of the cast had trouble with the level of backlash they face online on a daily basis. In your experience, is the Internet making it harder for “SNL” to do its job?  There’s a great positive, which is that “SNL” doesn’t need to have people watch it on Saturday night at 11:30, like you used to, in order to appreciate it or see it. The next morning, you can get basically every single sketch online. The bad news is now there are really weird metrics attached to it. Before, the show would get a general rating. Now — Andy Samberg and Jorma and Akiva [from “The Lonely Island”] talk about this — like: Oh my gosh, look at the hits on "Lazy Sunday." And you can do that with sketches, too. Like, the question of how viral does a sketch go? Right, they’re already competing to get airtime. Then they’re competing to be aggregated on Twitter. This is stuff that 90 percent of the earlier cast never even imagined they had to deal with. I can’t tell you how many cast members said "I had to stop Googling myself. I stopped looking at whether or not a sketch was picked up by Deadline or HuffPo or Slate or Salon." “SNL” has been criticized a lot for its lack of diversity, and you cover that a lot in the book, including the casting call for black female cast members that took place last year. What was the mood like from the staff around this issue? It seemed like there was a split of opinions.  Clearly, there were people who were bothered by it. When that whole controversy started up, I know some people were surprised by the extent of the conversation and how much it became a national conversation. I think it was just one of those reminders that “SNL” is a pretty big blip on our cultural radar. It wasn’t an insignificant conversation or controversy or debate. That said, Sasheer [Zamata] is just amazing and I think she’s been a terrific addition to the cast. She’s incredibly talented. There’s no one in the world who could say — or if they do feel that way, have them call me — that she doesn’t belong in that cast. I also think they were really smart about how they brought her along, the first night. She is very methodical about how involved she got. It was really smart. And so that’s behind them now. A number of female writers and cast members you interview — Nora Dunn, Janeane Garofalo — talk about the historical notion that "SNL" is bad for women. How has that changed over the years, and do you think the assessment of “SNL” as a boys' club is a fair one, or has it been overblown? When someone says that they feel something about their workplace, I try never to sit and judge and say, “Oh wow, that’s overblown.” I’m not a woman, I wasn’t in the room when a guy may have been somewhat demeaning. I can't say. What I do know is that your question is rooted in truth, which is that a lot of people felt the way that they did. And I think that you can’t be on the air for 40 years and not go through changes. I think that Lorne is not the type of person to understand a problem of that magnitude and then ignore it. I will say this, that from the time Tina [Fey] became head writer, I did not hear that once from anyone, about Tina. Not once. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a nice segment in the book where she talks about going back to host in 2006, and observing this newfound sense of camaraderie on staff, which she credits to the women on the show at the time, like Amy, Tina and Maya, and how they really changed the attitude there. Maya was terrific on this subject. When Maya talks about the sisterhood that exists in the “SNL” biosphere, it’s actually beautiful. She’s so freaking articulate. It’s crazy. I could have done 40 pages just on her. I think I’ve interviewed 570 people for “SNL,” and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is on my Mount Rushmore. She was part of the earlier days and she was really candid about that. And I was so glad to interview her now for the new volume because she did come back and host and she’s just so unbelievably smart and has this keen sense. Her radar is amazing. Who else is on your Mount Rushmore? Maya. She doesn’t have the visibility that Tina and Amy have. It’s easy to love Tina and Amy, because we know them so well and they are smart, they are gracious. When I interviewed Amy, she was in the middle of production and even though her reps said she had limited time, she was like, “Do you need anything more? What else can I help you with?” That’s a window into somebody’s character. One of the reasons why I felt that this had to be an oral history was because each of these people have such distinct sensibilities and they’re really interesting to listen to. There’s no way -- I don’t care if you’re Hemingway -- you can write prose that will capture the uniqueness of all of them. There were days when I would have four unbelievable conversations. I mean, they’re really, really smart and they’re candid and they really care. I know "really care" sounds like a saccharine phrase, but here’s the thing — and Kristen Wiig was so great about this — you don’t sleep and you don’t see daylight and it’s not really glamorous. But they’re committed. When you’re on "SNL," you’re swimming in the deep end of the pool. You cannot fake it. If you fake it, then Lorne and the writers and the rest of the cast will see it and then on Saturday night, the audience will see it. There’s just no margin for error. You gotta come through. So, it requires a lot of commitment. I actually had many of the cast members talk about the fact that their work life was much more demanding on "SNL" than it was on a TV show or a movie, and I think that says a lot. Lorne is this really fascinating, almost mythical figure who seems to inspire fear and love in equal measure. People describe him as a father figure, a mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, all sorts of things. How would you characterize Lorne’s relationship with his cast and how that has changed over the years? The thing I really appreciate about Lorne is, in some ways, as much as he didn’t like old Hollywood and how he’s been a chief architect of a new era, he’s a throwback. He’s iconic, like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg. When you say Lorne, it's like Cher. The least-used word in the world is Michaels, because you don’t need to say it. I think the fact that he’s been doing it for 40 years is obviously noteworthy, but more importantly he has a very complex relationship with staff and with writers. And I think what’s been interesting to document under the rubric of cultural anthropology is Lorne’s growth through the years and how it has manifest with the staff. Because person after person [has said] he has been, particularly since having children, much more benevolent. He’s been a little less mysterious. The first twenty years of the show, people were absolutely terrified of him. Not everyone, but there was no doubt that he was the head raccoon. And people always were trying to figure out "is he mad at me, does he love me, does he like me?" And I think that nowadays there’s less anxiety about that. He’s much more of a father figure. He’s much more involved. Cast member after cast member talked about how he’s great with career guidance and he’s been a real mentor. That’s been really interesting to write about. And now Lorne doesn’t just have “SNL,” he also has “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night,” and he recently had “30 Rock.” NBC late nights are entirely his domain. Has that changed the dynamic on the show at all? If I were to say to you, Lorne Michaels has “30 Rock,” an Emmy-winning primetime show, he’s got late night shows — I’m conflating eras here — and he’s got “Saturday Night Live,” one might think, okay, he’s been doing “SNL” a long time, he’s kind of on autopilot, he’s going to devote his energies to “30 Rock” and launching Jimmy Fallon and someone else is going to be the de-facto head of “SNL.” And you’d be totally wrong. Because “SNL” is still the center of his universe. He’s never missed a show. Never. So in terms of the hierarchy of needs, I’m sure Jimmy Fallon and Seth and Tina, when they needed him, that’s fine. But he has always been wedded to the fact that on those 20 [“SNL”] shows a season he’s going to do everything he can that week to make it the best show possible. And that’s pretty extraordinary. You referred to “SNL’s” trajectory as being like an EKG machine. What are we in now, a peak or a valley?  Last year there was a lot of attention because of the 40th anniversary and the special itself was so spectacular. It was kind of like a tsunami that washed over individual episodes. I do think last year and the year before, one of the things we saw is that the show has the tendency to be a little host-dependent. So what’s happening from a ratings perspective is people aren’t sitting down because it’s Saturday at 11:30, they're saying “Oh, Justin Timberlake is on, let’s watch that.” So that puts a lot of pressure on the booking department in the sense that you’ve got to make sure the hosts are a certain caliber. I think one of the things the political year may do for “SNL” is that people will not pay so much attention to who the host is and they’ll want to just come and see all this great political humor. I was excited when I heard Taran Killam was going to play Trump, because I think he’s such a huge talent. Is there anyone that you are particularly excited about on the show right now? I would watch Kate McKinnon read the Yellow Pages. She’s out of this world, crazy talented. Unbelievable. And I think Aidy [Bryant] has grown so much. But in terms of the political stuff, Kate is doing Hillary this year. And she’s off-the-charts talented. Other than Kate McKinnon, which cast members do you hold a soft spot for? I’m really glad Kenan came back; there was a rumor he was going to leave. And that would have been sad. I understand everybody has their own shelf life at “SNL” but I’m really glad he’s back. There’s a bunch of really talented people. I’m always going to root for “SNL.” Not just because of its great history, but because I think it occupies a really special and important place in the culture and in television. Wherever I give a speech or a book signing, people say “Oh god, ‘SNL,’ it used to be so great.” Come on. It’s such a lazy way of looking at things. A lot of these people haven’t even seen the show in four or five years. So I’m rooting for it. I know it’s cooler to be cynical, but I’m kind of burnt out on cynicism. I tell my kids, I think we live in a world where good news travels too slow. So I’m happy to say I’m rooting for it. I hope they have a great year.When James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” came out in 2002, it was heralded as the definitive behind-the-scenes look at the legendary late-night institution. Containing interviews with hundreds of writers, cast members, hosts and NBC execs, spanning from the hedonistic heyday of the Not Ready for Primetime Players through the troubled "Saturday Night Dead" years into the new golden age of Ferrell and Fey, the book is a rich, densely-populated tribute to the show's legacy and its enduring impact on entertainment, politics and American culture at large. On Oct. 6, Miller and Shales are releasing the paperback version of the updated edition, with its 200 new pages covering the last 10 years of "SNL." While the show has always gone through ups and downs, this past decade has been a particularly tumultuous one, as the show has fought to forge a path for itself in the rapidly changing digital world and to remain relevant in an increasingly competitive and fragmented viewing landscape. In the new pages, we hear the show's recent history described by the people who were there in the trenches: Andy Samberg discusses the rise of "SNL's" now-omnipresent digital shorts; Tina Fey and Sarah Palin reflect on the political impression that defined the 2008 election; while Kenan Thompson, Sasheer Zamata and other cast members weigh in on the diversity casting crisis that engulfed the show last season. But, as ever, the most important figure is producer Lorne Michaels, the enigmatic visionary who reshaped the entire entertainment industry in his own image, and to whom the book serves as testament and tribute. Ahead of the show's 41st season premiere this Saturday, we sat down with Miller to talk about the show's evolving history, its current challenges, and his hopes for the future of an American institution. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed. I was really impressed by how candid the cast members and writers were, and how open everyone was about their dislikes and their grudges. How did you get people to open up? I don't mean to be pretentious about this, but the goal is to make a book of record. In terms of how certain things really happened, you want it to be in that book. So I think that people understand that this is their chance to really speak the truth, and speak honestly about what they did and what they felt, and who was problematic. Was there anyone who particularly surprised or impressed you during the interview process? Well, it's funny because you see these people on TV, and you always wonder going into an interview: Are they going to be like their persona on TV or not? Take somebody like Chris Rock, for instance, who's incredibly funny – but he winds up being so smart too. I mean, the guy was so smart. I remember leaving that first interview with him and thinking: Whoa, yes, his stand-up is great, and he's fun in the show, but there's so much more going on. There were some amazing anecdotes that came out, like when Bill Murray talks about carrying Gilda Radner around a party just before her death, the sort of amazing little moments that you were able to elicit.  When you hear something like that you just realize how special that is, how really incredible. At that moment, you almost stop being an interviewer and you're just a fan of the show. Gilda, Belushi, Phil Hartman: These are people that you wish you could have interviewed. But it was so incredible to hear [Murray] talk about that moment, and to hear people talk about her. Because the truth is that there were other people that were part of "SNL," and then people would say, “I couldn't wait for him to leave” or “I couldn't wait for her to leave.” So when somebody like Gilda comes along, you realize how deep-seated the love is. When people in the book talk about it, it really does seem that there was sort of a magic happening in those legendary first five years of the show. Absolutely. Look, there were a couple of things. One, it was new. So just the fact that it was new and it was breaking down so many barriers, and we'd never seen anything like that. And there was no expectation that it was going to work. I think Lorne understood it, but certainly a lot of the members of the cast didn't. So there was just so much new about the first five years. And then the incredible talent, and the fact that they were, week after week, still messing around with convention, and being really disruptive in the most delicious way. So I think I totally understand when cast members after those first five years looked back with envy or intimidation. It was just inevitable given the weight and the import, the magnitude of those first five years. Can “SNL” still do that sort of risky, ground-breaking comedy, given how long it has been around and all the new competition it faces? I think it can still push boundaries. But the problem is that our world has changed, so some of the stuff that they do Jon Stewart was doing, and now John Oliver is doing, and Stephen Colbert was doing, so they're not the only game in town. [These other shows] may not be doing sketch comedy, but just in terms of sensibilities and being really satirical about what's going on, the landscape is a little cluttered, frankly. Do you think that "SNL" can stay relevant in the current political landscape when pitted against John Oliver, and Colbert, and all those guys? This is what I was trying to say at in my recent Vanity Fair piece. They’ve always had a special place and this year they need to keep that place. They need to not be conflated with other shows that are doing satirical, political humor. That means the sketches have to be very distinctive and noteworthy and the writing has to be as sharp as ever. I think it’s going to be an exciting year for them, because there’s a lot of material. [Longtime writer] Jim Downey was a very prominent figure in the book, and he is pretty harsh when speaking about the show’s politics in recent years. He says that the show hasn’t done anything surprising in recent years and that “SNL” has become “an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment.” The thing I love about Jim is that he's so genuine. He doesn't pander, and he's just one of my favorite people to interview because you really get to understand how he feels. The 40 years of "SNL" kind of run like an EKG. There are triumphant times, there are downtimes, and there are transition years. And I think that some of that is mirrored also in terms of political years. 