"Over his long career, Mr. Allen has made two films — 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' in 1989 and 'Match Point,' 16 years later — about deceitful men who murder women and get away with it."

"The evasion of consequence has been an enduring source of fascination. In the end, perhaps Mr. Epstein provided Mr. Allen with something even more valuable than cachet: potential material."

Writes Ginia Bellafante, in "Woody Allen Is Not Sorry About His Friendship With Jeffrey Epstein/The nonagenarian director is taking a slightly different tack than many of the other powerful people associated with the disgraced former financier" (NYT).

Woody is in some of those photos the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee bestowed upon us the other day. We're told: "The images suggest that the two men, both children of postwar working-class Brooklyn, were better acquainted than previously believed. They also indicate just how taken the culturally privileged can be with the financially extravagant, felony sentencing be damned."

That is to say, Woody liked going to the lavish parties at Epstein's gigantic house in Manhattan. 

"In order to return to the university, some students would be required to complete a 49-page set of reading and tasks — 'modules' — known as the Ethos Integrity Series..."

"... geared at helping participants 'make gains' in 'moral reasoning' and 'ethical decision making.'... Some students would be assigned a 'reflection paper'... address[ing] several questions, among them: What are your values? Did the decision you made align with your personal values? What have you done or need still to do to make things right? Explicitly instructed not to 'justify' their actions, the students were told to turn their papers in by May 29 in '12-point Times New Roman or similar font.'..."

Writes Ginia Bellafante, in "Why Is N.Y.U. Forcing Protesters to Write Apology Letters?/The university calls it a 'restorative practice'; the students call it a coerced confession" (NYT).

A university spokesman characterized the assignment as consistent with what are called "restorative practices." Bellafante writes:

In this instance, though, the exercise cannibalizes the mission, favoring a will to dishonesty — inviting a charade of guilt. Anyone driven to protest is marching and chanting precisely as an expression of a certain set of fiercely held moral beliefs and values — not in deviation from them....

In this instance... what about other instances? Is this instance so special? I'd like to see more depth on this topic of "restorative practices" and the horrors of forced speech and compulsory insincerity. 

I liked this comment over there, from Jeremy:

"It was hard not to interpret these recent offenses within the broader context of a roving and seemingly ever-more-insidious misogyny."

"In 2022, the most recent year for which there is available city data, women were killed by intimate partners at a rate 30 percent higher than the previous year. Reports of domestic violence also increased during that period, and nationwide, between 2018 and 2021, incidents of domestic violence involving guns went up by more than 7 percent. According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, a third of women under 35 report having been sexually harassed online. And this is to say nothing of the less manifestly aggressive if pervasive abrasions — the distillation of any middle-aged woman who complains about anything to the favored signifier of oblivious bourgeois entitlement, the 'Karen.'..."

Writes Ginia Bellafante in "Sexism, Hate, Mental Illness: Why Are Men Randomly Punching Women?/Conversation about the attacks on the streets of New York have centered on mental illness, but the offenses seem to have their roots in hatred of women" (NYT).

"[A] former assistant who said she had to pick up clothes from Chanel for Mr. Sachs’s wife... and prepare meals for her French bulldog..."

"... consisting of wild rabbit, spinach, aloe water and coconut oil.... [A] studio spokesman told Artnet that assistants were in fact dispatched to make Napoleon’s 'veterinarian-prescribed meals.'... On Tuesday, Mr. Sachs... said that he sincerely regretted having referred to a particular room in the studio housing an air compressor as the 'rape room.'... For all the recent show that the art and fashion worlds have made of their progressive politics — their efforts to market their alignment with inclusive causes — they remain tied to caricatures of intemperate genius — even when the genius itself is hard to locate. A brilliant artist reads beneath the culture, identifying the undercurrents the rest of us cannot easily recognize. What should we make of one who has managed to miss what is happening right on top, who has been blind to a tidal wave of shifting social norms?"

Writes Ginia Bellafante, in "Who Is the Bad Art Boss? Tom Sachs made an art career on casual shock value and relationships with luxury brands. Now he’s under attack for what employees say was an abusive studio environment" (NYT).

This gets my tag "geniuses." 

"Five years ago, the New York State Thruway Authority conducted a survey of more than 2,600 drivers to take measure of the customer experience at the service areas..."

"... lining the 570 miles of road that make up one of the largest toll highways in the country, stretching from the edge of the Bronx up past Buffalo. Whether participants were traveling for work or for pleasure, they had needs that apparently were going unfulfilled. Among those who identified as occasional users of the Thruway, more than half said they would like food halls with 'local artisan' offerings. Some commuters wanted Blue Apron meal kits. The resulting report listed as chief takeaways that leisure travelers complained about unappealing interiors and the lack of 'Instagrammable moments.'"

