Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb) speaks during the Senate Judiciary Committee on the fourth day of hearings on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, on October 15, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.KEVIN DIETSCH/Getty Images
Sen. Ben Sasse apparently had a lot to say. In a 2,200-word Facebook post, the senator from Nebraska made clear he “will not be participating” in an effort by some of his fellow Republican lawmakers to overturn the election, characterizing it as a “dangerous ploy” that is being carried out for political gain. “Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Sasse wrote shortly after Sen. Josh Hawley said he would challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory when Congress meets to certify Electoral College votes next week. Hawley is seen as a potential presidential candidate in 2024. “But they’re wrong—and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government,” Sasse added.
In his post, Sasse made clear there is no evidence to support the contention that the result of the election would have been different if not for widespread voter fraud. “For President-Elect Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College victory to be overturned, President Trump would need to flip multiple states. But not a single state is in legal doubt,” Sasse wrote. The claims that the election was stolen really amount to “a fundraising strategy” rather than a legal one.
“All the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party,” Sasse wrote. The president and those in Congress who are trying to aid his efforts to overturn the result “are playing with fire,” Sasse added, characterizing his colleagues who will pursue the initiative as “institutional arsonist members of Congress.” Ultimately, Sasse said, “We have good reason to think this year’s election was fair, secure, and law-abiding.”
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board also decried Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, saying that “Republicans should be embarrassed by Mr. Trump’s Electoral College hustle.” Even though Trump has been furiously tweeting about fraud, his lawsuits have been rejected. The effort to challenge Biden’s electors “appears doomed” and would only give Democrats in the House of Representatives an “opportunity to excoriate Mr. Trump a final time on his way out the door.” Trump’s allies are now pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to toss out electors, which is “putting his loyal VP in a terrible spot.”
In the end it seems some Republicans at least aren’t thinking of the consequences of their actions. “What do Republicans think would happen if Mr. Pence pulled the trigger, Mr. Biden was denied 270 electoral votes, and the House chose Mr. Trump as President? Riots in the streets would be the least of it,” notes the Journal’s editorial board. “The scramble to overturn the will of the voters tarnishes Mr. Trump’s legacy and undermines any designs he has on running in 2024.”
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/395PalR
via IFTTT
Every week, the crew responds to a bonus question in chat form.
Dear How to Do It,
I’m a bi woman in my early 30s, and I’ve been dating an amazing man for the past several months. We’re both head over heels for each other and definitely see a future together. We have an amazing sex life, which both of us have described as the best either of us has ever had. Recently, he threw me for a loop by proposing a threesome with a former friend with benefits of his. I told him from the beginning that I’m not a big believer in monogamy, so theoretically I’m into the idea (assuming everyone quarantines, or we wait until the pandemic has died down), but she’s not really my type, she’s never been with another woman, and he said that she was the one who suggested it—which makes me question what kind of conversations they’ve been having since we got together. I have a few days before we can have an in-person conversation about this, and there are a few things that I want to clear up: I want him to know that if he’s having sexual conversations with other women, I’m fine with it as long as he’s being honest with me about it. And I want him to know that I’m into the idea of a threesome, but maybe not with this particular woman. Any advice for getting this across to him without sounding like I don’t trust him, or moving our default setting back to monogamous?
—Two to One
Stoya: I think our writer has a very reasonable ask here: 1) Keep her in the loop. 2) Don’t expect her to be someone’s first something.
Rich: It’s important to set the tone, too—she’s laying down groundwork for what might turn out to be a long-term, ethically nonmonogamous relationship. I think introducing the discussion to that effect would help mitigate her concerns of seeming closed off or distrustful.
Stoya: So starting off with something like “I’m happy that you’re interested in exploring open options,” before moving into boundaries and desires?
Rich: Definitely—starting off with the positives is an invitation to a conversation, and will mitigate the suggestion of a reprimand, rebuffing, or the building of a wall.
Stoya: Speaking of positives, framing can be useful around desires as well. “I don’t want to be someone’s first W/W encounter” and “I prefer experienced partners” mean the same thing, but the latter is more constructive.
Rich: Exactly. And it’s totally reasonable to veto a prospective third that your partner suggests. To do so is not to telegraph “I’m not interested in a threesome,” just “I’m not interested in a threesome with this person.” I’ve experienced this myself, on both sides, and it’s never derailed the larger relationship dynamic. But like I said, this is why it’s important to set the tone: Construct your nonmonogamy so that it includes straightforward and honest conversations about your potential playmates. If that’s baked in, your partner won’t have reason to suspect that you have ulterior motives for saying no. It can be hard to find a partner for one, let alone one that appeals to two. A degree of trial and error can be expected.
Stoya: For sure. Unless you’re lucky enough to have the same taste in women, you should expect to sort through twice as many people at least as you would solo before you even find someone to approach, much less someone who is also interested in both of you.
Rich: It’s just part of the process. To say no along the way isn’t to roadblock the overall arc of the relationship. I wonder if she’s as OK with him talking to other women sexually as she wants us to believe she is, though.
Stoya: Tell me more?
Rich: She says that she’s fine with this “as long as he’s being honest with me about it,” but there’s no indication from what we see that he isn’t being honest. In fact, bringing this up casually suggests honesty—this kind of conversation would seem to be matter of course for him. It seems like our writer is suspicious nonetheless, and I wonder if that’s more coming from her than him. Hard to say, though, and it’s also hard to say just how much honesty she’s requesting—if she’d prefer to know everything or be given a heads up when he’s having these conversations (or even prior to them being had), well, that’s definitely stuff to work out.
Stoya: If my partner’s former friends with benefits suggested a threesome out of the blue, I’d be wary.
Rich: It’s happened with me and I’ve never thought one thing or another about it—I feel like if I’m in an arrangement where nonmonogamy is OK, I expect such conversations, and in the absence of Yelp reviews for hookups, I think a partner’s endorsement is useful for predicting that a good time will be had. It’s worked! But for our writer, it’s really OK to comb through that to determine the exact comfort level. Again, I’d start positively: “Thanks for bringing this up.” The idea is to encourage, not shut down.
Stoya: If she can ask out of genuine curiosity, she might inquire for further information about the context.
Rich: Yeah, for sure—it seems like he’s basically in line with her expectations, so it’s a matter of just getting more/specifics (and clarifying what she doesn’t want to know). They seem well on their way, though, to satisfying group play.
More How to Do It
My husband and I have an amazing relationship, and I love him deeply. A few months ago, at my suggestion, we started trying threesomes (with another woman) and have really enjoyed it so far. It’s brought us even closer—it’s given me a chance to explore that side of my sexuality—and it’s been a really fun and positive experience. That is, until push came to shove with one of our explicit boundaries.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3ogKEa8
via IFTTT
It bears repeating that Scott Pace and his team put an immense amount of heart and soul into their time at the National Space Council. They paid attention to a lot of things that had not been paid attention to for a very long time. They created something for others to build upon. https://t.co/U5VyWVHHSp
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by CMC Pictures.
In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—this year, Justin Chang, Odie Henderson, and Alison Willmore—about the year in cinema. Read the previous dispatch here.
Dear auld acquaintance,
As we close out this sprawling conversation, and as this Godforsaken year finally comes to a close, I wanted to take a second to acknowledge 2020’s global box-office champion. That’s not Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, despite that much-touted, much-delayed, and ultimately messy theatrical release we discussed. And it’s not Bad Boys for Life, the reigning blockbuster from the few months before everything shut down, either. The No. 1 movie in theaters worldwide this year was actually, drumroll … Guan Hu’s war epic The Eight Hundred, which depicts, in extravagant detail, the 1937 defense of Sihang Warehouse in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. You’d all be forgiven for not having caught it, when it only opened quietly on 142 screens in the U.S. at the end of August, and was released by a distributor, CMC Pictures, that tends to target diasporic audiences. The vast majority of its $460 million in ticket sales was homegrown, courtesy of the fact that most theaters throughout China reopened on July 20, even as the U.S. lurched into second and third waves with the virus. Its triumph is, in some ways, another asterisk in a year filled with them—the first year since 2007 when topping the chart wasn’t a billion-dollar enterprise.
Sign up for the Slate Culture newsletter
The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox three times a week.
In other ways, though, it’s a reminder that Hollywood doesn’t have a monopoly on big entertainments, and that even as the studios pin their theatrical hopes on movies that have to be huge worldwide hits to be successes, other markets have been proving themselves capable of making work that feels equally vast in scale. And, more than anything, The Eight Hundred feels big. It cost a reported $80 million and was shot entirely on IMAX cameras. It is, like many a war movie, deeply nationalistic (and still got pulled from the 2019 Shanghai Film Festival and reworked for allegedly being too sympathetic to the Kuomintang). Like Dunkirk, it’s about a triumph for morale rather than a triumph in battle. The incident it depicts, in which a small battalion of Chinese men held off thousands of Japanese troops over the course of four days, was a feat that was also a performance. The warehouse was directly across the river from the foreign enclaves left untouched by the bombing that had otherwise decimated the city. The astonishingly realized sets of the neighborhood, teeming with people and lit up like a hallucination, are presented as hosting an audience for the pummeling of these soldiers who hope to draw the world’s attention to what’s happening. It’s not lost on me that, when it comes to the film’s own success, international viewers were ultimately unnecessary.
