As news of rampant corruption and industrial-scale dishonesty engulf his presidency, Donald Trump has found a novel way to fight back: Retweeting Twitter videos of himself rotoscoped in the style of director Steve Barron’s 1985 groundbreaking music video for A-Ha’s “Take on Me.” Seriously! Here is the current pinned tweet from the President of the United States of America:
The video comes from Twitter user @realPowerTie, who tweeted it out several times before the president decided to share his work with the world:
But while @realPowerTie had the vision of putting Trump in a music video from more than three decades ago, NBC deserves at least co-production credit, because they produced the source material—presumably at great expense to the network, and undeniably at great expense to the nation—for at least two shots in the video. Here’s one of the original sources, from November 7, 2015, when they let Donald Trump host Saturday Night Live:
It is so nice to be reminded of these funny, humanizing, NBC-produced Donald Trump moments as impeachment looms, and we can only hope that as the process continues, the president will stand by his longstanding commitment to dragging everyone who ever enabled him down right along with him. As for dragging his enemies down, this video won’t do it: As historian Kevin Kruse pointed out on Twitter, the part in the video that takes aim at Chuck Schumer depends on no one looking up the source of the footage:
In other words, things are continuing to get dumber and weirder at an unprecedented pace. So before rotoscoping—a perfectly fine filmmaking technique that doesn’t deserve to be associated with this garbage—gets ruined forever, here’s the video for “Take On Me,” from A-Ha, which deservedly won six MTV Music Video Awards in 1986, a few months after Donald Trump’s 40th birthday. Were we ever so young?
Anyway, on the off chance Donald Trump is desperately looking for advice to avoid impeachment—and he’s currently retweeting tribute videos animated in the style of A-Ha, so maybe it’s more than an off chance—here’s a useful tip: The better-known music video for A-Ha’s “Take On Me” is not the original, and it’s not even the original recording of the song. Here’s the version that did not win any MTV Music Video Awards:
I think I speak for every American when I say that if Donald Trump spent the next few weeks painstakingly producing a shot-for-shot remake of the original “Take On Me” video in which he played all the parts, leotard cartwheels very much included, it wouldn’t change anything at all about his impeachment, but it’d be a whole lot cooler than whatever it is he’s doing now. Please, Mr. President: Start ripping up your t-shirts!
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If you were a small one-eyed monster, would you want to visit a black hole? Well the one in this video does -- but should it? No, actually, but since our little friend is insistent on going, the video informs it what black holes really are, and how to be as safe as possible when visiting. Black holes are clumps of matter so dense that light cannot escape. Pairs of black holes, each several times the mass of our Sun, have recently been found to merge by detection of unusual gravitational radiation. The regions surrounding supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies can light up as stars that near them get shredded. The closest known black hole to the Earth is V616 Mon, which is about 3,300 light years away. The best way for our monster friend to stay safe, the video informs, is to not go too close. via NASA https://ift.tt/2nhrA1r
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Episode Notes
On The Gist, what’s going on at Café Altura?
In the interview, journalist Amanda Aronczyk is here to talk with Mike about her recent series for WNYC’s The Stakes podcast, “A History of Persuasion.” Through the lens of Ted Kaczynski she explores the way behavioral psychology has been used to shape the way we think, and how the manipulation has only ramped up thanks to the tech industry.
In the Spiel, Giuliani, Stephen Miller, and self-impeachment.
President Donald Trump arrives to speak after touring the Lima Army Tank Plant in Ohio on March 20.
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
“Impeachment,” wrote British historian and ambassador Viscount James Bryce, “is the heaviest piece of artillery in the congressional arsenal, but because it is so heavy it is unfit for ordinary use. It is like a hundred-ton gun which needs complex machinery to bring it into position, an enormous charge of powder to fire it, and a large mark to aim at.”
The House has rolled out the hundred-ton gun. An extraordinary measure, befitting extraordinary circumstances. President Donald Trump has long shown manifest unfitness for office, but the Ukraine scandal stands apart. Last week we learned of Trump’s Mafioso-like conditioning of foreign military aid on help criminally investigating a political rival. We will continue learning more as details trickle out, especially if Congressman Adam Schiff succeeds in persuading the still-anonymous whistleblower to testify. But it would be a mistake to imagine that Schiff’s success in getting that testimony is vital: We already know enough to say that Trump has betrayed his country and endangered national security.
But that knowledge only begins the inquiry. Impeachment is a fearsome power, and our Constitution demands careful inquiry before its deployment. The goal of impeachment, after all, is not merely shortening an abusive leader’s time in office. The goal is safeguarding American democracy. An impeachment proceeding, even when successful, rips asunder the national fabric and leaves lasting scars on our already-fragile public psyche. Those costs are real and serious.
Yet there remain circumstances in which impeachment is absolutely necessary despite its costs. Impeachment is fraught with peril, but so too is non-impeachment: The long-term damage to our nation from tolerating the intolerable counts, too. We must take seriously both sets of costs.
Given these complexities, responsible discussions of impeachment must consider three questions. First, has the president engaged in conduct that warrants his removal under the Constitution? Second, is the effort to remove him likely to make a positive impact—or will impeachment be a mere quixotic quest? And third, would impeachment be worth the resulting rupturing of our national fabric?
In other words: Is impeachment permissible? Is it reasonably likely to succeed? And is it worth it? Let us review the evidence.
High crimes and misdemeanors
Americans have never reduced to a simple formula what it means to commit “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” A working definition captures two general elements. First, impeachable offenses represent betrayal of office. And second, those offenses pose such a serious risk of harm that they require preventive action—in other words, they suggest that the president endangers the nation. Such offenses may involve a pattern of closely related abuses, rather than a single deed. But the ultimate inquiry is whether the president has so betrayed his office and poses such a continuing threat that leaving him in power could imperil our constitutional democracy.
This president has done just that.
