→ December 31, 2019
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Dark Money (book).

Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is the most horrifying book I read all year – but it’s not a horror novel, just a work of well-investigated, well-argued non-fiction that details how archconservative billionaires, usually mad over having to pay taxes, have spent hundreds of millions or more of their own money to buy control of our government. Their efforts helped catapult the retrograde right-wing of the Republican Party from the fringes to the party’s new core, gave them control of the legislative and executive branches, and have, for the last two years, allowed them to pack the federal judiciary with judges who agree with their reactionary views on taxation, environmental regulations, and women’s rights. If this book doesn’t horrify you, you must be one of them.

The main target of Dark Money is the Koch brothers, David (who just died this August) and Charles, who run the second-largest closely held company in the United States. Before David’s death, each was worth around $50 billion, each had longstanding individual efforts to avoid paying taxes, and their company had decades of violations of environmental regulations, including dumping benzene, a known human carcinogen that we absorb by breathing its vapors, into the air near their oil refinery in Corpus Christi. The Kochs’ response to these various federal actions against them has been to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into various front groups that donate to legislative and gubernatorial candidates who promise, in turn, to roll back environmental protections or to push tax cuts for the highest brackets; and to fund professorships at various universities where the positions will go to so-called “free-market advocates” and where the Koch brothers may have had say in hiring. Along with other anti-tax, anti-regulation billionaires, including the DeVos family, Wilbur Ross, John Olin, Art Pope, and more, the Kochs helped found the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation; spent hundreds of millions fighting climate reform; and helped fund massive gerrymanders in states from Ohio and Pennsylvania to North Carolina. They’ve packaged most of these policies, which help them directly or indirectly by helping the businesses they own, as issues of “freedom,” while tying some of them to issues that matter to social conservatives, so that they might convince enough voters to swing their way even when those policies (such as eliminating laws or regulations that fight pollution) would hurt those voters themselves.

Even if you agree with some of the positions that these billionaires are pushing, Mayer’s main thesis here is that our democracy has been bought by a tiny number of people, so that fewer than 20 of these billionaires are setting wide swaths of federal and state policies for a country of 300 million. It is improbable that this extreme minority, all of whom are white and quite old, nearly all of whom are male, and all of whom are in the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of Americans by wealth, would all agree among themselves on policies that are also beneficial to the country as a whole … but even if, improbably, they did so, that’s not how our system of government is supposed to work, and not how most Americans think it works. But, as Mayer describes through her history of the Kochs and of the way money has metastasized throughout our political system, since Citizens United – a Supreme Court ruling that resulted from funding by the Koch brothers and their allies – this is exactly how our government works. Billionaires buying the policies they want is a feature, not a bug.

Mayer also goes into the Nazi roots of the Kochs’ fortune; it is unlikely that the brothers would have become this wealthy had their father not helped Adolf Hitler build a major oil refinery in Hamburg that let the Nazis refine high-octane fuel for their warplanes. Fred Koch, Charles’ and David’s father, also helped Joseph Stalin develop the Soviets’ then-moribund oil industry, helping ensure the dictator’s grip on power and setting the stage for the Cold War after the second World War. It’s estimated they spent nearly $900 million in the 2016 election to try to elect their favored, hard-right Republicans to state legislatures across the country and ensure control of both houses of Congress. Is that possible if Fred Koch doesn’t take Hitler’s money?

There isn’t a simple solution to the problems Mayer details in Dark Money, and she doesn’t pretend there are, instead pointing out every policy change and judicial decision that created this particular monster. Lax IRS regulations have allowed billionaires to funnel money into “non-profits” that don’t have to disclose their donors but manage to skirt rules against such groups funding candidates. Citizens United gave corporations the free speech rights previously reserved for individuals. A lack of federal rules on soft money, donated to groups (like Super PACs) but not directly to candidates, has further enabled the wholesale purchasing of legislators; corporations can’t contribute directly to candidates, but they can fund Super PACs, which can then campaign for or against candidates as long as they aren’t coordinating with the candidates they support. None of this will change soon; it certainly won’t change as long as this version of the Koch-funded Republican Party retains control of the Senate, the White House, and much of the federal judiciary. A huge part of the power of Dark Money is that Mayer channels her obvious indignation into providing more details on the shady (yet legal!) behavior of these billionaires, rather than just delivering a screed on the subject, even though the desire to deliver a screed would be easy to understand.

I don’t think boycotts accomplish a whole lot – they require such enormous coordination, and the presence of viable alternatives – but I am at least trying to avoid spending my money with companies owned by these reactionary billionaires and other companies that support their efforts (such as by funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative lobbying group that goes so far as to write bills for their member legislators to submit). I wouldn’t shop at Menard’s if I lived in the Midwest, not with its owner helping fund fights against unions and saying he “doesn’t believe in environmental regulations.” I won’t buy paper goods from Georgia Pacific, although I’m realistic – if I buy a new house, or do some renovations, I probably have no say over where any plywood or OSB comes from. And I don’t think I’m going to move the needle with any of these companies; I would just rather know my money isn’t going directly to help the subjugation of our democracy.

Next up: I’m reading a pair of Evelyn Waugh novels – first The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and then Black Mischief.

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→ November 9, 2018
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The World As It Is.

The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House ended up a very different read than what the subtitle led me to believe it would be. Ben Rhodes, who was a senior adviser to Obama for all eight years of the latter’s tenure, mostly as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, does give numerous first-person anecdotes from his time in the White House. The point of this book, however, seems to be much more about the toxic political and media environment that started just before Obama’s election with the “birther” hoax movement, escalated during Obama’s first term thanks to the likes of Sen. Mitch McConnell and Fox News, and eventually triumphed with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. No one book could really answer the “how” of Trump’s election(although racism was certainly a big factor), but Rhodes attempts to show historical trends that led to this point, including the no-win situations they faced with tough foreign policy decisions in Libya, Syria, and Iran, as well as the rise of online disinformation efforts spearheaded by the Russian government.

The foreign-policy decisions drive much of the book, as that was Rhodes’ focus anyway and several of those choices ended up becoming massive political issues and headaches for the Administration. Rhodes details why we didn’t intercede in Syria earlier, and why we still did very little even when we chose to get involved after evidence that the Syrians had used chemical weapons on their own people. One such reason was the opposition from Republicans who, at the same time, were decrying the rise of ISIS (Daesh) in the region – a group that emerged in the vacuum created by our failure to establish a successor government after we invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam Hussein. The buildup to the coalition that conducted airstrikes on Libyan forces – including us, but with European allies agreeing to take the lead – also gets a detailed treatment.

