→ November 19, 2018
→ By

Burning.

Burning, Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is based loosely on a 1992 short story by Haruki Murakami called “Barn Burning.” It takes that very brief framework and builds a dreamlike, post-noir feature film, running nearly two and a half hours, that entraps viewers in its layered mysteries early and then increases the tension like a vice as it approaches its shocking resolution. (The Murakami story appears in The Elephant Vanishes, and is also in the online archives of the New Yorker.)

Lee Jong-su* is an unemployed, would-be writer who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi, whom he doesn’t recognize because she’s had plastic surgery. She spots him, and makes it clear that she has some interest in him, eventually bringing him back to her tiny apartment and sleeping with him. She also asks him to feed and clean up after her cat while she takes a two-week trip to Africa, which he agrees to do even though it’s a long drive from his father’s farm in the country. When Jong-su goes to pick Hae-mi up on her return, she’s with a new guy, Ben, who is rich, condescending, and possibly her boyfriend. Jong-su seems resigned to the loss of Hae-mi to Ben, but those two keep inviting him out with them, stringing him along, until one day Ben confesses to Jong-su that he has a hobby of burning greenhouses, burning one every two months or so because it’s the ‘right pace’ for him. Later that night, Jong-su makes a cutting remark to Hae-mi, after which she vanishes, leaving Jong-su to try to figure out what’s going on. From there, the story turns darker as Jong-su follows – or stalks – Ben in search of the girl.

* Korean names are written with the family name first; I’ve held to that convention in this review.

At one point in the film, Ben says to Hae-mi, “it’s a metaphor,” after which she asks what a metaphor is, and Ben says Jong-su should answer, since he’s a writer. This entire film is a metaphor wrapped around a set of smaller metaphors. There’s a strong subtext of the pervasive nature of class distinctions in Korean society, and how the upper class may view the lower classes as not just inferior but expendable. Ben represents the idle, entitled rich, while Jong-su and Hae-mi both come from the lower classes. Jong-su lives on a farm while his father is in jail for assaulting a government official, and has very little spare cash; his estranged mother reappears at one point, complaining of how rich Koreans treat her in her menial job and saying how she needs money, which Jong-su promises to provide despite lacking means. Hae-mi, we learn, is broke, with outstanding debts she can’t pay, working just occasionally as a model/dancer outside shops that hire girls like her to try to drum up business. Ben drives a Porsche, lives in a gorgeous apartment, thinks nothing of spending money on food or drink, and appears to have little regard for people he views as beneath him, as do the friends of his who appear in the film – totally ignoring Jong-su while he’s at their parties while treating Hae-mi and Ben’s next girlfriend as if they’re some sort of entertainment, not actual people.

Throughout the film are smaller metaphors, not least of them the actual burning and references to it. There are cigarettes everywhere (and the occasional joint), fires in the background of shots, the burning color of the sun at sunset, and hints of the world burning around our characters with Donald Trump appearing on a TV lying about immigration and with North Korean propaganda audible outside Jong-su’s house. Birds make several appearances; there’s a postcard drawing of a bird in Hae-mi’s apartment, but it’s gone after she vanishes. Hae-mi tells a story about a well that might also have been a metaphor, but discussing its implications would reveal too much.

The main criticism of Murakami’s writing has long been that he doesn’t write compelling women, and the woman in “Barn Burning” is nothing but a prop, so the screenwriters here had a blank canvas … and didn’t do a ton with it. Hae-mi, played by Jeon Jong-seo in her first film role (where she really reminds me of Lily James), is a Boolean character – she has two modes, the flirtatious and perhaps overly sexual coquette as well as the stark depressive who seems to lack a will to live. All her edges are extremely sharp, while Jong-su in particular is drawn with far more nuance to just about every aspect of his character. Jeon does what she can with a character that verges on the ridiculous, at times appearing more like the object of male fantasy than like a fully realized woman, but the writing limits what she can do.

The two male leads deliver outstanding performances. Yoo Ah-in plays Jong-su as a sort of slack-jawed stoner – seriously, his mouth is constantly open – whose expressions and slow reactions would imply that he’s not very bright, but there’s more intelligence beneath the surface here, and Yoo gives him some emotional depth that I wasn’t expecting given how the film first introduces the character. Stephen Yeun is totally magnetic as Ben, smarmy and confident and charismatic, the character Jong-su wants to dislike but can’t quite come around to doing so because Yeun gives him that extra layer of amiability on top of what appears to be a rather unpleasant core.

