"For over a century, film was at its core a theatrical art form: While it’s true that movies could be watched on TV, the primary cinematic experience was immersive viewing in a theater surrounded by strangers."

"Now there is a push to make the movie theater merely one platform among others, offering an experience deemed no more meaningful than watching the same feature-length visual narratives on a home entertainment system, a laptop, or even a cell phone." 

Writes Jeet Heer in "Movie Theaters Aren’t Dying—They’re Being Murdered/The Covid-19 pandemic is providing a perfect cover for media giants bent on replacing theatrical moviegoing with streaming at home" (The Nation).

As media giants like Netflix, Disney, and Warner Media try to downgrade the moviegoing experience, it’s important to articulate how essential immersive theatrical watching is. When we watch a movie at home, or on an airplane, or on a treadmill at the gym, the movie is a small part of the environment. It’s easy to be distracted from the movie by everything else all around us, even if we have a giant wall-screen TV. When we watch a movie in a theater, the movie isn’t part of the environment; it is the environment. We’re enveloped in the movie and taken away from our humdrum existence.

Our humdrum existence! It's the big screen that makes us feel like the little people out there in the dark. 

But even as theatrical moviegoing is more all-encompassing, it is also more social. At home, we watch a movie alone or with people we know. In a theater, we watch a movie with strangers, who are as immersed in the narrative as we are.

Except when they're not, which ruins the effect. Maybe we could get a virtual crowd to stream within our headset device. Make them perfect movie companions. Couldn't we have beautiful, witty partners sitting on either side of us, whispering perfectly apt comments and learning our sense of humor and our comfort with interruptions? 

When a comedian like Jim Carrey does a pratfall, the laughter in the crowd is infectious. When the romantic couple finally unites and kisses after endless complications, everyone watching can swoon in unison....

Yeah, that can be virtual, with an audience calibrated to my humor preference and sentimentality. I might want a more sophisticated crowd — with a few really smart hecklers.

[T]he film critic Johanna Schneller observed that “there is a collective emotional energy that floats above the people who are watching movies.”...

Yeah, this is The Nation, so I'm not surprised to encounter enthusiasm for the "collective" mind floating over us. 

The streaming future that these media giants are creating is very much a future that is favorable to capitalism: a deeply privatized, fragmented world where everyone watches in their own individual cave and is incapable of forming a collective identity. It’s the ideal autocracy as imagined by Plato—with Mickey Mouse as the philosopher king....

Here's a little movie about Plato's allegory of the cave. Let me know if you see any connection between that and the author's hope for "collective identity" and the practice of seeing movies in the theater: 

"The body of the woman is the overwhelming triumph of flesh. The woman is a concrete universal; she is a world..."

"... not an externalized world, but under the world, the warm interiority of the world, a compressed internalized world. Whence the prodigious sexual success of women: possessing a woman is possessing the world."

Wrote Gilles Deleuze, quoted in "To Fascinate and Unnerve/The philosophical leftovers of Gilles Deleuze" at The Nation.

I just thought I'd drop in over at The Nation to see what was going on. I do that now and then, maybe once a week at most. That "Fascinate and Unnerve" business seemed more promising that the other headlines I saw. For example: "The Deaths of 150,000 Americans Are on Trump’s Hands/Trump and his lackeys are guilty of criminal negligence, if not far worse. Who will hold them accountable?" Such evil pot-stirring.

But that Deleuze is something. Decades ago, one used to encounter so many statements like that, presented as impressively intellectual. They're funny now. I'd say the challenge is: What are we taking seriously that will be plainly ridiculous in 50 years?

"The narratives that painted Black Lives Matter activists as 'violent' have turned into legislation that targets black people, leftists, and other marginalized groups."

"The Dangers of Shunning ‘Bad’ Protesters" (The Nation).

Moderates are keen to promote only passive, nonviolent tactics under any circumstance, but fail to realize that when the police attack demonstrations that kind of resistance isn’t always an option....

The popular narratives that painted Black Lives Matter activists as “violent” have since escalated to new legislation targeting black people. Since Trump’s inauguration, lawmakers in 31 states proposed 64 anti-protest bills, some of them geared toward preventing protesters from blocking highways, a common Black Lives Matter protest tactic. Several of these bills proposed making it legal for drivers to run over protesters if they are blocking roads. These bills make formerly legal, even anodyne, forms of protest illegal, and in doing so, target marginalized protesters much more than others....