The Iran deal, on which President Trump recently reneged (which calls our reliability in international negotiations into question), gives Rhodes a chance to show how much back-channel work had to be done to convince enough Senators to agree to the deal despite well-funded opposition, much of it from donors and PACs sympathetic to Israel, and the vocal disapproval of Israel’s long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (As I write this, Netanyahu is embroiled in a corruption scandal that is threatening his position and his legacy.)

There’s a baseball connection in all of this as well, as Rhodes was one of the leaders of the covert effort to normalize relations between the United States and the communist regime in Cuba, which had broken off a half-century earlier. It’s the best part of the book as well, since Rhodes was in the room for so many discussions and can give snippets of dialogue between representatives of both sides, and even describe phone calls from Cuban authorities – including Raúl Castro – haranguing the President about the history of U.S. offenses against the Cuban government. The lengthy process resulted in the freedom of many political prisoners in Cuba, as well as the release of American Alan Gross, held there on (likely bogus) charges of espionage, although the regime’s grip on power remains too strong. And, of course, it all wrapped up in a state visit by Obama to Havana, where he took in a baseball game and appeared on ESPN.

Rhodes shows he has little respect remaining for the opposition after the obstructionist tactics they used to fight the Iran deal, to stymie the nomination of Merrick Garland, and to help defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. He also details the rise of the disinformation industry during Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea and attempts to further infringe on Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, as well as the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 by Russian insurgents there, for which Russia managed to evade any responsibility or blame. There’s some self-reproach in here – should anyone in the Obama Administration have seen Russia’s use of troll farms to sway world opinion as a threat to our own democracy? – although it’s more based in opinion than hard research or evidence.

Rhodes also describes some of the public attacks made against him, his presumed faith, his degree in creative writing (as in, he would be good at spinning fiction in speeches he wrote), and more, an environment that only has deteriorated further in the last two years. When I posted a picture of a quote in the book to my Instagram, someone responded that he was “pretty sure Ben Rhodes is also the most incompetent senior level administration official in the last 100 years.” I really can’t speak to Rhodes’ competence – although, really, with Ringling Bros. staffing the current administration, I’m not sure how this could be true – but I think it speaks more to the incomplete and likely inaccurate public depiction of a man whose actual function and performance were mostly hidden from view. Rhodes’ version of events is his perspective, of course, and perhaps the truth is that he did some parts of his job well and others not so well. That message and the toxic political culture into which this book was published overshadow any memoir-ish aspects of Rhodes’ book.

Next up: Connie Willis’ Terra Incognita, a collection of three of her novellas, including the Hugo-nominated Remake.

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→ October 9, 2018
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Dark Money.

The documentary Dark Money, now airing free on PBS after it received very positive reviews at Sundance this spring, focuses primarily on a very specific case of electoral manipulation in Montana, where the Koch brothers used various 501(c)(4) front groups – “social welfare” nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors – to flood districts with misleading or fraudulent materials in the last 30 days before elections. Montana’s history of restrictive campaign finance laws and tradition of citizen legislators makes it the ideal environment to expose these methods, which are at least subversive and unethical even when they’re not illegal, but a system designed to thwart such manipulation still wasn’t enough to stop it or make it easier to detect or fight. And, as the filmmakers show throughout the story, what happened in Montana is increasingly happening elsewhere, with the Koch brothers in particular behind much of it in their fights to eliminate labor unions, demonize public education, and gut environmental regulations on businesses. It’s horrifying, and Dark Money makes it clear that we the people have few if any tools available to stop it.

Dark Money largely follows the work of an investigative reporter named John S. Adams, who was let go when the state’s largest newspaper group shuttered its office covering state affairs and decided to start working on this case on his own. In several elections for the state legislature, candidates found themselves targeted by mailers that included inflammatory and often false claims, but were unable to effectively respond to them because they arrived at voters’ houses so late – and because responding would have required campaign funds they didn’t have. These mailers came from ‘dark money’ groups, nonprofits with innocuous names who don’t have to disclose their funders’ identities and in many cases don’t exist beyond a PO Box. Adams, with the help of some of the targeted candidates (many of whom were Republicans who were primaried from the right by candidates aided by dark money groups) and eventually some volunteer attorneys who helped the state build its case against one legislator, did his best to follow the money, and with some good fortune was eventually able to show that the Koch group Americans for Prosperity was behind the mailers. The film follows one specific case, against Republican Art Wittich, for accepting illegal contributions from the National Right to Work Committee, which is largely funded by the Koch brothers. The group has even continued meddling in Montana elections past the court case and timeline covered in the documentary.

Filmmaker Kim Reed does a superb job generalizing the case to constituencies beyond Montana, including showing how the Koch brothers and affiliated groups helped rig the recall election of Scott Walker and stack the Wisconsin Supreme Court with allies who shut down a state investigation into the Walker campaign’s finances. The IRS regulation on 501(c)(4) groups, which are categorized as “social welfare” organizations, is one major obstacle to allowing voters to know who’s funding those mailers or donating to political candidates. Another is the emasculation of the Federal Election Commission that began under Don McGahn, who joined the FEC with two other Republicans and made a pact to always vote in a bloc that effectively prevented the Commission from doing anything, killing the group’s authority to adjudicate in cases of campaign finance violations. (The FEC, by design, is a six-member panel, with three commissioners from each party, and thus is prone to 3-3 ties along party lines.)

And the third, of course, is the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC, where the Court ruled 5-4 that corporate donations to political campaigns were protected speech under the First Amendment – thus arguing that corporations, which are legal entities, have the same free speech rights as people. (Corporations primarily exist in law as a way to shield investors or owners from many forms of legal liability; they also enjoy different tax benefits from individuals, and also allow owners to gain from economies of scale not available to smaller entities. Corporations may act as individuals in the economic sphere, but they are not individual actors in the political space, or at least were not until Citizens United.) The rise of dark money also has created the possibility or even likelihood that foreign corporations or governments are funding American political campaigns; who’s to say that Chinese companies or the Russian or North Korean governments aren’t funding American Tradition Partnership or other front groups that support mostly conservative candidates who have agreed to reduce or eliminate regulations in exchange for campaign support?