Begin with the White House readout of Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That readout, even in its presumably sanitized form, reveals a multitude of impeachable offenses. On that call, Trump abused the foreign policy and military powers entrusted to the president by Article II to serve his own political interests—and perhaps those of his sometime benefactor, Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose tanks have penetrated Ukrainian territory and would be opposed by the military aid Trump was unilaterally withholding—rather than the interests of the American people.
The goal of impeachment, after all, is not merely shortening an abusive leader’s time inoffice.
The resultant cover-up, too, is staggering. We have learned that the effort to protect the president ensnared numerous senior White House officials, including the lawyers representing not the president personally but the presidential office. Indeed, the whistleblower complaint alleges that the cover-up was part of a pattern of systematically overclassifying politically embarrassing information to protect the president. Such conduct betrays the institution of the presidency and poses a clear and present danger to our national security. It does so by compromising the integrity of our system for classifying intelligence, thereby undermining the confidence of our key allies in how the secrets they share with us will be handled. And it conceals the ongoing danger posed to our most sensitive secrets by the seemingly reckless way our commander in chief deploys those secrets for personal advantage or political leverage.
The only real question now is whether an impeachment inquiry should focus narrowly on the Ukraine events or broadly examine the mosaic of offenses Trump has committed while in office and in the course of acquiring the presidency. Both approaches have merit. On one hand, Ukraine-gate offers a clear reckoning: Its disgraceful character is undeniable (though many have tried, sometimes by pretending not to know what our president said to Ukraine’s). On the other, it represents just one of the myriad abuses Trump has perpetrated during his time in office, and highlighting his repeated national betrayals might emphasize the urgency of his removal.
In any event, one fact is clear: We already know enough to impeach. Trump is so demagogic, corrupt, and self-aggrandizing that he normalizes conduct that ought to have been deemed impeachable from the start. We must interrupt his attempts at normalization. What we have now is enough. The transcript is enough. The cover-up is enough. Enough is enough.
Impeachment politics
The president has committed impeachable offenses. But that sad reality does not end the conversation. The House retains the discretion to decline impeachment, even where the underlying offenses warrant it. Often the House will have valid reasons for staying its hand—political, legal, or otherwise. Not here. Trump’s manifest betrayals of his oath require immediate action.
One common argument from the left against impeachment is that the Senate is all but certain not to convict, so the whole process will only strengthen Trump. Not so. Formal impeachment by the House, whatever further evidence comes out, might put useful pressure on senators to stand up and be counted rather than be seen by the nation as burying the case alive. The House might also decline to refer the matter to the Senate for trial. The House is empowered to reach a verdict on its own after conducting a full and fair hearing without a referral to the Senate, as I have argued elsewhere.
Even still, there is no doubt that Trump will seek to exploit a senatorial acquittal on the 2020 campaign trail. But that is all but irrelevant, because, whatever happens, this president will claim vindication and witch hunt, his familiar tropes. Indeed, he is already crying “treason” to brand those who are investigating his conduct with the most lethal term our legal and political lexicon has to offer. We cannot make decisions based on fear of what fables Trump might spin.
Our national trauma
The primary arguments against impeachment—articulated by liberals like Bruce Ackerman, moderates like Frank Bruni, and reactionaries like John Yoo—do not deny the gravity of the president’s violations. Rather, they argue that impeachment is not worth the national costs of enraging the incumbent president’s supporters, fanning the flames of the white-hot anger that drove many of them into his camp in the first place, and leaving even some who might be prepared to vote against Trump in 2020 with the sense that a group composed almost entirely of Democrats is illegitimately undoing the results of an election with which they never came to terms. We should weigh those costs carefully as we consider how to proceed.
But those concerns cannot outweigh the imminent concern of a lawless presidency. Yes, impeachment would be traumatic. But what is the alternative? Acquiescing to lawlessness out of fear? And declining to impeach would be traumatic as well.
Impeachment is, in any event, unlikely to be as nationally dangerous as the alternative. The nation is so divided that whatever added division the impeachment and trial process entail would not qualitatively worsen the situation—at least on balance, if one weighs impeachment against the bitterness, despair, and helplessness that failure to impeach would leave in its wake. If we are honestly ready to say we would impeach even if we were sympathetic to the president’s policies and not opposed to him on purely personal grounds unrelated to the survival of our republic, if we would vote to impeach even if the shoe were on the other foot, then we should not hesitate out of sheer nervousness. Caution is appropriate. Cowardice is not.
Yes, impeachment would be perilous. But not nearly as perilous as the alternative. Inaction is no longer an option. It’s time for the hundred-ton gun.
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Protesters holding umbrellas to protect against water cannons face tear gas from Hong Kong police on September 29, 2019.
Mohd Rasfan/Getty Images
After a weekend of demonstrations that turned out to be the most violent the region has seen in years, Hong Kong is bracing for mass protests during the Chinese government’s 70th anniversary celebration on Tuesday.
According to Reuters, the city has moved to shut down its metro stations and block off roads near the planned official celebration of the day. The government rejected a formal request for a permitted protest, citing safety concerns, but a large number of protesters are still expected to turn out to voice their anger over what they see as efforts by a repressive Chinese government to erode the region’s democratic rights under the one-country-two-systems framework.
Ominously, the Chinese government has doubled the number of troops in Hong Kong, Reuters reported Monday. There are now an estimated 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese troops in the region—up from 3,000 to 5,000 before August—even though state-run media have claimed that they are not increasing military presence there, according to Reuters. Some of that number include members of a separate paramilitary force that specializes in riot control. So far, Beijing has been willing to sit back and let Hong Kong’s own security forces handle the protests, but a full crackdown is feared. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam had said last month that China was not planning to intervene and put down the demonstrations itself, but the movement of troops into what is now thought to be the largest-ever Chinese force in Hong Kong indicates it’s highly possible the mainland government will make a show of force on Tuesday.