I realize I’ve written a lot about the business of movies in these dispatches. I feel like sometimes I’ve ended up focusing on it more than I have the movies themselves, only because I’ve felt hyperaware—this year more than any other—of how money affects what gets made, what we are encouraged to watch, and how we’re able to access it. As we accelerate toward some future of endless streaming content and bigger and bigger tentpole events, helped along by the seismic shake-ups that have come with COVID, I feel increasingly grateful for all the small, intimate, strange, and brilliant work out there, even as I worry (as Sam does) about it getting lost in the shuffle. So I wanted to spend my last few paragraphs here writing about one of those features—one that happens to be, fittingly, about the film biz.
I feel increasingly grateful for all the small, intimate, strange, and brilliant work outthere.
I saw Kitty Green’s The Assistant almost a year ago, in mid-January, shortly before leaving for Sundance. That feels like it might as well have been a decade ago now. But the film has lingered with me ever since, and so much of its power comes from its austerity, that way that it presents a universe in miniature with its unforgivingly tight focus on this lowly young employee, Jane (Julia Garner), who’s at what is, on paper, her dream job. In practice, it’s a mundane hell of cubicles and calls and systemic abuse.
I haven’t seen the film since that first viewing, but so many moments of this workplace drama as water torture still feel so clear in my memory. There’s the scene in which the other two assistants in the office reflexively come to stand over Jane’s shoulder and help her with what’s clearly a regular ritual of crafting an apology to her enraged boss, a Harvey Weinstein stand-in who’s only ever heard, never seen. There’s the way the HR director played by Matthew Macfadyen tells Jane that “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. You’re not his type”—a doubled-edged delivery of a line calibrated to fall right between “You, at least, are going to be fine” and “Who do you think you are?” And then there’s that shot you mentioned, Justin, in which Jane orders and picks at a late-in-the-day muffin while sitting at a counter in a deli. Green suffuses The Assistant with this unbearable sense of claustrophobia, and only some of it comes from the way that Jane barely ever seems to get to leave the office. The rest is due to the overwhelming pressure on her to participate and fall in line or, well, leave—and that’s a weight that she can’t leave behind, even as she finds this sad little sanctuary a few blocks away after a long day of work.
Is it perverse to say that thinking about that scene, lonely and tragic as it is, makes me feel a pang of nostalgia for the regular world? I’ve been finding myself missing everything lately, even the prospect of stale pastries gulped down in lieu of dinner while taking shelter from the cold in some overpriced corner store in Tribeca. Unlike Jane, at least, when I’ve found myself doing that, it’s usually been because I’m killing time before heading off to do something better. And on that note, I’ll end this. Unlike Odie, I have no talent for song parodies, so instead I’ll just say that it’s been lovely talking movies with you all, and it will be lovely still when we get the chance to do so in person again someday.
Until then,
Alison
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2XcztUp
via IFTTT
A Secret Service agent stands guard as President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Prescott Regional Airport in Prescott, Arizona on October 19, 2020.MANDEL NGAN/Getty Images
The Secret Service will be changing up the agents that are in the presidential detail to protect President-elect Joe Biden. Even though it isn’t rare for agents to change when a new president arrives, this time the shake-up is taking place amid suspicion that some agents are politically aligned with President Donald Trump, reports the Washington Post. To allay any concerns, the Secret Service will be bringing back some of the senior agents that Biden already knows from his time as vice president.
Several recent incidents have led to questions about the political leanings of agents on the presidential detail. Some, for example, urged agents and Secret Service officers not to wear masks on presidential trips because the president saw them as a sign of weakness. That may have contributed to the way in which more than 130 Secret Service officers either tested positive for the coronavirus or were forced to quarantine because they were in close contact with someone who contracted COVID-19.
In a particularly telling detail of how much at least some agents are aligned with Trump, the previous head of the presidential detail, Anthony Ornato, became White House deputy chief of staff earlier this year. He was key to organizing the photo-op in June in which peaceful protesters were violently cleared out of Lafayette Square so the president could get a photo posing with a Bible. Ornato is now set to return to the Secret Service although he won’t be involved in protecting the president.
The Secret Service declined to comment on staffing changes but insisted that it is committed to being apolitical. “The U.S. Secret Service is uniquely authorized to provide protection to designated U.S. and other world leaders and remains steadfastly dedicated to a standard of excellence in those operations, wholly apolitically and unaffiliated with the political parties of protectees,” spokeswoman Catherine Milhoan said. “As a matter of practice and due to operational security, the agency does not comment on protective operations inclusive of internal decisions on agency assignments. ”
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/34VcukM
via IFTTT
A Minneapolis Police officer rolls up caution tape at a crime scene on June 16, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Minneapolis police shot and killed a man during a traffic stop on the city’s south side on Wednesday night. It was the first officer-involved killing since George Floyd died while he was being detained by Minneapolis police officers in May less than a mile away. Police said there was an exchange of gunfire and Chief Medaria Arradondo, noted reports that the man was the first to open fire. “Initial witness statements indicate that the subject involved in this felony stop fired first at Minneapolis police officers who then exchanged gunfire with the suspect,” Arradondo said.
The officers had body cameras active during the incident and footage will be released Thursday, Arradondo said. “I want the community to be able to see what occurred and I think that that is part of us again moving forward and wanting to make sure we get the facts out there,” he said.
Police have yet to release any information about the man who was killed or details about the alleged felony. They also did not release any information about his race. The man was declared dead at the scene and a woman who was in the car with him was not harmed, according to police spokesman John Elder. Mayor Jacob Frey issued a statement vowing that the investigation would be transparent. “We know a life has been cut short tonight and that trust between communities of color and law enforcement is fragile.” Frey wrote. “Rebuilding that trust will depend on complete transparency.”
Shortly after the shooting, a group of around 100 protesters gathered at the scene. And while there were moments of tension, including protesters throwing snowballs at police, everything remained “relatively peaceful,” reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Arradonda said the rights of protesters would be respected but called on them to remain peaceful. “As chief, I recognize the trauma that our city has been under, and we want to do everything we can to maintain the peace,” he said. “Our city has gone through too much. We need to keep our officers safe, we need to keep our community safe, and I tell you, we need to preserve that crime scene.”
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3n4SW3y
via IFTTT
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Natalie Matthews-Ramo, Lisa Larson Walker, and Shasha Léonard.
When the present is scary, the future can be virtually unthinkable. But it’s at times of great change and uncertainty—and 2020 surely qualifies—that it is most important to try to look ahead, to think about how decisions made right now can reverberate.
This year, Future Tense Fiction—a partnership of Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination—published 12 stories that take very different looks at the years to come. In the case of Max Barry’s “It Came From Cruden Farm,” that future is very near—it’s set on Inauguration Day 2021, when a new president learns that the U.S. government has custody of an alien, and it’s complicated. Other futures are more distant; as part of our package of three stories on artificial intelligence and governance, “The State Machine,” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, follows a graduate student trying to learn about the very earliest days of his country being run by A.I. Tobias S. Buckell’s “Scar Tissue,” Holli Mintzer’s “Legal Salvage,” and Karl Schroeder’s “The Suicide of Our Troubles” all grapple, in very different ways, with legal rights for nonhumans. Several tales are clearly rooted in the upheaval of 2020, particularly “How to Pay Reparations: a Documentary,” in which Tochi Onyebuchi looks at what might happen if a white mayor decided to use algorithms to calculate reparations owed to a city’s Black population. Each story comes with a response essay in which an expert—like a technologist, a scientist, a journalist, or a researcher—responds to the real-world themes, bringing even the most fantastical imagined tomorrow down to earth.
These stories are funny, heartbreaking, enraging, inspiring, sobering, alarming—and most importantly, a great opportunity to think about how we want to shape the years, decades, and centuries to come. Below, you’ll find links to each story, accompanied by its response essay.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by BartekSzewczyk/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Slate is now asking those who read the most to support our journalism more directly by subscribing to Slate Plus.Learn more.