There is so much to infuriate voters in Dark Money; even if you agree with these astroturfing groups’ policy aims, do you really agree with their methods? Should campaign funding be untraceable? Should there be consequences for sending out fliers with misleading or false statements against candidates? To what extent should corporate money be involved in politics when, as described in the documentary, those candidates will in turn vote on matters like environmental regulations where the interests of the companies funding candidates do not align with those of voters (assuming voters like clean water)? One of the many examples in the film that serves as a microcosm for the increasingly dirty, toxic atmosphere of our body politic is when the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity holds a “town hall” meeting, promising voters they can ask a specific candidate why he’s supporting Obamacare or voting certain ways on issues … but didn’t invite the candidate himself, despite using his name and image on fliers advertising the event. The candidate shows up, and the group’s director, Zach Lahn (now involved in a Koch-funded primary school in Wichita, despite having no background in education) claims he left the candidate “two messages,” and then tells a voter that he didn’t lie about the event because he used a “different definition of town hall.” Our rights are at stake, and we don’t know who’s paying for the information that shows up in our mailboxes, or to whom the names on the ballot might be beholden once they’re elected. Even if you don’t care about the methods used to get the candidates you think you want in office elected, once they’re there, they may be voting for a lot of things you didn’t know they’d support. Dark Money is the ultimate cautionary tale as our republic’s foundations begin to crack.

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→ August 9, 2018
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So You Want to Talk About Race.

When a TV channel decided to put together a panel on the Atlanta Braves’ 1990 teams on Hall of Fame weekend last month, they chose a set of criteria – members of the organization from that time period who were also inducted or selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame by the writers or one of the Hall’s committees – that produced a panel of six men, all of whom are white. The 1990s Braves were a typically diverse MLB team for the era; about 20-24% of their roster in any given year comprised players of color, some of whom were crucial to the team’s success. Fred McGriff’s arrival in a mid-1993 trade spurred one of the most furious second half runs we’ve ever seen, where Atlanta overtook San Francisco to win the division after falling nine games back in mid-July. David Justice’s home run accounted for the only run in Game 6 of the 1995 World Series, the only championship won by Atlanta in the 1990s. Andruw Jones became the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game in 1996, then became the second player ever to homer in his first two World Series at bats, and his defense was a big part of Atlanta’s run of division titles for the rest of that decade. Given that those Atlanta teams depended on the contributions of players of color, and that diversity improves outcomes in education, workplace productivity, and decision-making, the choice of criteria that excluded all persons of color harmed the end product.

This panel took place right after I had finished listening to the audio version of Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race, which is part polemic, part plea, and part guide for people of all political and philosophical beliefs who want to talk or even think about issues of race and diversity. She’s talking about racism, yes, but more broadly, she’s talking about race and how we can have better, more productive conversations about race, and racial bias, and similar types of bias like those around gender, place of origin, or sexual orientation. Ojuo is a queer black woman whose father is Nigerian, so she is able to fill the book with personal anecdotes, but she also draws substantially on others’ stories and on scholarship in the areas of racism and diversity.

The book’s chapters are provocative, by design, even though the subject matter within each often veers significantly from the initial questions. Chapters include “Why can’t I say the N-word?,” “Is police brutality really about race?,” and “Why can’t I touch your hair?,” all of which contain stories that range from appalling to horrifying, and grab the reader’s attention from the outset by the shocking nature of the titles. (The hair thing really flabbergasted me, but I asked two African-American women I know well enough to ask about the subject, and both said yes, they are frequently asked by strangers if someone can touch their hair – or have strangers touch their hair without asking.) I’m sure most people inclined to pick this book up would have the same reaction to such chapter titles as I did – because you’re not black, yes it is, and because it’s not your body – but Oluo uses those as departure points for broader questions of how society others people of color and ignores systemic or structural forces that continue to hold back nonwhite members of society on both social and economic fronts.

Other chapters get right to the meat of the subject, such as those on intersectionality and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the one titled “Why am I always being told to ‘check my privilege?'” Oluo is comfortable making the reader uncomfortable; she even acknowledges this by telling how often she’s been criticized for talking too much or too vocally about race and racial bias. Some people want to believe we live in a post-racial society or that we are raising our children to be “blind to color.” The systemic issues behind police brutality against citizens of color or the high discipline and incarceration rates of young black men are not gone, or going away any time soon, and Oluo explains just how pervasive they are (that black students are far more likely to be suspended than white students, three times as likely for boys and six times as likely for girls).

As for privilege, Oluo doesn’t hold back. You can see some of the same ideas that appear in her book in this long essay she wrote in March of 2017, in which she points out that people who ‘woke up’ to the existence of systemic and structural racism after the election of Donald Trump were, in fact, experiencing the result of privilege, because Americans of color deal with it and its residues every day. (Resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks for interviews than those with nonwhite-sound names. Scare quotes may apply.) But Oluo’s message to white readers is clear: We are late, and we have contributed to the backsliding in the rights of minorities, but we can still help if we are willing to accept our own failings and those of society. She wrote in that essay to white readers, “you can help in ways that I cannot,” and the exhortation appears again and again in the book, with countless suggestions and calls to action, questions you can ask at work, at your children’s schools, of your elected representatives, in formal and informal social groups.

There is much work to be done, and it will require the cooperation and effort of populations who are not adversely affected by such biases, conscious or structural. If you have privilege and a platform, which I do, you can use it to speak out when you see active or passive bias – lack of representation, dog-whistling, micro-aggressions, stereotype threat. You can go to school board or PTA meetings and ask about the percentage of faculty members who are persons of color, or whether the curriculum accurately reflects nonwhite cultural experiences, or how students of color are disciplined – and whether that’s different from how white students are. You can push for laws that might reduce incidents of police violence against citizens of color, like requiring body cameras, or to change or repeal laws that do not mention race but have had a disparate impact on black communities, like fighting to decriminalize drug possession and to expunge records of those non-violent crimes. You can push for greater diversity at work, not for ‘tokenism,’ but because it will make you and your company more productive. Most of all, Oluo urges readers, you can’t just pretend this stuff isn’t real. It’s everywhere because it is writ into the fabric of our society, a society that is a mere six generations away from enslaving black people, two generations away from denying them basic civil rights, one generation away from open discrimination in the workplace, and still today in a world where Americans of color, especially those who are black, face insidious, subtle discrimination at the workplace, in church, on the streets, in schools, and anywhere else they might dare to be black.

