Meat Pies (One Meatless) with “Sweeney Todd” ’s Newest Stars

Annaleigh Ashford (Mrs. Lovett) and Josh Groban (the demon barber of Fleet Street) compare notes on their early Sondheimian setbacks.
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The Cryptic Crossword: Sunday, January 29, 2023

Greek god’s head of Olympus after a vote (6).
http://dlvr.it/ShfH39

Corporate Alternatives to the Compliment Sandwich

The Honey Bomb, the Spiralling Donut, Performance Pies, and other scrumptious snacks for your subordinates.
http://dlvr.it/ShcBgx

The Striking Public Art of Shahzia Sikander

The Pakistani American artist’s sculptures, in a project titled “Havah . . . to breathe, air, life,” are on view in Madison Square Park.
http://dlvr.it/ShZBGW

The Frictionless Charms of the Ferrante Cinematic Universe

The film and television adaptations of the Italian author’s novels offer an almost suspicious lack of resistance.
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How to Care for Your New Floral Arrangement

Our core belief is that gifts that make you work hard and require constant upkeep are more appreciated.
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The Rules According to Pamela Paul

At the Times, Paul often writes on the hazards of shifting norms. But she’s also revealed the fraught position of the opinion columnist.
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Thank You for Your Reservation

Shouts & Murmurs by Anand Giridharadas: Your party must be complete, emotionally, to be seated. No substitutions, no takeout containers, and food allergies be damned.
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The Biden-Documents Mess

House Republicans are ramping up conspiracy theories, but one thing seems clear: the government’s documents system has an overclassification addiction.
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The Cryptic Crossword: Sunday, January 22, 2023

Broadcast Nevada’s sin (4).
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The Artist Who Collaborates with Ants

By working with insects, Catherine Chalmers reveals how much we have in common with them.
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The Mother-Lovers of “MILF Manor”

The dating show, on TLC, which puts eight older women in a house with their young sons, is haunted by the spectre of incest.
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Why Is Columbia Kicking Out a Beloved Preschool?

The Red Balloon is part of the university’s progressive history, but it may not have a future.
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Medicating Madame Bovary (While Waiting for Godot)

Godot, yesterday was the one-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixty-seventh appointment you’ve missed. Are Tuesdays at two-thirty still a good time to meet?
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A Parisian Wanderer with a Humanist Lens

Pierre Verger traced and retraced paths through the U.S. and elsewhere while staying alert to beauty in all its forms.
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New York’s Theatre Festivals Imagine a World After Mankind

Recent shows’ visions of the future haven’t exactly been post-apocalyptic, with the violence and darkness that term implies. Instead, they have delighted in our disappearance, savored it.
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The Mail

Letters respond to Emma Green’s piece about the People’s C.D.C., David Denby’s essay about Norman Mailer, and Molly Ringwald’s Personal History about Jean-Luc Godard.
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Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans’ Rocky Road Ahead

With members of the House G.O.P. caucus still pulling in all directions, does anyone know where the Party is headed?
http://dlvr.it/SgxTXv

An Extremely Laudatory Oral History of Your High-School Theatre Program

A lot of people are completely delusional about their high-school theatre programs being special, but not us.
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The Self-Taught Artist Whose Work Tells the History of Modern Korea

Oh U-Am’s paintings depict working-class life in this century and last, yet seem to exist in the timeless space of allegory.
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The Objectively Objectionable Grammatical Pet Peeve

A semi-attentive investigation into a confounding sentence type.
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The Golden Globes Find an Exit from Their Self-Made Mess

Jerrod Carmichael gave the evening a tinge of danger, while Jennifer Coolidge, Quinta Brunson, Steven Spielberg, Michelle Yeoh, and other assembled stars contributed to the fizz and fun.
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An Octogenarian Tackles Her Bucket List in “FLOAT!”

Azza Cohen’s bubbe, who didn’t think she was important enough to be the subject of a documentary, learns to swim.
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McCarthy Asks Whatever Joker Hid His Gavel to Give It Back

“O.K., guys, you’ve had your fun,” the new House Speaker said, his voice barely audible over the derisive hoots of his fellow-Republicans.
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Terminally ill people urge UK government to pay pensions early

Those of working age who die are twice as likely to spend final year of life in poverty, says charity Terminally ill people are calling on the UK government to start paying their state pensions early so they can enjoy what is left of their lives and tackle a “cost of dying” crisis. People of working age who are unlikely to survive long enough to claim their state pension say the change would cost little more than the amount lost each year to erroneous pension payouts by the Department for Work and Pensions. Continue reading...
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OPINION GUEST ESSAY: Temple Grandin: Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All

Credit...Alanah Sarginson

 By Temple Grandin, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jan. 9, 2023

Ms. Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and the author of “Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions.”