Dear Prudence,
My close friend, “Will,” was fired due to a sexual harassment complaint against him at work. Will and the women involved are of similar ages and status in the company. I don’t work with him and don’t really know details, but from what I do know, it’s in the category of “hitting on women at work and continuing to after they said no.” He denies most of it. Without knowing what exactly happened, my guess at the truth would be that it happened and is possibly more severe than Will believes but maybe slightly exaggerated on the women’s part. Still, he shouldn’t have done it at all, and this is obviously not good behavior. Our friend group is divided: A few believe Will, a few don’t and have cut ties, and one friend who works in the same industry as Will (but not at the same company) fears his own professional reputation will suffer if he keeps the friendship. Another friend who used to work with both Will and the women involved is also unsure what to believe. I’ve been close with Will for years, and though he is a ladies’ man type, I also consider him a feminist (I’m a woman and also a feminist). He has always been a kind, respectful, and generous friend. Should I cut him off? Demote him to an acquaintance? Is losing his job enough of a punishment, or should he lose his friends too?
—Still Friends?
If you don’t really know details, why not ask Will for more of them? Tell him what you’ve told me—that this seems at odds with the version of him you’ve known for years, that you’re not clear exactly what happened—and ask him specifically what he denies. Does he deny doing any of it? Does he admit to hitting on colleagues after they told him they weren’t interested but objects to their characterization of his repeated attempts? Can he summarize his employers’ position and the reasons they gave for his dismissal? Then use your own judgment as you listen to his response. Do you find his answers compelling and thoughtful? Do you find him reflexively defensive? Do you find his characterization of his former company and the women who accused him of harassment to be fair, accurate, and reasonable? How many women filed complaints?
I realize you can only get Will’s side of the story, but you’re not being asked to offer up a legal ruling. You’re trying to get a better sense of your friend’s character, and you’ll have to rely on your own judgment as you evaluate his account of said character. Don’t avoid these questions in the uneasy hope that you can simply back off from a formerly close friendship without ever having to have a conversation on the subject. You’re not obligated to punish Will, even if you find his answers troubling, but if he’s really a close friend of yours, you should seek to learn more so that you can offer him useful advice and counsel—even if that counsel is, “Will, I love you, and I think you deserved to get fired because I believe you harassed those women, and you need to change your life.” Information is not your enemy here. It will help you make useful, clear decisions that are in line with your feminist values—values that are not incompatible with loving Will.
Dear Prudence,
On the last day of a family trip, my stepfather suddenly died. We knew he didn’t have long, but it was still pretty traumatic. My mother and I have always been close, and I was her rock for the first year after his death. Then she met someone and abruptly stopped talking to me, my brother, and our kids. I brought it up with her countless times, telling her how it felt, how much I missed her, and eventually warning her that it will affect her relationship with her children and grandchildren. This new guy was incredibly off-putting. We gave him a chance, but it was very clear that he was taking advantage of her generosity and large pension. She finally realized that he was not interested in a relationship with her, and they stayed friends.
Now she’s dating someone new, and I was recently at her home for the weekend. “Adam” was there, constantly interrupting me and talking over me. He tried to diagnose one of my family members with a common disorder because he took one psych course in college. This was only my second time meeting him, but I let it go. The next day, I mentioned one of my daughters quit horseback riding, and he interrupted to tell me a good parent would have made her get back on the horse. I let him know that she did get back on the horse and finished off her lessons for that month as well. He just kept putting his oar in all weekend—at one point he told me he thought my behavior is “maladaptive” and I should rethink my decisions. I looked at my mom, and she said nothing. I went to my room and started packing. Adam came in to apologize, touching my back to get my attention. I told him I didn’t ask for his opinion, that he was not my father, and that just because he was sleeping with my mother didn’t mean he was entitled to speak about situations he knows nothing about. He walked away, and my mom came in shouting that I was behaving like an adolescent and that I should have just told him when he was interrupting. I asked her when it became my house, because it’s the host’s responsibility to correct bad behavior. She lost it when I pointed out that she had abandoned her family for the last two years. It’s now been two weeks, and I haven’t spoken to my mother. I truly don’t want to. Is it wrong that I’m waiting for her to apologize?
—Bad Blood
It’s not wrong that you’re waiting for your mother to apologize. In your position I’d probably want an apology too. I just can’t promise you that you’re going to get one.
If you haven’t heard from her in another few weeks, but you’ve managed to cool off a bit yourself, I’d encourage you to drop her a brief line asking her if she’s willing to talk about what happened. But based on how the past few years have gone, she may respond angrily or not at all. While you’re taking that time to come down, it’s worth reflecting on whether you could have done anything differently that past weekend with Adam. That’s not to say that he wasn’t rude—he definitely was—but do you think saying something like, “Adam, I’m really not looking for advice right now. Could you please stop?” when you were only slightly frustrated would have altered the outcome? It might also help to open your note to your mother with “I’ve thought a lot about how that weekend went, and here’s what I wish I’d done differently.” It’s not an apology for your frustration, which was truly merited, but it might defuse her instinctive defensiveness long enough to make a real conversation possible. But you’re entitled to be angry with how Adam behaved, and you’re entitled to be hurt about her sudden absence from your life after she started dating again, and you don’t have to just let it go because she’s your mother.
How to Get Advice From Prudie
• Send questions for publication toprudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.) • Join the live chat every Monday at noon.Submit your questions and comments herebefore or during the live discussion. • Call the voicemail of the Dear Prudence podcast at 401-371-DEAR (3327) to hear your question answered on a future episode of the show.
Dear Prudence,
My best friend has been dating someone new after ending a long-term relationship. A large factor in their relationship seems to be their shared love of drugs: ketamine, molly, opium, mescaline, poppers, and the like. Though I have my own concerns with my best friend using drugs frequently, my real issue is that her new partner is an ER doctor. This doctor routinely works several shifts in a row and then goes on drug benders with my friend for multiple days. Though I don’t think the doctor goes to work high, I feel a nagging concern that they should not be treating patients. Can someone provide excellent health care and also be a heavy drug user? I mean, I wouldn’t voluntarily choose a doctor who did drugs on the side. Should I write HR a confidential letter to drug-test the doctor (most hospitals don’t routinely drug-test physicians)? Should I mind my business?
—Doctored Doctor
One of those drugs is very much not like the others! That’s not to say there would be no reason for concern in an ER doctor recreationally using poppers, psychedelics, and club drugs, but they are in a very different class from opium, which is highly addictive and dangerous.
The potential for harm here—both to your friend’s partner’s patients and to her partner—is serious enough that I believe you may have an obligation to intervene. But that intervention should not begin with a letter to HR. You say you’ve had nagging concerns about both your friend’s drug use and her partner’s, but not whether you’ve ever expressed those concerns to her. Having a frank conversation with her (ideally both of them) is an indispensable first step, not least for the sake of your friendship but also for discussing practicalities like whether they have a safety plan for reversing potential overdoses, an important question for opiate use. If that conversation exacerbates your concerns about this doctor’s ability to work safely, you may then decide to escalate. Do prepare yourself, in that event, both for your friendship to suffer and for the possibility that your inquiry (if it’s based on secondhand reports) may stall.
Help! Am I Giving Up on My Troubled Daughter if I Send Her Away?
Danny M. Lavery takes a look at some of the many memorable letters of 2020 on this week’s episodeof the Dear Prudence podcast.
My husband and I separated during the pandemic as his drinking hit a critical point, and I just couldn’t deal with the emotional abuse and absenteeism in our son’s life anymore. Our son is 3 now, and I’ve felt like a single parent for much of that time. After a month in rehab and a couple of slip-ups later, my husband has been sober for almost three months now. Because of COVID and wanting to provide some stability for our son, we are living together until the spring. However, I have started seeing someone else. My soon-to-be ex-husband knows. I want to move forward with this other relationship. He’s invited me to go away for the weekend, and I really want to spend a night away with him. Is this OK? How can I broach this with my ex? The guy I’m seeing works from home and has minimal contacts, so I am not concerned about COVID exposure, but my ex is.
—Separated, Together
Your desire to spend a night away with your new boyfriend makes a great deal of sense, especially after months spent in isolation with your soon-to-be ex-husband. But the most important question is whether you think your ex can handle being your son’s sole caregiver for that long. You say he’s been mostly absent for your son’s life, that his recent bout of sobriety has been marked by a few slip-ups, and that he’s been emotionally abusive. Has he ever spent time alone with your son safely before? If so, for how long? If he hasn’t, or if even a small part of you worries about how your son might fare in your absence, I think it’s better to postpone overnight trips for another few months and to spend the intervening time consulting with your divorce lawyer and preparing to seek primary custody, so that when you finally do get that night away, you can leave with real peace of mind (and with a trustworthy babysitter).
I’ll also point out that though your ex’s failings as a partner and a parent sound fairly serious, they don’t automatically preclude him from having legitimate concerns about what constitutes an unacceptable COVID risk. If you do talk to him about future trips during the pandemic and he expresses concern, you should take that concern seriously, especially while you two are still living together.