2008 was incredible, with Tina playing Sarah Palin. But I think Jim was trying to say that they'd become a victim of their own success – boy, they don't take as many chances as they used to. And I think that's what he was really speaking to, and I think that kind of frustrated him. Whereas Horatio Sanz, in the book, refers to Downey as “the Karl Rove of SNL,” and he expresses the concern that Lorne leans too much on Downey instead of relying on more liberal writers like Seth Meyers. And that the show hasn’t been tough enough on the GOP in recent years. One of my favorite indoor sports is at a dinner party or when you're just sitting around with friends, and people will say, “Oh, you know, 'Saturday Night Live' is a really a Democratic show.” And then somebody will say, “Oh no, no, no. Its a really conservative show. Jim Downey's a really big conservative, and you should see the way he skewered Hillary.” In a way, the show's been incredibly successful in the sense that you don't think it's an arm of MSNBC or Fox News, or something like that. I think that they're an equal opportunity offender. They like messing around with everybody who's on the stage. And I think that's really important because if there was a de facto branding of their political philosophies, that would be really detrimental. Do you think that Lorne has become more afraid to go after the left, or to do humor without thinking about the political consequences?  Somebody once tweeted to me: “I just saw Lorne at a restaurant with the Clintons. And you have to write about this, because how can he make fun of them now if he's hanging out with them socially?” And I wrote back, “You don't know Lorne.” Lorne's got a big world, and there's lots of interesting, famous people in there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're out of bounds. There has always been this debate about the extent to which “SNL” actually influences politics on the ground. There are people who say that because Will Ferrell's Bush was so lovable, that it turned the tide of the 2000 election. And there's also the viewpoint that Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression is really what ruined her. How strong do you think “SNL’s" political impact is, ultimately? I'm not sure if there's somebody who goes into a voting booth and votes a certain way because of an “SNL” sketch. But I will say this. The Will Ferrell-George Bush thing was really interesting for me because my Republican friends said, “I can't believe how 'SNL' is killing Bush. They're making him out to be this idiot, and he's so stupid, and he's under Cheney's control.” And my Democratic friends were saying, “I can't believe how ‘SNL' is helping Bush, because at the end of the day, they make him out to be the kind of guy you'd like to go out and have a beer with.” And studies show that that's partly how [people] calculate who they're going to vote for. So I don't think it's directly linked to how somebody votes, but I think there's a kind of subconscious branding you have in the back of your mind. I think that there were things with Sarah Palin that may have been more deleterious to her than Tina, like the Katie Couric thing. Let’s talk a bit about the coming election: In your recent  Vanity Fair piece, you point out that the Donald Trump impression is quite difficult because he's already such a larger-than-life character, and someone in the book described Obama as an impression with a “10.10” degree of difficulty. I think the Trump thing is like, when the Lord wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. Because there's this unbelievable character in the race, right? So just to jump into the writers’ room: Everybody is throwing out ideas like, “What if Trump says something about Carly Fiorina’s face. Y’know, ’look at that face! You can’t be president with that face!’” And someone else will say, “No, he actually said that!” Or “What if he gets on a riff about John McCain, and just says like, ‘I don’t even think he’s a hero.’” “No, no, he already said that.” So it’s like, where do you get stuff? It’s a little tricky. And Jay Pharaoh is back doing Obama. Can you talk a little about the notoriously difficult Obama impression? This has been the case since 2007. Obama is, without a doubt, the most difficult president in the history of "Saturday Night Live," in part because he doesn’t have tics. He doesn’t have — Jim Downey calls them ‘handles’ — almost like this port of entry where you get in there and mess around with his mind or his affectations. One of the great defining sketches of the Bill Clinton era was Phil Hartman jogging and he makes a campaign stop at a McDonald’s. He’s talking to everybody about policy and he says, “Hey, can I have a bit of your burger? Can I have a sip of your shake?” You saw that Clinton boyish id there and it was just perfect. Obama doesn’t have something like that. It’s much harder for him. In the update of the book, you write a lot about the new digital culture surrounding "SNL" — how everything gets picked up and dissected online nowadays. It seemed that a lot of the cast had trouble with the level of backlash they face online on a daily basis. In your experience, is the Internet making it harder for “SNL” to do its job?  There’s a great positive, which is that “SNL” doesn’t need to have people watch it on Saturday night at 11:30, like you used to, in order to appreciate it or see it. The next morning, you can get basically every single sketch online. The bad news is now there are really weird metrics attached to it. Before, the show would get a general rating. Now — Andy Samberg and Jorma and Akiva [from “The Lonely Island”] talk about this — like: Oh my gosh, look at the hits on "Lazy Sunday." And you can do that with sketches, too. Like, the question of how viral does a sketch go? Right, they’re already competing to get airtime. Then they’re competing to be aggregated on Twitter. This is stuff that 90 percent of the earlier cast never even imagined they had to deal with. I can’t tell you how many cast members said "I had to stop Googling myself. I stopped looking at whether or not a sketch was picked up by Deadline or HuffPo or Slate or Salon." “SNL” has been criticized a lot for its lack of diversity, and you cover that a lot in the book, including the casting call for black female cast members that took place last year. What was the mood like from the staff around this issue? It seemed like there was a split of opinions.  Clearly, there were people who were bothered by it. When that whole controversy started up, I know some people were surprised by the extent of the conversation and how much it became a national conversation. I think it was just one of those reminders that “SNL” is a pretty big blip on our cultural radar. It wasn’t an insignificant conversation or controversy or debate. That said, Sasheer [Zamata] is just amazing and I think she’s been a terrific addition to the cast. She’s incredibly talented. There’s no one in the world who could say — or if they do feel that way, have them call me — that she doesn’t belong in that cast. I also think they were really smart about how they brought her along, the first night. She is very methodical about how involved she got. It was really smart. And so that’s behind them now. A number of female writers and cast members you interview — Nora Dunn, Janeane Garofalo — talk about the historical notion that "SNL" is bad for women. How has that changed over the years, and do you think the assessment of “SNL” as a boys' club is a fair one, or has it been overblown? When someone says that they feel something about their workplace, I try never to sit and judge and say, “Oh wow, that’s overblown.” I’m not a woman, I wasn’t in the room when a guy may have been somewhat demeaning. I can't say. What I do know is that your question is rooted in truth, which is that a lot of people felt the way that they did. And I think that you can’t be on the air for 40 years and not go through changes. I think that Lorne is not the type of person to understand a problem of that magnitude and then ignore it. I will say this, that from the time Tina [Fey] became head writer, I did not hear that once from anyone, about Tina. Not once. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a nice segment in the book where she talks about going back to host in 2006, and observing this newfound sense of camaraderie on staff, which she credits to the women on the show at the time, like Amy, Tina and Maya, and how they really changed the attitude there. Maya was terrific on this subject. When Maya talks about the sisterhood that exists in the “SNL” biosphere, it’s actually beautiful. She’s so freaking articulate. It’s crazy. I could have done 40 pages just on her. I think I’ve interviewed 570 people for “SNL,” and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is on my Mount Rushmore. She was part of the earlier days and she was really candid about that. And I was so glad to interview her now for the new volume because she did come back and host and she’s just so unbelievably smart and has this keen sense. Her radar is amazing. Who else is on your Mount Rushmore? Maya. She doesn’t have the visibility that Tina and Amy have. It’s easy to love Tina and Amy, because we know them so well and they are smart, they are gracious. When I interviewed Amy, she was in the middle of production and even though her reps said she had limited time, she was like, “Do you need anything more? What else can I help you with?” That’s a window into somebody’s character. One of the reasons why I felt that this had to be an oral history was because each of these people have such distinct sensibilities and they’re really interesting to listen to. There’s no way -- I don’t care if you’re Hemingway -- you can write prose that will capture the uniqueness of all of them. There were days when I would have four unbelievable conversations. I mean, they’re really, really smart and they’re candid and they really care. I know "really care" sounds like a saccharine phrase, but here’s the thing — and Kristen Wiig was so great about this — you don’t sleep and you don’t see daylight and it’s not really glamorous. But they’re committed. When you’re on "SNL," you’re swimming in the deep end of the pool. You cannot fake it. If you fake it, then Lorne and the writers and the rest of the cast will see it and then on Saturday night, the audience will see it. There’s just no margin for error. You gotta come through. So, it requires a lot of commitment. I actually had many of the cast members talk about the fact that their work life was much more demanding on "SNL" than it was on a TV show or a movie, and I think that says a lot. Lorne is this really fascinating, almost mythical figure who seems to inspire fear and love in equal measure. People describe him as a father figure, a mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, all sorts of things. How would you characterize Lorne’s relationship with his cast and how that has changed over the years? The thing I really appreciate about Lorne is, in some ways, as much as he didn’t like old Hollywood and how he’s been a chief architect of a new era, he’s a throwback. He’s iconic, like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg. When you say Lorne, it's like Cher. The least-used word in the world is Michaels, because you don’t need to say it. I think the fact that he’s been doing it for 40 years is obviously noteworthy, but more importantly he has a very complex relationship with staff and with writers. And I think what’s been interesting to document under the rubric of cultural anthropology is Lorne’s growth through the years and how it has manifest with the staff. Because person after person [has said] he has been, particularly since having children, much more benevolent. He’s been a little less mysterious. The first twenty years of the show, people were absolutely terrified of him. Not everyone, but there was no doubt that he was the head raccoon. And people always were trying to figure out "is he mad at me, does he love me, does he like me?" And I think that nowadays there’s less anxiety about that. He’s much more of a father figure. He’s much more involved. Cast member after cast member talked about how he’s great with career guidance and he’s been a real mentor. That’s been really interesting to write about. And now Lorne doesn’t just have “SNL,” he also has “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night,” and he recently had “30 Rock.” NBC late nights are entirely his domain. Has that changed the dynamic on the show at all? If I were to say to you, Lorne Michaels has “30 Rock,” an Emmy-winning primetime show, he’s got late night shows — I’m conflating eras here — and he’s got “Saturday Night Live,” one might think, okay, he’s been doing “SNL” a long time, he’s kind of on autopilot, he’s going to devote his energies to “30 Rock” and launching Jimmy Fallon and someone else is going to be the de-facto head of “SNL.” And you’d be totally wrong. Because “SNL” is still the center of his universe. He’s never missed a show. Never. So in terms of the hierarchy of needs, I’m sure Jimmy Fallon and Seth and Tina, when they needed him, that’s fine. But he has always been wedded to the fact that on those 20 [“SNL”] shows a season he’s going to do everything he can that week to make it the best show possible. And that’s pretty extraordinary. You referred to “SNL’s” trajectory as being like an EKG machine. What are we in now, a peak or a valley?  Last year there was a lot of attention because of the 40th anniversary and the special itself was so spectacular. It was kind of like a tsunami that washed over individual episodes. I do think last year and the year before, one of the things we saw is that the show has the tendency to be a little host-dependent. So what’s happening from a ratings perspective is people aren’t sitting down because it’s Saturday at 11:30, they're saying “Oh, Justin Timberlake is on, let’s watch that.” So that puts a lot of pressure on the booking department in the sense that you’ve got to make sure the hosts are a certain caliber. I think one of the things the political year may do for “SNL” is that people will not pay so much attention to who the host is and they’ll want to just come and see all this great political humor. I was excited when I heard Taran Killam was going to play Trump, because I think he’s such a huge talent. Is there anyone that you are particularly excited about on the show right now? I would watch Kate McKinnon read the Yellow Pages. She’s out of this world, crazy talented. Unbelievable. And I think Aidy [Bryant] has grown so much. But in terms of the political stuff, Kate is doing Hillary this year. And she’s off-the-charts talented. Other than Kate McKinnon, which cast members do you hold a soft spot for? I’m really glad Kenan came back; there was a rumor he was going to leave. And that would have been sad. I understand everybody has their own shelf life at “SNL” but I’m really glad he’s back. There’s a bunch of really talented people. I’m always going to root for “SNL.” Not just because of its great history, but because I think it occupies a really special and important place in the culture and in television. Wherever I give a speech or a book signing, people say “Oh god, ‘SNL,’ it used to be so great.” Come on. It’s such a lazy way of looking at things. A lot of these people haven’t even seen the show in four or five years. So I’m rooting for it. I know it’s cooler to be cynical, but I’m kind of burnt out on cynicism. I tell my kids, I think we live in a world where good news travels too slow. So I’m happy to say I’m rooting for it. I hope they have a great year.