When I was younger, I believed that everybody thought in photo-realistic pictures the same way I did, with images clicking through my mind a little bit like PowerPoint slides or TikTok videos.

I had no idea that most people are more word-centric than I am. For many, words, not pictures, shape thought. That’s probably how our culture got to be so talky: Teachers lecture, religious leaders preach, politicians make speeches and we watch “talking heads” on TV. We call most of these people neurotypical — they develop along predictable lines and communicate, for the most part, verbally.

I was born in the late 1940s just as the diagnosis of autism was being applied to kids like me. I had no language until age 4 and was first diagnosed as brain damaged. Today, many people would say that I’m neurodivergent — a term that encompasses not only autism but also dyslexia, A.D.H.D. and other learning problems. The popularization of the term neurodivergence and society’s growing understanding about the different ways that brains work are unquestionably positive developments for many individuals like me.

Still, many aspects of our society are not set up to allow visual thinkers — which so many of us neurodivergent folks are — to thrive. In fact, many aspects of our society seem set up specifically so we will fail. Schools force students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum. The workplace relies too much on résumés and G.P.A.s to assess candidates’ worth. This must change not only because neurodivergent people, and all visual thinkers, deserve better but also because without a major shift in how we think about how we learn, American innovation will be stifled.

When I was 7 or 8, I spent hours tinkering and experimenting to figure out how to make parachutes, fashioned from old scarves, open more quickly each time I tossed them into the air. This required careful observation to determine how small design changes affected performance. My single-mindedness, verging on obsession, was probably because I was autistic. At the time I loved a book about famous inventors and their inventions. It impressed me that Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers were so single-minded in figuring out how to make a light bulb or an airplane. They spent lots of time obsessively perfecting their inventions. It is likely that some of the inventors in that book also were autistic.

We hear a great deal about the need to fix the infrastructure in this country, but we are too focused on the things that need improving and updating rather than the people who will be able to do the work. For over 25 years, I designed equipment to handle livestock and worked with the highly skilled people who built the equipment. When I look back at all the projects I designed for large companies, I estimate that 20 percent of the skilled welders and drafting technicians were either autistic, dyslexic or had A.D.H.D. I remember two people who had autism and held numerous patents for mechanical devices they invented and sold equipment to many companies. Our visual thinking skills were key to our success.

Today, we want our students to be well-rounded; we should think about making sure that the education we provide is as well. At the same time, I wager that the people who will fix America’s infrastructure have spent hours and hours on one thing, whether it be Legos, violin or chess — hyper-focus is a classic sign of neurodivergent thinking and it’s critical for innovation and invention.

I often get asked what I would do to improve both elementary and high school. The first step would be to put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics and welding. I would have hated school if the hands-on classes had been removed, as so many have been today. These classes also expose students — especially neurodivergent students — to skills that could become a career. Exposure is key. Too many students are growing up who have never used a tool. They are completely removed from the world of the practical.

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Despite my accomplishments, if I were a young person today, I would have difficulty graduating from high school because I could not pass algebra. It was too abstract, with no visual correlations. This is true for many of today’s students who get labeled as bad at math, students who might otherwise pass alternative math courses such as statistics that would also apply to real-life work situations. There is too much emphasis in school on testing and not enough on career outcomes. The fact that I failed the SAT in math prohibited me from getting into veterinary school, but today I am a university professor in animal sciences and I am invited to speak to groups of veterinarians to advise them on their work. The true measure of an education isn’t what grades a student gets today, but where they are 10 years later.

I am often invited to give talks at corporations and government agencies, and the first thing I tell managers is that they need a neurodiverse work force. Complementary skills are the key to successful teams. We need the people who can build our trains and planes and internet, and the people who can make them run. Studies have shown that diverse teams will outperform homogeneous teams. If you’ve ever attended a meeting where nothing gets solved, it may be because there are too many people who think alike.