The original story has Jong-su’s character comparing Ben’s to Jay Gatsby, a line that also appears in the film, while William Faulkner comes up twice during the movie as well. (I had a book with me to read while I waited for the film to start, and in a pure coincidence, it was Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.) The Faulkner connection is fascinating as his writing was frequently opaque, full of symbol and metaphor, and covered themes like racial prejudice and the moral decay that can accompany rising financial status. Ben’s skin is substantially lighter than those of the other main characters, as are his friends’, and the question of his morality and motivations, and even how he acquired such wealth, hangs over the last half of the film.

Murakami’s story doesn’t make the ending clear, but the film makes it much more evident what’s happening with these characters – at least, I think it does, although director Lee Chang-dong ensures that we never get explicit proof that our suspicions are correct. There’s sufficient misdirection here to keep viewers thinking about this film for days afterwards, as I have been. It’s well-written, extremely well-acted, features some stunning and memorable shots, and is just tortuous enough to keep you off balance right through the final scene. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

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→ September 20, 2018
→ By

Florida.

The National Book Award announced its longlist for its 2018 fiction prize last week, and among the ten titles was Florida, the new short story collection from Lauren Groff. She was previously nominated for the same honor for her 2015 novel Fates and Furies, which earned widespread critical acclaim and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Florida is a good bit shorter and showcases Groff’s ability to craft a compelling narrative in just a handful of pages, with the typical inconsistency of most short story collections but some standouts that rank among the best things I’ve read all year.

The stories in Florida are connected only by that state, which is the setting for most of them and the place of origin for central characters in the others, with recurring themes across stories like the pernicious effects of climate change (including the existential fears it causes for various characters), physical or metaphorical sinkholes, or growing income disparity in a state often associated with ostentatious wealth. Groff paints a grim portrait of the state’s present and its future in stories that range from psychological horror to pleas for empathy, turning the so-called “Sunshine State” into a vaguely menacing and often depressing backdrop for stories of lives gone awry.

The best story in the book – and quite possibly the best story of any length I’ll read in 2018 – is “Above and Below,” which tells of an adjunct professor who slides far too easily into homelessness and follows her over several weeks and months of living in her car, in a homeless encampment, in a flophouse hotel, and more, documenting her own feelings through the process of simply trying to stay alive and safe. The story, about 30 pages long, manages to touch on so many aspects of the protagonist’s life, including her broken relationship with her mother and stepfather, as well as the way superficial factors affect our sense of self and how people within our lives can quickly become invisible to us. There’s so much heartbreak in this brief work that I found it easy to understand and empathize with the main character, even though I’ve never experienced any of this; nothing hit me harder than the moment when she thinks she’s been recognized by a former coworker and is mortified by the thought of him seeing her in her current state, only to realize he’s seen right through her and is looking at someone else.

The other true standout in the collection is “Dogs Go Wolf,” which reads like a horror story, with two young girls left alone in an island cabin by their mother who may be off partying (although as with most off-screen details in Florida, Groff leaves much of this ambiguous) while a storm approaches and the girls’ supplies start to dwindle. They’re young enough to be scared of imminent threats but probably should be more scared about who’s going to rescue them, and manage to keep themselves feeling somewhat safe by telling each other stories – a theme, that stories can nourish and comfort us, that recurs throughout the novel in all manner of settings.

One maddening aspect of Florida is Groff’s insistence on leaving characters without names. Once in a while, it can be a clever rhetorical device, something that helps make a story seem more universal, or that can emphasize the dehumanizing experiences a character undergoes, but when every story has the same feature, it begins to feel like affect rather than a purposeful decision on the part of the author. The opening and closing stories appear to include the same central character, a woman who in the first part is trying to avoid making a scene at home after dinner and in the second has her two young sons with her on a quixotic working vacation to research Guy de Maupassant in France, but she’s also one of the least sympathetic figures in the entire collection, someone who hamstrings herself with questionable choices and rash decisions, and even in 70-plus pages featuring her, the reasons for her odd behavior are never made clear.

I haven’t read any other nominees for the National Book Award yet, so I have no idea where Florida might rank, but I do expect to see it come up frequently in best-of-2018 lists given its quality and Groff’s history. It’s certainly miles ahead of the latest Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, the forgettable novel Less, with stories here that will stay with me for months, and a hazy, sluggish atmosphere throughout the collection that left me feeling dazed the way a humid summer day in Florida itself would.

Next up: Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.

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→ September 5, 2018
→ By

From a Low and Quiet Sea.

Irish writer Donal Ryan has received significant acclaim in his home country and Great Britain for his works to date, but relatively little attention here so far, although that might change with his latest book, From a Low and Quiet Sea, which was just long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and weaves together three narratives of men adrift in their worlds that is by turns harrowing, wry, and empathetic.