Given what we know about protest repression, it’s imperative to resist these harmful laws and narratives at all costs, and fight like hell for “bad” protesters. The Republican bill names anti-fascists, but it’s not hard to imagine the vague term “disguise” being applied to any number of garments commonly worn to protests. Maybe even pussy hats.

"Anders Carlson-Wee engaged in nothing we moderns need slur as 'blackface.'"

"To wit, while we must evaluate each case on its own basis, to the extent that any white person’s depiction of Black English of whatever quality or diligence elicits rolling eyes at best and social media witch hunts at worst, we have lost step not only with linguistic science, but also with what most would consider norms of how human groups co-occupy social spaces and learn from one another."

Writes John McWhorter in "There’s Nothing Wrong With Black English/Accepting it as an alternative form of the language, and not a degraded one, requires being open to artists employing it in their work, even if they didn't grow up speaking it" (The Atlantic).

Anders Carlson-Wee is the white poet whose poem The Nation obsequiously apologized for publishing. We talked about it here.

McWhorter pushes back the writer/professor/editor/commentator Roxane Gay (who, like McWhorter, is African American):

[Roxane Gay] directs white writers to “know your lane,” and not depict the dialect.... Of course, if a Carlson-Wee depicted Black English gracelessly in terms of the grammar, it’d be time to call foul. But he got it right....

Gay... wrote on Twitter: “The reality is that when most white writers use [African American Vernacular English] they do so badly. They do so without understanding that it is a language with rules. Instead, they use AAVE to denote that there is a black character in their story because they understand blackness as a monolith. Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy.” Indeed. But it isn’t clear to me that Carlson-Wee is guilty of either of these flubs....

This may be some solace to Carlson-Wee, but — for all McWhorter's linguistic expertise — Gay's message is the one that will stick. What white writer would read all this and decide anything other than just to stay in your lane as Gay instructed? You might get McWhorter's elevated, educated approval, but you'll only get that — is that enough?! — if you avoid "flubs" — what are all the possible flubs?! — and even then, I sense there's something more:

[W]hen a Carlson-Wee briefly explores the pain of a black homeless person and shows her using precisely the speech variety she actually would, or an Oscar Hammerstein knows that working-class black people in a parachute factory [in Carmen Jones] would not talk like the characters in his previous hits Oklahoma! or Carousel, it’s time for educated America to get past the cringe of seeing Black English depicted on the page by someone who didn’t grow up speaking it.

It seems the writer will also have to pass an empathy test and successfully inspire the belief that he's exploring the pain or showering knowledge of working class black people. But good literature doesn't make it that clear. How do we know this writer is not making fun of black people or criticizing them in some way? Even when he's not, you may think he is. I read Carlson-Wee's poem and I don't think it unambiguously or simply "explores the pain." As I wrote a few days ago:

The voice is that of a black person, talking to other black people, explaining how to to collect money from the white people who pass by... The key insight is that you get money by causing white people to think about who they are and to be motivated to give you money because they were made to think that the person who gives you money is the person they want to be. So you succeed if you essentially cease to be and transform yourself into the image of whatever it is that jogs them into feeling they need to be the person who helps you. That key insight follows a how-to list of ways to be that inauthentic person who gets white people to give you money.

Is the main problem that the white poet had the nerve to appropriate a black voice or is it that he portrayed black people as pathetic and conniving? Or is it that he portrayed white people helping black people as a matter of white narcissism?

That is, I suspect that the hostility to Carlson-Wee came not because he tried to embody a suffering black person, but because he had that black person criticize the kind of good white person The Nation's readers like to think they are. Didn't pass the political test. And I see McWhorter as carrying forward a political test, though he paid almost no attention to it.

I'd like to think McWhorter would approve of the politics of the Carlson-Wee poem that means what I said it means. But even if the McWhorter seal of approval is all a white writer would need to have permission to depict a black style of speech, who would take the risk? And what writer would choose a project that entails the incessant inhibition of gunning for that approval?