Today, Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s highest tech silicon chips. Much of the specialized mechanical equipment used for processing meat is made in Holland and Germany. When I visited the Steve Jobs Theater in California, pre-Covid, I discovered that the glass walls were created by an Italian company. The massive carbon fiber roof that looks like a spaceship was imported from Dubai. The reason this equipment is coming from outside the United States can be traced in part to differences in educational systems. In Italy and the Netherlands, for instance, a student at about age 14 decides whether to go the university route or the vocational route. The vocational route is not looked down on or regarded as a lesser form of intelligence. And that’s how it should be everywhere, because the skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.

Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and the author of “Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Third of England’s teachers who qualified in last decade ‘have left profession’

Exclusive: Labour analysis of DfE figures comes as party hopes to shift political focus to education Nearly a third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have since left the profession, according to Labour analysis that has been released as the party attempts to shift the political focus on to education. With the results of strike ballots by teaching unions due in the coming days, Labour intends to use a Commons vote this week to push their plan to impose VAT on private school fees, which they say would help pay for new teachers in the state sector. Continue reading...
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What Lies Do to a Life

In “A History of Lying,” the novelist Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel argues that lies are inescapable. But being in the periphery of a real man who couldn’t stop lying casts light on the ways that’s not quite true.

By Lucie Elven, THE NEW YORKER, Page-Turner

January 5, 2023

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

Ionce knew a man whose remarkable lying caused me to overlook him. When we met, I was nineteen and world-weary, and he fit a mold I thought I knew: rich (he’d attended Harrow, a particularly expensive private school), clever (then Oxford, early), seemingly conservative (a link to the army). A few years later, I crossed paths with him again when I was thinking of moving into a cheap room in a house in London occupied by a woman he was dating. The room was in the eaves, and I took it, even though it didn’t have a door—just a permanently open trap with a ladder leading in.

At that time, the man worked for the civil service. He was writing a satire about it, he said. He would come to our house with a big army bag slung over his shoulders, and through the square hole in my floor I’d hear him talking about the Grenadier Guards, Afghanistan, P.T.S.D. I paid him little attention, but I knew that class was a constant source of stress in his relationship with my housemate, whom I’ll call Sophie. He had a string of names and well-known relations; he introduced himself as the son of a lord. She was middle class. Sometimes, the liar would go to extravagant parties and not invite her, and she would feel insufficiently impressive.

When Sophie, who had become dissatisfied with her job, applied for a position with the intelligence services, he encouraged her. But then she told him that she’d listed his name on a questionnaire—the sort designed to reveal anything in her private life that might compromise her, Queen, or country—and he said that there was no need to mention him. Days later, he broke things off. Sophie was shocked and upset, and grew more so when, shortly after that, she received a text message from the interviewer to whom she had spoken, meant for someone else. “It’s all a tissue of lies,” it read. “No Grenadier Guards. No Harrow. Nothing.”

The phrase “tissue of lies,” like “web” and “fabrication,” evokes the warp and weft of a narrative woven largely from threads of untruth—its sometimes animal vitality. Since then, I’ve thought often about how to retell the story of the liar. Relating it to friends as an anecdote was to submit to its surreal quality. It didn’t feel entirely right when I told it that way, given the license for exaggeration that the anecdote form allows. Doing so seemed to enact a kind of indulgent dynamic that I associate with ghost tours and urban myths of baby alligators living in sewers, or viral videos of shrouded figures walking across doorways. When I began to write fiction, I considered using the story but felt that it was unsuitable—both implausible and, somehow, too obvious. The parts that were most shocking in real life—the secret services, the texted tricolon, the degree to which he inflated his imaginary aristocratic heritage—would read as clichéd plot devices. But, over the years, the story kept hopping into my mind. When I encountered lies in my own life or in the news—reading about British undercover officers infiltrating the climate movement, for example, using the identities of dead babies and fathering children with activists—I would find the story of Sophie’s liar sitting there underneath, a toad under a pile of leaves.

Perhaps the reason that the liar has stayed with me has something to do with his simultaneous brazenness and banality—though the revelation was shocking, he himself had registered so little with me, and the fact of being lied to seemed, in the end, almost pedestrian. Lies are ubiquitous; in a certain light, to be shocked by them seems precious.