The novel, a scant 180 pages with a lot of white space within, unfurls in four parts, one for each protagonist and then a short final section that brings the three plot threads together. The first of the stories is the most powerful and feels the most timely: we meet Farouk, a Syrian doctor who senses that country’s civil war approaching the city where he lives with his wife and daughter and arranges with a smuggler to take them out of Syria to Europe, only to find that the smuggler has lied and put the three of them and dozens of others on a ramshackle boat that isn’t seaworthy and ultimately ends in tragedy. Farouk is then left to try to assimilate into a new country while bearing the weight of the tragedy that befell him and many of his countrymen, without a home to which he can return.

The next two stories are less gripping, although they will eventually connect with Farouk’s in powerful fashion in the final section. Lampy is a ne’er-do-well of sorts, a college-aged man with a job as a bus driver for local assisted living facilities, living with his mother and her father, with Lampy’s father unknown to him and seldom even discussed. John is nearing the end of his life and expressing remorse for so many of the actions of his younger years, including how many lives he ruined as a “lobbyist” (a fixer, really) and one man he killed by accident. Eventually these characters and a few adjacent ones intersect in part four, with deep consequences for most of them.

Ryan’s prose style is challenging, with meandering sentences that run on for half the page, reminiscent of Faulkner or Ryan’s contemporary Eimear McBride, but his scene-setting skills are remarkable if you can process all the information he’s throwing at you in these endless phrases. He’s at his best as a pure writer in Lampy’s section, explaining the chaos of Lampy’s home life and communicating his disorientation within his own life. Ryan often gives you the sense that you’re observing the action from a remote distance, or perhaps from some altitude, so while the action is clear, the images might be blurred around the edges, which establishes the inner confusion of the three primary characters – Farouk ripped from his normal life into a new country; Lampy uncertain of fundamental aspects of his identity; John grappling with his own mortality, unsure if any repentance will suffice for things he’s done.

That sense of distance and of the reader’s difficulty in fully observing the action before him is strongest in the final section, where Ryan connects the three stories in oblique fashion, enough so that I had to re-read several parts to be sure I had caught the intended connections Ryan had made between characters. You might piece one or two of them together earlier in the book, but I did not, and Ryan’s unannounced shifts in how he identifies certain characters was jarring.

However, Ryan has infused so much of the empathy he has for his creations into this book that even my momentary confusion at how he assembled the pieces in the fourth part couldn’t reduce my investment in the resolution – and that is From a Low and Quiet Sea‘s great strength. This is a literary work, aimed high in prose and complexity, but is still fundamentally an accessible and human work, a novel that is simultaneously timeless and very much a document of our time today.

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→ August 29, 2018
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Word by Word.

Until just last year, if you wanted to read a popular non-fiction book about dictionaries, there was really just one title – The Professor and the Madman, the runaway hit by Simon Winchester that tells the story of the strange relationship between James Murray, the primary editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary, and, Dr. W.C. Minor, an erudite murderer who contributed countless citations for words in the book while writing from the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. The book was more about that partnership than the creation of the dictionary itself; Winchester followed it up with The Meaning of Everything to tell the rest of the story of the OED’s creation, but it lacked the verve of the first book.

Kory Stamper, a lexicographer who worked for Merriam-Webster for about two decades, has now contributed to this niche with a ribald and totally fascinating book about her experiences there and what really goes into the making of a modern dictionary in Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, which turns what might appear to be a staid subject into almost a romp through the process of making and revising definitions. That process is changing rapidly in the digital age, and Stamper seems to have hit this topic at the perfect time, right up to a description of the staff cuts at M-W that happened just a few years ago (right before her departure, I think), and to a last chapter on the way lexicographers – people who write and edit dictionaries – now have a much different role, one that has them interacting with readers more than before and in more direct fashion. With Merriam-Webster also making aggressive moves on to social media – their Twitter account is a must follow, as their subtweet game is a grade 80 for me – and re-establishing itself as the preeminent brand in its space even as Google tries to obviate dictionaries completely by defining words on page one of search results, it’s an ideal time to examine and reconsider the importance of dictionaries in the lives of anyone who loves or lives by language.

Word by Word doesn’t have a straight narrative, but there are consistent themes running through the book that tie widely disparate chapters together, none more strongly than the innate love of words and language that connects lexicographers and folks, like me, who still find pleasure in getting lost in a dictionary. (I was one of those kids who, when bored, would pull the dictionary or a volume of our World Book encyclopedia off the shelf and read pages at random.) Stamper uses those ties to walk readers through and around the dictionary’s essential contents, such as the way definitions are written, the structure and purpose of etymologies, and how dictionaries handle thorny matters like how to handle offensive words or when to even identify words as such (in the chapter “Bitch”), how to ensure that definitions aren’t unintentionally biased (in the chapter “Nude” – think pantyhose), and how to handle words that some people don’t think are words (“irregardless” – not a proper word, but because it’s a word people use, it has to be in the dictionary). I’m sort of amazed at how much flak Stamper reports getting from readers who believe that the dictionary has the authority to control the language, like the Académie Française, or even to alter society. The chapter on the word “Marriage” revolves, of course, around Merriam-Webster’s internal debate over how to handle same-sex marriage – first acknowledging it in a second definition, and eventually simply defining it, as they do now, without regard to gender or identity: “the state of being united as spouses in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law.” There’s a usage note at that link, discussing the controversy and saying that “This is not an issue to be resolved by dictionaries,” although it’s clear that no one ever reads the intro or the usage notes.