From "Must We Gentrify the Rest Stop? McDonald’s is gone, and the Manhattanization of the New York State Thruway has begun. Prepare to Instagram your pit stop" by Ginia Bellafante (NYT).

"Between the years 1979, when it opened in theaters, and 1984, I saw 'Manhattan' 11 times, after which I stopped keeping count."

"The early 1980s marked both the period of my adolescent hunger for an urbane, grown-up life in New York and the dawn of VHS, enabling the obsessive consumption of movies, which in my case meant the obsessive consumption of movies by Woody Allen. In them, I found a vision of the future I wanted, a series of aspirations — to have opinions, to write, to go to book parties but also to make fun of people who approached those things too seriously. The hope was to inhabit the world the way Woody Allen did, as both conspirator and judge.... For all of its visual beauty and brilliant writing, the movie is a shell game in the end. Look over there, the director is telling us — it’s pretension and quaaludes and bad sitcoms that are really the problem. Feminists themselves were in on the game. One scene is set at fund-raiser for the Equal Rights Amendment in which the politician and women’s rights leader, Bella Abzug, makes a cameo. Reduced to its elements, 'Manhattan' is a movie about a guy who beds a sweet 17-year-old girl, breaks her heart when he leaves her for someone else and only comes crawling back when he gets dumped. It is not simply that so many of us were so besotted with the film for so long; it’s that we were perfectly content to look and see virtue."

Writes Ginia Bellafante in "Why My Teenage Self Gave Woody Allen a Pass/The urbane paradise of 'Manhattan' looks a lot different through the lens of the new HBO documentary 'Allen v. Farrow'" (NYT).

Yes, Woody Allen did create the image of a sophisticated world that a very young woman — like Bellafante, who was 14 when "Manhattan" came out — might want to grow up and inhabit. Movies have always provided dream material for the young. The Woody Allen dream that charmed Bellafante was one where smart people cared about writing, said clever things to each other, and thought they were superior to the people who made up the bulk of America. You know, the deplorables. 

The problem Bellafante sees now is that Woody Allen was sexually attracted to young women, like the 17-year-old in the movie. Bellafante says "17-year-old girl," but 17 is and was the age of consent in New York. I guess if only the characters in the movie were more plausibly proximate in age, it would have been just fine to shape your life around high-level literary taste and look down at everyone who's not up there with you.

"In the Trumpian worldview — one certainly shared by other real estate developers — cities are not configured of neighborhoods and ecosystems..."

"... and a broad constellation of creative aspirations and complexities; they are sales shelves from which to market luxury apartments, ultimately occupied by people who don’t deeply embed in them so much as pass through. It is a notion largely out of step with how the world has evolved. The country has become increasingly urban. Between 2010 and 2013, according to the census, eight new cities were created in the South, three of them in Texas alone. Cities are home to nearly two-thirds of the population in this country. Do the people living in them want men in camouflage or better schools?"

So ends the NYT column "Why the Big City President Made Cities the Enemy/Donald Trump — a lifelong New Yorker — declares war on urban America" by Gina Bellafante.

What is this war? It's his criticism of the Democrats who run the big American cities without controlling the violence. He's "portraying metropolitan life as an unsafe, ugly dystopia, when the real hazard was a lacquered prosperity that continues to put it out of reach to so many working people."

I'm seeing a political dispute in which both sides claim to be the true champion the little people.

"The white man’s path is a rut for the rest of us" — writes a privileged white woman...

.... Jennifer Palmieri, in a newspaper owned by a white man (The Washington Post, owned by mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos).

Where does Palmieri get the identitarian authority to speak for a group called "the rest of us" against "the white man"?

To her credit, she begins by showing her awareness that she really doesn't have the authority:

A few years ago, I would have dismissed as unhelpful the notion that I was a woman struggling to succeed in a man’s world. I thought I was doing great. I was working in Barack Obama’s White House. Hillary Clinton’s election as the first female president seemed to be on the horizon and....

Palmieri was Hillary's communications director.

But I no longer see it as self-defeating to call myself an outsider in a man’s world.

She'd have been an insider if Hillary had become President. But she's not saying she is an outsider, just that it's to her advantage — not "self-defeating" — to call herself an outsider.

Instead, I think the self-preservation of all marginalized people demands it.

All marginalized people need you — extremely privileged white woman — to call yourself an outsider. Their "self-preservation" depends on you claiming to be one of them?