"The Nation Magazine Betrays a Poet — and Itself/I was the magazine’s poetry editor for 35 years. Never once did we apologize for publishing a poem."

Writes Grace Shulman (in the NYT).

We followed a path blazed by Henry James, who in 1865 wrote a damning review of Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” calling the great poem “arrant prose.” Mistaken, yes, but it was James’s view at the time. And it was never retracted....

Last month, the magazine published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poet is white. His poem, “How-To,” draws on black vernacular.

Following a vicious backlash against the poem on social media, the poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, apologized for publishing it in the first place: “We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” they wrote in an apology longer than the actual poem. The poet apologized, too, saying, “I am sorry for the pain I caused.”...

As Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, put it, the magazine’s apology for Mr. Carlson-Wee’s work was “craven” and “looks like a letter from re-education camp.”...

It would not be proper for me to comment on the aesthetic merits of Mr. Carlson-Wee’s piece. That’s the job of the magazine’s current poetry editors. But going forward, I’d recommend they follow Henry James’s example. Just as he never apologized for his negative review of Whitman, they had zero reason to regret their decision.

You can read the poem and The Nation's apology here. Give The Nation some credit: It left the poem up. It just has this heavy-handed "Editor's note" introducing it. I'll reprint the whole thing:

In The Nation, critique of "The Elite Fixation With Russiagate."

By Aaron Maté:

From the outset, Russiagate proponents have exhibited a blind faith in the unverified claims of US government officials and other sources, most of them unnamed....

"Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful/A new study finds empirical evidence of the 'Trump Effect.'"

So says The Nation.

Liberal websites absorb/process the Al Franken news, part 5: The Nation.

The front page of The Nation is ready to impeach Donald Trump but eager to help Al Franken:



The Franken article, by Joan Walsh, is, "What Should Democrats Do About Al Franken?/With work, Franken can and should survive this story of his past bad behavior. But if there are more tales like this, he’s probably history." Walsh obviously loves Franken, and she's open about it. She "loved" his "hilarious" book and says it made her want him to run for President. She admits to having a "huge double standard":

I believed Moore’s accusers right away—especially given all the detail in their accounts, and all the corroborating witnesses. I confess: I spent at least 30 minutes looking for proof that Franken didn’t do what he’s accused of. 

That's how the human mind works. Good to admit it!

I reached out to women who are close to Franken, and at least two say they don’t know enough to confirm or deny it, but they’re devastated. I don’t know him well enough to be devastated, but I’m enormously sad.... This... really hurts....

She does not want Franken to resign: 

Franken has been an excellent senator; you can’t just trade him for a player to be named later. It’s one allegation, albeit an ugly one, and he’s apologized for it. If more come out, we can reexamine this question. But Republicans have persevered through much worse than this....

Franken has been an excellent senator, a committed feminist, a brilliant Trump foil, and the rare Democrat with a sense for the dramatic and the entertaining. We shouldn’t disown him just because Republicans want a scapegoat. We will have to, though, if these stories multiply, as they have with Trump and Moore. My fingers are crossed that they will not.

She's just rooting for her side, openly and nicely.

Meanwhile, 8 minutes after the Walsh piece went up, The Nation gave us "It Is Time to Impeach the President" by John Nichols. That's the balance at The Nation. Unlike Walsh, Nichols doesn't explain the urge to oust Trump in terms of his own personal emotional journey. He takes the lofty rational tone and says things like "The grounds for impeachment are sufficient, and they are well established" and who knows what a roiling cauldron of emotion Nichols is on the inside?

"Has the 'new normal' of the Trump age been causing you to take time out of your day to stare wistfully out a window, muttering audibly over a glass of wine?"

"Did you know you can support The Nation with that vino?"

This came in the email today:



Do you realize how unusual that is — advertising an alcohol beverage as a way to deal with unhappiness or any sort of problem? Can you think of any other time you've seen that? Normally, alcohol is advertised as aesthetically pleasing — delicious and beautifully packaged — or as an accompaniment to joyful activities. If the mood-altering power is referenced at all, it is in the context of making good times even better.

"A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack/Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system."

Writes Patrick Lawrence in The Nation. Excerpt:

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second....

Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between—but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone....

Who is hurt... who is helped...

... by this picture?