So yes, I do want to talk about race. I want to try to do something to make the world better when it comes to race, bias, and diversity. I believe that world will make us all better off – we’ll be happier and more productive people. I also believe that I am privileged, and that I’ve benefited from the same kind of structures that Oluo points out have held back people of color, because most of these arenas are a zero-sum game – college admissions, employment, etc. If a black candidate is rejected for his/her race, or is seen as less qualified because s/he grew up in disadvantaged conditions and lacked access to better education or learning resources, the beneficiary will more than likely be a white person. Oluo’s book encouraged me to say something when I saw tweets about that panel – not that it was “racist” per se, but that it excluded persons of color, and thus was not representative – and to think more about how I can make some small difference when it comes to race and bias in my work and in my life.

One aside: There was one section of one chapter in So You Want to Talk About Race that rang false for me – the portion of the chapter on cultural appropriation (an uncomfortable read for me, as someone who consumes a lot of culture without thinking about this question) where Oluo discusses rap music. Rap originated as a black genre of music, just as jazz and the blues did, and was later co-opted by the musical mainstream, which has meant white artists also use the form, and white record executives and promoters and agents all profit from it. Whether a musical form, essentially rhythmic poetry, can truly be appropriated is a worthwhile question to debate; is it comparable to a structure like a fugue or an aria, a template to which the artist must then apply his or her own creative energies? Oluo lost me, however, with claims that this assimilation has led to white rappers finding easy success in the field despite showing less talent than black rappers who struggle to find an audience. The claim itself is entirely subjective; judging what rappers have more talent would probably bog down in an argument over what exactly defines talent in rap, whether it is technical skill or lyrical ingenuity or musical innovation or something else, but even more troubling to me is that the claim appears not to be true. A few white rappers have found enormous commercial and critical success. Eminem is the best example, but he was the protégé of Dr. Dre (who is African-American), and Dre produced Eminem’s biggest albums and released them through his Aftermath imprint. (For example, The Marshall Mathers LP was produced by Dre, The 45 King, Mel-Man, and the Bass Brothers; three of those five men are African-American.) You could count the number of white rappers to have significant commercial success on two hands – the Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, Macklemore – while African-American rappers, many of whom seem (to my subjective ears) to have had success because of who produced them rather than their own talents, continue to dominate the singles and album charts. I understand what Oluo was trying to say here, but I don’t think the reality of the marketplace bears out her specific criticisms.

Next up: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.

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→ April 9, 2018
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Killers of the Flower Moon.

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is a non-fiction ‘novel’ that manages to combine a real-world mystery with noir and organized crime elements while also elucidating historical racism against a population seldom considered in modern reevaluations of our own history of oppressing minorities. Drawing on what appears to be a wealth of notes from the initial investigation as well as private correspondence, Grann gives the reader a murder story with a proper resolution, but enough loose ends to set up a final section to the book where he continues exploring unsolved crimes, revealing even further how little the government did to protect the Osage against pitiless enemies. It’s among the leading candidates to win the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction on Monday.

The Osage were one of the Native American tribes banished to present-day Oklahoma when that area was known as “Indian Territory,” marked as such on many maps of the late 19th century; Oklahoma as we know it didn’t exist until 1907, when it became the 46th state. (It always amused me to think of the ‘hole’ in the map of the U.S. as late as 1906, before Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico attained statehood.) By a fortunate accident, the plot of apparently useless land to which the federal government exiled the Osage sat on top of one of the largest petroleum deposits in the continental U.S., which made the Osage mineral millionaires. The government couldn’t quite revoke their rights, but instead ruled that the Osage, being savages, were incompetent to run their own affairs, and that Osage adults required white ‘guardians’ to oversee their financial decisions, which, of course, led to much thievery and embezzlement and, in time, foul play, such as white citizens marrying Osage members and then poisoning their spouses to gain legal control of their headrights and the income they provided.

Two murders in particular attracted the attention of authorities outside of the county, however, as both Osage victims were shot in the head at close range, so there was no question of claiming natural causes, as was often the case when victims were poisoned (often in whiskey, so alcohol could be blamed). These murders were part of a spate of dozens of killings, many of which didn’t appear at first to be connected other than that the victims were either Osage themselves or were in some way investigating the crimes; the sheer scope of this and some media coverage brought in the attention of a young, ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, who decided to put one of his top agents at the nascent Bureau of Investigation (no ‘federal’ in its title) on the case. The subsequent unraveling of the deceptions and the revelation that the mastermind of the plot was someone closer to the Osage than anyone expected included both early forensic science and dogged investigative work, leading eventually to one confession that toppled the criminal enterprise – only to have the trial twist and turn more than once before the final verdict.

Grann couldn’t have picked a better subject for the book, because these characters often seem plucked from Twin Peaks, from the Osage woman Molly, a survivor of a poisoning attempt whose sister was one of the victims killed by gunshot and who had several other family members die in suspicious circumstances, on up to the head of the scheme, a man whose greed and malice lay hidden behind a façade of benevolence toward his Osage neighbors. Killers of the Flower Moon would make an excellent dramatic film if told straight, but it would take just a little artistic license to turn it into the sort of crime tapestry in which HBO has excelled for years by sharpening or exaggerating some of the individuals’ personalities.

The story of the murders and the federal agents’ work to convict the killers is, in itself, more than enough to stand alone as a compelling narrative work, but Grann explains how the federal, state, and county authorities regularly worked to strip the Osage of their rights, fueled by outright racism and by jealousy of the tribe’s good fortune (with, it appears, no consideration of how racism and avarice drove the tribe to Oklahoma in the first place). After the verdict and what might normally stand as an epilogue, Grann himself appears, writing in the first person about his experiences researching the book and how he found evidence that the Bureau didn’t solve all of the murders, or even most of them, but assumed that they’d gotten the Big Foozle and had thus closed the case. Grann may have solved one more murder himself, but as he interviews more surviving relatives of the victims – many of whom ask him to find out who killed their fathers or uncles or sisters – it becomes clear that the majority of these killings will remain unsolved, a sort of ultimate insult on top of the lifetime of indignities to which these Osage victims were subjected.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion, although Grann never makes it explicit, that this would never have happened if any of the governing (white) authorities viewed the Osage tribe members as actual people. Dozens of killings went unsolved and unaddressed for several years before Hoover’s men arrived, and some unknown but large percentage of the killings will never be solved. What white officials didn’t do for the Osage in the 1920s continues today in what mostly (but not always) white officials don’t do today to address violence in urban, mostly African-American communities, including right near me in the majority-black city of Wilmington, nicknamed “Murder Town” for its disproportionately high rate of deaths by gun. If the governments responsible for the safety of these citizens don’t see those citizens’ deaths as important, or as equal to the deaths of white citizens, then it is unlikely that anything of substance will be done to stop it.