Such is the posture assumed by the Spanish novelist Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel in “A History of Lying,” a book-length essay in which he declares that “the history of humankind is nothing other than the history of making it up.” Best known for a parodic crime novel titled “The Hypochondriac Hitman” and other postmodern experiments with literary convention, Muñoz-Rengel sets out from a brief summary of Cartesian doubt (which, he says, none of the philosophical solutions that have been proposed properly resolve) to argue that lying is not, as conventional morality might have us assume, a practice to be avoided whenever possible but, rather, an innate and inevitable element of language and life.

Muñoz-Rengel marshals a wide range of examples to this end, beginning with that of the Cretan seer Epimenides, who rose from a deep sleep in the sixth century B.C. to declare that “all Cretans are liars,” and stretching to the present day, when Spotify’s sharing function allows people to “stop listening to the things they want to and begin prioritising instead the image of themselves.” Skimming the surface of philosophy (Nietzsche, Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, and post-structuralists are all praised for their skepticism), Muñoz-Rengel also attempts to give his polemic a scientific varnish by referring to the natural world. The book is laced with nuggets of evolutionary biology and examples of animals with the ability to disguise themselves. Consider the cuttlefish, he writes, for whom deception is a biological strategy. It can not only change color but is also “capable of modifying its texture, the entirety of its external structure, and even of generating patterns similar to the shifting seabed, which it can then set in motion along its body in the opposite direction to that in which it is actually moving.”

The example does much to illustrate the breadth of Muñoz-Rengel’s definition of a lie, as well as his subsequent tendency to blur concrete details, as well as historical fact, in service of his theory. So broad is his lens that people captured and enslaved by the Phoenicians are described as “overly trusting foreigners—the more credulous kind, who probably hung around the bait, rather than withdrawing somewhere safe.” Even his less extreme conflations are absurd. “Having dealings with other people means staying in a constant state of dissimulation,” he writes—in other words, you lie whenever you are polite. Gone are the important distinctions—based on their scale and severity, their effects and their motivations—between individual lies. And who would hold a single cuttlefish to be an example of deceitful behavior, when its aptitude for concealment is helpful to its survival?

Some of the most exaggerated portions of Muñoz-Rengel’s book are those in which he claims that, because language uses signs to represent real things, it, too, is a sort of deception, and that all understandings reached through metaphors are therefore “based on speculation, projection, lies.” This, again, seems to elide crucial nuances. While metaphors can sometimes be misleading, they can also illuminate the speaker’s personal response to a subject. In neither case do they impart knowledge that is empirically falsifiable, as lies do. When I compared the story of the liar to a toad buried in leaf litter, I was not claiming that the story had literally been hibernating for the winter—grayish, warty—then sprung out when it was unexpectedly disturbed, an unwelcome, grotesque, vaguely comic creature. I was trying to convey something of the particular way the story had lodged itself in my mind and, even when I forgot about it, seemed to be leading a life of its own.

Sometimes, among all Muñoz-Rengel’s vague tracings of unreality, I detect something sincere. His fierce allegiance to the idea that the origins of lying reside in any detachment from reality brings to mind the idea of not lying as an active pursuit, which takes the form of a constant sifting through the details of life, and a simultaneous attempt to articulate them as clearly as possible—something akin to producing art. But when he writes off representation with such little regard for the distinction between it and intentional lying, it comes—gradually, frustratingly—to seem as if he is not so much making a case about the inevitability of epistemological carelessness as providing a demonstration of it.

Ican’t pretend his lying hasn’t made the liar I knew more interesting, but more interesting still was how, around him, the world behaved in unlikely ways. Like Boris Johnson—who was described by one former Tory M.P., himself often denying having been in the intelligence services, as “the best liar we’ve ever had”—the liar told stories that were superficially entertaining but predictable, and used them to garner power.

The propulsive force of people who know how to gain trust by knitting improbable tales is Muñoz-Rengel’s most generative subject. He recounts the story of the Catalan man Joan Pujol, who, in 1941, approached the British authorities to offer his services as a spy. By his own account, Pujol—whose family suffered during the Spanish Civil War, and who consequently hated Fascism and Communism both—came to spying in a roundabout way:

I was managing a poultry farm. . . . The poultry farm was not a success. . . . I decided to “exit” from the stage, as they say in the theatre. . . . My life in Madrid as a hotel manager began peacefully enough. . . . On 3 September 1939 England had declared war on Germany. . . . My humanist convictions would not allow me to turn a blind eye to the enormous suffering that was being unleashed by this psychopath Hitler.