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The irreversible damage of Volkswagen’s stunning deceit

Volkswagen’s ruse to circumvent U.S. auto emissions standards has left many wondering about the precise environmental impact of its cars, which emitted more pollutants than regulations allow. Although the extra pollution is impossible to quantify so soon, experts agree that although the amount is globally insignificant, it might add to Europe’s regional health concerns. On September 18 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered that four Volkswagen vehicles from model years 2009 to 2015 had been rigged with illegal software. They used a sophisticated algorithm that would make the cars run cleanly during emissions tests but then stop so the cars would get better fuel economy and driving ability. As such, the unrestricted vehicles released higher-than-acceptable emissions in everyday driving situations. The German automaker quickly recalled 482,000 VW and Audi brand cars in the U.S. alone, and later admitted that the software might have been fitted to 11 million vehicles worldwide. EPA now suspects that these cars emitted 10 to 40 times more nitrogen oxide—a pollutant that can harm human health—than standards allow. Many news organizations were quick to jump on this number. The Guardian ran its own analysis, claiming that the scandal may have caused nearly one million extra metric tons of pollution yearly. But experts remain skeptical. John Heywood, a mechanical engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who focuses on internal combustion engines and air pollution is hesitant to agree with such high numbers. He has identified a key change in how the engine operates (by delaying the start of combustion) that would improve the snappiness of the driving, but it would only increase nitrogen oxide emissions by three to five times. Travis Bradford, director of Energy and Environment Concentration at Columbia University, agrees. He argues that a number as high as 40 likely represents a spike while the car is accelerating. It cannot be anywhere near the average. “Fuels these days are not that dirty and emissions control systems are not that clean,” Bradford says. “So the idea that it would on average be 40 times the amount of emissions is pretty incredulous.” Still, experts agree that nitrogen oxide (pdf) is a nasty pollutant. Once released into the air it quickly converts into nitrogen dioxide—a reddish-brown gas with a pungent odor—and then absorbs sunlight to transform into the yellow-brown haze that blankets cities. It is this smog that can exacerbate dozens of health problems, including asthma, bronchitis and emphysema. Alternatively, it can be washed into the ground in the form of acid rain, which can kill plants and animals. Once the damage is done “there is no antidote,” says Yiannis Levendis, an engineering professor at Northeastern University who focuses on diesel emissions. The news is not tragic for those living in the U.S., where the portion of diesel-powered cars is small (roughly 1 percent). But in Europe that number is much higher, clocking in at roughly 50 percent. In some European cities there is already so much nitrogen dioxide that it is “toxic in its own right,” Heywood says. But that was prior to the scandal. VW just upped the dosage. All experts agree that on a local scale, the extra pollution can only make matters worse; on a global scale, however, it is insignificant. According to the EPA, small cars released roughly one billion metric tons (pdf) of greenhouse gases in 2011 alone. TheGuardian’s estimate, which experts agree is likely too high, is that the rigged cars account for only 0.1 percent of that. “Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, this is a drop in the bucket in terms of our aggregate pollution,” Bradford says. He says “unfortunately” mostly because he thinks it’s a shame that pollution is already so high, and partially because he is flabbergasted that a company of VW’s stature could stoop so low. “They literally stole public property,” he says. “They took air that could have been cleaner and available to all the people in the U.S. because they wanted to sell cars.” Heywood will keep crunching the numbers. But he’s waiting for Volkswagen and EPA to release more concrete information. “We've got to let the dust settle on the numbers,” he says, before we jump to any radical conclusions.