I listened to the audio version of Grann’s book, which has three narrators, one of whom, actor Will Patton, does an unbelievable job of bringing the various characters, especially the conspirators, to life. The other narrators were fine, but Patton’s voice and intonations made this one of the most memorable audiobooks I’ve listened to.

Next up: I just finished George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2017 and is among the favorites to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction next week; and have begun Joan Silber’s Improvement, also from 2017.

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→ March 12, 2018
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The Warmth of Other Suns.

Isabel Wilkerson says she spent 15 years researching the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 2010, and the research shows in the incredible depth of detail in this tripartite narrative about the mass movement of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the north and west from 1915 to 1970. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while working for the New York Times, interviewed over 1200 people, and focused this sweeping saga on three African-Americans who fled the south’s limited opportunities and overt, violent racism, fleeing Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana for Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Their stories are interwoven with each other’s and with other related histories of others who followed similar paths, and the tragedies of some of those who chose to stay behind.

Wilkerson gives us three characters who will accompany us through the book’s 600-odd pages (for me, 22-plus hours of audio): Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi who followed her husband, George, to Milwaukee and eventually the south side of Chicago; George Starling, a fruit picker from Eustis, Florida, who tried to organize other fruit pickers to earn better wages but fled from white landowners who set out to lynch him; and Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor from Louisiana who became a successful surgeon in Los Angeles and served many celebrity patients. The three all marry and raise children, and all find greater prosperity in the north than would ever have been possible where they were born, but all face the normal travails of any working-class life, and each carries some of the baggage of their birth and upbringing as outcasts in a racist country well into adulthood.

All three have compelling, often heartbreaking individual stories – although I think Wilkerson’s touch here is so deft that she could make anyone’s life story compelling – but none was more fascinating than the path taken by Dr. Foster, who left Monroe, Louisiana, and found success as a doctor in California both by outworking other doctors and by bringing an intense, precise sort of personal attention to his patients. Shedding his childhood name of Pershing after he moved to go by the more conventional name of Robert, Dr. Foster seems to have achieved the American dream against long odds, earning material wealth, marrying well, raising three daughters who themselves became successful, thus creating an ongoing chain of success and upward mobility from his own struggle. Yet he never seems to be able to escape the scars of a childhood (and possibly a marriage that brought him in-laws who never thought he was good enough) in a way that allows him to enjoy his success. Wilkerson illustrates him as a demanding, controlling husband who was meticulous about his own appearance and that of his wife, while he also was a compulsive gambler who clearly enjoyed how his spending at casinos bought him a form of respect at the casinos he frequented. Later in the book, Wilkerson tells of a gala Foster threw in his own honor, and how he agonized over every detail of the party, and how he couldn´t enjoy it during or afterwards because of perceived imperfections in the result.

At times a brutal, unsparing look at the treatment southern whites doled out to the black underclass as a matter of course, The Warmth of Other Suns is also deeply personal and empathetic. Wilkerson tells several stories of lynchings, including Leander Shaw and Claude Neal, the latter of whom was brutally tortured before he was hanged for a murder he may not have committed. She details the violent, racist reign of Lake County, Florida, Sheriff Willis McCall, accused at least 50 times of abusing or killing black suspects in his custody, once shooting two handcuffed black prisoners in cold blood and finally ousted from office after eight terms when he kicked a black prisoner to death. (McCall’s son, now 64, was arrested in January for molesting a young girl and possessing child pornography. He had stated in the past that his father was innocent of all charges of civil rights violations.) George Starling leaves Florida because a friend tells him local whites are going to take him to a swamp for a ´necktie party,´ racist slang for lynching. Ida Mae and her husband, also George, leave their life as sharecroppers under a benevolent but still manipulative, controlling landowner after a friend of theirs is beaten into senselessness over the theft of some turkeys that, it turns out, had just wandered off. Robert Foster isn’t driven out the same way but realizes that as a black doctor who can’t even receive admitting privileges at the white hospital, he’ll end up as just a ‘country doctor’ if he doesn’t move out of the land of Jim Crow.

The stories of violence and outright suppression are hard enough to fathom today, but the smaller indignities that the three protagonists and other African-American characters in the book faced fill in the gap and have even more impact because they’re easier to ingest today, when lynchings like that of James Byrd Jr. are extremely rare and result in actual convictions of the killers. When Dr. Foster is driving to California and can’t find a hotel room, even though some white proprietors are kind in rejecting him, lying to his face about vacancies, you can see and feel it. When Ida Mae has to take a series of temporary jobs in Chicago, where most employers will still choose only white candidates, she ends up in a situation right out of #MeToo. Even positive stories often come with a bitter reminder of what came before; George Starling, working as a porter on a north-south rail line, is told to direct black passengers to certain cars when the train passes into the south even after Jim Crow has been made illegal, and has to subtly inform these passengers of their right to say no, at risk of his own employment.

Wilkerson’s personal approach to the book does not exclude the academic research on the subject, but she instead sprinkles details and observations of experts on the timing, motive, and extent of the migration – which came in waves, and finally slowed after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and slowly implemented over the following decade. (And, of course, we now see one party trying to roll it back, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) This is a work of scholarship, yet also a labor of love, as no author could spend so much time and become so invested in a subject unless it were of abiding personal interest to her in the first place. It’s also a potent reminder of why African-Americans today remain at an economic disadvantage relative to whites, and how we are simply repeating the sins of our fathers when we deny black Americans their right to vote, or incarcerate them on nonviolent drug charges, or underfund urban schools as if they were the ‘colored’ schools of the Jim Crow era.

Next up: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 Worlds Fair.

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→ September 1, 2017
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Evicted.

I have two new Insider posts on the Verlander trade and the Justin Upton trade.