When the English rejected him, Pujol instead applied to work for the Germans, who, unsuspecting, took him on and assigned him a mission to Britain. Pujol, who had no intention of spying for them (he later claimed that he planned to work as a double agent), told his handlers that he was moving to Lake Windermere. Instead, he and his wife, whom he married in Madrid, had moved to Lisbon, where he bought a British guidebook, railway timetable, and map, and began to send made-up reports to his employer, accompanied by expense invoices. In April, 1942, the Allies signed Pujol on as a double agent, code-named Garbo. Over the next two years, he wove “a network of completely fictitious sub-agents”—twenty-seven in total—who all needed paying. His inventions included a Brit of Swiss-German descent named William Gerbers, a Welsh nationalist named Dagobert, a Gibraltarian waiter living in Chislehurst, and a Venezuelan student in Glasgow (and his brother, whom Pujol named Moonbeam). Their invented efforts led to Pujol charging the Nazis a fortune. Sometimes, when the Germans wondered why Pujol’s sources failed to file reports until after the fact, he made up stories of illness or told them that the source had died, leaving behind a fictional widow who needed the money.

In 1943, Pujol was enlisted to convince the Germans that the Allies were planning an invasion of the Pas-de-Calais, rather than Normandy. He kept up the lie until the last moment, when it was too late for the Germans to stop the D Day landings. By then, he and his wife and first child had been relocated to London, where the couple had a second baby. Declassified M.I.5 files show that, at the time, his wife was so homesick (she especially missed her mother) that she threatened to expose Pujol to the Germans. To keep her silent, Pujol and his British handler tricked her into believing that her behavior had led to his imprisonment, and arranged for her to visit a detention center, where Pujol pretended to be incarcerated. The Allies helped him maintain his cover throughout the war (and even after); he was both awarded an Iron Cross by Hitler and made an M.B.E. by King George VI—after which he faked a bout of malaria, and sloped off to Venezuela, where he opened a bookshop.

Pujol’s story only became known publicly in 1984, when an author named Nigel West went on a mission to uncover Garbo’s true identity: the result was a book, “Operation Garbo,” co-written with Pujol and published in 1985. (Although Pujol used his real name, “Nigel West” is a pseudonym for Rupert Allason, a former Conservative M.P. who has written about espionage, and has published several crime novels.) In “Operation Garbo,” Pujol is a lavish narrator, alert to the possibilities of storytelling even in his everyday life. When meeting his Nazi handler, he wonders whether he was taken on because this handler was “intoxicated by my verbosity.”

Muñoz-Rengel approves of Pujol for his “capacity for artifice,” which he used to fight against injustice “without firing a single bullet.” (None of Pujol’s wife’s role or treatment appears in the book, and one has the sense that Muñoz-Rengel is captivated by Pujol’s madcap behavior, rather than curious about its roots or its implications for the people who knew him.) Muñoz-Rengel attributes West’s success at tracking down Pujol in part to his vocation, writing that “novelists understand better than anyone the fictional nature of reality.” If there is an optimistic proposition in Muñoz-Rengel’s book, it is the idea that such an awareness grants you a special kind of agency. Once one knows that “everything” is a lie, one is no longer “some unsuspecting sap” but instead becomes “an actor who has chosen to act.” What this agency grants the person who wields it is not clear, but Muñoz-Rengel emphasizes that it is through art—“a sublime kind of deceit”—that one can obtain it. Cubists, for example, ditched the “fleeting lie” of classical beauty, and Dadaists broke with “the dominion of logic.” Conceptual art draws the viewer “into a game of reinterpretation and construction about what is real.”

It’s a shame that Muñoz-Rengel doesn’t connect these musings to his own work as a fiction writer. His account suggests a unidirectional process of unsettling that emanates from the artist into the world. But invention can also lead artists to unearth experience that was unadmitted to themselves. I write fiction partly to work out what I skate over and keep secret from myself; it’s difficult to start without something that feels real, a solid platform on which to stand. After that, it’s stimulating to stitch artifice and reality into a performance—a lie that lets someone in. Sketching out the relationship of truth and falsehood in Muñoz-Rengel’s own process might have offered the reader a foothold in the shifting sands of his argument, and an example of the kind of liberation and agency that he claims to value.