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Trump and Putin’s crazy bromance: Two guys too weird for fiction who long to rule the world

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin both resemble fictional characters more than real people, which may help explain Trump’s repeated assertions that he understands the Russian president and would get along with him. “In terms of leadership, he’s getting an A,” the putative GOP frontrunner told Bill O’Reilly, while essentially endorsing Putin’s current campaign to prop up Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, a major factor in the mounting tensions between the United States and Russia. So far the bromance has been one-sided, thankfully. Putin is nothing if not a shrewd operator, and whoever in his inner circle has been tasked with making sense of the Trump phenomenon has no doubt advised him to steer clear. But if Putin and Trump seem like satirical or symbolic figures out of novels or movies, they come from different kinds of stories and, more to the point, from radically different fictional traditions. Trump is a larger-than-life caricature taken from a Sinclair Lewis novel or an early Frank Capra film, a vicious and merciless plutocrat-turned-politician who appeals (as I have previously suggested) to deep, ugly currents within human nature and American history. Putin may look like a similarly blunt instrument from this distance, an old-time Russian strongman who invades neighboring nations, imprisons political opponents and causes voices of dissent to die or disappear under mysterious circumstances. But the man who consolidated power in post-Soviet Russia 15 years ago with startling rapidity – in a process that has been much investigated but never entirely explained – is a subtler and more shadowy creation than that outline suggests. He’s a character out of a postmodern, metafictional work by Don DeLillo or Philip K. Dick, about whom so little is certain that the reader begins to suspect he does not exist. Certain facts about Putin’s life and career can be ascertained, but the more you examine them, the more they seem like “facts” in quotation marks, or come to resemble the constant Russian media images of Putin fighting forest fires in Siberia, diving beneath the Black Sea in a submersible or riding a motorbike with the Russian equivalent of the Hell’s Angels. I mean, he really went to those places and put on those uniforms, right? Those are facts too. Clear across the American political spectrum, from those eager to cast Putin as an unhinged, power-mad tyrant who is singlehandedly relaunching the Cold War to those on the radical left who halfheartedly try to cast him as a hero standing up to the American empire (i.e., because he is singlehandedly relaunching the Cold War), our problem is that we think we have Putin figured out but we don’t. We don’t understand Putin because we know almost nothing about Russian society or Russian political history, and we don’t understand him because the invented or self-invented character called “Putin” is not meant to be understood. If those sound like contradictory proposals, well, welcome to Putin-land. When I waded into “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” a whopping volume by the Brookings Institution scholars Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy that is viewed as the authoritative work on Putin in English, I did not suspect that the American foreign policy establishment would embrace this sort of literary or philosophical ambiguity. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are all said to have read this book, which was expressly intended to provide Western policy-makers and bureaucrats with a psychological and historical framework for understanding this most perplexing of contemporary world leaders. But you barely get five pages into “Mr. Putin” before Hill and Gaddy start to sound like bright liberal-arts undergrads who just got stoned and read Jacques Derrida or Slavoj Žižek for the first time. “Attempting to write about Vladimir Putin,” they observe, presented challenges they had not noticed or imagined until they were well into the project. When you “delve into his hidden aspects, whether in the past or present, you are playing a game with Putin. It is a game where he is in charge. He controls the facts and the ‘stories.’” They could not afford to “take any story or so-called fact at face value when it comes to Vladimir Putin,” they continue, because “we are dealing with someone who is a master at manipulating information, suppressing information, and creating pseudo-information … after 15 years, we remain ignorant of some of the most basic facts about a man who is arguably the most powerful individual in the world, the leader of an important nation.” Very little is known about Putin’s childhood in Leningrad (as it was then called), and almost all the so-called information comes either from stories he has told himself or official campaign biographies. Putin was married for more than 30 years (he is now divorced) and has two adult daughters, but his wife and children “are conspicuously absent from the public domain,” as Hill and Gaddy put it. During the latter stages of the Soviet era, he was a KGB officer for about 15 years, a fact often reported as if it explained anything. But Putin was nowhere near the top of the Soviet bureaucracy, and there are any number of onetime KGB officials and Communist Party apparatchiks among the ruling elite of contemporary Russia. Only one of them rose to undisputed control of the entire country. How that happened is the great mystery of Putin’s career, one he appears to have purposefully clouded in doubt and one that “Mr. Putin” makes only tentative efforts to unpack. Somehow or other, Putin went from being the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in 1996 (who was nearly brought down by a local corruption scandal that threatened the city’s food supply) to becoming the acting president of Russia on the last day of 1999, following Boris Yeltsin’s abrupt resignation. He has run the show in Moscow ever since, and whether that outcome resulted from a coordinated backroom coup d’état or represents the unintended consequence of a chaotic chain of events remains a huge unanswered question. In the grand tradition of political science doorstops, “Mr. Putin” includes considerable wonky dissection of power struggles within the Russian oligarchy and the contributory factors behind specific policy decisions of the Putin era. I particularly enjoyed the detective work that leads Hill and Gaddy to conclude, purely on circumstantial evidence, that Putin’s strategic thinking was shaped by an American business-school textbook from 1978 that was apparently in vogue at the KGB academy when he studied there. On a more substantive level, the book offers a succinct account of how Putin came to feel increasingly disrespected and undermined by both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations between 1999 and the Iraq invasion in 2003, and moved from a generally pro-American position to the view that the United States was a fatally arrogant and grossly incompetent player on the world stage. You don’t have to like the guy to concede that he had a point. But even amid the mind-melting forest of details compiled by Hill and Gaddy’s years of Putin-spelunking, they never move far from the idea that to understand Putin even a little we need to struggle with Russian history and the concept of “Russian-ness,” and that those things come heavily loaded with contradiction, mystification and doubt. I had already come up with the conceit of describing Putin as a literary character (I swear!) before discovering that Hill and Gaddy had done it too. Their example is funnier: Putin’s attitude toward Russia and its history, they argue, resembles that of Oleg Komarov, a “pseudo-colorful” Russian émigré who teaches at a small American college in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel “Pnin.” Komarov is both reactionary and pro-Communist: His ideal Russia, Nabokov writes, is an incoherent blend “of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church and the Hydro-Electric Dam.” Whatever violence and brutality and repression Putin inflicts on Russian dissidents, disagreeable ethnic minorities or neighboring nations, at least according to the central thesis of “Mr. Putin,” is done in the Komarov spirit. He channels the Russian people’s historical memory of repeated invasion, war and privation, and their collective desire to reclaim the lost greatness of both the Russian Empire that crumbled in 1917 and the Soviet colossus that collapsed in 1991. Putin is a “man of the state,” as signified by the untranslatable Russian word gosudarstvennik – a term no American political figure would willingly embrace even if it clearly fit (as it would, perhaps, for Biden or Hillary Clinton). In our peculiar political discourse the word “American” carries a double meaning; as either a noun or an adjective, it does not signify the same thing when spoken on Fox News or on MSNBC, by Donald Trump or by Bernie Sanders. That’s just one small example of the way English lacks the fine distinctions of Russian. Hill and Gaddy make the important point that even as Putin has capitalized on resurgent Russian nationalism as a pillar of his political base, he has also positioned himself as a bulwark against its most extreme varieties, a reasonable man trying to hold an unreasonable country together. Putin consistently uses the more neutral term Rossiyskiy to describe Russian identity – again, a word associated with the Russian state – instead of Russkiy, which is associated with Slavic Russian ethnicity, the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Church. (In other words, with what we would call racism, although the term does not precisely apply in the Russian context.) Putin waged an extended, bloody and expensive war to subdue the rebellion in Chechnya, while facing a campaign of domestic terrorism many times worse than 9/11. Throughout that period he resisted the calls of Russian nationalists for ethnic cleansing in Chechnya, or systematic discrimination against Muslims and ethnic Chechens living in Russia. Putin’s record on human rights and civil liberties has been dreadful and should not be whitewashed, but every decision has been framed in terms of the Russian state’s historic destiny, rather than narrower conceptions of nationality or race. Both Putin and Donald Trump have risen to power and prominence as national archetypes of strength and as “self-made men.” But Trump is a self-created grotesque, a reality TV star constructed to be more shocking and outrageous than any Kardashian, any celebrity gender reassignment, any mass shooter, any accordion-playing YouTube kitty. Putin, on the other hand, was constructed to disappear into a vague idea of Russian greatness and a purposefully generic cloud of “pseudo-information.” He has all but erased his own identity to become the semi-divine avatar of his nation-state, as Stalin and Peter the Great and a long line of others did before him. Not for nothing did journalist Masha Gessen call her 2012 Putin biography “The Man Without a Face.” No doubt it's true that Putin and Trump reflect related global strains of populism and nationalism, and that both appeal to the deep-seated human yearning for a strong male leader or father figure. But the social and historical currents that created them are so different that the comparison is almost meaningless in practical terms, and for good or for ill the reality of a Trump presidency – dreadful as that is to contemplate – would look nothing like Putin’s presidency. Trump’s charismatic and/or repulsive persona is rooted in the American myth of the sovereign individual, the John Wayne or Clint Eastwood figure who stands free of laws and social conventions and who views government as a big hoax inflicted on suckers by pencil-pushing pantywaists. Whether you think that archetype is more or less sinister than Putin's gosudarstvennik, the abstract embodiment of a collective identity, is a matter of interpretation. But it is even more contradictory, and far less functional. Trump can only gaze across Europe longingly and dream of the kind of power wielded by the faceless, characterless man in the Kremlin. As fundamentally screwed as our country is, we should be thankful that he’ll never have it.

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The Catholic Church’s South American shame

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The Catholic Church has allowed priests accused of sexually abusing children in the United States and Europe to relocate to poor parishes in South America, a yearlong GlobalPost investigation has found.

Reporters confronted five accused priests in as many countries: Paraguay, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil and Peru. One priest who relocated to a poor parish in Peru admitted on camera to molesting a 13-year-old boy while working in the Jackson, Mississippi diocese. Another is currently under investigation in Brazil after allegations arose that he abused disadvantaged children living in an orphanage he founded there.

All five were able to continue working as priests, despite criminal investigations or cash payouts to alleged victims. All enjoyed the privilege, respect and unfettered access to young people that comes with being clergy members.

In the US, Catholic leaders have come under intense pressure for concealing priests’ sex crimes, and for transferring perpetrators among parishes rather than turning them over to law enforcement. The scandal has cost the church billions of dollars and led to a sharp decline in new clergy.

Victim advocates say that relocating priests to poorer parishes overseas is the church’s latest strategy for protecting its reputation.

In response, in 2002 US bishops approved a “zero-tolerance” policy, under which priests who molest children are no longer allowed a second chance to serve in the clergy.

Victim advocates say that relocating priests to poorer parishes overseas is the church’s latest strategy for protecting its reputation.

“As developed countries find it tougher to keep predator priests on the job, bishops are increasingly moving them to the developing world where there’s less vigorous law enforcement, less independent media and a greater power differential between priests and parishioners,” said David Clohessy, spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. “This is massive, and my suspicion is that it’s becoming more and more pronounced.”