Dear Prudence Uncensored
“You still got to shut them up and knock them down a peg, but it’s not about that.”
Over 10 years ago, I started a career I was really excited about. For years, I put my all into it. I moved up through the ranks, which meant stakes were higher and the burden heavier. I still enjoyed it, because I believed in my work. I greatly admire the people who have worked in my office for decades. But now I’m tired. Maybe it’s because the pandemic has put things into perspective, but it’s also true that social changes have made our work increasingly difficult over the last few years. I just want to slow down. I can do that, but my work won’t be quite as meaningful, and I won’t have the same success that the people I look up to have.
That makes me feel like a failure, like I’m giving up. I don’t look down on the people in my office who do other types of work—it’s just my own internal judgment of myself. This also isn’t about wanting more of a life outside of work. Despite sometimes working long hours, I’m still able to have a social life. I just hate feeling like I can give this job my all, and sometimes, through absolutely no fault of my own, my all won’t matter. How do I come to terms with wanting to scale back?
—Striving for Mediocrity
Wanting to give your job “a lot” instead of “your all” is still, you know, a lot. That might sound pat, but it’s true. And it says something about a workaholic, profit-driven culture that you feel embarrassed about wanting to scale back after a breakneck decade because you’re already “able” to have a social life. A social life isn’t a little dollop you earn through good behavior, and the part of your life spent away from the office, whether you dedicate it to rest, to hobbies, to volunteer work, to community organizing, to friendships, or to nothing at all is deeply important. What you propose here is a life where you continue to work diligently and capably, but you no longer put your career over everything else—a life where you pay attention to something as serious as feeling tired all the time! Real rest, real relaxation, and a real sense of scale are all worthy achievements, not impediments to success. Your job should not demand your all. No job should. What you are proposing is a good thing, something you can be proud of, not a compromise of your ideals.
Now available in your podcast player: the audiobook edition of Danny M. Lavery’s latest book, Something That May Shock and Discredit You. Get it from Slate.
Dear Prudence,
We’ll be in contact with my brother and his girlfriend this holiday season. I’m delighted they’re a couple. She’s deeply kind and has made him very happy. She also wears masks everywhere and follows COVID safety protocols. The “but … ” is that she is a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Just throw a dart at a map of Big Pharma, the Illuminati, or aliens and she’ll find some way they’re planning humanity’s downfall. What’s especially weird is this country’s evildoers are not exactly subtle about it, yet somehow she thinks there is a big, secret conspiracy just waiting to be uncovered. This is going to be a bit much this year, but I can’t seem to think of the right exit. Could you please hand me a conversational get-out-of-jail card that I can use without hurting her feelings?
—“I Think You’re Daft,” but Nicely
“Oh, I think that’s awfully unlikely,” “I think the people in power who harm humanity the most are usually pretty obvious about it,” and “I disagree!” are all polite summations of what you’ve written here, but more gentle than rolling your eyes or telling someone you think they’re stupid. You are allowed to disagree with your brother’s girlfriend, even if it’s a holiday, and so long as you don’t take the opportunity as an excuse to indirectly communicate contempt or try to embarrass her, you can just say what you think, perhaps followed by a change of subject.
Classic Prudie
I’ve been dating my boyfriend, “Mark,” for a few months now, but we’ve been casual friends for more than five years. He is overall a kindhearted person, a hard worker and provider, a fantastic father (to his daughter from a previous relationship), and a supportive and passionate partner. I feel very strongly that he could be “the one.” After he disclosed some not-so-great things about his past to me, none of which is an issue for me, I went snooping online (to see if there was anything he wasn’t telling me) and found public records that generally corroborated what he told me. I also found a request for a restraining order against him for domestic violence around the time he split with his child’s mom before we met. I didn’t know about this, but it doesn’t surprise me given what I know about her. However, I also found a potential other name for him on one of those background check sites. The first name is very close to his current name (think Mark vs. Matt), and the last name is his mother’s maiden name. She raised Mark as a single mom, and he didn’t know his dad until he was older. This discovery could be harmless, such as he changed his name when he finally got to know his dad, or something more serious, such as he has a really bad past he wants to escape. What do I do with this information? Do I bring it up and ask? Do I let it go and see if he brings it up?
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3aUnhzp
via IFTTT
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by monkeybusinessimages/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Ridofranz/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. In addition to our traditional advice, every Thursday we feature an assortment of teachers from across the country answering your education questions. Have a question for our teachers? Emailaskateacher@slate.comor post it in theSlate Parenting Facebook group.
Any advice on how to help a 9-year-old boy pay more attention to his math work? He is very bright and uses math in his everyday life, but when he needs to solve an algorithmic problem, he tends to miss one small step, and then the entire problem goes off course and winds up incorrect. This is mainly happening with multiplication and division problems. He also has messy handwriting, does not double-check his work, and flies through it to talk to his friends. I am at my wits’ end.
—Slow Down
Dear Slow Down,
You sound like a teacher! I have these conversations with my colleagues every day. We refer to these mistakes as precision errors, and they are the bane of every teacher’s existence. A student completes the 19-step long division problem correctly, then adds 5 and 4 and gets 8. Messy handwriting admittedly doesn’t help. A lot of math amounts to organizing information well.
It’s also tricky in elementary school, where assignments are typically not graded. If your son’s accuracy was attached to an actual grade, he might be more inclined to slow down and check his work, but when there is less tangible accountability, there are fewer reasons to take the steps to ensure accuracy.
The good news is that some of this will improve with maturity. As your son gets older and he becomes more organized, and his handwriting improves, these mistakes will start to disappear. Some of it will likely improve when grades are dependent upon precision and accuracy. He will also begin to learn that taking the time to do the job right the first time will save him a lot of time in the long run.
In the meantime, here are two things you might do:
Increasing your son’s proficiency with multiplication and division facts will help a lot. I tell my students that the basic facts are the alphabet of math. If you don’t know that 8 × 8 is 64 as well as you know your own middle name, math is going to be hard for you. Not only will it take longer to solve problems, but error rates will increase. I place enormous emphasis in my classroom on memorizing the basic facts, and year after year I watch as students begin to find more success and even enjoyment in math once those facts are mastered.
A simple trick I use with my students to increase their willingness to slow down and double-check their results is to hand them a worksheet with 10 problems and tell them: “Choose any four to complete. Get the answers correct and you’re done. Get one wrong and you’ll need to do another until you get four problems correct or finish the page.”
First, kids love this. They love the ability to choose their problems, and the idea that they can avoid additional work by doing well the first time is very appealing. I never hand out any work without creating some choice over the assignment for my students.
In the case of math, the goal is to find ways to incentivize precision. Place a premium on double-checking an answer. Motivate your son to see precision and accuracy as steps that make math easier. Help him to see that double-checking an answer is not extra work but a means of reducing the workload.
I hope this helps. And welcome to the ranks of the frustrated math teacher. You’re in good company!
—Mr. Dicks (fifth grade teacher, Connecticut)
My son is almost 5 and will start kindergarten next year. I am worried that he won’t be ready for school because he seems to like to do things the lazy way. For example, his preschool requires him to do a few worksheets every day, and he consistently starts his worksheets off correctly but then reverts to coloring or writing nonsense scribbles. The same thing happens with his handwriting practice. I’ve been working with him a lot on reading and writing, 45 minutes a day or so, since just after he turned 4. He’s made great strides in reading (he reads the Cam Jansen series for fun), but he makes sloppy mistakes on his handwriting. For example, he’s written dozens upon dozens of lowercase a’s at this point and knows where to start this letter, but he’ll still regularly start writing them in some random place so that they wind up looking like a Q. When I make him do it again, he cries or throws the pencil, but then writes the letter correctly, so it’s not about his ability.
Why can’t he just do these things correctly the first time, when he knows how to do them and he knows that he’ll have to do them over again if it’s wrong? His attitude isn’t going to fly in kindergarten, right? We’ve talked to him a lot about the importance of being conscientious and about not crying or getting angry when someone points out your mistakes, but I’m not sure if the words are getting through to him. His last preschool teacher had a lot of trouble with him and tried to demote him from the full-day to the half-day program, but we pushed back because we have jobs. How can we get him to shape up before he enters real school, where he will face real consequences he can’t understand for not participating and not following directions?
—Possibly Overly Worried
Dear Possibly Overly Worried,
You’re not possibly overly worried, you are definitely overly worried, and your kiddo may also be feeling a little overworked. Listen, your kid is doing fine. Keep in mind he is only 4 and he is already solving math problems and reading books well above his age level (Cam Jansen is recommended for kids 7–11). He’s also writing letters with success, even though he’s still in the early stages of developing his fine motor skills. As a second grade teacher I can say with confidence your kid is not only succeeding for his age, he is surpassing what’s expected of kids his age. And while it’s great that you all are practicing reading and writing for 45 minutes a day, best practice suggests that kids in grades K–5 read independently for only 20–30 minutes a day.