After Sophie learned that her boyfriend wasn’t the person he claimed to be—he had cribbed aristocratic middle names from fiction and an adopted forebear, had not obtained his undergraduate education early at Oxford, and so on—I did not see him for years. I drifted away from our shared friends, whom I hadn’t told what I knew. In our post-university social universe, personal and professional connections were difficult to disentangle, and there seemed to be a violence in puncturing their relationships and confronting them—him, too—with the truth. I had the opportunity to expose him to them, and I decided not to take it.

Still, I heard things about him from this or that person from time to time. One said that his age was different depending on whom you asked. Another maintained that he had tried to warn Sophie by recommending Graham Greene’s novel “England Made Me,” in which the protagonist pretends to have gone to Harrow and goes on lying from there. One night, I saw him at a bachelorette party. At the end of the evening, he was met by a willowy blond woman, a celebrity whose face I knew from science-fiction and period dramas—another notch in the story that seemed to me, in the days and years after, so implausible it was like a narrative contagion.

I sometimes wonder whether, in the end, not telling friends about the liar wasn’t so much an act of gentleness but an avenue to power. If the liar felt that he had a nice view over the people in his life—knowing more, seeing more—then I was there, watching them all, from a little higher up. It can be intoxicating to watch someone turn themselves into a character when you can see the color and the construction of the work. Nowadays, the liar works in tech, occasionally writes articles, and appears in front of governmental bodies.

Whenever I see her, Sophie and I add something that we’ve heard to the story of the liar, reframing the tale with new information, joking darkly about the latest development—it doesn’t look like the story is about to end. It’s not that Sophie hasn’t moved on. It’s not that the liar was particularly magnetic or charismatic. It’s that his lies made her marginal, and reduced their relationship to petrol fumes, and we want to make it solid again. Perhaps in using words carefully, placing the events in relation to other facts, and admitting how much we don’t know, Sophie and I run the risk of being overly literal, but I don’t think so. When the truth is strange, telling the story to each other—a version of it that incorporates both the plotline he wanted us to inhabit and our own experiences—is a way of showing how much life is driven by fiction, and then of weaving that fiction back into the real world, where it belongs. ♦

Lucie Elven is the author of the novel “The Weak Spot.”

The Days

By Adrienne Su, THE NEW YORKER, Poems January 2 & 9, 2023 Issue

December 26, 2022

Audio: Read by the author.

 

If only I could live my life, not write it,
I’d have double the experience

and be better at nothingness, at being present.
The page, I once believed, offers permanence,

sanctifying time, making it longer,
but now I see my words as susceptible,

even if digital, to fire, flood, misplacement.
To misinterpretation. To accidental

download by enemy. I don’t yet want them
to be lost, but I dread the possibility

that they won’t self-destruct at the end
of my life, or the end of my lucidity.

Maybe I’ve been using paper all wrong,
committing to ink what should live in my head,

which is part of my body, which will not last.
Long ago, in college, a friend once said

he would never keep a journal; he preferred
to live in the moment. Back home in June,

I threw the lot of them, dating back to childhood,
into a rose-red shopping bag—we reused

every one—then put the bag out with the trash.
Thank the stars or our thrift for its luminosity:

my mother asked what was in it, then ran
down the driveway, hauled it back up. Her family

had once lost everything. She knew what I wanted
to be, what I already was. “You have to keep them!”

she yelled. She never yelled. Even my friend,
hearing it later, said the same. What worked for him

might not be right for me. He loved to argue
and was always there, vociferous, ready to engage,

while I was too receptive, too easily swayed,
though I often swatted back. That’s what college

is for, the wisdom goes, late-night conversation
with challenging peers. A few years later,

we were no longer friends, not through conflict
but cliché: he had wanted more, I had demurred,

and then there was nothing to say. But maybe
I’d been partial to aspects of his attention—

maybe all the platitudes were true. I had failed
to consider, despite constant reflection,

what my being there must have conveyed.
Reflection is simply an image, a face in a mirror;

to look upon is not the same as to examine.
Perhaps there is such a thing as a neutral observer.

Each night, I had written Here is what happened
like a kid whose pen makes her small life exciting,

then gone on mistaking the plot for the story,
as if the point of writing were writing.

Published in the print edition of the January 2 & 9, 2023, issue.

Adrienne Su has written five poetry collections, including “Peach State, which the Georgia Center for the Book named a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read.

Eshu or Ambition

By Kwame Dawes, THE NEW YORKER, Poems January 2 & 9, 2023 Issue

December 26, 2022

Audio: Read by the author.