The chaos in Hong Kong over the weekend hinted at the conflict that may be expected Tuesday. At Sunday’s unsanctioned march, which was billed as a “Global anti-totalitarianism rally,” more than 100 people were arrested, the South China Morning Post reported. Protesters carried signs comparing the Chinese president Xi Jinping to Hitler and China to historical authoritarian regimes, smashed the windows of government buildings, plastered pro-democracy posters around the city, and spray-painted anti-government messages on mainland Chinese businesses. The black-clad protesters clashed with police, who tried to contain the crowds with tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and water cannons. Activists fought back by throwing bricks and starting street fires. More than a dozen people, including an Indonesian journalist who was shot in the face by a nonlethal projectile, were injured.
On Monday, two high-profile Hong Kong activists were arrested and charged with crimes related to vandalism in connection to earlier protests.
Meanwhile, in Beijing itself, dissidents were warned by the government to keep a low profile ahead of Tuesday’s celebrations, according to the Guardian. Some were put under surveillance or removed from the city. Others were warned that police would stand guard outside their homes during the celebrations. Others throughout mainland China were reportedly also harassed.
This week marks both the 17th week of political demonstrations in Hong Kong and the fifth anniversary of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. This year’s protests began in June over an extradition bill that would have allowed people in Hong Kong to be sent to mainland China to stand trial. Lam has since pledged to withdraw the bill, but the largely leaderless movement continued, expanding its demands to include universal suffrage, direct democratic elections, and an independent investigation into alleged police brutality and excessive force.
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Donald Trump holds a National Sheriffs’ Association award at the White House on Sept. 26.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The original Impeach-O-Meter was a wildly subjective and speculative estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump would be removed before his term ended. Republicans have since established that there’s nothing that Trump could do to lose their support, making a conviction in the GOP-held Senate inconceivable. But as evidence of the president’s criminal unfitness for office continues to accumulate, an increasing number of Democrats are willing to say that he should be held accountable, at the least, via impeachment proceedings in the House. So we’ve relaunched the Impeach-O-Meter as a (still wildly subjective and speculative) estimate of the likelihood that the House votes to impeach Trump before the end of his first term.
House Democrats are launching their investigation of Donald Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme with what for them is an unusual level of urgency. But it will still take some time to obtain documents and schedule witnesses, so there haven’t any major substantive developments in the story since last Friday. The facts that are already public about it are incriminating, though—and, because the bulk of the evidence against the president comes form a document whose release he authorized, they’re also unusually spin-resistant.
Perhaps relatedly, public polling is consistently finding majority support for impeachment hearings.
With both the facts and the public against him, Trump is, to use a political science term, going berserk. On Sunday he sent or retweeted 20 Twitter posts about a Fox News host, Ed Henry, who’d suggested in measured terms that Trump’s conduct toward Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky may not have been appropriate. (One of the retweets referred to Henry as a “lying shit head.”) Then he wrote out and endorsed a statement that MAGA megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress made on Fox in which Jeffress warned that impeachment would cause a “Civil War-like fracture.” Finally, Trump has begun demanding that House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff be arrested and “questioned at the highest level” for committing treason, the alleged treason having occurred when Schiff paraphrased Trump’s conversation with Zelensky in the manner of a Mafia-style shakedown during a hearing last Thursday:
(Schiff made clear before his account of the conversation that he was conveying its “essence” in “not so many words,” not reading it verbatim.)
Trump’s party does not seem to be embracing this crisis-response approach. GOP Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger (who represents a district that Trump won by 17 points) called the civil war tweet “beyond repugnant,” while Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who typically finds that Senate rules require him to do exactly what is most politically beneficial for the Republican Party, announced that Senate rules require him to hold a trial—as opposed to having a quick vote to dismiss charges or ignoring the issue altogether—if the House votes to impeach:
At some point, you’d have to imagine that the brain-possessing members of the GOP will force Trump to start taking some better legal and political advice. But it’s also starting to become possible to at least begin to think about imagining that said advice will be “you should resign because you’ve screwed everything up.” And that’s when things will really start to get interesting, because he definitely won’t want to do that!
Illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo and Lisa Larson-Walker/Slate. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Win McNamee/Getty Images, Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, and Peter Parks-Pool/Getty Images.
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For 5 nights in July 2019, shortly after dusk, an American landmark disappeared from the Washington, D.C. skyline. The spotlights on the Washington Monument dimmed to reveal a monumental tribute to the Space Age: a life-sized projection of the Saturn V rocket, the tallest, heaviest, most powerful launch vehicle ever built. Expelling digital puffs of water vapor as it towered over the National Mall, the dynamic projection breathed new life into NASA's 50-year-old Apollo moon landing program.
With special permission from Congress, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum orchestrated this commemorative event, which culminated in a feature presentation of "Apollo 50: Go for the Moon." This 17-minute visual spectacular told the story of the 8-day mission across 3 screens and the eastern face of the Washington Monument. The production married historic audio recordings and video footage with the highest quality computer-generated imagery and a swelling score.
Thousands gathered on the Mall for the screenings on July 19 and 20. Friends and family sprawled across picnic blankets and perched on folding chairs, with snacks and cameras close at hand. A group of 20-somethings played the Interstellar soundtrack on a Bluetooth speaker. Food trucks distributed ice cream and hot dogs to hungry visitors awaiting the start of the show. The air heavy with humidity and anticipation, the spirit of launch day was alive on the National Mall.
NASA / Bill Ingalls
Apollo 50th Anniversary at the National Mall
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum projected a full-scale Saturn V on the Washington Monument to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first crewed lunar landing.
In the days leading up to the launch of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969, people from across the country and the world poured into Brevard County, Florida, home of NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Roadways were gridlocked and regional airports reported 4 to 5 times their usual traffic. The Sheriff's Department estimated that somewhere between 750,000 to 900,000 tourists assembled along the county's coastline to witness this history-making event.
One observer described the scene that Wednesday morning as a "mammoth family picnic" filled with "kids and sand castles and the smell of suntan lotion and a sea of blankets and six-packs of Busch strapped to belt loops and lovers in the sand dunes and bridge games and paper bags fashioned into sun shades and dogs like fuzzy brown mushrooms." People set up telescopes alongside charcoal grills, waved American flags, and displayed hand-painted signs wishing the astronauts well. Residents sold them orange juice from local citrus groves and an enterprising youngster rented seats in a makeshift grandstand in her parents' backyard.
