Category: You Should See This

True literature can thrive only in places where literature is created not by obedient and reliable bureaucrats but by madmen, recluses, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. Where a writer must be reasonable, faithful like a Catholic, useful in the present moment, where he cannot flail at everyone as Jonathan Swift did or smile at everything as Anatole France does, there can be no literature that is cast in bronze—there can only be the sort printed on paper, the newsprint sort that’s read today and used to wrap bars of soap tomorrow.

“These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists,” she said. “They are — by design — dividing us and radicalizing us.”

Holding the camera himself, he says, “changes the energy of the room.” Part of Wilson’s charm is that he almost never lets this energy provoke a cringe, except at his own expense. That reversal is the point of astonishment in “How To Cover Furniture,” a rumination on how we try to protect things from harm. At its climax, an interior designer answers Wilson’s questions with a friendly evisceration of his whole vibe: His camera, she says, is a protective mechanism, which he uses to connect with people from behind a barrier. She looks into its lens and offers advice that feels both kind and situationally hostile: “I would love for you, sometimes in your life, in your head, to be like, ‘I should put the camera down in this situation. I should just be John.’”

Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

“All of our food, directly or indirectly, comes from the process of photosynthesis,” Long told me. “And we know that even our very best crops are only achieving a fraction of photosynthesis’s theoretical efficiency. So, if we can work out how to improve photosynthesis, we can boost yields. We won’t have to go on destroying yet more land for crops—we can try to produce more on the land we’re already using.”

In the studio, Kenny G displays his own relentless adjustments of his own playing; he plays his soprano sax, and then has the recording engineer demonstrate the way it will sound on the record, after multiple “reverbs” are added to it—and this, the saxophonist says, is “what it really sounds like.” And, he adds, “When I give it my stamp of approval, I sit back and go, ‘That’s fuckin’ beautiful.’ I just say it.”

Young people in a Missouri college town kept killing themselves. A parent of one victim is convinced that her son’s friend encouraged the deaths. Has a sinister figure been exposed, or is it a case of misplaced blame?

“They wanna know why all these muthafuckin’ cops are here talkin’ with me,” McDaniel says. “And you know what? So do I.”

Just three days into their work, there was a knock at the door. Xia assumed it was someone calling them to dinner, until she saw men in uniforms with badges. Initially, it was impossible to communicate, until an officer who spoke Mandarin arrived. He asked the workers if they knew what kind of “flowers” they were cutting. One by one, they shook their heads.