One common guideline to take to heart is that most kids have attention spans equal to their age in minutes. So for your 4-year-old, long sessions might not be the ideal learning experience. Try cutting your reading and writing sessions in half, practicing for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon (or just 20 minutes per day). This guideline may also explain why he solves math problems correctly at first and then seems to trail off. In my opinion it’s less about him being lazy and more about him being mentally tired. From your letter it sounds like you want your son to develop a sense of perseverance and grit. However, that will only come with time as he experiences more trying situations and is encouraged to overcome them. So please, for his sake, be patient.
—Mr. Hersey (second grade teacher, Washington)
Slate needs your support right now. Sign up for Slate Plusto keep reading the advice you crave every week.
My daughter moved into a new kindergarten class a month ago, and I’ve noticed that her new teacher often corrects her behavior on minor issues, like not looking at the screen and doodling during class. These corrections were causing a lot of stress for my daughter, and she was beginning to resist school, so I called her teacher to express my concern. The teacher’s response was that my daughter probably just didn’t like the fact that she (the new teacher) has stricter boundaries, and that I should contact the school counselor for help.
Do you think talking with the school counselor could help in dealing with the teacher? Do school counselors ever serve as liaisons to encourage teachers to meet the needs of students? I was pretty firm with the teacher that the corrections for minor things need to stop, but if she doesn’t, I’m wondering if the counselor can help, or if I should go directly up the chain of command. I hate to add stress to the teacher by going to the principal, but I also need school to be workable for my kid. What do you think?
—Constant Corrections
Dear Corrections,
First, you were right to call the teacher and initiate the conversation. For reference, my own kindergartener is fully virtual this year too, and her (heroically good) teacher never addresses behavior like lack of eye contact. She also only corrects individuals if they are unmuting themselves to holler off-topic comments—and even then, she does so in the gentlest possible terms, because it’s kindergarten and the hollering of off-topic comments is part of the milieu. Kindergarten is all about learning how to “do” school, and this first introduction to formal education with very young children should not be an experience of frequent critique, no matter the format in which it’s conducted.
As for what to do, talking to the counselor might help in the sense that the counselor could potentially lead a meeting that feels more collaborative and supportive than your first discussion—but it also sounds like coming back to the table for a solutions-generating session is not what the teacher had in mind by referring you to the counselor. As for whether the counselor will directly intercede on your behalf: no, likely not. Teachers and counselors are peers who work in parallel, handling different facets of the student experience, and they sometimes don’t engage all that closely with one another. A counselor would probably notify the teacher that they fielded a call from you and discussed the situation, and might offer their perspective or make a few friendly suggestions, but would not (and can’t) formally correct the teacher’s choices.
Even so, if you’re still concerned about the teacher’s management, I think it could be beneficial to initiate a group meeting with the counselor. It sounds like your first discussion went in a pretty adversarial direction. Don’t get me wrong—the teacher’s expectations are inappropriate to the age and the format, and it’s really disappointing that she was so uncompromising. But firmly telling the teacher—who, again, absolutely needs to improve her management of distance learning, but who is also probably exhausted and stressed and uncomfortable with having her every instructional move observed by an unseen audience of parents—that the corrections “need to stop” is also probably not the tack I’d have advised you to take in your first conversation.
If you do meet with the teacher and the counselor, I’d be really explicit about how much you want this to work for both your daughter and the teacher, and ask for suggestions and solutions in how your daughter can manage her energy and attention while remaining engaged and feeling welcome. (Wiggle chair? Basket of small fidget objects? Camera-off breaks to flop around?)
If the teacher’s answer is “None of those will work for me, and I will continue calling her out whenever her eyeline drifts,” then you are fully justified in asking the principal for support as a next step—and you will have the evidence that you’ve clearly done your part to make a good-faith effort at partnership, to boot.
—Ms. Bauer (middle and high school teacher, New York)
My 5-year-old daughter is in a mixed-age home-based school program this year. The program is all outdoors, and during the school day the kids have quiet time in individual tents. Lately, she’s been falling asleep during quiet time. The problem then is that when she sleeps at school, she doesn’t fall asleep at night until 9:30 p.m. or later, and she’s also then a wreck on the days that she’s at home.
It’s not an option for her not to go into her tent, but the teacher is quite relaxed about what she does in there as long as she is quiet and doesn’t keep the other kids awake. Books aren’t cutting it. Audiobooks always work at home (where she also has quiet time, but never sleeps), but I can’t think of any easy way to send them in with her, even with headphones. Do you have any ideas for good non-screen activities that might keep her from nodding off?
—Stay Awake
Dear Stay Awake,
To some degree, this depends on how lenient your daughter’s teacher is, but I think there are lots of options for activities. My immediate thought was that you could send her in with some sensory play options like rice, play dough, or even slime. If she can bring into her tent a tray or a bin with some kind of sensory activity in it, I think that would be a great option. It’s engaging, fairly quiet, and I’ve noticed kids often choose it over napping when that’s an option. The obvious downside would be the potential mess factor, but if your daughter’s teacher is relaxed, it could be a great choice. Check out options online for different sensory bin ideas. One activity my school used to do that makes great fine motor practice is to take putty and hide little beads or rhinestones in it. Kids like peeling them out, and it is good for fine-tuning those pre-writing muscles.
If sensory play isn’t an option, or your daughter isn’t particularly into it, my next suggestion would be a sticker book and a stack of papers, maybe with some crayons. Little kids love making “scenes,” and if you buy a big sticker book with her favorite characters and give her some paper, I’m sure she can fill an hour or two. Sticker books that have pages with a background (like a sky and a meadow) and a related page of stickers (flowers, birds, and trees) are a great way to fill time too.
Third, if none of these work, you might be able to make audiobooks work. I had a student once who couldn’t fall asleep without audiobooks, and we found an old, cheap iPod on eBay, downloaded a few books onto it, and set him up with the classroom headphones. If you have a tablet you don’t mind her using, that is an option you could finagle with the teacher’s help as a last resort too. Good luck!
—Ms. Sarnell (early childhood special education teacher, New York)
More Advice From Slate
My kid’s virtual kindergarten class had a pretend election on Election Day. When the teacher described what a president does, she used only male pronouns, and then she presented the class with candidates for “president of the forest.” Those candidates were a bear wearing a suit, a fox wearing overalls, and a naked beaver wearing a bow, presenting her rump, and making bedroom eyes. This is nuts, right?
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2LbEiu1
via IFTTT
Photo illustration by Slate. Images via paladin13/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Harry N. Abrams.
Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication.
Almost every day I read a new story, listen to a new podcast, or encounter a new thread of tweets chronicling the cancerous spread of internet cults and unfounded conspiracy theories. And, almost every day, I can’t help but think of a sparsely read novel written by a dude in the back office of an Arkansas dive bar in 1985. Though you’ve likely never heard of Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis, it’s revered among a certain circle of comedians. Parks and Recreation co-creator Michael Schur calls it a “masterpiece”; he read it at the suggestion of The Office co-creator Greg Daniels. Bill Hader, Michael Cera, and Conan O’Brien also count themselves among its fans.
“It’s recommended and passed around more than any fiction book I know of, outside maybe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” said David Cross, who has the novel’s original cover art tattooed on his arm.
Portis, who died in February, is best known as the guy who wrote True Grit, but he also penned four other novels, each funnier and more extraordinary than his most famous work. Masters of Atlantis, his comic magnum opus, turned 35 years old this October, but its message has never been more relevant. It’s the perfect novel to explain QAnon, to explain Trump, to explain organized religion—hell, to explain America itself.
Sign up for the Slate Culture newsletter
The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox three times a week.
The story chronicles the life of a Lamar Jimmerson, a charming simpleton who stumbles into leading a cult known as the Gnomon Society. In the opening pages, Jimmerson is milling around post-WWI Europe, looking for work and fun before headed back home stateside. Portis wastes not two sentences before introducing the inciting action: Jimmerson bumps into a homeless man who offers to trade a small book in exchange for cigarettes. The homeless man introduces himself as Nick, an Albanian refugee from Turkey. The two eat dinner together, and Nick reveals he’s actually Mike, a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt. A page after that: Mike reveals his true identity to be Jack, an Armenian from Damascus. And that book he traded for smokes? Worthless. But he has another, far superior book to trade Lamar: the Codex Pappus, a collection of secret symbols and equations that proves the existence of Atlantis and provides the basis for the ancient, all-knowing Gnomon Society. And, oh yeah, his name isn’t actually Jack, but Robert. Through all of this, Jimmerson doesn’t even bat an eye. He’s hooked. Obsessed. He has to know more.