At 9:32 a.m., all eyes turned to the sky as Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong began their ascent towards the moon. Millions more watched from the comfort of home courtesy of ABC, CBS, and NBC. As the mission unfolded, 53 million households (nearly 94% of all homes with a television set) tuned in. The moon landing had the largest audience of any event in history up to that point.
United in their viewership, Americans were in fact deeply divided over the value of Project Apollo. The program's staggering cost—projected to exceed $20 billion—and accelerated pace caused great concern. Many people felt that the money spent on the lunar landing program should be applied to terrestrial issues, such as curing cancer, improving education, and fighting poverty. Others feared that the race to the moon diverted America's best minds—scientists, engineers, and managers—from the same problems. Public opinion polls reveal that, in the 8 years between Kennedy's directive and touch down at Tranquility Base, 45 to 60% of Americans believed Project Apollo was not worth the costs.
NASA
Earth-bound Space Tourists
Motivated by the novel spectacle of spaceflight, tourists were drawn to NASA centers around the country. But it took congressional action to create the visitor centers that accommodate and excite members of the public about space exploration.
This widespread ambivalence alarmed Olin Teague, chair of the House Subcommittee for Manned Spaceflight, who understood the correlation between public approval and appropriations. In 1964 Teague wrote to NASA Administrator James E. Webb with a radical suggestion to rally support for Project Apollo: opening the Kennedy Space Center to the public. Recognizing the space agency's need to encourage public participation in its programs, Webb endorsed Teague's proposal. Modest visitor programming began in the fall of 1964 and a formal visitor center opened in 1967. By then, the Kennedy Space Center had become one of the top tourist attractions in pre-Disney Florida. (To learn more, check out my interview with Casey Dreier here.)
More than fifty years later, the Kennedy Space Center is still a wildly popular destination, welcoming over 1.5 million visitors a year. It is a place where people from across the globe come to learn about and celebrate America's activities in space. Ironically, the visitor programs emerged from a moment of criticism rather than celebration. Tourism at the Kennedy Space Center is an important, if forgotten, legacy of Project Apollo.
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At the end of Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence—an austere and sublime 161-minute epic about faith, doubt, and suffering, set in the world of Portuguese missionaries in 17th-century Japan—I remember thinking: If this is Scorsese’s last movie, I’m OK with that. I didn’t want it to be, mind you, and the evidence offered by the film itself, the sheer ambition of the project and the energy required for its execution, suggested that the master had more than one film left in him. But Silence, with its elegiac tone and somber subject matter, might have served as a fitting farewell, in part because the world it explored was so different from the material usually associated with the creator of urban gangster sagas like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino,Gangs of New York, and The Departed. Of course, Scorsese has made other films explicitly concerned with religious experience—Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ could be considered the first two parts of a trilogy that ends with Silence—but the deepest mark he’s left on the culture is as our great modern poet of organized crime.
What a double joy, then, to have Scorsese’s next film after Silence not only answer the question “Does he have one more in him?” with a resounding yes, but for that same film to be an audacious masterwork that brings the themes dear to Silence (mortality, loneliness, the struggle between faith and doubt) into a version of the culturally specific milieu that Scorsese grew up immersed in and understands to his bones. The bulk of The Irishman, based on Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses, takes place not in the Little Italy of the director’s New York childhood but in mid-20th-century Philadelphia, where Frank Sheehan (Robert De Niro), the Irishman of the title, goes from being a mildly crooked meat-delivery truck driver to rising in the ranks of the Italian mob as a ruthless and dependably discreet hit man.
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Our first glimpse of Frank is as an old man in a wheelchair in the common room of a Catholic nursing home, at the end of a long opening shot that establishes his everyday world—life-size statues of saints, nurses bearing IV bags, codgers doing jigsaw puzzles—with as much style and skill as a similar tracking shot in Goodfellas that introduced us to the romanticized world of gangster life as seen through the eyes of Ray Liotta’s not-yet-made-man Henry Hill. In a voice-over that starts inside Sheeran’s head and then turns into spoken language, Frank promises to tell us a story that will explain it all: how he ended up there; who were the people he knew, loved, and killed along the way; and what the whole thing—his life—has meant. It’s that last question that proves too intractable even for this movie’s 210 leisurely minutes to address. But that very intractability—the lack of an interpretive framework that could make sense of a life lived in the service of violence, power, and money—is a part of The Irishman’s point. It’s a film about the inherent inadequacy of stories, the way our lives exceed (or at times simply outlast) the narratives we cling to about ourselves and the people around us.
In order to tell us his story, Frank must go back in time—a move accomplished narratively through a series of intricately nested flashbacks and visually via a digital technique that puts De Niro’s familiar grizzled face, along with those of a few of his most famous co-stars, through a kind of age-reversing filter. The effect, while it takes a few scenes to get used to, is shockingly successful. As Frank recalls a road trip he once took with his boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and their wives (Stephanie Kurtzuba and Kathrine Narducci), we see him at the wheel of his old tank of a car, slightly less wrinkled and gray, but already stolid and worn down by years of serving as fixer and hit man for a Philadelphia crime family. A stop near the gas station where Russ and Frank first met years before triggers another flashback, and another injection of digital Botox: Frank, not yet associated with the Mafia, is the driver of a meat-delivery truck who pads his paycheck by occasionally stealing the goods to sell under the table. When he’s defended in court by a mob lawyer (Ray Romano) who also happens to be Russ’ cousin, Frank falls into the orbit of the Bufalino crime family. His ability to carry out orders of the most grisly kind, established in a further flashback to his service in WWII, serves him well as he rises through the ranks.