Jimmy Chalk/GlobalPost

The priests GlobalPost confronted on camera, far from the US and European churches where the sexual abuse allegations occurred, include:

Father Carlos Urrutigoity, accused of sharing beds with and fondling teenage boys in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The bishop of Scranton called him a “serious threat to young people,” but in Paraguay, reporters found him leading Mass in a major church. He had been promoted to second-in-command of the diocese of Ciudad del Este. Father Francisco “Fredy” Montero, accused of abusing a 4-year-old girl in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He relocated to his native Ecuador, where he was placed in a succession of remote parishes — despite a dossier sent by the Archdiocese of Minneapolis to his new diocese, warning of Montero’s past. Father Paul Madden, who admitted molesting a 13-year-old boy on a mission trip when he was stationed in Jackson, Mississippi. The diocese paid the victim’s family $50,000 and Madden moved to the diocese of Chimbote, Peru, where he still celebrates Mass each week. Father Jan Van Dael, accused of molesting several young men in his native Belgium before moving to northeastern Brazil, where he started an orphanage for street kids. Van Dael is under investigation by Belgian and Brazilian authorities after accusations of abuse arose in Brazil, too.

Another priest we tracked down, Father Federico Fernandez Baeza, was indicted by a grand jury in 1987 on two second-degree felony charges of indecency with a child.

The priests we tracked headed south after sex abuse allegations were made against them in US and European dioceses.

A family in San Antonio, Texas accused Fernandez in a civil lawsuit of ritually raping two brothers over a two-year period. Prosecutors dropped the criminal case after the diocese of San Antonio reportedly paid the family more than $1 million. Fernandez flew to Colombia, where he continued a high-profile career in the church. We traced him to the city of Cartagena, where he’s a senior administrator and priest at a Catholic university.

After consulting with Fernandez’s office, university guards prohibited us from entering the campus, and Fernandez has not responded to requests for comment.

The priests told us they have been allowed to continue preaching unfettered, without facing internal investigations, despite Pope Francis’ pledges to clean up the church.

Last year, the pope sent a letter to every bishop in the world, ordering them to follow a global “zero tolerance policy” on child abuse. This year he created a commission tasked specifically with protecting children from church sex abuse.

Following repeated phone calls and emails, both the Vatican’s press office and the head of the commission, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley, declined to provide comment for this story.

The cases GlobalPost found are exactly what the church and Cardinal O’Malley’s commission need to be focusing on, said Peter Saunders, an advocate for abuse survivors and a lay member of the church’s commission.

“Zero tolerance is meaningless unless it applies to the whole institution,” he said. “Arguably, some of the biggest problems are in the less well-off parts of the world, South America, Africa, the Far East. This is where we know many priests flee to in order to carry on their abuse, which is an absolute outrage.”

View the full investigation here.

 

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“My partner left me because I can’t have children”: Women who face infertility share their stories

Whisper is a social network where men and women can express their deepest feelings anonymously. Below, women facing infertility talk about their fear, guilt and sadness about not being able to conceive a child, and wonder why friends don't get how insensitive it is to ask, "Why not just adopt?"

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“If any network had a chance to put Tina Fey in that job, they’d throw every man overboard”: Bill Carter surveys the late-night landscape

In the last few weeks, Stephen Colbert has taken over “The Late Show” from David Letterman, and Trevor Noah has inherited Jon Stewart’s perch on “The Daily Show.” Other “Daily Show” alums – Larry Wilmore, John Oliver – now have their own programs. And with the 2016 political race in motion, political issues are at the center of late night in what may be an unprecedented degree. It all adds up to the most attention and expectation around late-night television in years. To make sense of the big picture, we spoke to Bill Carter, the former New York Times television writer who now contributes to CNN, the Hollywood Reporter and Sirius XM. He’s also the author of “The Late Shift” and “The War for Late Night.” The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Late-night television seems to be in a pretty significant period of transition these days, with the arrival of Colbert and Noah. How does this seem to be working out? Do audiences seem to be responding? Do the shows seem to be as lively as they used to be? Well, it’s pretty early. Most guys get a boost of publicity when they first start out. There was a tremendous [buzz] around Colbert’s arrival; he got a nice launch, and he’s done alright since then. I think Jimmy Fallon, who’s been the dominant guy for a year and a half or so, has been very shrewd in how he’s loaded up his show to thwart what momentum Colbert has. Fallon had a brilliant show the second night of Colbert — it looked like it took months, with Ellen DeGeneres and Justin Timberlake; they really pulled out all the stops. You could see that he was making his move to say, no, I’m not going to stand on the sidelines. As for Trevor Noah, he got a lot of people excited because he’s new and fresh, and he came out with a very smooth show. I think people are really excited to give him a chance. He’s got a tall, tall [order] to replace Stewart. It’s a challenge to replace Letterman, but let’s face it, Letterman was at the end of his career – Stewart could have gone another 10 years. So that’s a taller order. It still seemed like Stewart had something to offer. And the change in temperament, change in nationality, and change in generation when you bring Trevor Noah in ... No question. And they’re emphasizing that generational change when they bring Trevor Noah in. They’re going for millennials – they’re openly saying that. I think it’s a little risky. That show has always had a pretty broad and serious audience of regular adults. Temperament is a good word: Jon brought an edge. He was angry about certain things. One note I’d give Trevor Noah early on: Don’t laugh at your own jokes so much. Personally, I don’t think that plays well. We’ve been talking partly about hosts who discuss politics on late night. John Oliver does, too. How does the current discussion of politics on late night compare to the way it worked out 10, 20 years ago? It’s way, way more intense. Twenty years ago, it would be highly rare to have politicians on. Ten years ago, the more prominent [pols] would come on near the end of the presidential race. You wouldn’t see the more marginal candidates weaving their way through. Late night shows were not that interested in political candidates: They didn’t bring in audiences, they weren’t entertainment, they weren’t funny. Now I think they’re very interested. The same celebrities are everywhere, and you can’t stand out that much [hosting] celebrities. So it is exciting to book a politician, especially Trump, who’s a celebrity and a politician, and he drives numbers. But they’re interested in Chris Christie, and Biden, and Hillary, of course, and even second-tier people. Colbert seems to be heavily concentrating on that kind of guest, and not just politicians. He’s also bringing on CEOs of tech companies and people with other causes, such as Malala, the Muslim teenager who won the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not a typical late-night guest. Colbert’s trying to stand out that way. There might be a risk; in late night, you can have some of that. But I do think people want lighter entertainment before they go to bed. They don’t want to see “Meet the Press.” John Kerry was on last night, deep into Syria and bombing… Those guys are on CNN all day, talking about that. Back to “The Daily Show.” We’ve heard that the host job was offered to Amy Schumer and Amy Poehler. But there’s still no major late-night program hosted by a woman. Is that because of the demographics of late night – because it’s still mostly a male audience – or network politics? Or is it something that could easily flip in the next year or two? I’ve been on the record saying that as soon as Jon [Stewart] left and someone asked me who they should hire, I said Amy Schumer, instantly. She’s the biggest comic star out there. In the past there probably was a more male audience; I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think if any network had a chance to put Tina Fey in that job, they’d throw every man overboard. She is a home-run, classic, perfect host. So it’s not that they don’t think they’d be great. But it’s a different sort of lifestyle to do this; you have to change your life. People have criticized me for saying this, but it’s true: If you’re Tina Fey, and you have two little kids at home, I don’t think you want to do this job. It’s a different kind of role. I talk to these guys all the time – [especially] the Jimmys – their lives are defined by this job, especially the five-nights-a-week guys. So I think there’s some reluctance, on a lifestyle basis, by some of the hugely talented women to do this. There are other women who could do it. I think Amy [Schumer] is single, so she could do it. But her career is going through the roof right now, and maybe she thinks it would be limiting. The reach for the unknown – which happened with James Corden – wouldn’t happen with a woman; they’d be afraid to do that. There’s a sense among some people that Conan O’Brien has dropped off the map a bit, that his talents are being wasted. How has his show on TBS worked out for him and his admirers? Conan has always had a fantastic following among young people, and I think he’s retained a lot of that. But there’s no question that going off to TBS put certain limits on his reach. Not on his talent – he’s still really talented, and a very funny guy. But there’s no question that when you have a cable channel – unlike Comedy Central, which has a lot of shows, from “South Park” to “Key and Peele” to “Inside Amy Schumer”… On TBS they’ve not had an original show work on prime time for a long time; they’re not bringing in an audience with their other shows to let them know, “Conan’s got Will Ferrell tonight.” He’s not enough on the radar, but it has nothing to do with his talent. His monologues are consistently fantastically well-written. Unfortunately he did not get to do what would have been advantageous to him when he left NBC – to join Comedy Central or Fox. If he had, he’d be as hot as he ever was. How healthy does the late night landscape seem to be these day? Does it seem lively, well-rounded, or is there something missing? I think it’s doing more than it’s ever done. There’s a huge amount of talent there – the talent level is way up high. Because they’re trying to expand their audience through the Internet, they’re doing things with video that are occasionally extremely ambitious. And very creative. Fallon has set the [standard] for this: The show is bigger, broader, more variety elements, the range of elements. That guy is a fantastic sketch comedian, brilliant using music, he’s a fantastic impressionist, he does all these things that have to be rehearsed, he did a barbershop quartet thing… Do you know how much time it takes to do that? A relentless pace, high energy. The jury is still out on a few things. I don’t know if Trevor Noah will measure up to Jon Stewart. But you throw John Oliver in… And I think James Corden is fantastic, he brings in a lot of those elements: singing, dancing, Broadway-style entertainment. And he’s funny. So with all these shows, if you can’t find something to like, I don’t know what to say.In the last few weeks, Stephen Colbert has taken over “The Late Show” from David Letterman, and Trevor Noah has inherited Jon Stewart’s perch on “The Daily Show.” Other “Daily Show” alums – Larry Wilmore, John Oliver – now have their own programs. And with the 2016 political race in motion, political issues are at the center of late night in what may be an unprecedented degree. It all adds up to the most attention and expectation around late-night television in years. To make sense of the big picture, we spoke to Bill Carter, the former New York Times television writer who now contributes to CNN, the Hollywood Reporter and Sirius XM. He’s also the author of “The Late Shift” and “The War for Late Night.” The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Late-night television seems to be in a pretty significant period of transition these days, with the arrival of Colbert and Noah. How does this seem to be working out? Do audiences seem to be responding? Do the shows seem to be as lively as they used to be? Well, it’s pretty early. Most guys get a boost of publicity when they first start out. There was a tremendous [buzz] around Colbert’s arrival; he got a nice launch, and he’s done alright since then. I think Jimmy Fallon, who’s been the dominant guy for a year and a half or so, has been very shrewd in how he’s loaded up his show to thwart what momentum Colbert has. Fallon had a brilliant show the second night of Colbert — it looked like it took months, with Ellen DeGeneres and Justin Timberlake; they really pulled out all the stops. You could see that he was making his move to say, no, I’m not going to stand on the sidelines. As for Trevor Noah, he got a lot of people excited because he’s new and fresh, and he came out with a very smooth show. I think people are really excited to give him a chance. He’s got a tall, tall [order] to replace Stewart. It’s a challenge to replace Letterman, but let’s face it, Letterman was at the end of his career – Stewart could have gone another 10 years. So that’s a taller order. It still seemed like Stewart had something to offer. And the change in temperament, change in nationality, and change in generation when you bring Trevor Noah in ... No question. And they’re emphasizing that generational change when they bring Trevor Noah in. They’re going for millennials – they’re openly saying that. I think it’s a little risky. That show has always had a pretty broad and serious audience of regular adults. Temperament is a good word: Jon brought an edge. He was angry about certain things. One note I’d give Trevor Noah early on: Don’t laugh at your own jokes so much. Personally, I don’t think that plays well. We’ve been talking partly about hosts who discuss politics on late night. John Oliver does, too. How does the current discussion of politics on late night compare to the way it worked out 10, 20 years ago? It’s way, way more intense. Twenty years ago, it would be highly rare to have politicians on. Ten years ago, the more prominent [pols] would come on near the end of the presidential race. You wouldn’t see the more marginal candidates weaving their way through. Late night shows were not that interested in political candidates: They didn’t bring in audiences, they weren’t entertainment, they weren’t funny. Now I think they’re very interested. The same celebrities are everywhere, and you can’t stand out that much [hosting] celebrities. So it is exciting to book a politician, especially Trump, who’s a celebrity and a politician, and he drives numbers. But they’re interested in Chris Christie, and Biden, and Hillary, of course, and even second-tier people. Colbert seems to be heavily concentrating on that kind of guest, and not just politicians. He’s also bringing on CEOs of tech companies and people with other causes, such as Malala, the Muslim teenager who won the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not a typical late-night guest. Colbert’s trying to stand out that way. There might be a risk; in late night, you can have some of that. But I do think people want lighter entertainment before they go to bed. They don’t want to see “Meet the Press.” John Kerry was on last night, deep into Syria and bombing… Those guys are on CNN all day, talking about that. Back to “The Daily Show.” We’ve heard that the host job was offered to Amy Schumer and Amy Poehler. But there’s still no major late-night program hosted by a woman. Is that because of the demographics of late night – because it’s still mostly a male audience – or network politics? Or is it something that could easily flip in the next year or two? I’ve been on the record saying that as soon as Jon [Stewart] left and someone asked me who they should hire, I said Amy Schumer, instantly. She’s the biggest comic star out there. In the past there probably was a more male audience; I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think if any network had a chance to put Tina Fey in that job, they’d throw every man overboard. She is a home-run, classic, perfect host. So it’s not that they don’t think they’d be great. But it’s a different sort of lifestyle to do this; you have to change your life. People have criticized me for saying this, but it’s true: If you’re Tina Fey, and you have two little kids at home, I don’t think you want to do this job. It’s a different kind of role. I talk to these guys all the time – [especially] the Jimmys – their lives are defined by this job, especially the five-nights-a-week guys. So I think there’s some reluctance, on a lifestyle basis, by some of the hugely talented women to do this. There are other women who could do it. I think Amy [Schumer] is single, so she could do it. But her career is going through the roof right now, and maybe she thinks it would be limiting. The reach for the unknown – which happened with James Corden – wouldn’t happen with a woman; they’d be afraid to do that. There’s a sense among some people that Conan O’Brien has dropped off the map a bit, that his talents are being wasted. How has his show on TBS worked out for him and his admirers? Conan has always had a fantastic following among young people, and I think he’s retained a lot of that. But there’s no question that going off to TBS put certain limits on his reach. Not on his talent – he’s still really talented, and a very funny guy. But there’s no question that when you have a cable channel – unlike Comedy Central, which has a lot of shows, from “South Park” to “Key and Peele” to “Inside Amy Schumer”… On TBS they’ve not had an original show work on prime time for a long time; they’re not bringing in an audience with their other shows to let them know, “Conan’s got Will Ferrell tonight.” He’s not enough on the radar, but it has nothing to do with his talent. His monologues are consistently fantastically well-written. Unfortunately he did not get to do what would have been advantageous to him when he left NBC – to join Comedy Central or Fox. If he had, he’d be as hot as he ever was. How healthy does the late night landscape seem to be these day? Does it seem lively, well-rounded, or is there something missing? I think it’s doing more than it’s ever done. There’s a huge amount of talent there – the talent level is way up high. Because they’re trying to expand their audience through the Internet, they’re doing things with video that are occasionally extremely ambitious. And very creative. Fallon has set the [standard] for this: The show is bigger, broader, more variety elements, the range of elements. That guy is a fantastic sketch comedian, brilliant using music, he’s a fantastic impressionist, he does all these things that have to be rehearsed, he did a barbershop quartet thing… Do you know how much time it takes to do that? A relentless pace, high energy. The jury is still out on a few things. I don’t know if Trevor Noah will measure up to Jon Stewart. But you throw John Oliver in… And I think James Corden is fantastic, he brings in a lot of those elements: singing, dancing, Broadway-style entertainment. And he’s funny. So with all these shows, if you can’t find something to like, I don’t know what to say.

