september 2011

May 2011

“The only thing a uterus is good for after a certain point is causing pain and killing you. Why are we even talking about this?” Nora jams a fork into her chopped chicken salad, the one she insisted I order as well. “If your doctor says it needs to come out, yank it out.” Nora speaks her mind the way others breathe: an involuntary reflex, not a choice. (Obviously, all dialogue here, including my own, is recorded from the distortion field of memory.)

“But the uterus …” I say, spearing a slice of egg. “It’s so …”

“Symbolic?”

“Yes. Don’t roll your eyes.”

“I’m not rolling my eyes.” She leans in. “I’m trying to get you to face a, well, it’s not even a hard truth. It’s an easy one. Promise me the minute you leave this lunch you’ll pick up the phone and schedule the hysterectomy today. Not tomorrow. Today.”

Every striver who ever slipped the rank of their birth to ascend to a higher order has shared the capacity to ingratiate themselves with their betters. What the truly exceptional ones have in common is the ability to connect not only with their superiors but also with their peers and inferiors. And only the rarest talents among them can bond authentically—not just transactionally—with the people who will help them be who they want to be in the world. It’s a preternatural, almost Promethean gift if you have it, and Amy Chua does.

Thus begins the scandal dubbed “dinner-party-gate,” the latest in the annals of Amy Chua, Yale Law’s very own Tiger Mom, whose infamous defense of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the “dinner-party-gate” of its day approximately three years ago. Then, as now, Chua’s differences with some denizens of her milieu played out in the press, vituperations, allegations, insinuations, and all.

As president, Donald Trump wasn’t known for his mastery of the federal regulatory process. The “Muslim ban” is perhaps the most famous example of a Trump policy that was enacted hastily, challenged repeatedly, and ultimately undone by his successor; others, like his attempted changes to the census, methane emissions, and payday lending, fell flat for similar reasons.

Trump’s failures to permanently change government policy were remarkably diverse. Even when his administration pursued classically Republican agenda items, such as cutting food stamps, and had lots of outside help from conservative advocacy groups, it ran into trouble. For a time, the Trump administration did significantly change the way food stamps worked. But in that realm, too, few of Trump’s changes stuck: Some were struck down by courts, and others were reversed by the Biden administration.

King Arthur’s Round Table is an impressively austere sight in The Green Knight: a circle of white stone bathed in dim light where mythic figures sit like statues, ready to be venerated. Tucked in the background of this scene is Gawain (played by Dev Patel), a young warrior eager to prove his mettle by going on the same journey as his idols. But David Lowery’s adaptation of the epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight puts him on a stranger path, a voyage of self-discovery that evokes the original work’s heady mix of chivalry, temptation, and valor while digging into its contradictions.

It’s the movie Lowery was born to make, a dreamy piece of high fantasy that bombards the viewer with visual delights, skimps on all but the most essential dialogue, and turns an age-old tale into something to be puzzled over anew. Throughout his career, Lowery has moved between more straightforward commercial works (Disney’s Pete’s Dragon remake, The Old Man & the Gun) and artsier fare (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, the terrific A Ghost Story). The Green Knight feels like the perfect blend of his interests, a Dungeons & Dragons tale told with intimacy and loaded with aesthetic oddments; it’s easily the best and most complete-feeling film I’ve seen all year.

In 2019, Steven Spielberg called for a ban on Oscar eligibility for streaming films, claiming that “movie theaters need to be around forever” and that audiences had to be given “the motion picture theatrical experience” for a movie to be a movie. Spielberg’s fury was about not only the threat that streaming posed to the in-person viewing experience but the ways in which the streaming giant Netflix reported theatrical grosses and budgets, despite these not being the ways in which one evaluates whether a movie is good or not. Netflix held firm, saying that it stood for “everyone, everywhere [enjoying] releases at the same time,” and for “giving filmmakers more ways to share art.” Ultimately, Spielberg balked, and last month his company even signed a deal with Netflix, likely because he now sees the writing on the wall: Modern audiences enjoy watching movies at home.