Stamper has a prodigious vocabulary, which is hardly surprising, and writes with a mixture of the erudition and ease of a David Foster Wallace, mixing high and lowbrow humor with aplomb, and never dumbing down her prose or patronizing the readers. This is an unapologetically smart book for people who don’t blench at obscure words or mind a didactic or technical discussion of word origins or how best to phrase a definition. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in many places, in part because Stamper can really craft a good story, and in part because some of what she describes – reader feedback, in-house arguments, even an escapade with the cleaning crew messing up her notes – is just so ridiculous. And throughout it all is a genuine love of words, one I truly share. I still write down new words I encounter in books – ouroboros is one I recently found – so I can look them up, and have a little notebook with those words and their definitions because maybe some day I’ll need one of them. Even if I don’t, I still have them and can appreciate them for their own sake. I think Ms. Stamper would approve.

Next up: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles.

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→ August 17, 2018
→ By

Deep Work.

I am very prone to distractions, especially when it comes to sitting down at the computer to get work done. The obvious one is social media – I need to be on Twitter and Facebook for work purposes, but I spend far more time on those sites, especially the former, than I could justify rationally – which soaks up far too much of both my time and attention each day. But there are far more distractions around me, even though I don’t work in an office. Email is a constant intrusion, coupled with the feeling that you have to respond to certain emails immediately. Texts are the same, with an even greater sense of urgency. But there are also more mundane aspects of quotidian life at home that interfere with my ability to work – seemingly innocuous things like stopping to make coffee or to grab the mail, or to do a little cleaning, or to go get the mail, or to start prepping dinner. I’m aware on some level that all of these things make me less productive than I could be, but it takes a conscious effort to surmount them.

Cal Newport has some advice for me and anyone else who suffers from the noises & distractions from anything good in his new book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, a quick read that offers some hard advice that sounds easy to follow but in practice is hard to implement. He argues that deep work is an entirely different mode of thinking, the kind that we tend to disdain today because it doesn’t ‘look’ productive, but in fact is far more conducive to the kinds of productivity that matter: you’ll get more done, and what you do will be better. Newport even emphasizes that this is the kind of work that’s going to matter more in our modern, knowledge-driven economy, where merely being good at repetitive but shallow tasks isn’t enough to give you a sustainable career.

Deep Work has two sections, and you could easily just skip the first and read the second if you’re more focused on advice and a checklist for becoming a deep worker than in his arguments why deep work matters (although I’d still recommend reading the whole thing). That first part explains why you should realign your working habits around deep work: that it’s valuable in the marketplace, that few people can do it well, and that the cognitive processes around it produce work that is meaningful for the person doing it. Your brain functions differently in ‘deep work’ modes, and the more time you spend practicing it, the better you’ll get, producing more work and higher quality work as a result. He delves into the idea of ‘deliberate practice,’ popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and then roundly mocked by critics, going back to the professor, K. Anders Ericsson, who coined the phrase based on research into how we learn difficult material and what separates experts in certain fields from others working in those areas.

Newport also talks distractions, explaining why they’re a real problem in part one and recommending avoiding them in part two. Open offices come in for particular criticism, because they create more noises and more opportunities for co-workers to interrupt any attempts at deep work, all under the guise of creating “more opportunities for collaboration” (which, he later points out, may not even be accurate). The increased desire across industries to measure employee productivity – what Newport calls “the metric black hole” – also contributes to the fight against deep work, driving employees to do what will improve their metrics, not what will be more productive. And there are huge social obstacles to deep work, because most of us naturally want to be responsive, collegial, and, worst of all, available for colleagues when they appear to need our attention.