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An Oregon teacher’s letter to lawmakers: We don’t need your prayers, we need your courage

Thursday, October 1 was my second day of class as a writing instructor at a community college in Oregon.

Following the shooting that occurred at Umpqua Community College on Thursday, where 10 people were killed, I realized that as a new hire, I hadn’t been fully informed on my college’s emergency protocols. What should I do in the event of what we now call, with heartbreaking regularity, an active shooter situation? According to my school’s Emergency Response Guide, I should attempt to evacuate my students if it is deemed safe to do so. My classroom is on the third floor; to evacuate we would need to descend two flights down an open staircase, and exit through a wide lobby. We would need to know with absolute certainty that the active shooter was not on the third floor, or the second, or anywhere in the lobby. In other words, evacuation, my first course of action, seems highly unlikely.

The next option, according to my college, is to lock the door. This unfortunately is not possible, as the door to my classroom can only be locked with a key, a key that I do not have and won’t ever be given. Left, then, in my third-floor classroom with its unlocked door, I am instructed to turn off the lights and lower the blinds, to use the tables to build a barricade, and get everyone out of the line of fire. I am further instructed to “arm [myself] with classroom items (e.g., stapler, chair, fire extinguisher) to fight back with in the event that the shooter attempts to enter [my] room.” 

In the next paragraph, I am told what to do if that shooter does in fact enter our classroom: “There is no one procedure that can be recommended in this situation,” the manual informs me with grim honesty, before adding, “[i]f you must fight, fight to win and survive.”

Fight to survive. I am a teacher, with a master’s degree in creative writing, and this is part of my job.

These security measures -- generic, unfollowable, completely incompatible with the reality of my school -- are, in their inadequate way, essential. It is not the school’s fault that heavily armed people, whether through incurable rage or mental instability, all too frequently choose academic institutions as the settings for the horror they unleash. I recognize that we do not have the resources to retrofit our facilities with safer features. I am positive that handing me -- or any teacher -- a gun will solve nothing. Regardless of the level of preparedness, though, it is clear that schools and teachers are being asked to do a job that they are not meant to do.

 My son will start kindergarten next year. At 5 years old he and his classmates, in addition to learning reading and math, will be walked through lockdown drills by a teacher who will likely be hiding an immense terror as she has students practice finding a cozy place to hide and times how long they can remain quiet. It will probably seem like a game to him at first, but eventually my son and the rest of America’s schoolchildren who are learning the same lessons will ask why. Why have we allowed our schools to become a place where children must hide, and teachers must fight to survive?

What do you recommend I tell him? This week, when I speak to my students about what happened at Umpqua and about our own emergency procedures, what do you advise I say after I explain that the stapler and whiteboard markers — the only classroom supplies I have in my room — are critical to our survival?

I could tell them that your thoughts and prayers are with us. I could tell them we have your deepest sympathies. But I am teaching a class on argument, instructing my students on the importance of facts. So instead I will tell them the truth: They have to be prepared to hide out of the line of fire, and I to fight for our survival, because you, our lawmakers, haven’t done your jobs. I will tell them that their rights, my rights, the rights of my 5-year-old, to attend school without fear of facing senseless slaughter by machine-gun fire, are not important to you, that we must be prepared to fight tooth and nail, stapler and whiteboard marker, because you refuse to fight the gun lobby in this country.

The next time you have an opportunity to sponsor or vote on common-sense gun legislation, instead of fearing the attack ads the gun lobby will undoubtedly launch against you, the lost campaign revenue, or the threat to your job, I hope that you think of me and my students, of the rest of the educators and students across the country, who have been asked to stand up to gunmen because you are too scared to stand up to a handful of lobbyists.

