april 2016

When you contemplate the end of democracy in America, what kind of person do you think will bring it about? Maybe you picture a sinister billionaire in a bespoke suit, slipping brown envelopes to politicians. Maybe your nightmare is a rogue general, hijacking the nuclear football. Maybe you think of a jackbooted thug leading a horde of men in white sheets, all carrying burning crosses.

Here is what you probably don’t imagine: an affable, self-made midwesterner, one of those goofy businessmen who makes his own infomercials. A recovered crack addict, no less, who laughs good-naturedly when jokes are made at his expense. A man who will talk to anyone willing to listen (and to many who aren’t). A philanthropist. A good boss. A patriot—or so he says—who may well be doing more damage to American democracy than anyone since Jefferson Davis.

The CDC’s color-coded coronavirus case map, if you can find it, is easy enough to read. It’s a county-by-county snapshot of viral transmission—the agency’s new fallback for advising fully vaccinated people on whether they need to don a mask indoors. The parts painted in those scary shades of orange or red are areas of substantial or high transmission, respectively; they’re the places where you should be shielding your face indoors, regardless of how shot-fortified your immune system is. According to the agency, not everyone has to mask up again, so the map is, in theory, something inoculated Americans could check like a weather forecast to decide their face’s fate. Use the map, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky advised in a press briefing this week. It’s updated daily.

For raw emotional content, Tuesday’s hearing of the new House select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection was nonpareil. Four police officers who fought to hold back armed hordes seeking to disrupt Congress told stories of physical injury, racist abuse, and post-traumatic distress. Even for Americans who paid close attention to the crisis, these stories added new texture and horror.

But the House Oversight Committee shed more light this week on just how and why January 6 happened, releasing handwritten notes by Richard Donoghue, a top Justice Department official in the waning days of the Trump administration. The violence of the day has taken center stage, but these notes help put it in context: The angry crowd was just one part of President Donald Trump’s long-running effort to overturn the results of the election in the House of Representatives.

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.”

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.