It’s the literary equivalent of falling down an internet rabbit hole. Jimmerson is sold a copy of the supposedly sacred, all-revealing Codex Pappus and shares his newfound knowledge with his equally naïve pal, Sydney Hen, as well as the duplicitous (but equally dimwitted) Austin Popper. Together, the trio become unlikely apostles for a brand-new religion.
On the spectrum of conspiracy theories, Gnomonry is closer to the relatively benign flat-earthers and moon-landing deniers than the horrific black hole of QAnon. Though the infamously press-shy Portis never stated on the record any precise targets for his farcical sendup, astute readers seeking to uncover the real-world roots of Gnomonry will likely find it a vague mishmash of ideologies, mixing bits and pieces from Freemasonry and Scientology with allusions to the famed lost city under the sea. “[Portis] is probably one of the widest readers I’ve ever known,” said writer Jay Jennings, a friend of the author and editor of Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. “When he gets into a subject like, in this case, secret societies and their strangeness, he’s really omnivorous in his reading. It may just be a little three-word phrase that tells you all of that preparational reading went into one line.”
His fascination with the cults of yore sneaks into the details and dogma of Gnomonism. At least, in the specifics of the society that he’s willing to share. For one of the true genius Portis strokes is to reveal little of the actual content hidden within the Codex Pappus—if he’s revealing anything at all. Jimmerson’s rambling about sacred cones and all-explaining triangles may just be an idiot’s interpretation of an outdated or poorly translated trigonometry textbook, or perhaps some delirious misappropriation granting divine providence to Fibonacci’s famed sequence.
Though he intentionally avoids diving too deep into the minutiae of Gnomonism, Portis nails the reasons why cults, secret societies, and conspiracy theories grip certain members of society: namely, a desire for deeper truths and hidden meanings to explain a world that no longer makes sense. And, crucially, a dangerous abundance of free time.
“Things began to pick up towards the end of the decade,” Portis writes early on. “And then in 1929, with the economic collapse of the nation, the Gnomon Society fairly flourished. Traders and lawyers and bricklayers and salesmen and farmers now had time on their hands. They had time to listen and some were so desperate to seek answers in books.” As Gnomon mania spreads across the heartland, Jimmerson breaks ground on the society’s lavish limestone temple in Burnett, Indiana, “the most fashionable suburb of Gary.”
As the story unfolds over decades of Jimmerson’s life and Gnomonry balloons, each of the suddenly all-too-familiar signs of collective delusion are present. Weirdos, outsiders, fools, the angry, and the marginalized become ensnared by the ideology. Grifters and con men like Popper are all too happy to steer the gullible flock in wallet-lining directions. Contradictions zip over the heads of any and all True Believers. And, perhaps most importantly, a yo-yoing series of surefire predictions and grand declarations inevitably fail to materialize, only to be explained away by a minor miscalculation or infinitesimally small misreading of the tea leaves. The prophecy didn’t fail; it’s just delayed until TBD. Do not question the prophet, for the prophet remains unimpeachable.
Portis nails why cults, secret societies, and conspiracy theories grip certain members of society: namely, a desire for deeper truths and hidden meanings to explain a world that no longer makessense.
This phenomenon of explaining away failed predictions occurs with comic frequency in the QAnon alternate reality. Q drops, as they’re called—the cryptic messages from the eponymous (alleged) “deep state” insider forewarning of imminent arrests of child-eating liberals and Hollywood types—always fail to come to fruition. And yet, somehow, followers manage to twist and contort each failure into another clue to even grander conspiracy. It’s been three years since some punk on 4chan posted his very first prediction, about the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state still walks free, yet the QAnon cult now looms so large that it seatedan actual congressional caucus. Meanwhile, some followers have accepted literal time travel as the asphalt to pave over the plot holes of their new favorite religion.
Masters of Atlantis offers its own simple explanation for the failure of prophecy, such as the “Jimmerson Lag,” explaining why foretold events have yet to occur. Appropriately, it’s this harebrained apologia that leads to a schism in the Church of Gnomonry, with Jimmerson leading a sect devoted to an increasingly loose interpretation of the Codex Pappus and Hen retaining a purist wing. It’d all be unbearably grim if it weren’t so goddamn silly. Portis spins a blunt, matter-of-fact account of creeping ridiculousness—a delightful stylistic holdover from Portis’s erstwhile journalism days. His deft grasp on the syntax and diction of the all-American oddballs results in tickling, retrograde dialogue: “I watched you eating your macaroons. Not the straightforward bites of an honest man, just ratlike nibbling around the edges,” the deceitful grifter Popper memorably snaps at his former friend.
Reading Portis today is like reverse-engineering a specific strain of comedic voice present in some of the most popular comedy products of the past 20 years. To illustrate Portis’ influence is to draw a Glenn Beck–ian chalkboard connecting this book’s numerous high-profile fans.
Greg Daniels stumbled upon Masters of Atlantis in a used book store. He then recommended the book to The Office writer Michael Schur, who would go on to hire accomplished comedy writer Matt Murray on Parks and Recreation. Years earlier, while writing for Saturday Night Live, Murray had introduced Masters of Atlantis to Bill Hader, who became so enamored with Portis he even briefly secured the film rights to Portis’ third novel, The Dog of the South—a project he planned to develop and complete with Greg Mottola, who directed Hader in Superbad. Also in Superbad is Michael Cera, who currently owns the adaptation rights to Masters of Atlantis and is actively shopping an Atlantis TV series.
Cera’s buddy and occasional creative collaborator Clark Duke—who has a bit role in Superbad and earned a series regular role in Season 9 of The Office—is such a fan of Portis that he featured a quote by the author in the title sequence of his recent directorial debut, Arkansas. Duke first encountered Masters of Atlantis on the set of Hot Tub Time Machine, when screen partner John Cusack recommended the novel. Years later, Duke aimed to secure the rights to Atlantis, only to discover that Cera narrowly beat him to it. It was the first time the friends realized they shared an affinity for the author.
David Cross bonded over a shared Portis fandom with pal and Mr. Show co-creator Bob Odenkirk, who wrote for Saturday Night Live from 1987–91, overlapping with Daniels’ stint in the sketch show’s writers room. Also present in 30 Rock at the time? Daniels’ college friend and early writing partner Conan O’Brien, quoted on the back cover of the Overlook Press’ early-2000s reprint of Atlantis: “One of the few laugh-out-loud novels I’ve read.”
For this collection of veterans from the turn-of-the-century alternative-comedy boom, Portis is a hero, and in their work you’ll find flourishes of Portis DNA rippling through scenes, riffs, characters, and jokes.
“One thing that Portis does brilliantly in Masters of Atlantis is maybe a variation of what would come to be called ‘cringe comedy’ when people talk about The Office,” Daniels told me over email. “I think it’s taking flawed, stupid people making bad decisions and enjoying and pursuing the pathetic, clumsy foolishness relentlessly as far as you possibly can. Nobody enjoys following that road to its very end as much as other comedy writers. Normal people enjoy going there for a laugh, but then want to get back to following a character pursuing a valid and reasonable objective. Comedy writers love a bad, implausible, half-baked goal, and Masters of Atlantis is all fools self-importantly pursuing nonsense.”
Schur drew an even more direct connection between Masters of Atlantis and The Office. “The Office was always pitched as a guy who had an enormous blind spot for the way that people saw him. His vision of himself and the vision other people had of him was completely different,” Schur told me. It was in the context of blind spots that Daniels first recommended Masters of Atlantis to him. “If you want to read to read a 300-page book that absolutely nails in the funniest and most eloquent way what it is that humans are searching for, this is the book for you,” Schur added.
As with most great comedies, if you peel back the gag lines of Masters of Atlantis, you’ll find a searing, incisive examination into the soul of man, the Sisyphean struggle to find truth, meaning, and purpose—and the intoxicating capacity of any man, book, or ideology that promises you such elusive things. You get the sense Portis hates humanity but loves humans. He indicts the world but treats his characters gently, a reminder that even the most gullible, the dumbest, and the most opportunistic are people simply seeking answers. Portis would probably love to sit downwind from the proverbial crazy uncle preaching about Kamala Harris installing 5G networks in a devilish plot to upload Che Guevera propaganda and all five seasons of Netflix’s Queer Eye straight into the brains of regular everyday ’Mericans.
But that’s Portis for you, a cultural anthropologist of the weird and, more specifically, the weirdos. In the end, Masters of Atlantis is never really even about the fringe theories but the people who read and believe them all without a single critical thought crossing their mind. “I think Portis would write a great book about Alex Jones’ friendly cameraman who never questions any of the crazy shit he’s saying,” Bill Hader hypothesized to me over email. “And then mid-book he’d quit and start running fishing expeditions in Galveston, and Alex Jones would completely vanish from the story.” It’s about as succinct and spot on an elevator pitch for Portis fan fiction as I can imagine.