Patiently waiting for things to improve has served only to sustain the very systems that keep women and people of color from obtaining real power.

Systems! You were communications director and your candidate lost. That's why you don't have power — and it would have been immense and real. Because your campaign fell short, you now posit "systems" that are holding you back in the same way they hold back women in general and "people of color." What were the "systems" that held back "people of color" when you were working in Barack Obama’s White House? Or do the "systems" come and go depending on whether Hillary Clinton blabbered about "deplorables" and didn't go to Michigan?

"No. You can not base your life on frowning and glaring at others literally behind your shades and think you are making a positive impact on lives."

"Just like the met gala is a ridiculous, outdated event that does no good except for advancing privilege. I hope we begin to understand how many generous, kind people there are in the world and that those are the individuals we should be celebrating."

The second-highest-rated comment on "Can Anna Wintour Survive the Social Justice Movement?/A reckoning has come to Bon Appétit and the other magazines of Condé Nast. Can a culture built on elitism and exclusion possibly change?" by Ginia Bellafante (NYT).

The first-highest-rated comment: "It's kind of rich when a newspaper that oozes white privilege and credential worship, prints endless real-estate stories about zillion-dolllar properties, and covers celebrities endlessly in its style magazine and arts pages goes after Anna Wintour."

The NYT is going after Anna Wintour — not because she said anything arguably racist or got caught in blackface or anything like that, but simply because she is powerful and imperious and because, apparently, Vogue is a fashion magazine.

They also have this quote from André Leon Talley, "a black man and longtime former editor at Vogue": "I wanna say one thing, Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame. I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege."

A colonial broad, whatever "colonial" is supposed to mean. As for "broad"... it's a blatantly sexist word, but sexism was last year's concern. This year it's race, and for some perverted reason, we can't concern ourselves with both at the same time.

She is literally a "Dame" — I'm reading that at Wikipedia, where I also learn that she lives in Greenwich Village, rises before 6 a.m., "rarely stays at parties for more than 20 minutes at a time and goes to bed by 10:15 every night." For lunch she eats "a steak (or bunless hamburger)" but years ago it was "smoked salmon and scrambled eggs every single day." She wears sunglasses all the time because they are "actually corrective lenses" but also (as one acquaintance says) "you know, really, armour."

Politically, she's a big supporter of Democrats. They say if Hillary Clinton had won, Anna Wintour would have become the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. And now, look what she gets. The NYT coming after her for nothing. You can't devote your life to fashion for the sake of fashion in the Social Justice Regime.

ADDED: From "Anna Wintour Isn’t Going To Cancel Herself/Vogue’s editor is now promising to do better for Black employees and readers. Does she not realize that she, largely alone, had all the power all along?" (BuzzFeed News):

Wintour has built her entire career on the foundation of fetishizing white-woman meanness... Wintour’s persona isn’t just of a boss that’s tough to please, but of a woman boss who’s just as awful as a man could be. It’s an earlier, less PR-optimized incarnation of the Nasty Woman/Girl Boss modus operandi: the idea that being authoritarian or contemptuous at work is feminist, because if men get to do it, why can’t women?

Wintour embraces a version of femininity that says you have to be skinny, white, elegant, aloof, and rich..... Wintour found power in being icy, while third-wave “feminist” bosses learned to hide their harshness behind public displays of feminist solidarity.... 

Feminism is so last year. This year is all about race. Wintour is white, so she's out.

"How come it's always the guy who doesn't take his suit jacket off, eats too much red meat, and refuses to use a personal desk fan who controls the AC for the whole office?"

That's a comment under this NYT piece by Ginia Bellafante about how air conditioners ought to be set at 78°.

The title of the piece is "What’s Cooler Than Cool? 78 Degrees on the A.C.," because they'd like you to think that somehow fancying yourself as a hipster, following a trend, will feel better than actual physical comfort. Setting the thermostat high — in this view — is like wearing stilettos. You look marvelous. You should suffer for fashion.

Meanwhile, the male who seeks banal, normal comfort is presumed to be the culprit. The imagined demon man — who's always controlling everything — is just wearing the ordinary professional garb that has been worn with little fuss for over 100 years and eating the food that people who don't think too much about food enjoy eating.

But is it really men who feel the need to set the thermostat low? What does it matter? If at any point you feel uncomfortable, focus on the notion that men, manifesting their male characteristics, are doing this to you. That seems to be an acceptable form of amusement. But if you don't find it funny, you might get heated up... beyond the power of your personal desk fan to deliver relief.