That rise is depicted with none of the glamour of Ray Liotta’s gangster apotheosis in Goodfellas. Though the two films rhyme in many moments—that long opening shot, or a late scene involving a shared prison meal—The Irishman isn’t a bildungsroman but an elegy. The world in which it takes place is fallen from the start: Frank harbors no illusions about the allure of violence or the beauty of Mafia brotherhood. He does, however, grow attached to some of the men he’s hired to protect, especially the legendary Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who enters this capacious saga at around the one-hour point, played by Al Pacino with a curious mixture of menace, paranoia, and sweetness. (Both Pacino and De Niro seem more energized by their roles in The Irishman than they have been by anything they’ve done in years. As for the too-long-absent Joe Pesci, he dials his Goodfellas-era bluster way back and delivers what may be the movie’s best performance—quiet, focused, and, like much of the dialogue by Steven Zaillian, intermittently very funny.)
Joe Pesci dials his Goodfellas-era bluster way back and delivers what may be the movie’s bestperformance.
After he takes on a role as Hoffa’s combination bodyguard and consigliere, Frank ascends to a different rung in the hierarchy. He’s entrusted with more secrets but also expected to carry out more dangerous high-profile hits, including the real-life killing of “Crazy Joe” Gallo at a Little Italy clam house and, ultimately, the assassination of Hoffa himself. (Whether Sheeran really was “the Forrest Gump of organized crime,” stumbling into a role in nearly every significant chapter across three decades of mob history, is a matter that has faced heavy skepticism from Mafia experts.) But before that climactic betrayal, Hoffa also becomes close to Frank’s family, especially his daughter Peggy (played by Lucy Gallina as a child and Anna Paquin as a young woman), who’s sharp-eyed enough to realize early on that something fishy is going on with her dad’s irregular hours and frequent late-night disappearances. The dearth of significant female characters in The Irishman will no doubt cause some discussion, and it would have been satisfying to see Paquin get at least one juicy dialogue scene amid all the silent glances and angry glares. But part of the point of the Peggy subplot is to establish how peripheral a role Frank’s wife and four daughters played in his emotional life, such as it was.
A huge part of the power of this richly layered, temporally twisting film is its sheer duration. In many ways, it’s a movie about duration, about the subjective experience of passing through time and the tragedy of outlasting nearly everyone you love. The way Frank’s life story seems to expand and contract with the rhythm of his telling—individual days are recalled in pristine detail, while whole decades whoosh past in a blur—sometimes put me in mind of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, which also, like The Irishman, concludes with an extended meditation on aging and loss. Those final scenes wouldn’t have the melancholy sting they do without the weight of everything that’s come before. I’d be hard-pressed to say that the three-plus hours of The Irishman fly by, but it’s also tough to think of a single individual scene I’d want to lose. Between the burnished sheen of Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, a soundtrack full of perfectly chosen period pop music, and countless sharply observed details of place, time, and character, The Irishman establishes a world that, for all its violence and tragedy, is hard to leave behind when the last shot (which again echoes Goodfellas, with its closing image of an anxious retired mobster framed by an open door) finally comes. The goodfella has aged into an oldfella, but at some point, won’t we all?
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"I am very pleased to inform you that Bobby Braun will be joining the Laboratory Executive leadership team effective January 15, 2020 in this capacity. ... Due to the increasingly integrated nature of NASA's Planetary program, and to Bobby's long experience with the Mars Program, we will conduct a study this fall to merge significant portions of the existing Mars Exploration Directorate (6X) into the Solar System Exploration Directorate (4X)."
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station plan to conduct what may become a record pace of 10 complex spacewalks during the next three months, a cadence that has not been experienced since assembly of the space station was completed in 2011.
September 30, 2019
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Sometimes you find a profound political statement in the middle of a goofy adventure story. In Season 2 of the superhero show DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, our team of superpowered misfits use their badass time ship to correct historical “aberrations” during the Civil War. Jax, one of the team’s black characters, is shocked when he meets slaves for the first time. Not because of how horribly they are treated—he already knew about that—but because they still have so much hope for the future, even when they’ve been beaten and tied up for disobedience.
Jax is there to prevent a malicious time-traveler from changing the course of the war, but he decides to make his own unauthorized changes. Untying the slaves so they can escape, he realizes he’s creating new potential historical aberrations. But Jax welcomes this possibility. “Slavery is the aberration,” he says. With that one line, he explains both the lure of time-travel fiction and the reason why it feels so vital during periods of dramatic political instability like our own.
In time-travel stories about the past, history isn’t merely an exotic setting—it’s a problem that needs to be solved. In some cases, this means guaranteeing that the past remains unchanged. But as with Legends of Tomorrow, we’re seeing more stories about time-travelers who aim to change history for the better. Call it temporal activism.
I finished my new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, in late 2017. That whole year, a lot of people were saying half-jokingly that we were in the wrong timeline. It wasn’t just that a long-shot presidential candidate, reality TV star Donald Trump, had won the U.S. election. There was a sense that history was out of joint, as democratic countries across the world changed course and rallied around right-wing populist leaders. That year changed my novel too. My time-travelers go to the 19th century to secure more rights for women. Originally, I had planned for them to fail. But the events of 2017 persuaded me that they should succeed.
There’s nothing like witnessing radical, unexpected social changes to make you realize that the timeline is constantly being rewritten—and its authors are not always so-called Great Men. Sometimes they’re groups of ordinary people, whose connections to each other form a field of resistance to tyranny.
This counterintuitive sense of hope crops up in many recent time-travel stories. In Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War, agents on the opposite sides of a battle over the timeline fall in love. In the process, they undo the toxic history of white-settler colonialism in the Americas. Kelly Robson’s brilliant novella Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach imagines scientists using time travel to help remediate the worst effects of climate disasters. Even the new Doctor on Doctor Who has become something of a temporal activist, protecting historical figures like Rosa Parks to ensure that the long arc of history bends toward justice.
Though time travel has always been a popular plot device, it doesn’t usually encourage us to root for the people who are changing history. Instead, the premise of most time-travel stories is that changing the past would be a disaster. Ray Bradbury’s influential short story “A Sound of Thunder” describes a time-traveler who accidentally kills a butterfly during a trip to the Cretaceous. As a result, millions of years later, a fascist named Deutscher has won the presidential election in the U.S. This story introduced the idea of the “butterfly effect,” which posits that even tiny changes can have far-reaching effects.