By the end of Masters of Atlantis, Jimmerson, Hen, Popper, and what remains of the warring factions of Gnomonry put aside their differences and live peacefully as old men in a Texas trailer park, playing dominoes and reminiscing about their youth. The exceptional sway they once commanded is now an afterthought, a slight irritant, distracting from what they wanted all along: personal connections and shared understanding. The true secret meaning of life was the friends made along the way.
Yes, there’s a grave irony in glorifying and proselytizing a funny book chock-full of warnings about glorifying and proselytizing funny books. But hey, I’m just a guy with a desire for deeper truths and hidden meanings to explain a world that no longer makes sense. And, crucially, a dangerous abundance of free time. Portis seems to have all the answers.
By Charles Portis. Overlook Press.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3aVTiHr
via IFTTT
Many years ago, I met a friend for lunch in New York. This was in the days before cellphones, so we made a plan to find each other at the 96th Street subway station. When I arrived, it was windy and rainy, so I huddled under an awning with my hood up. I was worried that my friend wouldn’t find me, but more worried that I would get soaked, so I stayed there, searching all the drab raincoats exiting the subway for a familiar form.
After a few minutes, a body separated from the masses on the other side of Broadway, crossed the street, and approached me. It was my friend. “I knew it was you from over there,” he said, “because I could see you biting your nails.”
I was appalled. Until that moment I had never thought of myself as a nail-biter—or rather, I had never realized that a nail-biter was what everyone thought of me as. But of course they did, because that was what I was. It was what I had been for decades before, and it was what I would be for decades after. But somehow, this year, of all years, that changed.
The year 2020 was a year of feeling out of control. We were helpless to change the maps that showed the pandemic blooming across the country, as the reds that once represented the top of the scale were supplanted by new, hotter, more terrible reds. We could do nothing to stop the Trump administration from careening through its final year, doing immense damage both by actively doing evil and by not doing anything. We could try to protect ourselves and our families, and in doing so contribute in our small way to the health of our community, but even that felt far from safe or reliable enough.
It was a year where achievements were modest. Yes, there were those who accomplished new personal records or built new decks, but the real achievements of 2020, if the year went as well as it could, were the things we avoided. I managed not to get sick or get anyone else sick. I canceled the trips I had so eagerly anticipated. I wasn’t overwhelmed by depression or panic or apocalyptic thinking, though I flirted with them all.
And so it’s fitting that the personal achievement I’m most proud of in 2020 is a thing I stopped doing: I stopped biting my fingernails. In a year of helplessness, I exerted this tiny bit of control over myself, over my body. In this most stressful of years, I managed to break a stress-related habit that has bedeviled me for my entire life. As this awful year came to a close, I wanted to understand how I did it.
Nickelodeon
My mother says she has a memory of me sitting at our kitchen table in the sunshine, “gnawing away while you were deep into a book.” She thinks I was in second or third grade. I bit my nails as a teenager, nibbling in world lit while Ms. Gutschow discussed the Green Knight. I bit my nails in college, waiting backstage for my entrance in a Pinter play. I bit my nails in my first jobs in publishing; I bit my nails at my wedding and during the births of my children; I bit my nails as I became, in most other respects, a grown man with responsibilities and credentials. And each New Year’s I would think, well, this is ridiculous. I am 25/35/40 years old, I am a graduate student/professional journalist/father of teenagers, and yet my cuticles are bleeding and my nails are ragged and torn.
But I never quit. For our entire marriage, my wife had had standing permission to smack me on the arm whenever she saw my hands go to my mouth, but I didn’t quit. I painted my nails with that foul-tasting clear nail polish, but I didn’t quit. I let go of any number of other harmful habits picked up in the 1980s and ’90s—cigarettes, “ironic” homophobia, Piers Anthony novels—but kept right on biting my nails.
As a character note, nail-biting is what I think of as an indicator: a behavior that telegraphs a certain emotional state, whether you want it to or not. If you are biting your nails, people believe you are nervous. It’s a bit obvious, as a signifier of anxiety and is, unsurprisingly, common in animation: Goofy wood-chips his nails when he’s on a diet, Pegasus chews his hooves as Hercules makes his way through an obstacle course. There’s a whole SpongeBob SquarePants episode about SpongeBob’s nail-biting habit; thwarted from chewing his own, he resorts to biting the nails of his friends.
For our entire marriage, my wife had had standing permission to smack me on the arm whenever she saw my hands go to mymouth.
Yet I’ve never really thought of myself as a particularly anxious person. For me, nail-biting was a habit for bad times and good. I bit my nails unconsciously, indiscriminately—that is, I would be doing something else, lost in thought, and then I would come to at the pleasant, decisive clack of my teeth, the delectable tug of the nail away from my finger. My hand was at my mouth and I had no idea how it had gotten there. But now that it was there—now that the nail was uneven, its tiny point waiting to snag a sweater or simply bother me—I might as well finish the job. And it made no sense to have one very short nail and other, longer nails, and I’d already fallen prey to the habit, so why not just work my way through the fingers, cutting every nail down to size?
God! Even typing these words I curl my fingertips in delight. My neural pathways still recall the sensation, and crave it. I have quit biting my nails, but I haven’t quit wanting to bite them.
NBC
Nail-biting is a body-focused repetitive behavior, in the same family as hair-pulling, skin-picking, and cheek-chewing. As with all such behaviors, it can be triggered by stress or anxiety but is not necessarily in and of itself a sign of stress of anxiety. “These are all grooming behaviors in the animal kingdom,” said John Piacentini, professor of psychiatry and director of UCLA’s CARES Center for childhood anxiety. “Grooming behaviors are very, very strong instincts and patterns. We believe that these disorders are grooming instincts that have gone a bit awry.”
The behavior is particularly hard to curb. “There’s no medication, really,” said Piacentini. “It’s hard to monitor, and hard to prevent. Oftentimes, it’s done automatically. We catch ourselves only after we start it. So even if you are trying to stop, the horse is out of the barn before you realize it.”
On New Year’s Day 2020, I once again set myself the resolution of minimizing, and eventually eliminating, this embarrassing habit. It might be tough in an election year, I thought, but I’m now 45 years old and I have got to find a way. I tried a different technique: For the first few weeks of January I restricted my biting to one hand, my left, letting the fingernails on my right hand grow unmolested. This worked, basically, allowing me on the one hand to continue my habit while, on the other, seeing the positive effects of restraint. In February, I attempted a kind of gentle withdrawal practice: I allowed myself to put my hands near my mouth, even to put my fingernails on my teeth, but I did not bite down. I just kept my hand there until the desire passed. When my wife smacked me, I ineffectually protested, “I’m not biting!” She was right that it was still gross, but I was right that I wasn’t biting. Those moments of tapping my ever-longer fingernails against my teeth were, it seemed, what I needed to curtail my desire.
Right around the time of the year that I would typically relapse, the pandemic came. In those first months of the novel coronavirus, we were all obsessed with fomite transfer: the notion that the virus might travel from a surface to your hand and from your hand to a mucous membrane. We sang “Happy Birthday” twice while washing our hands. And we were suddenly hideously conscious of how often our hands touched our face. This was frightening but also, for a person in his third month of trying to stop biting his nails, very helpful. Specialists working to help a patient stop biting nails use a technique called “habit reversal,” which requires increasing awareness of the offending behavior. “You might wear a wrist weight, or a jangly bracelet,” Piacentini said, to alert you when your hand approaches your mouth. Now I had something even more effective than a jangly bracelet: a worldwide public health crisis and the fear of death. Plus, I was often wearing a mask.
As my fingernails got longer I rediscovered the little sensations and annoyances familiar, I suppose, to normal people with normal fingers. I kept stubbing my new fingernails painfully into things. Once, hands wet from their hourly washing, I tried to turn the bathroom doorknob and my nails dug into my own palm, leaving four bright red crescents in my hand. But I could also open a can of Diet Coke without asking my wife for help. “Your nails look good,” she said one day in April, after I—what was this devilry?—clipped them.
Disney
Perhaps because of nail-biting’s cartoonishness, it’s not that common a character trait in literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald made glamorous Gloria Gilbert an unlikely nail-biter in The Beautiful and Damned—she takes Anthony to the drugstore to buy gumballs in order to give herself something else to do with her hands. In Lord of the Flies, Ralph, the island’s last exemplar of civilization, looks in a moment of despair down at his nails: “They were bitten down to the quick though he could not remember when he had restarted this habit nor any time when he indulged it.” The implication is that Ralph had once bit his nails, shed the habit, and now—trapped by a plane crash, forced into a position of leadership—he’s returned to it. He hates it.
Finally, I was as inescapably anxious as my habit had always telegraphed, and in the midst of this upheaval, I found gentle comfort in the one tiny bit of continued control I was exerting over mylife.
