march 2013

Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster.

BERLIN—What happens when you do a prime-time interview with a far-right leader—but don’t ask them anything about refugees?

German television viewers found out Sunday night when the broadcaster ZDF ran a major interview with Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which capitalized on anti-refugee sentiment to earn its first-ever seats in the German Parliament last fall. Ahead of the interview, ZDF’s Twitter feed teased the interview as dealing with “climate change, retirement, digitalization—and without refugees.”

The resulting 19-minute interview, in which Gauland struggles to answer basic questions about his party’s positions on such issues, has been lauded by opponents of the AfD as masterful. Supporters of the AfD and Gauland himself panned it as biased. The ZDF journalist Thomas Walde, who conducted the interview, repeatedly pushed Gauland to clarify or explain statements made by his fellow party members—and asked more than once about proposed policy “alternatives” from a party that counts the word alternative as part of its name.

In 2012, on a whim, Vincent Lynch decided to search the genome of the African elephant to see if it had extra anti-cancer genes. Cancers happen when cells build up mutations in their DNA that allow them to grow and divide uncontrollably. Bigger animals, whose bodies comprise more cells, should therefore have a higher risk of cancer. This is true within species: On average, taller humans are more likely to develop tumors than shorter ones, and bigger dogs have a higher cancer risk than smaller ones.

But this trend breaks down when you look across species. Elephants are no more susceptible to tumors than Chihuahuas, and whales are no more likely to develop cancers than humans—if anything, their risk is lower. That’s especially strange because big animals also tend to have longer life spans, giving more opportunities for each of their already abundant cells to become cancerous. They ought to be walking (or swimming) masses of tumors—but clearly they aren’t. For the vast majority of mammals that have been studied, the odds of dying from cancer range from 1 to 10 percent, whether you’re talking about a 50-gram grass mouse or a 5,000-kilogram African elephant.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric may be coarsening most everything in America, but might the already rowdy realm of commercial rap at least be safe? Don’t bet on it. Midway through Nicki Minaj’s “LLC,” one line washed me with a nausea of familiarity: “All these low-IQ hoes baffle me.” Low-IQ as a modifier: Isn’t that Trump’s thing? The president makes a habit of invoking IQ as an insult, drawing on an aptitude test that’s otherwise been falling out of fashion due to, among other things, a historical association with racism.

Minaj may or may not be channeling Trump with that line, which certainly isn’t the toughest dis heard on her 19-track fourth album, Queen. And her rivals’ intellects have long been in her crosshairs, as heard on 2011’s delicious Lil’ Kim takedown “Stupid Hoe.” But lately, as she’s returned to a rap landscape that’s shifted in the four years since her previous album, Minaj has been particularly fixated on claims about the brain. Premiering Queen on Apple’s streaming radio station, she said it used to be that “it felt like you had to be smart to rap. And now, it’s a little bit different.” Interviewed by Roxane Gay in 2017, she said, “Do you sound intelligent? Does your flow switch up? Are you in command of the beat? I listen for things like that.”

Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television.

“What is that?” I asked.

He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.”

“Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.

That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.  

On HBO’s Insecure, the Issa Rae–helmed comedy about black women navigating life and love in Los Angeles, the show’s main characters tease each other lovingly and unceasingly. The two friends, Issa Dee (Rae) and Molly Carter (Yvonne Orji), trade barbs in a cheeky, exaggerated tone. It’s a welcome dynamic, a reminder that the show is first and foremost dedicated to the story of the women’s friendship (even if disillusioned male fans insist that Lawrence, Issa’s ex, is integral to her narrative). The interactions speak to Issa and Molly’s closeness—who but your  giii-iiii-iiiirlfriends could get away with calling you a bitch so often?

Taken as standalone scenes, these barbs don’t grate much; it’s not unusual for marginalized people to reclaim words that originated as slurs, and to then offer these words to one another as terms of endearment. It’s not rare to lend tenderness to words that could otherwise convey malice, to strip them of their venom by sheer force of will and pitch. In one such scene during Sunday night’s Season 3 premiere, Molly and Issa sit down for a meal at L.A.’s famed Pann’s Restaurant. Having just returned from a much needed getaway after quitting a job where she wasn’t paid as much as her white male colleagues, Molly explains her new life strategy to Issa:

The Young family of Crazy Rich Asians is, for lack of a better word, quite wealthy. They’re well-off. One might say they have oodles of money. There’s no ignoring the obvious here—the Youngs are absurdly rich, to the point where merely being close to them is exciting enough to serve as the premise of a major summer movie. Though Crazy Rich Asians is rightly being lauded for its groundbreaking nature (as the first studio film with an Asian cast set in the present day since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club), it’s also a charming throwback to the kind of story Hollywood doesn’t tell much anymore: the high-society comedy, rife with family drama, acidic one-liners, and indomitable female characters.

Based on Kevin Kwan’s best-selling 2013 novel, Crazy Rich Asians is a classic ballad of life among the 1 percent, and how it can be as thrilling as it is ultimately unfulfilling. The extravagance on display is nonsensical, but that’s part of the fun; the movie is filmed with colorful dynamism by Jon M. Chu, the man behind buzzy, disposable delights like Step Up 3D and Jem and the Holograms. The setting (Singapore) and the ensemble cast (which doesn’t feature a white actor after the first scene) are breaths of fresh air, but so is the fact that Hollywood can still churn out a winsome family rom-com when it wants to.

CHTAURA, Lebanon—Sitting on a bench in the shade of giant fir trees at a monastery in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, Yasmin, a 30-year-old Syrian refugee from the town of Daraya, recalled what her father told her back in the spring of 2011 when protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad began. “Why should we use force when we have brains? Let’s resist peacefully,” he would tell Yasmin and her siblings, who were captivated by the promise of the Arab Spring revolts sweeping the region. Inspired by their father, her brother, 20 at the start of the uprising, joined a group committed to a pacifist struggle led by Yahya Shurbaji, a charismatic local activist and organizer. “We want a civil state; Muslims and Christians, Druze and Alawite,” their slogan went. Yasmin watched her brother and his friends hand out roses and bottled water to regime soldiers sent to Daraya to assault them.

Fiona Goodall, a photographer working with Getty Images, recently visited the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, a country battling rising sea levels with limited resources. Goodall reports that high tides regularly bring flooding that “inundates taro plantations, floods either side of the airport runway, and affects people’s homes.” While a study released in February showed that Tuvalu’s land area had actually increased by 2.9 percent since 1970, due mostly to wave-driven beach buildup, the elevation of the nation’s nine islands was not growing—and the sea has been rising by approximately 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) every year, above the global average, since 1993. The government of Tuvalu is working with public and private groups from around the Pacific to develop hardy crops, shore up vulnerable beaches, and move toward a goal of becoming 100 percent renewable-energy dependent by 2025.

Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. “It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings,” he says. “It’s like the window is a frame and you’re all part of a perfect picture.”

“You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy,” Jo replies.

The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel’s publication, fans have worshipped Alcott’s story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.