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Laura Jane Grace’s rebel music: “I doubt you’re gonna find a successful civil movement or social movement that doesn’t have a soundtrack”

As anyone who’s caught Against Me! in concert lately will testify, the veteran punk band is in a particularly ferocious and inspired-sounding period. Thankfully, the quartet — frontwoman Laura Jane Grace, longtime guitarist James Bowman, bassist Inge Johansson and drummer Atom Willard — have captured this moment in time with a new live album, “23 Live Sex Acts.” The record documents songs from the band’s entire career — from the scrappy early songs “Don’t Lose Touch” and “I Still Love You Julie” to the major label-era jams “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” and “Thrash Unreal” and recent songs from 2014’s “Transgender Dysphoria Blues.” When not fronting Against Me!, however, Laura Jane Grace is a busy woman. She’s the music curator of MTV's “Rebel Music” series, which explores the way activism and political music manifests itself around the world, and was also nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy for her AOL original show, “True Trans.” The compelling multi-episode documentary series weaves Grace’s own personal transgender coming-out story with the lives and experiences of transgender and gender-variant people from all over the U.S. In between all of this work, Grace is putting the finishing touches on her memoir — and is also on the precipice of recording new Against Me! music. Grace talked to Salon on Labor Day, while she was holed up in a hotel in New York. “I don’t usually get to sleep and I’ve gotten to sleep for the past 24 hours, and it’s been kind of heavenly, I’ll be honest with you,” she laughs. What was the genesis for deciding to release this new Against Me! live record? Laura Jane Grace: We’ve been on tour for the last two years in support of our last record, and as we were touring, it felt better and better and better. Just as we were playing tighter as a band, that’s was what started getting said backstage after the shows. It’s like, “Wow, we really should be recording these shows, and we should do something with it.” [Laughs] And then we were like, “You know, we can do that. Let’s just do that.” So we did it. We wanted to capture a snapshot of a“that was us when we were touring then” type of deal. And so many of the older songs have changed and grown, and they’re played differently than they were recorded, just being that it’s a pretty new band now. [We kind of wanted] to give ownership to everyone in the band of our older songs, and to give a… bookmark in a way. The close of a chapter and moving forward, you know? A song like “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” when you guys play it now, there’s almost a more wistful, nostalgic bent than it had in the past. How has your relationship changed to other songs in the Against Me! catalog? That one in particular, every time you play it, you’re further and further away from being a teenager. [Laughs] [That’s] what really causes a lot of that wistfulness, of like, “Ah yes, back in the day when I was a teenager, and now I’m in my mid-thirties.” It’s funny — songs are strange in that oftentimes the real meaning of them will reveal itself to you over time. A lot of the songs that I’ve been playing the longest are like that, where what it meant to me to play it when I was 20 years old doesn’t mean the same when I’m 30. And in a good way. Some of them, though, you play them, and it brings you right back to that time and place, and you can always feel that attachment to where they were coming from. I saw Against Me! in Cleveland this summer, and the band was easily the best it’s ever been live. I mean, obviously Atom Willard’s insanely good, and then Inge’s an incredible bassist. What else do you think is contributing to the obvious chemistry you guys have now? It took a really long time to get to a place where the four people in the band are all on the same page as far as knowing why they’re there, wanting to be there for the same reason, and wanting to really focus on music and play music and be a band — and be really appreciative of that, and not have this other thing on the side that they feel drawn towards too. Having that is really invaluable. And then we’ve just gotten lucky, too, with the past couple years of touring with the crew that we’ve had with us — like, our road crew has been the right combination of people. That can really make or break a tour or a show for you. And everyone was just so exuberant on stage. It’s nice to see a band where everyone is having fun. That should be obvious, but I see so many bands where it’s like, you don’t want to be up there; you’d rather be, like, anywhere else. [Laughs] I mean, when it comes down to it, our whole reason for being there is that hour up on stage. We’ve tried to be really cognizant of the fact that for some people going out to the show, [it’s] this thing they’ve been looking forward to for X amount of time. They got their tickets and it’s their night out or whatever, and they’re going to it. And your [own personal] experience of traveling to get there to the show, maybe it was like you had some crappy travel with the airport or whatever. But it was totally different than [the experience of] those people. So you’ve really gotta recognize that when you’re there at the show, it’s like… that’s the thing. That’s why you’re here, and that’s why you have to make that all worth it. Your AOL docu-series “True Trans” was nominated for an Emmy. What does that mean to you to be recognized like that? It’s really kind of alien to me. It’s one of those things that you never, I guess, really expect to hear. Or when you get the email about it, you’re like, “What? Really? Wait, what?” I mean, it’s awesome. It’s really cool and humbling and makes me feel really excited. Even just being nominated, it’s a cool thing to say happened. It’s nice to get recognized for something in that way, for sure. When you were filming the series, what was the most illuminating thing for you personally? Really just making the connections, and being in the room listening to the conversations. It became a thing where the cameras weren’t really even thought about. And having the conversations, and being able to relate to people’s experiences, and realize things I was really stressed out about, or maybe unsure or depressed about, that I wasn’t the first person to be unsure about those things [and] to be struggling with it. And then really to see the power of having those conversations and the way that could reach and educate people — knowing that, okay, hopefully whatever’s filmed goes on to reach people. But [also] knowing that the five people who are even working on the camera crew on the series, [we were able to watch] them as they understood more about trans people or gender-variant people, as they listened to more and more of the testimonials and videos. In real time being able to watch people understand something, relate to it, and have it become a non-issue was really satisfying. You’re also the music director of MTV’s “Rebel Music” series. What did the artists that you curated and spotlighted on the series teach you about your own music? It really re-demonstrated to me the importance of protest music. And that when it comes to music like that, artists will find a way to record and get their music out to people no matter what, even if that’s like, you know, dubbing it on a cassette tape and passing it out, putting it online, or bedroom-recording style on any recording medium that they could get. And that “by any means necessary” recording is rad, you know? Seeing those records, and seeing songs develop in other countries… At this point I, of course, love punk music, but I don’t only listen to punk music. And I’ve been lucky to travel a lot, and go to a lot of different countries and experience protest culture in a lot of different countries, and to see that kind of music firsthand — and see the way that people’s movements is really carried by music. And I doubt you’re gonna find a successful civil movement or social movement that doesn’t have a soundtrack to it. What was kind of your process of curating this music? How did you discover the artists? Well, a lot of it was really pretty limited, unfortunately, in that, when [you’re] focusing on some place like Myanmar or Venezuela or whatever, there were only so many bands that fit the criteria of being able to be showcased on the show. So really it was MTV just coming and being like, “Here are the bands that we’re choosing through, and here are the ones that we’re focusing on,” and listening through stuff. Oftentimes that’s kind of the amazing thing, too, is that you’re listening to a song [and] you can’t understand the language that it’s being sung in, but you understand the intent behind it. It’s pretty powerful, speaking to that. You’re working on your memoir as well. Does it have a release date yet? What’s the status of it? No release date yet, but yeah, I’m perpetually working on it. It turns out writing a book is a lot harder than one would think. [Laughs] But it’s been happening, you know. A lot of it’s just been slow because I’ve been touring and playing shows and everything like that. It’ll definitely be done within the next couple months, and then hopefully be out not too long after that. That’s one thing I was going to ask, is how writing that is different than writing songs. I always start with the lyrics when it comes to songwriting, so on the one hand it’s not too different. But you’re using a different voice or I guess sticking to one voice. And then you have a lot more… like with songwriting, I know that if I fill up one page of normal notebook paper, then I probably have enough lyrics for a song, whereas opposed to a book you just have to keep going and going and going. [Laughs] It’s just a little more drawn-out of a process. It’s hard, too, when it’s your own story, you know, and you’re looking back and remembering things. And things that may have way bigger importance to you might not necessarily have as big of importance to an audience or someone who doesn’t know the story. So figuring out even what’s interesting or what needs to be focused on, especially because my problem isn’t having a lack of material, it’s more that I have too much material. This memoir is based on tour journals, and I’ve totally transcribed all my tour journals. I had something like a million words, so cutting that down into a book under 100,000 words is an undertaking. That’s ridiculous! That’s like a massive editing job. It took a long time just to transcribe everything, and I was really determined that I wanted to do that. I wanted to fully transcribe all the journals, and it took a while. That was really the biggest thing that’s held me back. Now you know how journalists feel when we have to transcribe hours and hours of interviews… Oh, it’s brutal, right? It is brutal! [Laughs] It’s just tedious. Well, there’s no creative element involved in it. You’re just typing, you know? And to spend a lot of time where you’re not being creative sitting in front of the computer is like… your back starts hurting. [Laughs] You start thinking about all the other things you could be doing. But you get through it. As you were transcribing the journals, was there anything that really stood out to you as you were going back and reading things you wrote a long time ago? A lot of it was just remembering certain things, and remembering the moods you were in when certain things [were] happening, and forgetting about certain circumstances. Which was a real healthy exercise. When trying to write any kind of present-day narrative about the past, to actually be able to go back and in your own handwriting relive what you were going through was really a good tool to have, and really interesting to look back on. What’s more interesting, too, is, having gone back and read through all that stuff is… I read this book recently called “On the Road with The Ramones” that was like… it’s kind of an oral history of The Ramones, and it goes through talking to all of them and all the crew and everything. [It was interesting] reading through that, and knowing what I’ve read through of my own journals and remembering what I do of touring experiences, [and] realizing how much everything is the same — [and] how much has changed, too, at the same time. Yeah, there’s dodgy venues, dodgy bathrooms and dodgy promoters… And there never being any ice at venues in Europe. [Laughs] Stuff like that, you know? Really? That’s so bizarre. Yeah, that’s always the joke. We’re always like, you know, “Let’s trade in the guarantee tonight for a tub of ice so we can all have ice in our drinks.” [Laughs] Why is that? You know, I think — well, in general it’s a lot more common to just drink beverages warm over there, like warm beer, warm sodas, like that’s a thing. [Laughs] You ask for ice and even when you do get ice, it’s usually like two cubes in a cup and you’re like, “I want a full glass of ice right now!” [Laughs] The band has some tour dates at the end of September, but then what’s on the horizon for you after these wrap up? Yeah, we have up until the end of the month where we’re still playing shows, and then we’re just going right into the studio. I’ve just been kind of like… we’ve been working on the new record as we’ve been going, while we’ve been touring, and have a good handful of songs. So we’re ready to just start going for it and see where we get by the end of the year. What are the songs sounding like? What’s really been inspiring you? In general, it’s been a really travel-based record so far — or travel-based songs. Songs written while on the go in different locations and inspired by the experiences of travel is so far what I get of it. But it’s a little too