The butterfly effect also assumes that changing history is a dangerously political act, affecting outcomes of wars and the fates of nations. We see a similar notion behind real-life debates over how U.S. history should be written. It’s why conservative pundits reacted as if they’d been assaulted when the New York Times and other publications covered the 500th anniversary of the first slaves being brought to the U.S. It’s why academic historians are embroiled in debates over whether accounts of “Western civilization” should include the experiences of people of color and immigrants.
The butterfly effect assumes that changing history is a dangerously politicalact.
When we put the histories of those who have been marginalized or oppressed at the center of our stories, it changes the way we understand the present. Time travel literalizes this process, showing us clearly how revisiting history changes the current moment. Heroes who fight to keep the timeline fixed are therefore on a deeply conservative mission. They believe there is something inherently great about our past, and that messing around with it is both morally repugnant and destructive.
It’s no surprise that so many of us feel like we are in the wrong timeline right now. Our political leaders are trying to lock down our histories, tying them to nationalist narratives that exclude many of us. Meanwhile, activists who resist their power are radically destabilizing the histories that most Americans were taught in school, challenging the idea that white men had the right idea when they colonized the Americas and burned a bunch of fossil fuels to power the Industrial Revolution. The war for the present is a war over our histories—both political and personal—and sometimes it feels like time-travelers are messing with us.
But today’s time-travel stories offer a vision of hopeful historical change. That’s why my novel has a happy ending, with the time-travelers succeeding in changing the timeline. It’s not a spoiler to say that; it’s my promise to you. Like time travelers, we can go back and retrieve what’s been lost: the suppressed voices of slaves, the life stories of women, the contributions of immigrants to our economic prosperity. We can rebuild the history that’s been stolen from us, and in the process we can create a timeline that’s open enough for all of us.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images and Eva Hambach/AFP/Getty Images.
Way back in 2017, John Oliver started calling the early Trump-era scandals “Stupid Watergates” This blossomed over the years into a series of segments on episodes in the Donald Trump presidency that could be characterized as “a scandal with all the potential ramifications of Watergate, but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything.” He could have aired such episodes almost daily, but at some juncture, the Stupid Watergates just morphed into our daily political lives. As Oliver would continue to argue, the question was always less “What did the president know and when did he know it,” as it was “Is the president physically capable of knowing things at all?”
Later, Oliver would say of the series that “unfortunately, it was supposed to be just a self-contained joke, but current events are making it more and more relevant. Which is not normally how jokes work.” Stupid Watergate lived on, but the formulation also helps explain the speed with which we seem to be waking up to the joke. As my colleague Lili Loofbourow explains, “Americans still don’t quite believe that things that are done in the open are bad; it might be a joke, or a bit, or a performance, or a mistake. (We can’t even agree that Trump is lying because maybe he believes in his heart that the ‘falsehood’ is true.) Convincing the public of ill intent seems to require a ‘revelation’ or an ‘exposure’ or a secret.” Everyone was so persuaded Donald Trump was always joking that we couldn’t quite get John Oliver’s joke.
As a general matter, jokes are funny because they are at least partially true. Here, we have crossed a line where the joke is so true, it’s hardly funny. Donald Trump is not competent and many of the people with whom he surrounds himself—until he fires them—are not competent either. The primary work of his highest officials appears to have been hiding evidence of his malfeasance and ineptitude from us and pretending that work was heroic. Donald Trump never made sense in gatherings of foreign leaders, or among the victims of tragedies, or in any setting that wasn’t a staged stadium rally or photo-op. But somehow, we stopped believing that he would be caught out for this gross incompetence and absurdity, or even for the inherent lawlessness and corruption, and tried to laugh it all off. In the face of outrageous immorality, we were told we had a derangement problem.
Jokes are funny because they are at least partially true. Here, we have crossed a line where the joke is so true, it’s hardlyfunny.
And because it’s Stupid Watergate, it’s not just the cover-up, or even just the crime, but also the scorching ineptitude. Don’t for a moment forget about the myriad people who were alarmed by Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to find dirt on his political opponent and yet did nothing, as well as the deeply stupid people who were alarmed by Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to find dirt on his political opponent and tried to bury it. Because that there is some next-level stupid. And that too continues to unspool as we learn that other phone calls, with Russia and Saudi Arabia, were similarly disappeared.
From even the early days of Oliver’s “Stupid Watergate,” these scandals have followed the same general arc. Generally the pattern has been that Trump and his incandescently mediocre family and hapless enablers do something moronic (such as suggesting that Obama wiretapped him) and we all recoil in horror. That is followed by hasty claims that this was just Trump being Trump, and what can you do. As a result of the soft bigotry of ever-lowered expectations, the Trumpier Trump acted, the shruggier we became, until it actually appeared that he was slyly enrolling Americans in tolerating the stupidity and training us to accept yet more of the same. At some midpoint in this incubus, it seemed that nothing would ever seem stupid, or at least surprisingly stupid, ever again. And that is where the joke went to die.
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Why is this instance of Stupid Watergate different? Part of it might just be that Rudy Giuliani is truly terrible at everything. And yet Donald Trump seems to have dispatched Giuliani, his modern-day Roy Cohn/Michael Cohen/Watergate plumber, not to pay hush money to porn stars, as any respectable fixer might, but to advance Trump’s personal political ambitions under the guise of international diplomacy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Giuliani, who has soaked far too long in the Hofstadter bath bomb of deep state/Biden-gate/but-her-emails logic, actually believes he should be lauded as a hero for his efforts to follow through on Trump’s requests. But even the staunchest of Trump’s defenders must be wondering who authorized Trump’s personal attorney to lope around the globe, possibly without security clearance, pressuring sovereign leaders of foreign nations into interning for the Trump 2020 campaign. The State Department was unequivocal on this one point: “Mr. Giuliani is a private citizen and acts in a personal capacity as a lawyer for President Trump. He does not speak on behalf of the U.S. Government.” When Giuliani defended himself by insisting that he was authorized because he was working alongside actual government employees Kurt Volker and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, it turned out he was just accidentally throwing these men under the bus to be flattened right along with him.