(Which I found on Facebook, here.)

There's also this:



As you contemplate the anti-Trump propaganda, please take into account the analysis of the editors of The Nation in "Against Neo-McCarthyism/In their eagerness to defeat Trump, liberal pundits are reviving a damaging discourse":

In their zeal to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president—a goal we share—representative voices of the liberal establishment have joined with the forces of neoconservatism to engage in what can only be described as McCarthyist rhetoric. This magazine, which has a long and proud history of standing up to the
 worst excesses of McCarthyism, repudiates this unwelcome echo of the past. Let us recall that McCarthyism impugned the loyalty of American citizens by accusing them of allegiance to the Soviet Union. This political defamation—often a joint undertaking of Congress and the media—suppressed democratic debate over alternative policies and ideas, and in the process destroyed lives by stigmatizing those whose views were deemed insufficiently loyal to Cold War–era orthodoxies. The overall effect was to poison, chill, and censor the political discourse of the nation....

Does Donald Trump drive you to drink?

The Nation is fund-raising on the assumption he does. In the email:

Are you looking for that perfect Malbec to pair with Donald Trump’s xenophobic and misogynistic rally speeches? Perhaps a complex Cabernet over which to discuss Bernie's case for democratic socialism? Maybe a simple Riesling to balance the rage you feel while watching the news...

Here's the whole thing. (Click to enlarge.)

"Bernie Sanders and his supporters are bending the arc of history toward justice."

"Theirs is an insurgency, a possibility, and a dream that we proudly endorse," writes The Nation. Why abandon Hillary?

"Rahm Emanuel Must Resign/From Laquan McDonald to Homan Square, Rahm has tacitly endorsed police violence."

By the Editors of The Nation.

If he goes, who will fix it? He has the strongest motivation and capacity of anyone. Is symbolism worth more, or do you just not trust him?

"Given what we know in 2015, the question is whether anybody is really 'playing' football."

"Are high schoolers risking their lives for a chance out of poverty or a sense of elevated status really 'playing'? Are those who take the field in the NCAA, exploited for billions of dollars in television revenue while working in a state of indentured servitude, 'playing'? Are the NFL athletes who have to treat every single play as a potential threat to their brains, and get an average of three and a half years on the field, 'playing'? The only people 'playing' in this scenario are egomaniacal coaches and parents, craven NCAA thought leaders, and NFL executives, all preaching intensity and sacrifice, but really just playing with the lives of others. They are the sports equivalent of the Bush-era chickenhawks. Note how many big-time basketball coaches have kids who play hoops and note how few football coaches can say the same."

That's Dave Zirin in The Nation: "Why Does Anybody Play Football Anymore?/Football has never been more popular. And it has never felt less like a game."

Yes, that's a bit extreme and over-politicized, but I'm interested in the precedence given to "play," the different meanings of "play," and the work/play distinction.

There seems to be an assumption that if something is a game, it should be play and not work. You should be having fun, not striving and struggling, not using it as a way to get money. But what's bad about having a serious, hard-working mindset in sports? There's no corresponding assumption that those of us who are doing jobs that are not games shouldn't feel that we are at play, having fun, feeling joy that's disconnected from the money we're making.

Why did the lawyer for Patrick Kane's accuser suddenly withdraw from the case one day after doing a news conference holding up a bag he said was tampered-with evidence?

Wednesday, Thomas Eoannou claimed the bag was evidence from his client's case and that he had it because somebody had left it on the doorstep of his client's mother.

But in a news conference on Thursday, he said that the facts surrounding the evidence bag had been misrepresented. “In keeping with my ethical obligations as an officer of the court,” Mr. Eoannou said, “I can no longer represent my client effectively and am withdrawing effective immediately.”...

In his own conference on Thursday, Kane’s lawyer, Paul Cambria, said... “It’s obvious to me that Eoannou dropped out of the case because someone in this woman’s family lied to him about the evidence... I told you yesterday that this was a hoax, and now it’s obvious.”

I first read about the Kane story yesterday in The Nation, where the headline was: "The Patrick Kane Case Marks a New Low in the Long History of Rape Accusations Against Athletes/After a rape kit was dumped at the door of his accuser’s mother, the NHL can no longer be silent." That concluded:

"Aaron Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers’ All-World quarterback with Berkeley pedigree and long established hipster’s snark, threw some shade on Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson..."