Part two of Deep Work is the checklist, four global rules, each with various corollaries, for becoming a deep worker: practice working deeply, embrace boredom, quit social media, and schedule your day to sequester and minimize shallow work. Newport is really prescribing an entirely new way to approach your job, one that will probably feel highly restrictive and type A to most people. But even in less than two weeks of dabbling in some of his recommendations, I can vouch for everything I’ve tried. There’s no question he’s right about social media; I used to keep Twitter and my public Facebook page open in browser tabs all day, so I could keep an eye on relevant news and respond to reader questions, but I’ve stopped doing that entirely. I’m writing this post with my browser closed entirely, and have reserved any questions or links I’ll need to finish this review until I’ve completed the body text and am almost ready to post it. I’ve started cordoning off email time, realizing that virtually nothing in my email related to work is actually urgent unless it’s an editor’s question about something I’ve filed – and by that point, my period of deep work has paused because I’ve finished a column or post and moved on to the next task. I’ve long encouraged readers to post baseball questions in my chats, where I can address the entire audience at once, rather than via private messages like email or Facebook, where my answer goes to just one person. (I also wouldn’t have time to answer all the baseball questions I get through email or other services, but if you message me with questions about mental health, I will answer.) Somehow I managed to write a book without very good work habits, judging by the standards Newport lays out in Deep Work, but if I do get the chance to write another one, I’ll feel much better armed to do it now that I’ve read his advice.

Next up: Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel Pachinko.

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→ August 9, 2018
→ By

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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→ July 31, 2018
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Big Chicken.

Antibiotic resistance doesn’t get a ton of headlines, but it is one of the most critical threats to global health, enough so that the United Nations resolved to address the problem at a summit late in 2016. At the time, they estimated there would be 10 million deaths annually from resistant ‘superbugs’ by the year 2050, which doesn’t include people who would die indirectly from the scourge, such as people who can’t have surgery because the antibiotics that you receive before any operation are no longer effective. In a country where a third of the population rejects the truth of evolution, getting people to understand this issue – itself the product of evolutionary processes among bacteria – has been difficult, and never seems to rise very high on the priority lists for policymakers.

Maryn McKenna’s new book Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, the journalist and Schuster Institute fellow explains how we got here by way of the humble chicken, which took over our plates and menus thanks to the prodigious and reckless use of antibiotics, in turn leading to widespread antibiotic resistance in our food supply and outside of it as well. Chicken became an industrial product because someone realized that pumping birds full of antibiotics as part of their feed would make them grow faster, regardless of whether they had any need for these medications. While the chicken world consolidated and counted its profits, bacteria did what they do – evolved, through mutations and gene transfer, to become resist to one drug after another, spreading through and beyond our food supply, abetted by antibiotic residues that washed into the water supply from overuse.

McKenna builds the book around the narrative of one man who nearly died from salmonellosis, an infection caused by bacteria in the Salmonella genus (there are two species, and either can cause this illness), part of a widespread 2013 outbreak caused by unsanitary conditions at the Foster Farms chicken processing plant. The specific Salmonella strain in this outbreak, known as Heidelberg, was resistant to multiple antibiotics, sickened over 600 people, and resulted in at least 200 hospitalizations, although there were no reported deaths. Within the framework of this patient’s ordeal – he survived, but will have lifelong complications, which is common for people who develop these infections – McKenna walks through the history of the chicken as foodstuff, from its advent as an industrial product through changes to the bird to the very recent movement by major chicken producers and consumers to stop antibiotic use.

The very rise of this form of industrialized animal husbandry was an accident, which is one of the book’s most interesting sections (granted, I love history of science stories); there wasn’t any reason to think pumping healthy birds full of antibiotics would make them grow faster, but it did, to a shocking extent. What is infuriating, if not entirely surprising, is how government agencies responsible for ensuring public health rolled over and played dead for Big Chicken and the antibiotic manufacturers themselves even as scientists began to sound alarms about resistant bacteria in the 1950s. The manufacturers played the Big Tobacco game of demanding more proof, aided and abetted by Congressman Jamie Whitten, a Democrat from Mississippi, who abused his power to protect the two industries from proposed restrictions on antibiotic usage until his retirement in 1994. (Whitten wrote a pro-pesticide screed as a rejoinder to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in case you were unclear on his stance on the matter.) Mckenna parallels this narrative with a walk through the tactics of the bacterial world to outflank our best drugs, most recently with the emergence of bacteria with the mcr-1 gene, conferring resistance to colistin, an antibiotic of ‘last resort’ that has been used for bacteria resistant to all other antibiotics.

Blaming the two industries of chicken and pharma, along with the complicity of useless government agencies (the FDA and the USDA), is easy, but the American consumer is also a major part of the problem here. We eat far more meat than we need to meet our dietary requirements, but we insist on meat being cheap, which encourages us to both eat and waste more of it. We’ve also decided we want lean meat, based on nutritional advice from the Useless Department of Agriculture that turned out to be mostly to entirely wrong, leading to greater demand for breast meat, and in turn for farmers to grow chickens with giant breasts and smaller legs, to the point that the broiler-fryer chickens you might get in an average grocery or warehouse store can’t walk or stand up normally. (I rarely see them in stores, but once did buy a pasture-raised whole chicken; it had less than half the breast meat of even a well-raised conventional bird.) McKenna goes into this in more detail – how the rise of ‘chicken fingers’ and the McNugget exacerbated this trend, how consumers prefer buying chicken parts rather than whole birds – while also pointing out how producers bred birds with these un-natural characteristics to suit the marketplace.