Giuliani aside, the other reason it’s taken some time for the country to figure out how to respond to the onslaught of Stupid Watergates is because Donald Trump, while certainly often his own worst enemy, has perennially managed to also be his own best asset. His lies are so outlandish that everyone believes they must be jokes; his jokes are so grotesque everyone believes they must be lies. His contempt for the law is so acute, everyone starts to doubt that the law is of any fundamental utility. In this case, it’s not even clear that Trump has realized he did anything wrong—the whistleblower’s original complaint makes apparent that everyone in the White House assumed the now-infamous Ukrainian phone call would be routine, probably because Trump thought it was. It seems entirely possible he never saw a problem. (The complaint suggests that while staffers realized they’d need to do something to hide the full substance of the call, Trump was not worried about it.) He was not worried about confessing to two Russian visitors or Lester Holt his real reasons for firing James Comey, either.
That’s because Trump has one fatal flaw, one that Richard Nixon did not quite share. As a lifelong narcissist, Donald Trump genuinely believes he can do nothing wrong. He perhaps even genuinely believes that anything he has ever done that has been wrong is not, in fact, wrong. He further believes that the presidency is the perfect gig for him because presidents can do nothing illegal. And, somewhat pathetically, he apparently seems to think that if he could just explain his rightness about all things to everyone, we would finally give him the love he so desperately craves. And so, unlike Nixon, who at some point did give himself over to the cover-up, Donald Trump just keeps trying to publicly justify the crimes.
It’s unfortunately not even a little bit clear that the Ukraine scandal will be the bracing smack on the nose that brings a majority of a narcotized public back to something that approximates reality. It is clear that we’re hurtling faster and faster toward a reckoning of some kind. It seems perfectly possible that the more Trump tries to cajole and browbeat us into accepting his awesomeness, the worse it will become for him. Perhaps at some point his enablers will have to admit that they’ve wasted three years kissing the ring of an emperor who’s wearing … well … nothing but a ring. But it also seems perfectly possible that whatever we’re about to experience will continue to split us into two countries, living two irreconcilable realities, inhabiting two un-gettable jokes—on Sunday night, Trump, quoting Fox News, tweeted that if the impeachment inquiry into him is successful, it will cause a “Civil War like fracture” in America. Welcome to Stupid Watergate. Admitting the problem is the first step.
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Compounding pharmacies do the important work of tailoring medications to the needs of a particular patient, but as John Oliver points out on Last Week Tonight, they’re not as regulated as the major drug manufacturing companies, which opens them up to all sorts of problems. For instance, a study found that custom compounded pain creams were no more effective than using a placebo, but the pharmacies making them exploited a loophole that allowed them to bill the military for using unnecessary expensive ingredients.
That gave Oliver an idea for a new product: Johnny Gel. “It’s great for relieving tenderness in your back, neck, and joints,” he said. “And yes, it is just mayonnaise.” But as goofy as some of these crimes—like using a celebrity’s name or just writing “Big Baby Jesus” on a fake prescription— might sound, they’re actually serious offenses that can harm and even kill patients, Oliver explains. He then calls for backup from the likes of Kristen Bell, RuPaul, Michael Bolton, and other famous people whose names have been abused in the name of profit. Jimmy Kimmel even turns up to crack a joke about losing the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Talk Series to Oliver.
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Every week, our Culture Gabfesters spend a moment waxing enthusiastically about their favorite cultural obsessions—books, movies, music, and more. Our listeners often request book recommendations, so we’ve rounded up some of the Gabfesters’ fiction endorsements for your perusal. The crew’s eclectic taste ranges from beloved classics to more obscure contemporary graphic novels.
Julia Turner
The Witch Elm by Tana French
Turner calls crime master Tana French’s mystery The Witch Elm “one of the single best interrogations of white male privilege that I’ve seen in the culture in the last few years.”
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
“I love it, and I’m dying to talk about it a year late,” says Turner of Less, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018. Less is the story of Arthur Less, a 49-year-old gay man whose young lover of nine years breaks up with him, and what follows in that aftermath. Turner says, “It reads like light romantic fiction” but is “absolutely deserving of every prize … it takes this light comedic touch and tone … but does something incredibly profound and beautiful.”
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Metcalf calls the celebrated author’s unsettling mystery “a tone-perfect, exquisitely executed small novel. I mean, talk about the elegance of concision, total control of every aspect of fiction writing. It’s just a master class—a mistress class—in great fiction writing.”
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney
Metcalf praises Rooney’s debut novel about the intricacies of female friendship: “She’s got a very simple, straightforward style that’s meant to show you what people, especially young people, are no longer able to say to one another or themselves.”
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
“It’s such a deeply humane novel,” says Metcalf of Nabokov’s darkly comic masterpiece, which parodies literary aspirations and scholarship. “It’s so clearly not only a book about human suffering … but also [Nabokov’s] own suffering.”
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
Metcalf praises the third book in Elena Ferrante’s series about girls growing up in the outskirts of Naples: “It’s a perfect bildungsroman that’s also utterly unique to itself.” While he loves the entire four-part series, he calls the third installment “completely magnificent.”
Talent by Juliet Lapidos
Thomas recommends Lapidos’ debut novel, a literary mystery featuring Anna Brisker, a graduate student in search of inspiration for her dissertation about … inspiration. “There’s a lot of content that people who did their time in the graduate school salt mines will really relate to,” says Thomas, who used to work with Lapidos at Slate. “But even those of us who didn’t will find it hilarious and great.”
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew
Butler recommends this graphic novel that takes place in Singapore as an accompaniment to the portrayal of the country in Crazy Rich Asians: “It’s a really fascinating book because it … poses as a coffee table art book about a fictitious cartoonist and then within that, and in telling his life story … it tells the whole story of Singaporean independence.”