Princeton sociology professor and ethnographer Matthew Desmond won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a stunning work of first-person research that examines a major socioeconomic problem from the ground level, rather than the top-down, data-driven approach I expected from a book in his genre. Desmond spent several months living among the inner-city underclass in several neighborhoods in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009, shadowing tenants and landlords, witnessing evictions and forced moves, accompanying residents to rehab, AA meetings, even to court, recording what amounted to over 5000 pages of transcribed notes and conversations, to produce this devastating and utterly human portrait of people who simply do not exist to the house-secure classes.

Desmond’s aim here is clear: eviction is more than just a temporary loss of shelter, but a massive disruption to the economic and psychological well-being of entire families, a process that can lead to job loss, substance abuse, and crime, and a scarlet letter on a person’s record that can make it harder to obtain future housing and employment. The vulnerable class of the working or semi-working poor are victimized repeatedly by a system that takes the majority of their income, often over 75% of it, to cover rent for substandard housing, then punishes them if they fall behind and are evicted in a process that overwhelmingly favors the landlords. Tenants are often afraid to assert their rights, if they have any, or to report building code or maintenance violations for fear of retaliation. Once evicted, families may end up having to pay exorbitant fees to place their limited possessions in storage, with no access to their things, until the almost inevitable time when they can’t afford the monthly cost and lose what little they had.

Desmond accompanies several single residents and entire families on their journey through multiple evictions and the Lodge, a homeless shelter readers will know all too well before the book is complete. The access these people gave him is remarkable, as he captures their words at some of their most vulnerable and depressed moments, often witnessing their stuff being carted out to the curb in trash bags by Eagle Movers, who apparently maintain a truck (or two?) just for the purpose of serving landlords who are evicting residents. He also relates a firsthand account of housing discrimination – and explains in an afterword how the Fair Housing Authority did nothing with his formal complaint. (And that was under a Democratic administration; I doubt it’s any better today.) He also spends significant time with two slumlords – although he refuses to refer to either as such – to give their perspective, usually in their own words, even explaining how one, Sherrena, was “proud” of her landlord status and her collection of properties, even though Desmond makes it very clear that she is a nightmare landlord whose failure to maintain safe conditions in her buildings should probably have landed her in court.

By spending so much time with poor residents, Desmond also makes it clear what critical needs are not addressed when most of someone’s income – often income from disability payments – goes to cover the rent. Going without food, or without enough food, is an obvious outcome. But such tenants often have no heat or hot water, or sometimes can’t cover the gas or electric bills. Medical care is often entirely out of the question. Buying a new pair of shoes for a child, a mundane event for even middle-class families, is an enormous achievement. One of the few success stories in the book, Scott, a former nurse who lost everything when he became addicted to painkillers, has to borrow from his parents to cover the cost to get into a rehab program and begin taking methadone. Many other people Desmond follows don’t have even that bare safety net of a parent or relative to help cover a payment – or, in the case of one single mother, her safety net repeatedly refuses to help.

Desmond saves his prescriptions and recommendations for the epilogue, choosing instead to let the individual narratives tell the reader the overarching story of a system that traps these American untouchables in a cycle of poverty from which it is very difficult to escape. It’s easy to say, as so many politicians like to do, that the solution to poverty is to make poor adults go to work. That facile, elitist answer ignores the realities of work for the underclass: Available jobs barely pay enough to cover the rent, evictions and other related actions (police are often involved, with Milwaukee employing sheriffs specifically for this purpose) can count against someone on a job application, and missing time to try to find new living space can cost such a person his/her job. Affordable – or “affordable” – housing is often located far from work, with poor public transit options in many or most cities. We get repeated examples of people evicted because of the actions of someone else. One woman is evicted because the police were called to her apartment by a neighbor because her partner was beating her. Another loses what sounds like a perfect apartment because her young son got in a fight and her babysitter asked neighbors if they had any weed. And landlords get away with this because tenants don’t fight back, enforcement of what few rights they have is scarce, and there’s a line of people waiting to get into every apartment the evicted vacate.

In that epilogue, Desmond offers ideas and potential solutions, including universal housing vouchers that can be used anywhere, without discrimination, the way that recipients use food stamps. He speaks of reasonable housing as a fundamental human right, which is how western European governments and societies view it, arguing that “the pursuit of happiness” is impossible without adequate shelter. Desmond also pushes solutions that are, at best, antithetical to the capitalist underpinnings of our society, including broader rent control, without sufficient consideration of the economic consequences of such policies (rent control programs can stifle construction and push landlords to convert rental properties to non-rental ones). He seems to advocate for more public housing, but doesn’t discuss how we can expand the housing stock without repeating the problems of previous housing projects, many of which became unsafe and were razed within 20 years of their construction. His proposed solutions should spark discussion of how to solve the American housing crisis – or, at least, a discussion that there is a housing crisis at all – but seem like they will trade current problems for new ones rather than creating comprehensive solutions that at least consider how the market will react to major policy shifts. That’s a minor issue in a remarkable work that is dedicated more to exposing these problems to the wider audience, to bringing people in distress out of the shadows and into the public consciousness, because without that there won’t even be a conversation about how best to help them in an economy that still places a high value on the rights of private property owners.

I listened to the audio version of Evicted, which is narrated by actor Dion Graham, whose voice will be familiar to fans of The Wire. Graham does a masterful job of bringing the various characters to life with just subtle changes in tone – and treats these people, who are largely less educated and less articulate than, say, Graham himself is, with respect. It would be easy to caricature these underprivileged tenants, but Graham’s renditions infuse them with the quiet dignity they deserve, so that the listener may feel sorrow or pity for them, but not scorn.

Next up: Thomas Stribling’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Store. I’m about 60 pages in, and while the story is moving along, the casual racism in the writing – Stribling was from Alabama, set the novel in Florence, and has it taking place shortly after the Civil War – is appalling.

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→ July 27, 2017
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The Last Days of Night.

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 for his work on The Imitation Game, particularly impressive for a first-time screenwriter with just that and one novel under his belt at the time. His second novel, The Last Days of Night, came out last August and just appeared in paperback this spring, and is about as good a work of popular, contemporary fiction as I’ve come across.

Moore takes the term historical novel to a new extreme here, creating a coherent narrative around the War of Currents of the late 1800s – the public dispute over whether the nation’s power grid should run on direct current, favored by Thomas Edison, or alternating current, favored by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse – by relying on the historical record as much as possible for descriptions of characters, scenes, and even dialogue. This type of novel typically makes me uncomfortable because it potentially puts words and thoughts in the mouths of real-life personages, potentially coloring or distorting our impressions of them; Moore includes an appendix explaining source materials for many of the depictions in the book, even explaining the origins of some of the dialogue, and also delineating which events and timelines in the book are real and which he created or rearranged to fit the narrative. I’ve read “non-fiction” books that played faster and looser with the truth than Moore does here in his work of fiction.