Over the past four decades I, too, could often not remember when I restarted the habit after deliberate attempts to wean. I would go long weeks without touching my fingernails and then, in an unconscious frenzy while reading a particularly engrossing book, mow my fingers short. And then I would berate myself at my inattention, my lack of self-control, and then shrug: If my fingers look terrible again, why not soothe myself by biting some more? “We see some of the same patterns we see in drug addiction,” Piacentini told me. “You feel those negative consequences, and then you use drugs to make those consequences go away.”
But as spring 2020 moved into summer, I was able to avoid relapse. I realize now that the very unconsciousness of the habit is what doomed it in 2020. The thoughtless absorption in a book or a TV show or my own writing that was the harbor for the habit in the before times was a rarity now, so occupied was I with the various ways that the pandemic was changing our lives. Finally, I was as inescapably anxious as my habit had always telegraphed, and in the midst of this upheaval, I found gentle comfort in the one tiny bit of continued control I was exerting over my life. Even during the stress of the election and the continuing stress of the postelection, I found it easier to not bite my nails than to bite them. “We are creatures of habit,” said Piacentini. “And we can start building the habit of not biting.”
I have reached the end of 2020, this accursed year, with fingernails that are serviceable. They bear the scars of years gone by—I will never have the dewy nail beds of a Jergens model—but they look … OK. And I’m not the only one to have shed the practice. Piacentini revealed bashfully that he had been a nail-biter for 50 years before he went “cold turkey” in March. “I think that, perversely, this was a good year to quit,” he said. He still thinks about it, still desires the habit—he sounded almost wistful as we bonded over the simple pleasures of worrying at a thumbnail—but he hasn’t bitten a nail since the pandemic took over life in America.
In a way, I am writing this essay for the boost of accountability I hope it will provide. I can see, at some future date, the likely possibility that I will bite a nail. At that moment I will have a choice: I can give in to the illicit rapture and relapse. Or I can find it within myself to stop at one finger, to wear that bitten nail like a warning, and let myself go no further. If you see me out in public—at the theater, I hope, or at dinner together indoors—please ask me about my nails, and call me on it if they look bad.
I don’t mean to brag about this achievement, exactly. But I am proud of myself. 2020 was not the year to measure yourself against your childhood dreams. This is not the New Year’s to bemoan the novel you didn’t write or the race you didn’t run. 2020 was a year to find triumph in unlikely places. Day by day, hour by hour, I succeeded at something in this awful year. You did too, even if it was just seeing it to its end without doing too much damage to yourself.
It was a nail-biter, but you made it.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3huhHoK
via IFTTT
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Amazon Studios.
In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—this year, Justin Chang, Odie Henderson, and Alison Willmore—about the year in cinema.Read the previous dispatch here.
Fellow Cinematic Nomads,
Like this tumultuous year, the Movie Club is coming to an end. Parting is such sweet sorrow, to quote Kenneth Bran—I mean the Bard. Our impending goodbyes make me feel so bittersweet that I had to cue up Nicholas Britell’s If Beale Street Could Talk score for maximum effect.
Because so much turmoil befell me in 2020, my joys and successes were often pulled into the undertow by my worries, fears, and concerns. I often felt overwhelmed and hopeless. And it wasn’t just me; you could feel that same coexistence of sadness, dread, triumph and rage in this year’s documentaries. These films were so timely that they seemed to predict the hell we were to be plunged into, election-wise, pandemic-wise, and social-unrest-wise. This was due less to prognostication and more to how 2020 represented just a new chapter in the long-running story of injustice and the financial imbalance between rich and poor. Even documentaries thrown together this year, like Alex Gibney’s devastating yet ultimately flawed Totally Under Control, see their subjects’ horrific origins stitched into the great American fabric.
Looking at our Top 10 lists, I see that we were similarly affected by this year’s documentary offerings. Garrett Bradley’s Time, which Justin, Alison, and I had on our lists, is a beautiful encapsulation of all those feelings, a film as lyrical as Nomadland and just as nonjudgmental toward its subjects. Shot in haunting black and white, Time portrays Sibil Richardson’s battles with a system that punishes the guilty far more harshly if they’re not white. In your review, Justin, you described a particular sequence as “teeming with life, pulsing with joy and yet marked by a powerful, palpable absence,” a description that can also be applied to Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson’s unorthodox yet hauntingly funny meditation on impending parental loss. I wasn’t as high on this one as Dana and Alison, but I admired its daring and its approach. It was also great to see Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets represented on Alison’s list.
Sign up for the Slate Culture newsletter
The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox three times a week.
I haven’t seen City Hall yet, but I still got my fill of how political machines affected the people they’re supposed to represent. Collective was one of the hardest things I sat through this year. I was so consumed by my own anger that I had to turn it off briefly to compose myself. That same feeling arose while watching the Stacey Abrams documentary, All In: The Fight for Democracy, which ultimately managed to soothe my troubled soul by ending with “Turntables,” a fantastic song by Janelle Monáe. Her video for the song is one of the best short films of the year. The less said about Monáe’s other 2020 contribution, the repugnant Antebellum, the better.
All I can add to Dana’s and Justin’s insightful Nomadland comments is that I’m glad Chloé Zhao’s film was No. 2 on our collective Top 10 list at RogerEbert.com. It embodies what Roger Ebert, Movie Club hall of famer, always said about movies being an empathy machine. I don’t profess to understand Fern and her fellow nomads’ lifestyle, but Zhao unobtrusively allows us to sit with the characters and observe their joys and struggles. Their humanity shines through, so even if we don’t agree with their choices, we see the common bonds we all share as people. It’s a gorgeous, memorable film.
Empathy haunted the cinema this year. I was moved for personal reasons by Sound of Metal, Darius Marder’s beautiful film about a musician slowly coming to terms with his sudden deafness. Riz Ahmed is superb here, never overplaying a scene, going for realism when the overly dramatic would have been easier. It made me relive my own sudden loss of half my vision, and later the loss of enough of my hearing to cause concern. I understood Ahmed’s character pinning his hopes on a possible cure that doesn’t work as expected. Through the powerful performance of Paul Raci, I saw my own ultimate acceptance of things as they are.
You know what else haunted moviedom this year? Stage adaptations! We couldn’t get to the Great White Way, so it came to us. We had the slightly censored Hamilton, which Disney+ brought to folks who couldn’t afford its steep ticket prices or who weren’t able to bribe theater critics so they could go as a plus-one. (Odie stares into the distance, nonchalantly whistling to hide his guilt.) There was also the aforementioned American Utopia; the majestic and superb “what-if” scenario of Kemp Powers and Regina King’s One Night in Miami; and of course, Meryl Streep in Let Them All Sing, I mean, The Prom, the Ryan Murphy production that answered the musical question “What if James Corden were a puppet controlled by Wayland Flowers?”
Another Ryan Murphy thingamabob, The Boys in the Band, will tie in nicely with Justin’s comments about representation. Justin, I really identified with your sense that your voice needs to be heard on significant works by people of color. It’s a bit of a running joke how many Black films I’ve covered over the years, yet part of me feels compelled to put my two cents in on how I feel my people are represented. I fear being pigeonholed, but by that same token (pun intended), I realize there aren’t enough of us out here to achieve any kind of balance yet. Reviewing the second cinematic incarnation of Mart Crowley’s play offered me the rare opportunity to not only represent my Blackness (though I was very hard on its lone Black character) but also my bisexuality. I rarely get that opportunity, so I seized it and wrote a shade-filled, bitchy review that I’m sure Jim Parsons’ Michael would have enjoyed.
My coach is about to turn into a pumpkin, so I’d better wrap up. Alison, thank you for your words on Mank, a movie that is on my 10 worst list this year. I thought it was yet another film in which David Fincher is more occupied with showing you what he can do with technique rather than making a movie that’s not a goddamn bore. Those cigarette burns on the “film”—Lord, hold my tongue!—AARRRRRGGGGHH! At least Mank gave me two things to be happy about: Amanda Seyfried’s performance is one. The other is the opportunity to close out with a song. Join me, won’t you?
They’re Manky and the Brain
Yes Manky and the Brain
One’s a boy genius
The other wrote Kane
Their script ownership rights
Will make critics fight
They’re Manky, they’re Manky and the Brain
Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain Brain!
To give the Mank his due
Dave Fincher’s plan unfurled
With the help of Pauline Kael,
They’ll shatter Orson’s world.
They’re Manky and the Brain
Yes Manky and the Brain
That constant refrain
Will drive you quite insane.
But in the Twitterverse
They’ll prove that we’re all cursed.
They’re Manky, they’re Manky and the Brain
Brain Brain Brain Brain!
Thank you! I love you all!
I tip my fedora and bow out gracefully,
Odie
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/3n0LUwP
via IFTTT