soon to really have any perspective or grasp on a definite direction.As anyone who’s caught Against Me! in concert lately will testify, the veteran punk band is in a particularly ferocious and inspired-sounding period. Thankfully, the quartet — frontwoman Laura Jane Grace, longtime guitarist James Bowman, bassist Inge Johansson and drummer Atom Willard — have captured this moment in time with a new live album, “23 Live Sex Acts.” The record documents songs from the band’s entire career — from the scrappy early songs “Don’t Lose Touch” and “I Still Love You Julie” to the major label-era jams “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” and “Thrash Unreal” and recent songs from 2014’s “Transgender Dysphoria Blues.” When not fronting Against Me!, however, Laura Jane Grace is a busy woman. She’s the music curator of MTV's “Rebel Music” series, which explores the way activism and political music manifests itself around the world, and was also nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy for her AOL original show, “True Trans.” The compelling multi-episode documentary series weaves Grace’s own personal transgender coming-out story with the lives and experiences of transgender and gender-variant people from all over the U.S. In between all of this work, Grace is putting the finishing touches on her memoir — and is also on the precipice of recording new Against Me! music. Grace talked to Salon on Labor Day, while she was holed up in a hotel in New York. “I don’t usually get to sleep and I’ve gotten to sleep for the past 24 hours, and it’s been kind of heavenly, I’ll be honest with you,” she laughs. What was the genesis for deciding to release this new Against Me! live record? Laura Jane Grace: We’ve been on tour for the last two years in support of our last record, and as we were touring, it felt better and better and better. Just as we were playing tighter as a band, that’s was what started getting said backstage after the shows. It’s like, “Wow, we really should be recording these shows, and we should do something with it.” [Laughs] And then we were like, “You know, we can do that. Let’s just do that.” So we did it. We wanted to capture a snapshot of a“that was us when we were touring then” type of deal. And so many of the older songs have changed and grown, and they’re played differently than they were recorded, just being that it’s a pretty new band now. [We kind of wanted] to give ownership to everyone in the band of our older songs, and to give a… bookmark in a way. The close of a chapter and moving forward, you know? A song like “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” when you guys play it now, there’s almost a more wistful, nostalgic bent than it had in the past. How has your relationship changed to other songs in the Against Me! catalog? That one in particular, every time you play it, you’re further and further away from being a teenager. [Laughs] [That’s] what really causes a lot of that wistfulness, of like, “Ah yes, back in the day when I was a teenager, and now I’m in my mid-thirties.” It’s funny — songs are strange in that oftentimes the real meaning of them will reveal itself to you over time. A lot of the songs that I’ve been playing the longest are like that, where what it meant to me to play it when I was 20 years old doesn’t mean the same when I’m 30. And in a good way. Some of them, though, you play them, and it brings you right back to that time and place, and you can always feel that attachment to where they were coming from. I saw Against Me! in Cleveland this summer, and the band was easily the best it’s ever been live. I mean, obviously Atom Willard’s insanely good, and then Inge’s an incredible bassist. What else do you think is contributing to the obvious chemistry you guys have now? It took a really long time to get to a place where the four people in the band are all on the same page as far as knowing why they’re there, wanting to be there for the same reason, and wanting to really focus on music and play music and be a band — and be really appreciative of that, and not have this other thing on the side that they feel drawn towards too. Having that is really invaluable. And then we’ve just gotten lucky, too, with the past couple years of touring with the crew that we’ve had with us — like, our road crew has been the right combination of people. That can really make or break a tour or a show for you. And everyone was just so exuberant on stage. It’s nice to see a band where everyone is having fun. That should be obvious, but I see so many bands where it’s like, you don’t want to be up there; you’d rather be, like, anywhere else. [Laughs] I mean, when it comes down to it, our whole reason for being there is that hour up on stage. We’ve tried to be really cognizant of the fact that for some people going out to the show, [it’s] this thing they’ve been looking forward to for X amount of time. They got their tickets and it’s their night out or whatever, and they’re going to it. And your [own personal] experience of traveling to get there to the show, maybe it was like you had some crappy travel with the airport or whatever. But it was totally different than [the experience of] those people. So you’ve really gotta recognize that when you’re there at the show, it’s like… that’s the thing. That’s why you’re here, and that’s why you have to make that all worth it. Your AOL docu-series “True Trans” was nominated for an Emmy. What does that mean to you to be recognized like that? It’s really kind of alien to me. It’s one of those things that you never, I guess, really expect to hear. Or when you get the email about it, you’re like, “What? Really? Wait, what?” I mean, it’s awesome. It’s really cool and humbling and makes me feel really excited. Even just being nominated, it’s a cool thing to say happened. It’s nice to get recognized for something in that way, for sure. When you were filming the series, what was the most illuminating thing for you personally? Really just making the connections, and being in the room listening to the conversations. It became a thing where the cameras weren’t really even thought about. And having the conversations, and being able to relate to people’s experiences, and realize things I was really stressed out about, or maybe unsure or depressed about, that I wasn’t the first person to be unsure about those things [and] to be struggling with it. And then really to see the power of having those conversations and the way that could reach and educate people — knowing that, okay, hopefully whatever’s filmed goes on to reach people. But [also] knowing that the five people who are even working on the camera crew on the series, [we were able to watch] them as they understood more about trans people or gender-variant people, as they listened to more and more of the testimonials and videos. In real time being able to watch people understand something, relate to it, and have it become a non-issue was really satisfying. You’re also the music director of MTV’s “Rebel Music” series. What did the artists that you curated and spotlighted on the series teach you about your own music? It really re-demonstrated to me the importance of protest music. And that when it comes to music like that, artists will find a way to record and get their music out to people no matter what, even if that’s like, you know, dubbing it on a cassette tape and passing it out, putting it online, or bedroom-recording style on any recording medium that they could get. And that “by any means necessary” recording is rad, you know? Seeing those records, and seeing songs develop in other countries… At this point I, of course, love punk music, but I don’t only listen to punk music. And I’ve been lucky to travel a lot, and go to a lot of different countries and experience protest culture in a lot of different countries, and to see that kind of music firsthand — and see the way that people’s movements is really carried by music. And I doubt you’re gonna find a successful civil movement or social movement that doesn’t have a soundtrack to it. What was kind of your process of curating this music? How did you discover the artists? Well, a lot of it was really pretty limited, unfortunately, in that, when [you’re] focusing on some place like Myanmar or Venezuela or whatever, there were only so many bands that fit the criteria of being able to be showcased on the show. So really it was MTV just coming and being like, “Here are the bands that we’re choosing through, and here are the ones that we’re focusing on,” and listening through stuff. Oftentimes that’s kind of the amazing thing, too, is that you’re listening to a song [and] you can’t understand the language that it’s being sung in, but you understand the intent behind it. It’s pretty powerful, speaking to that. You’re working on your memoir as well. Does it have a release date yet? What’s the status of it? No release date yet, but yeah, I’m perpetually working on it. It turns out writing a book is a lot harder than one would think. [Laughs] But it’s been happening, you know. A lot of it’s just been slow because I’ve been touring and playing shows and everything like that. It’ll definitely be done within the next couple months, and then hopefully be out not too long after that. That’s one thing I was going to ask, is how writing that is different than writing songs. I always start with the lyrics when it comes to songwriting, so on the one hand it’s not too different. But you’re using a different voice or I guess sticking to one voice. And then you have a lot more… like with songwriting, I know that if I fill up one page of normal notebook paper, then I probably have enough lyrics for a song, whereas opposed to a book you just have to keep going and going and going. [Laughs] It’s just a little more drawn-out of a process. It’s hard, too, when it’s your own story, you know, and you’re looking back and remembering things. And things that may have way bigger importance to you might not necessarily have as big of importance to an audience or someone who doesn’t know the story. So figuring out even what’s interesting or what needs to be focused on, especially because my problem isn’t having a lack of material, it’s more that I have too much material. This memoir is based on tour journals, and I’ve totally transcribed all my tour journals. I had something like a million words, so cutting that down into a book under 100,000 words is an undertaking. That’s ridiculous! That’s like a massive editing job. It took a long time just to transcribe everything, and I was really determined that I wanted to do that. I wanted to fully transcribe all the journals, and it took a while. That was really the biggest thing that’s held me back. Now you know how journalists feel when we have to transcribe hours and hours of interviews… Oh, it’s brutal, right? It is brutal! [Laughs] It’s just tedious. Well, there’s no creative element involved in it. You’re just typing, you know? And to spend a lot of time where you’re not being creative sitting in front of the computer is like… your back starts hurting. [Laughs] You start thinking about all the other things you could be doing. But you get through it. As you were transcribing the journals, was there anything that really stood out to you as you were going back and reading things you wrote a long time ago? A lot of it was just remembering certain things, and remembering the moods you were in when certain things [were] happening, and forgetting about certain circumstances. Which was a real healthy exercise. When trying to write any kind of present-day narrative about the past, to actually be able to go back and in your own handwriting relive what you were going through was really a good tool to have, and really interesting to look back on. What’s more interesting, too, is, having gone back and read through all that stuff is… I read this book recently called “On the Road with The Ramones” that was like… it’s kind of an oral history of The Ramones, and it goes through talking to all of them and all the crew and everything. [It was interesting] reading through that, and knowing what I’ve read through of my own journals and remembering what I do of touring experiences, [and] realizing how much everything is the same — [and] how much has changed, too, at the same time. Yeah, there’s dodgy venues, dodgy bathrooms and dodgy promoters… And there never being any ice at venues in Europe. [Laughs] Stuff like that, you know? Really? That’s so bizarre. Yeah, that’s always the joke. We’re always like, you know, “Let’s trade in the guarantee tonight for a tub of ice so we can all have ice in our drinks.” [Laughs] Why is that? You know, I think — well, in general it’s a lot more common to just drink beverages warm over there, like warm beer, warm sodas, like that’s a thing. [Laughs] You ask for ice and even when you do get ice, it’s usually like two cubes in a cup and you’re like, “I want a full glass of ice right now!” [Laughs] The band has some tour dates at the end of September, but then what’s on the horizon for you after these wrap up? Yeah, we have up until the end of the month where we’re still playing shows, and then we’re just going right into the studio. I’ve just been kind of like… we’ve been working on the new record as we’ve been going, while we’ve been touring, and have a good handful of songs. So we’re ready to just start going for it and see where we get by the end of the year. What are the songs sounding like? What’s really been inspiring you? In general, it’s been a really travel-based record so far — or travel-based songs. Songs written while on the go in different locations and inspired by the experiences of travel is so far what I get of it. But it’s a little too soon to really have any perspective or grasp on a definite direction.

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