The War of Currents was kind of a big deal, and a lot more public than you’d expect a scientific debate to be, largely because the two figures at the center of it, Edison and Westinghouse, were both famous and powerful at the time – Edison the revered inventor and showman, Westinghouse the successful businessman and an inventor in his own right, the two embroiled in a public dispute over whether DC or AC was the safer choice for the nation’s emerging electrical grid. (AC was the inarguably superior technology, and eventually won out, but not necessarily for the ‘right’ reasons.) Moore wraps this battle, including the bizarre entrance of one Harold Brown, inventor of the electric chair, into the debate, in the larger one over who really invented the incandescent light bulb, spicing things up a little bit with some fictional details like the firebombing of Tesla’s laboratory and a hostile takeover of Edison’s company.

Told from the perspective of Paul Cravath, a young attorney who handled Westinghouse’s side of the various lawsuits back and forth between him and Edison and later founded the Council on Foreign Relations, The Last Days of Night manages to turn what could have been dry history into a suspenseful, fast-paced novel (aided by lots of short chapters) populated by well-rounded characters. Edison’s depiction might be a little too on the nose, but Westinghouse, Cravath, and even the enigmatic Tesla – whose Serbian-accented English is recreated in clever fashion by Moore, who explains his technique in the appendix – come to life on the page in three dimensions even with the limitations of their roles. Moore relied largely on historical information to flesh out the characters, with the main exception of Agnes Huntington, Cravath’s wife, on whom there was very little documentation, leading Moore (or perhaps simply allowing him) to create her backstory and eventual romance with Cravath out of whole cloth. The trick allows Moore to give the book its one proper female character, since the War of Currents was fought entirely by men in domains – science and the law – that were closed to women until the last century.

I found the pace of Last Days a little frenetic, definitely aimed more at the popular end of the market than the literary end; events move quickly, as Moore compressed almost a decade into about two years, and the book has short chapters and tons of dialogue to keep up the velocity. That meant I tore through the book but found it a little balanced towards action over meaning; there was just less to ponder, especially after the book was over, but I also never wanted to put the book down because there are so few points where the pace slackens. That makes it a rarity for me – a book I could recommend to anyone who likes fiction, regardless of what sort of fiction you like.

Next up: Still playing catchup with reviews; I’ve finished Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce ($2 on Kindle) and Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, and am now reading Anna Smaill’s weird, dystopian novel The Chimes.

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→ February 26, 2017
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Tower.

On August 1st, 1966, Charles Whitman, a white, Catholic 25-year-old who had trained as a sharpshooter with the Marines, murdered his wife and his mother, then went to the observation deck of the University of Texas Tower and began targeting and shooting anyone he could see, killing 14 and wounding 31 others. It was considered the first mass “school shooting” in U.S. history and the worst mass murder in Texas history to that point.

The documentary Tower, which was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, recreates the 96 minutes from when Whitman first started shooting until he was killed by policemen who, with the help of one courageous civilian, cornered him on the observation deck. By using first-person accounts from survivors and witnesses, Tower tells the story of the shootings via animation, some of it overlaid on actual footage from either that day or that time period. It’s an utterly gripping account that comes as close as possible to putting the viewer on the scene, and focuses on the victims, both those killed that day and those injured or involved who had to carry those memories for the rest of their lives. The film is available to rent on amazon and iTunes.

Whitman’s motives remain unknown to this day, although there are multiple theories, including that a brain tumor pressing on his amygdala had caused him to have murderous or delusional thoughts. Tower doesn’t get into Whitman’s story at all; in fact, he never appears in the film, not even in animation. Instead, the documentary gives us the stories of the people who are rarely if ever mentioned when the story of the Tower shootings are told.

One student, Claire Wilson, who was eight months pregnant and walking with her boyfriend was among the first people shot by Whitman; she survived, thanks to the help of multiple good Samaritans, two of whom eventually risked their lives to drag her to safety, but she lost the baby and her boyfriend was killed immediately. Another student, John “Artly” Fox, was one of the men who went into the open to bring Claire out of the sniper’s sight so she could get medical attention, and after three months in the hospital, she survived. Tower brings the two of them together for the first time since the shootings at the end of the film. A boy delivering newspapers was shot while on his cousin’s bicycle; he survived, but his parents were first told he’d been killed before finding him alive at the hospital. Air Force veteran Allen Crum, then the manager of the campus co-op store across the street, came out to break up what he thought was a fight, then realized there was a sniper and decided to make his way to the tower itself, eventually joining the officers on the observation deck and providing cover for them as they crept up on Whitman and killed him.

Many of the principals are still alive today and appear twice over in the film – as themselves, near the end of the documentary, but in animated form as their younger selves during the reenactments. The animation gimmick works incredibly well, more than simply hiring actors would have (if such a thing were even feasible), because it allowed me at least to focus completely on their words. There’s no question of someone overacting or rendering a person inaccurately here; we get their memories, enough to give us a fairly complete picture of those 96 minutes of hell, and a closing segment as those still alive discuss life after the shootings. And because this story is rarely told – victims are largely numbers, and modern accounts will always focus on the killer instead – there are tons of details here I’d never heard before, as well as the angle that elevates some of the day’s heroes over the murderer in the telling.

I’m floored Tower didn’t advance and earn of the five nominations for Best Documentary Feature. It’s better than the four nominees of normal length, with a clear narrative and a strong angle that remains important to this day (perhaps even more so, as the current federal government wants to ensure people with serious mental illnesses have easy access to guns). And it did something novel, combining animation with real footage to provide an accurate historical rendering of a major event in American history – one that I would say is somewhat forgotten outside of Texas, perhaps because school shootings have become so commonplace. It’s better structured than I Am Not Your Negro, more compelling than Life, Animated, and lacks the fatal flaw of The 13th. For it to fall behind all of those films defies understanding.

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→ October 21, 2016
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O.J.: Made in America.

My latest Insider column discusses Mike Hazen and diversity in baseball, and my latest boardgame review for Paste covers the pirate-themed Islebound, which looks great but plays too slowly.