There is hope, at least in this book, on both the antibiotic resistance and the chicken-producing fronts. The UN has, at least, paid lip service to the cause of fighting antibiotic resistance. Several major chicken producers, led by Purdue, have stopped or pledged to stop using antibiotics in full, or to only use them to treat sick birds rather than as growth promoters or for prophylactic purposes. Many large chicken buyers, including Panera, Chipotle, and even McDonald’s, have also pledged to go antibiotic-free, or have done so already. Whole Foods has long been antibiotic-free as well. (One reason I buy organic milk and eggs, even though ‘organic’ itself isn’t that meaningful: It guarantees the cows/birds in question weren’t given antibiotics.) And slowing the use of antibiotics on animals should help in particular if and when researchers discover the next big class of antibiotic compounds. We may have gotten much farther with the drugs we had if we hadn’t given them in such huge quantities to the animals we raised and ate.

McKenna also visits chicken farmers who are operating outside of the main supply chain of industrial birds, raising heirloom varieties in the American heartland or raising certified Label Rouge birds in France, chickens that neither look nor taste like the bland if predictable American hybrids. Educating consumers with the disposable income to buy these birds is a challenge, but one that has plenty of precedent in the market for high-end foods. The bigger conundrum is how to provide enough meat, chicken or otherwise, to feed a world that increasingly demands it and doesn’t want to pay more for it, without the overuse of antibiotics that has led us to the edge of a bottomless pit of resistance.

Next up: Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

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→ July 9, 2018
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Exit West.

Mohsin Hamid first gained global notice for his 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which became a best-seller, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won numerous smaller awards for the Pakistani author. His 2017 novel Exit West has been nearly as acclaimed, making the shortlists for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award, and even earning a nod from Barack Obama as one of the best books he read in 2017. Working with just a hint of magical realism, Hamid gives us a clear-eyed look at the refugee crisis from the perspective of a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, who fall in love in their unnamed, war-torn country (resembling Afghanistan), and manage to escape through a portal, only to find themselves transient through various stops where refugees are less than welcome.

The only gimmick Hamid employs in the book is the doors, these magic portals that appear and allow people to slip through them and emerge somewhere completely different in the world, at least until authorities find the door and attempt to block it. This allows Hamid to focus on the problems refugees face of resistance from native populations, of the obstacles they face toward assimilation, and of the strain the displacement puts on relationships, while skipping the just as real problems of getting out of the original country and, perhaps, dying en route to somewhere else. The horrors of migrants packed on to tiny, un-seaworthy vessels, or crammed in the back of overheated trucks, are legitimate, but including that part of the refugee experience might overwhelm the parts of the story Hamid wants to tell – the way wars or famines create populations of homeless refugees searching for little more than a safe place to live and work, much as they may have had before the crisis hit.

Nadia and Saeed live ordinary lives in what appears to be a moderate or even progressive Muslim country, with Nadia living alone as a liberated woman who has cut off her conservative family. The two fall in love just as the country begins its collapse, with fundamentalist rebels encroaching on their city and eventually taking it over and enforcing Taleban-like rules on the populace. (Hamid never names the country, the religion, or any of the forces, but the details he does provide sound an awful lot like Afghanistan under the rule of the Taleban, while the movements of the refugees after they exit through the first door resemble the flight of Syrians during their civil war.) After several small incidents drive Nadia from her apartment into Saeed’s home with his father – Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet in the street – they hear of a door that will allow them to escape to somewhere else, beginning a journey that will take them through several doors, to Greece, to England, and eventually the United States, an odyssey that changes them both as individuals and alters the nature of their relationship, permanently, by the time they find a permanent home in California.

Although the primary hook in Exit West is the magic of the doors, which boil down the leave/stay decision to one of money and family, the strongest element of Hamid’s narrative is the tapestry of mundane details of the itinerants’ lives once the social contract of their home city begins to dissolve. There’s a run on a local bank, and in the throngs of people crushing to get to their money, men grope women in the crowd, including Nadia, knowing well that there will be no repercussions, an early sign that without that social contract people will behave like animals. Refugees grasp at what might, to us, seem trivial details that reinforce their humanity – a warm meal, an actual shower, possession of items we take for granted.

At each destination, Hamid presents a different vision of the refugee crisis, none more potent than his version of London, where a military attempt to remove migrant squatters fails, and a new partnership between the natives and the refugees emerges, not merely a détente but an attempt to create a better life for everyone. These are interspersed with brief scenes of other people who pass through doors in search of safety, freedom, or merely something different, presenting the doors as metaphor rather than merely as a plot device to skip over the brutal conditions of migration.