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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will decide whether to give Domino’s Pizza one last chance at its three-year fight for the right to discriminate against people who are blind and visually impaired. The pizza giant is asking the court to reexamine an appellate court decision requiring Domino’s to make its website accessible to people with disabilities. In the lawsuit at the center of the dispute, Guillermo Robles, who is blind, alleges that he was unable to order a pizza from the Domino’s website or mobile app because neither was accessible via screen readers, a type of software utilized by visually impaired people to browse the web and use other applications on computers and phones. Domino’s says that it has “no interest in discriminating against potential customers” with disabilities but claims that the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal statute under which the lawsuit was filed, applies only to a physical “place” and therefore is inapplicable to websites.
The potential consequences of this fill me with genuine terror because the consequences extend far beyond pizza. I’m legally blind, and the internet, phone apps, and e-commerce are more integral parts of my daily life than shopping malls or brick-and-mortar stores have ever been. If the Supreme Court were to eventually rule in the company’s favor, the blind, visually impaired, and others who rely on accessibility tools to use the web could be locked out of the modern economy—and much of modern life. If companies and other organizations are not required to make their websites and apps accessible, people like me would be unable to access our bank accounts, look up or pay our utility bills, or buy household essentials from Amazon or other retailers.
Such a situation would further exacerbate the economic disparity that already exists for many individuals with disabilities. For example, visually impaired people who work in office jobs could find that the websites and apps they need to use in the course of their work are not accessible, making it impossible for them to meet the demands of their jobs. Others without full-time employment could find it impossible to participate in the gig economy, given that the websites and apps that provide the infrastructure for that economy need not be accessible. Social media sites, already significantly more challenging for someone like me to use, could become completely inaccessible, widening the isolation that some experience in tandem with vision loss or other disabilities.
It’s easy to envision the potential impact of this case because even today, many large companies do just enough to avoid (or to settle) litigation. As a result, accessibility hurdles abound. As I lost my sight, browsing the web and managing my tech-reliant life morphed from enjoyable to arduous. In the financial arena, large portions of my 401(k) plan’s website are completely inaccessible, including the section in which sighted users can access statements with key info about investment balances and portfolio performance. (This isn’t unique to my retirement plan; banking and financial websites are a frequent source of problems, as the New York Times noted in July.) When it comes to shopping or completing an online form, I’m often forced to abandon ship because there was a required field or checkbox out there somewhere that wasn’t correctly labeled or even visible to a screen reader. Or I lost the race in a “you have X minutes to complete checkout” adventure. Or an event I hoped to attend required that I be able to view the venue’s seating chart and click on available seats to purchase tickets. Or Captcha became convinced I was a (presumably visually impaired … ) robot.
On a more personal level, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit searching for an online store that sells anniversary and birthday cards with text descriptions—not just images—of the messages on the cards so I could partake in the simple joy of buying a card for my wife without asking a friend to come to a shop and read all the options out loud. Whether it’s photos of greeting cards or images that are integral to the navigation of websites (like this one), the internet is filled with pictures meant to convey meaning. These images leave me and others with vision limitations in the dust, even though the solution is simple: When adding pictures to a site, the developer can include “alt text,” a few words that describe the critical information being conveyed by the image. The alt text is automatically read aloud by screen readers but is invisible, and thus unobtrusive, to everyone else.
Given the prevalence of inaccessible websites and apps, I was not shocked that Domino’s chose to pick this fight. In doing so, the company has made itself an easy target for Twitter backlash, but it is far from alone in believing that it’s wasteful to spend time or money to open the door to customers with disabilities. In fact, national business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Retail Federation, among others, “are lining up behind Domino’s” to file friend-of-the-court briefs expressing their support. (For what it’s worth, I am able to visit portions of the Domino’s site, which now contains a disclaimer advising blind and visually impaired users “having problems” to call a phone number instead.)
These businesses claim their aversion to making websites accessible is not based in bias but rather is an unfortunate economic reality. Per Domino’s, “[o]rganizations simply lack ‘the financial and manpower resources to retrofit these sites.’ ” Of course, companies choose where to spend their resources. In the case of Domino’s, that choice is clear. For years, the company has boasted that its massive investments in technology are the key to its success, announcing it has transformed from a pizza company into “an e-commerce company that sells pizza,” with one-third of its total HQ staff “dedicated to tech and digital platforms.” Despite this all-in approach, Domino’s says it cannot scrape together the funds to make its site and app accessible, a process it warns could “run into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.” One estimate puts the cost at about $38,000. For context, Domino’s topped $13.5 billion in global sales last year.
Domino’s and its supporters likely would not take this anti-accessibility position if they thought there was an economic incentive for attracting (or at least not discriminating against) customers with disabilities. But companies seem to cling to the erroneous assumption that the blind, visually impaired, and other people with disabilities are not self-sufficient and lead unrelatable, unfulfilling lives.
If this sounds like hyperbole, picture yourself taking the New York City subway to work for a month as a legally blind person using a white cane, dressed in business attire. Count how many genuinely kind, well-meaning strangers tell you how impressed they are by you. (For going to work in the morning? For dressing professionally? I’m not quite sure.) Ask yourself what assumptions about the lives and independence levels of people with disabilities lead to those interactions. Then, consider how those same assumptions might play out in a different environment: as a corporation decides how to allocate resources.
Importantly, businesses do not decide in a vacuum that accessibility is one of their lowest priorities. Corporate decisionmakers are surrounded by signals confirming their implicit understanding that equal access for the 61 million Americans with disabilities is a pie-in-the-sky ideal that society aspires to only when it is not a significant inconvenience.
Nearly 30 years after the ADA was enacted, less than 20 percent of NYC public schools are fully accessible to children with disabilities, only 25 percent of subway stations are wheelchair-accessible, and under 3 percent of the city’s intersections have accessible pedestrian signals. Across the U.S., an inadequate 40 percent of polling locations in the 2016 presidential election were accessible, according to a government analysis.