My employer’s eight-hour documentary O.J.: Made in America is a real tour de force of nonfiction storytelling, combining two separate, strong narratives to give us the rise and fall of one of the most beloved celebrities of the last fifty years within the context of American race relations, particularly between white police and government authorities and African-American civilians. It paints pictures of two O.J.’s: the sports star who crossed over to become an icon to black and white audiences, and the manipulative wife-beater who eventually killed Nicole Brown and innocent bystander Ronald Goldman, only to be acquitted in a ‘trial of the century.’ Aired in five separate parts, the film casts an incredibly wide net and manages to inform the viewers not just on the facts but on the landscape in which those facts took place. (The film is streaming via the WatchESPN app and can be purchased on amazon or iTunes).

The documentary starts more or less with Simpson in community college, although it dips back into his childhood to introduce us to many of the figures who appear in the documentary on camera or in the action itself, as he’s about to head to USC, where the nation first became aware of his superlative talent on the field. The Buffalo Bills drafted Simpson, but their system didn’t make good use of his abilities for the first few years of his career and he appeared to be a disappointment until new head coach Lou Saban built the team’s offense around him in 1972. Simpson took off from there, becoming the first back to rush for 2000 yards (back in the 14-game schedule), breaking Jim Brown’s single-season rushing record, winning the league MVP and several rushing titles, and eventually retiring with the second-most rushing yards in NFL history.

Simpson started to convert his football prowess into commercial success early in his career, and began acting in films shortly after becoming a football star. Although the documentary focuses more on his comic work – he was Nordberg in the three Naked Gun films, probably the role for which he’s most remembered now as an actor – he also appeared in dramatic works, including an episode of Roots, only the greatest miniseries of all time (per Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz). By the time Simpson hung up his cleats, he was a cross-platform star, a bankable celebrity whom the film credits with ushering in the era of the sports star endorsement that we can blame for those awful Peyton Manning Nationwide commercials.

That story takes up the first two hours or so of the film, and it’s exhilirating to watch: there’s plenty of game footage, but we also get to watch the development of a national icon, turning from a charming but very unpolished athlete into a confident, ambitious actor and pitchman. In an era where endorsements were limited to white stars, Simpson broke the mold. That he did so by avoiding any emphasis on his race, such as commenting on political matters or protests, did not seem remarkable at the time; it was the path of least resistance for someone who wanted the fame and income that came from celebrity, not the power or the podium.

This part of the documentary is interspersed with the backdrop of rising racial animus in California, including the Watts riots, the police shooting of Eulia Love, the murder of Latasha Harkins by a Korean grocer (convicted but sentenced only to probation), and the Rodney King beating and acquittal. In a sense, it’s all prologue for the murder trial of Simpson, where the context of a city where many black citizens were convinced that they were being unfairly targeted by the police and treated differently by the courts informed a trial that included a cop, Mark Fuhrman, with a history of racist statements, and the defense accusation of planted evidence. The physical evidence, including DNA, should have made this a slam-dunk for the prosecution, but the defense created plenty of reasonable doubt, including prosecutor Chris Darden’s own inexplicable decision to ask Simpson to try on one of the gloves with his DNA on it, as well as by playing the race card to gain Simpson a fast acquittal.

I remember being disgusted to see people celebrating the verdict at the time, and the images still repulse me today: the fact that a black man could beat the system should not be more important than the fact that an abused wife and a total stranger were brutally murdered. But O.J.: Made in America doesn’t pass judgment itself; the film gives us both contemporary footage from the trial and reaction along with commentary today from so many participants, including two jurors (both black women) and the practically made-for-television civil rights lawyer Carl Douglas. Although a few key people are missing from these confessional interviews – Al Cowlings, Marguerite Simpson, and Darden stand out among the missing – the sheer number of people who did talk, and talked at length, is the production’s greatest strength. Furhman’s here. So are several of the cops who arrested Simpson, including those involved in the absurd white Bronco debacle. Many of O.J.’s longtime friends appear, including a childhood friend, Joe Bell, who comes as close as anyone here to defending the subject.

From there, we get the ugly post-trial life of Simpson up to his 2007 arrest and 2008 conviction on kidnapping and burglary charges that the film strongly implies was all payback for the 1994 acquittal. Simpson believed, according to his friends, that after the original verdict, he’d return to his old life as if nothing had happened, only to find his endorsements evaporating and many of his friends distancing themselves from him. The narrative gets a bit flimsy at this point, but the story is one of a man who relocates to Florida (to avoid the civil judgment against him), starts hanging out with less and less savory characters, and eventually adopts a “gangster” (their word, not mine) image along with his increasingly erratic behavior and poor judgment. Of course, the worst people Simpson was hanging with were collectibles dealers, and you can interpret that as you wish.

What the documentary doesn’t do, unfortunately, is even explore the question of why. Domestic violence itself is worthy of that kind of discussion – are abusers born, or are they made? If the latter, how do we interrupt the cycle that creates them? – but in Simpson’s case, the program itself gives us portraits of two extremely different men. The Simpson of the 1960s and 1970s that we see in episodes 1 and 2, married to his high school sweetheart Marguerite and out of any sort of trouble, is completely different from the controlling, obsessed Simpson who abused and eventually killed Nicole Brown. This dichotomy all but requires explanation: Was Simpson always a potential abuser, but didn’t become one until his second marriage? (Marguerite has steadfastly said that Simpson never abused her, and there is no record of any violence during their relationship.) Did his football career have anything to do with him becoming abusive or aspects of his personality that changed? The directors seem to hint at O.J.’s troubled relationship with his father, who was gay and later became a well-known drag performer, as a cause, but that’s hardly a justification for violence against women and the subject is barely discussed. It appears the directors didn’t ask any of the many longtime friends and business associates of Simpson the question: was this really who Simpson was all along?

The documentary itself is riveting; I don’t remember any single-story work of this length that held my attention as long as this one did. The pacing is brisk, and the first-person commentaries from folks as diverse as Marcia Clark, Hertz CEO Frank Olson, and Simpson’s friend Ron Shipp, a retired LAPD officer who testified against Simpson at the murder trial, are invaluable for framing (no pun intended) the story. The directors delivered even more on their “in America” part, showing how the racial and cultural context first made O.J. into a star and then helped him avoid a conviction for the two murders, even more than they tell us how O.J. was “made” into a domestic abuser and killer. ESPN released the film to theaters in New York and Los Angeles for a week so it would be eligible for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and I find it hard to imagine any two-hour challenger could come close to topping it.

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