"... after Green Bay’s 27-17 victory on Sunday. In the post-game version of sub-tweeting. Rodgers commented that God 'was a Packers fan tonight,' as he seemed to visibly fight a grin. Rodgers’s comments, subtle as a blowtorch, are being read as a direct response to the garrulously religious Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson’s comments after last year’s truly 'miraculous' come-from-behind playoff win over the Pack when he said that a Higher Power made him throw four interceptions because, 'That’s God setting it up, to make it so dramatic, so rewarding, so special.'"

That's Dave Zirin in a piece at The Nation titled "Getting God Out of Football/Believers and non-believers alike should welcome Aaron Rodgers’s and Arian Foster’s dissent against the constant invocation of Christ in football."

I really don't care one way or the other whether football players attribute their fate to God. It's the kind of religion I put under the tag "lightweight religion." I'll join your effort to shush the God-talk from football players, Nation, if you first make it a thing to shame the casual "omigod"/"OMG" exclamations out of common speech. That's even more lightweight. Should we take offense or let it go?

I think The Nation just doesn't like football, and, sure enough, the truth comes out in the end, where we hear of the sport's "filthy underbelly" and "brain injuries" and "boozing and bacchanalia."

Bacchanalia. Who talks like that? People who build an argument on the idea that the person whose position they want to endorse has a "Berkeley pedigree." Rodgers didn't just go to Berkeley. He has a "pedigree." Yeesh. And as for "hipster’s snark" — the phrase that caused me to open up a "new post" window — when has Aaron Rodger's ever been considered a hipster? Hipster! Ridiculous.

And by the way, Rodgers actually was subtle:



Nothing blowtorch-y at all about that.

"If Carly Fiorina gains any traction from her barbed attacks on Hillary Clinton, the rightwing cartoons will practically draw themselves..."

"... Carly and Hillary in a teeth-baring cat fight, Carly’s claws like a tiger’s, HRC’s eyes as red as a Demon Sheep’s, and Benghazi burning in the background. As one man tweeted, 'Let the Cat Fight begin!! Fiorina will tear Hillary to shreds.'"

One man, eh?

The quote is from The Nation, and all I can say to you right-wingers is: Don't give the lefties what they want. You do see what they want, don't you? I'm not going to womansplain it to you. If you don't see what you shouldn't do, I'm not going to help.

Cruelly neutrally yours,

Your humble blogger, Althouse

"Latest" = Charles Lindbergh takes flight, "Insane" = Lindsey Graham.

A screenshot from The Nation:



"Charles Lindbergh Takes Flight for France" is a new article. It begins:

One scarcely knows where to begin in unpacking the historical ironies embedded in The Nation’s editorial heralding Lindbergh’s successful solo flight over the Atlantic—which was titled “'I Am Charles Lindbergh,’” citing a phrase apparently as ubiquitous then as “Je Suis Charlie” has been this year. 

Ah! How serendipitous. I'm writing a post about a headline and I run into an essay about a headline. The old 1927 article said:

The happiest feature of the country’s acclaim of Captain Lindbergh is that for once, everybody, of every shade of opinion, can agree.... The only discordant note comes from certain militarists in Washington, who dolefully warn us that America’s isolation is at an end, that the sea is no longer a rampart of defense....

The list of 10 "insane" things Lindsey Graham has said is here. It's mostly tough we-are-at-war talk, things like "Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war," which unfortunately don't sound insane. They're just clearly, memorably stated versions of ideas that most politicians deliver with more verbal padding.

Blaming the Jackie Robinson West Little League scandal on Rahm Emanuel.

"Mayor Rahm closed half a dozen schools in Jackie Robinson West’s part of the city, and tried to close the school, Marcus Garvey, where the founder of JRW—Joe Haley—worked. Then Chicago Public Schools cut funding for high school freshman sports, laid off a thousand teachers. CPS put forty kids in physical education classes and doesn’t even put a librarian in most of the school libraries in [the South Side district of] Auburn Gresham."

From "Gentrification Is the Real Scandal Surrounding Jackie Robinson West," in The Nation.