The displacement takes a toll on Nadia and Saeed as well; neither character is the same by the time their journey ends, at least for now, in California. Nadia is also the more interesting and well-developed of the two characters, both at the start of the novel and by the time the two have evolved over the course of the book. The power of Exit West, however, is that the theme applies to any characters forced by circumstance to leave everything behind and step through the first door that appears – without any idea where they’ll end up.

Next up: I just started N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the final book in her Broken Earth trilogy that began with The Fifth Season.

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→ June 11, 2018
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The Tale.

Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at Sundance in 1987, when she was just 28 years old, for her debut feature Beirut: The Last Home Movie, about a Lebanese family living in a mansion in the country’s capital during its extensive civil war. She returned to Sundance this year with her first traditional (non-documentary) feature, The Tale, which received rave reviews and was picked up by HBO, which debuted the movie at the end of May. Telling the story of how Fox’s track coach groomed and molested her when she was just 13, it stars Laura Dern as the adult Fox, whose memories around that summer mislead her into thinking of it as a romantic relationship, and who tries to uncover the truth of what happened to her, thirty years later, when her mother discovers a story Fox had written at the time that described the predatory “relationship.”

Rather than simply using flashbacks, Fox tells the story as if she (as Dern) were traveling through her own memories, not just witnessing them but interacting with them, including conversations with her younger self (played by Isabelle Nélisse) and interrogations of her equestrian teacher Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki) within the memories. Fox arrived at Mrs. G’s for a summer of horseback riding lessons, and is immediately introduced to the charming forty-ish neighbor Bill Allens (Jason Ritter), who is Mrs. G’s lover and who quickly turns the charm on for Jenny, then gradually grooms her for rape.

Nearly every revelation in Fox’s memory begins with a false start, some detail rendered inaccurately (including her own age at the time of the assaults) or person not remembered, so that The Tale becomes not just a story about a young girl sexually assaulted by an older man, but about how we respond to trauma within our minds – how our brains can try to protect us by creating a fictional shell around the more difficult truth. Thus the movie plays out as a true-life detective story, where the culprit is known but the crime is hazy, and Fox has to navigate her own memories by uncovering clues in the present day – talking to her fellow students at the time and visiting Mrs. G, who goes from helpful to stonewalling in the blink of an eye – so that she can peel away the fictional outer layer on those memories and show us the truth. The technique is jarring, as it should be given the subject matter, because any scene showing the past may subsequently be rewound and rewritten so we can see it as it actually happened, not as present-day Fox recalled it. It’s most striking when she discovers another young girl (older than she was) in photographs from that summer whom she hadn’t remembered at all.

Dern is riveting as Fox, carrying us through the stages of denial, anger, and eventually something like acceptance – she confronts Bill in the present day, in a scene that is truly fictional but also pivotal to resolving the film – and making her seem understandably irrational in her worst moments. There’s a fight with her fiancé, played by Common, that is anguishing to watch because it’s clear that he’s right and willing to help, but she’s incapable of even discussing what happened with the person who is, in theory, closest to her. And Ritter is so creepy in the grooming moments – let alone the utterly harrowing, barely watchable scenes of statutory rape (filmed with a body double for Nélisse) – that it’ll be hard to see him in anything else in the future. (It also doesn’t help that he looks so much like his dad, the late John Ritter of Three’s Company fame.)

There’s a recurring refrain in The Tale that’s used to hand-wave away any violations of social norms or boundaries, including the whole idea that a 40-year-old man shouldn’t have sex with a 13-year-old girl: “It was the seventies.” There’s such a note of dismissiveness in the quote, uttered by at least three different characters, that you feel how uphill Fox’s battle to get at the truth might have been for her. People don’t like to dig up the past in any unpleasant circumstances, even less so when they might feel some complicity in someone else’s crimes, and pointing to the sexual permissiveness of the era – which was used to try to whitewash the story of David Bowie sleeping with teenaged groupies after his passing – only adds another wall for the victims to scale as they try to grapple with their histories of trauma.

The Tale uses Jennifer Fox’s real name for her character, but changed the names of the real-life Mrs. G and Bill Allens, as both are still alive. There is no indication whether Allens ever faced any charges or even repercussions for what is later implied to be dozens of assaults on various underaged girls, or if the various buildings or wings of buildings named for him still bear his name. I understand the legal ramifications of using his real name in the film, but if he’s still alive, he may still be a threat, and there are likely may other surviving victims who would like answers, even if justice is still beyond them.

