Tag: Reading

The notion of reaching out to the Williams family or other massacre descendants during the development did not occur to him, Lindelof said, though the production team did consult with the Greenwood Cultural Center and used various primary-source documents. “It didn’t feel like it was appropriation. It felt like we were telling history,” he said. Entertainment conglomerates, such as Warner Media, HBO’s parent company, have used trademark and copyright laws to protect their intellectual property for decades. For large corporations and wealthy families, such legal maneuvers are easy. For average people, seeing their stories come to light is often assumed to be payment enough.

But even for Trump, there was something particularly over the top about his debate performance on Tuesday night. It was more of a primal scream than a political appearance, a rant by a man who not only cannot control himself but, for some reason, thinks he does not have to try. Who could this possibly have been designed to persuade? For the last few months, as polls have shown the decisive suburbs slipping away from him, Trump has talked about his appeal to the “suburban housewives” of America. If there is a single additional suburban housewife, or any woman, who is voting for Trump after that debate, I would like to meet her. The bottom line is that Trump’s chances for a second term are dwindling fast. He knows it. Which is why he will not shut up, on the debate stage or anywhere else, for the next thirty-four days. At this point, there is only one way to get Donald Trump to shut up. “Elections have consequences,” he said, in his very first answer of the evening. To which America will soon have its chance to reply: yes, they do.

Small or large, personal or industrial—retrieving anything from space is immensely difficult, and has been done on just a handful of occasions. The military tracks about twenty-six thousand artifacts orbiting Earth, but its catalogue recognizes only objects larger than ten centimetres; the total number is much greater. By one estimate, there are a hundred million bits of debris that are a millimetre in size, a hundred trillion as small as a micron. We live in a corona of trash.

Wallace kept trying to get the President to say that he would play by the normal rules, but each exchange only encouraged Trump to signal that he wouldn’t. A few minutes earlier, Wallace had asked the President about right-wing militia groups. Trump responded, “What do you want me to call them?” The Proud Boys, Biden said, from the other podium, naming a prominent far-right group. Trump said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” Biden flashed a big grin, which covered some of the chill of the moment: Had Trump meant to condemn the right-wing militias or encourage them? The Proud Boys’ chairman, Enrique Tarrio, wrote online, “Standing by sir.”

As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting.”

As Election Day approaches, the President has escalated his level of incitement. With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, last week, a battle with the Democrats in the Senate is almost inevitable. Trump has already moved from allegations of fraud to intimations of unlawfulness and violence. “Gotta be careful with those ballots,” he said on September 8th, in a speech in North Carolina. “Watch those ballots. I don’t like it.” He continued, “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.” Trump has advised his supporters to vote twice—once by absentee and once at the polls, to make sure their votes count. (This would be a crime.) He has expressed sympathy for the anti-Black Lives Matter counter-protesters who fired paintballs at their adversaries in Portland, and has defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the pro-Trump vigilante who is accused of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump also retweeted a prediction that political unrest “could lead to ‘rise of citizen militias around the country.’ ” In light of these provocations, it seems that anything short of a landslide for either Biden or Trump could lead to chaos. It’s unsurprising that, when the Transition Integrity Project, a group of a hundred bipartisan experts, ran a series of simulations, they concluded that “the potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

In the video, Troye recounts when Trump, a noted germaphobe, met with the coronavirus task force, early on in the crisis, and told its members that perhaps the pandemic was a good thing because he would no longer have to shake hands with all the “disgusting people” at his rallies and other public events. During our interview, I asked Troye if she could remember other particularly memorable times when Trump spoke privately to the group. She recalled how Trump refused several times to consider urgent business that the task force presented to him, deciding “to talk about himself and a preferred news network and how upset he was with them, instead of focussing on the agenda at hand.” Fox News coverage, in other words, preoccupied the President more than saving American lives. I asked Troye if that shocked her. “No,” she said. She remembered what she thought at the time: “This is exactly what you would expect.”

As to when do you go off the rails, the answer is when somebody says something that’s really funny. Suddenly you realize there is a comedy idea there that wasn’t there five seconds before, and it’s almost as good as an orgasm. David Sherlock, who was Graham’s boyfriend, would be downstairs, and we’d be upstairs, and suddenly he would hear an enormous amount of noise—shrieking and drumming of feet—and that was the moment when we both saw that there was a great comic possibility.

In 2008, Hawke married Ryan Shawhughes, a month before their first daughter, Clementine, was born. Shawhughes, who had worked briefly as a nanny for him and Thurman while she was a student at Columbia University, “turned his life around,” according to O’Brien. As well as managing Hawke’s finances, she has collaborated with him artistically, co-producing “First Reformed,” “Seymour,” a film version of his novel “The Hottest State,” and “Blaze,” a 2018 bio-pic about the country singer Blaze Foley, which was Hawke’s first major outing as a director. In 2011, Hawke called his mother to tell her that Shawhughes was pregnant with their second child, Indiana. As he remembers it, Leslie said, “Ethan, you’re gonna go broke. You have so many children. You’re crazy.” She hung up and then called right back. “I take that back,” she said. “The best thing that could happen to you and your children is you go broke. You need to keep your hunger alive. Have more children. Just don’t stop making good art.”

The first hints that Woodward, too, thinks that Trump’s Presidency might be somehow salvageable occur on the first page, when Woodward suggests that Trump might be too “consumed” by impeachment to pay attention to his job. (In classic Woodward fashion, he contradicts himself—or perhaps lets slip the absurdity of the entire formulation—when he mentions, four pages later, that the Super Bowl was also consuming Trump’s attention.) Many of these scenes—and this attitude toward Trump—will be familiar to readers of “Fear,” but the second half of the narrative is distinct because of the presence of Woodward himself. He has never been shy about using himself as a character in his books, whether in some memorable tête-à-têtes with Donald Rumsfeld or his famous account of a deathbed conversation with William Casey, in which the former C.I.A. director admitted having known that money from Iranian arms sales was being funnelled to the Nicaraguan Contras. (Others have questioned the story.)

In 2013, for example, a Boeing engineer suggested installing a computer-based airspeed indicator to supplement the 737 max’s single external speed sensor, the faulty operation of which is suspected of triggering the mcas in the two deadly crashes: Lion Air Flight 610, on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, on March 10, 2019. The engineer’s request “was rejected by Boeing management due to cost concerns and because adding synthetic airspeed could have jeopardized the 737 MAX program’s directive to avoid pilot simulator training requirements,” the report says. If Boeing had told airlines that their pilots would need extensive retraining to fly the new planes, including instruction on how to react to an activation of the mcas, the airlines might have been less eager to order them. Not only did Boeing neglect to inform the airlines about the new feature, but it removed any references to the mcas from the operations manual that pilots of the 737 max relied on.