Because it hasn’t received a theatrical release, The Tale isn’t eligible for Oscar or other annual awards for movies, but should earn Emmy consideration this fall for the movie itself and for Dern, Ritter, and Fox both as director and writer. I’ll still rank it along movies that did go to theaters at some point, and I’ll guess even before the halfway point that it’ll end up in my top ten for 2018. It’s powerful without ever manipulating its audience, and the novel way it walks us down the false starts of memory gives the viewer such a sense of Fox’s confusion that you’ll crave the catharsis that Fox can never really receive.

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→ May 29, 2018
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Beast.

Who is the actual Beast of this taut, Hitchcockian thriller’s title? Although we’re led to believe from the start that it’s the rakish, mysterious outsider, who quickly becomes the suspect in a series of killings of young girls on the British Crown Dependency of Jersey, the title, like many other names and aspects of this intense and well-acted film, carries more than one meaning. (It’s available to rent on amazon.)

Beast is the debut feature from director and screenwriter Michael Pearce, who has just a handful of British TV credits to his name, and hinges on a star turn from Irish actress Jessie Buckley as Moll, a young woman in her mid-20s who lives with her domineering mother and senile father in a giant house that still feels awfully close on screen. The film opens with Moll’s birthday party, at which she is quickly upstaged by her beautiful sister, leading Moll to flee to go out dancing all night, eventually leading her to a chance encounter with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a rifle-toting loner who lives on his own and seems to be the only person who treats Moll as an individual. His status as an outsider from polite society – ironic, as he’s of old Jersey stock, evidenced by his French surname, Deneuve – makes him an easy target for the police as they look for the man who’s raped and killed three teenaged girls on the small island, pushing Moll into the quandary of having to lie to protect her new lover or to question the possibility that he’s a murderer.

Pascal posterAlthough the obvious implication of the title and the posters showing Flynn out of focus at the front of the picture is that Pascal is or might be the beast, the script regularly offers us potential interpretations of the term. Moll herself has something in her past that’s revealed in stages over the course of the film, but it’s clear from the start that she is at least a complex character with something serious and unaddressed inside of her, based on something she does before leaving the house during her party. There’s a graphic scene later in the film involving an animal Moll shoots under Pascal’s training that also reveals an unexpected rage within Moll that will also be gradually and incompletely explained as the film progresses. And her mother, Hillary (Geraldine James), who favors her other two children over Moll, is utterly terrifying in her controlling nature, reducing Moll to a blubbering child, and her instantaneous shifts to everything-is-okay mode, even concluding one scolding with, “Let’s all be friends again.” Even as we’re given a Moll-Pascal relationship that could be dangerous, we’re given plain evidence that the relationship between Hillary and her mother is downright toxic.

Pascal’s name itself feels like another ironic twist in a film laden with irony and misdirection. Pascal’s wager argues that a bet on God’s existence, and thus eternal life after death, has a positive payoff if correct but little or no negative cost if wrong, while a bet against God’s existence, thus living a life of sin, has a huge negative cost if wrong and little to no benefit if correct. Beast‘s version of Pascal’s wager for Moll is flipped on its head – she can bet that he’s not the killer, but that bet carries some rather substantial downside risk for her, and she may actually be chasing the illusion of love rather than a true version of it. Even when she sees a glimpse of what Pascal is capable of doing when angry, and gets evidence from her very creepy cop friend (or cousin?) that Pascal has hurt someone before, she still decides to believe in her lover rather than anything else she’s seen – and we are left in the dark right up until the end of the film on whether she made the right call.

The ending of Beast is wonderfully ambiguous as well; after Pascal does something I would call unforgivable, the tenor shifts, and the last layers of Moll’s exterior are peeled back, and their entire relationship changes color to something much darker and bleaker. Buckley’s performance as Moll is riveting – I doubt there will be five better performances by lead actresses in all of 2018 – as she seems to portray a set of interrelated characters all rolled up into one, at times appearing to be an awkward teenager, at times an independent and headstrong adult. The film also gives us clues as to her states of mind or roles within scenes by changing Buckley’s hairstyle, whether it’s pulled back, tightly curled, frizzy, even a little mussed, just enough to alter her mien and put her in different footing in each setting. (Also, I know that the fairy tale character’s hair isn’t red, but the scenes of Moll walking through the forest gave me a Little Red Riding Hood vibe … and we’re left to wonder if Pascal is a real human or just a wolf in disguise.)

The scenes with Cliff and one with a stark, accented policewoman from off island are a bit forced, and it’s unclear why Moll or Pascal would be interrogated without attorneys or would agree to it when not obligated to stay; those are the only times when the tension flags and the element that puts the viewer right into the film starts to fade. The remainder of Beast is utterly intense from start to finish, and the conclusion is just ambiguous enough to let the viewer come up with another interpretation, Memento-like, to everything that came before. This deserves a much wider audience, and Buckley in particular should be on everyone’s short list for acting awards in the fall.

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