 

Robert Johnson walked to the crossroads,
the place where the spirits chatter,
and there he met a large Black man, some called him Satan,
some called him Legba, some called him Blues.
But, whatever he was, he took Robert Johnson’s guitar,
and he played the guitar, and played it well,
and when Robert Johnson returned to the land
of the living, the small towns, the juke joints, the bars,
and the fields of elation and suffering,
he was transformed in ways that let folks know
that he left something behind with that big Black man.
There is a faint line between gratitude and loathing,
the self, turning in on itself—for what does it deserve?
And it is not even a question in search of an answer,
for the answer, elegant as a prayer, is as ancient
as the pathologies of desperate people in search
of a cult of hubris that says we cannot make
of ourselves what we are not. It bears saying,
for the sake of this art, that Robert Johnson
is me, though my triumph was to leave the crossroads
intact. No one offered me the genius of fingers—
I waited, and the big Black man set the guitar down,
walked away with his bowlegs and strut, tossing
back, “Dat ting is out of tune.” So there is that.
Back in the square, no one turned their faces
from the glow of me, a few polite nods,
and the dogs moved along with their doggy
life, as the ancients like to say; and me,
I returned to my hut, sat and watched the world
pass me by, my heart thick with love in search
of a home. Perhaps this is ambition, this persistent
hunger. Today is a day of stomach cramps,
the hollow melancholia of the interim, the slough
between mountains, and this, too, is what it must be.

Published in the print edition of the January 2 & 9, 2023, issue.

Kwame Dawes, a 2019 Windham-Campbell Prize winner, teaches English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His latest book, co-authored with John Kinsella, is “unHistory.”

An Anatomy of a Murder in “Saint Omer”

Based on an actual case, the first feature by the French documentarian Alice Diop is a troubling story of matricide, racism, and sorcery.

By Anthony Lane, THE NEW YORKER, The Current Cinema January 16, 2023 Issue

January 6, 2023

Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanda star in Alice Diop’s film.Illustration by Anna Parini

In November, 2013, a baby girl was found drowned on the beach at Berck-sur-Mer, in northwest France. Not long afterward, police arrested the child’s mother, Fabienne Kabou, who was charged with murder. Born and raised in Dakar, Kabou was academically bright, and had come from Senegal to France, where she pursued her studies. She had moved in with a much older man; he was the father of the girl who died.

One of those who attended the subsequent trial, in the town of Saint-Omer, was the filmmaker Alice Diop. Hitherto, Diop’s work has been in documentary; now we have her first feature, “Saint Omer,” which is clearly and closely inspired by the case of Kabou, and which retains the attentiveness—the patient ardor—of a good documentary. Much of the movie is set in a courtroom, and includes not just lengthy scenes of cross-examination but also, more discomforting still, moments of suspended animation, as it were, during which one character stares or glares at another. The presiding judge (Valérie Dréville) is, quite rightly, the glarer-in-chief.

The defendant in the film is Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), who, like her real-life counterpart, hails from Senegal and is highly educated. Calm of demeanor, she admits to having caused the death of her daughter, Élise, but finds it hard to explain how she could have done such a thing, saying, “I hope this trial will give me the answer”—words not often heard in the mouth of an accused person. The mystery grows; Laurence, we learn, told the police that she was the victim of sorcery, cursed by the “evil eye” and hallucinations. She also describes herself as a “Cartesian.” (Warning: do not use that line, in self-defense, anywhere other than France.) Some of her statements, when she is caught out in prevarication, have the air of logical riddles. “If I’m lying, I can’t know why,” she says, to the frustration of the prosecuting counsel (Robert Cantarella).

Other characters take the stand. We meet the child’s father, Luc Dumontet—frail, white, and very well played by Xavier Maly as a paragon of self-pity and slyness. (Molière would recognize the type.) Of his relationship with Laurence, he says, “I would go as far as to say that we were happy, at least in the beginning.” Ah, l’amour! He found it convenient to keep her at arm’s length from his everyday life; it was as if she, and their child, did not officially exist. We can sense “Saint Omer” beginning to mount the case for mitigation, and setting before us a young Black woman corroded both by subtle indifference, in the private sphere, and by a more brazen prejudice elsewhere. A professor, informing the court that Laurence aimed to write a doctoral thesis on Wittgenstein, adds, “Isn’t it rather odd, an African woman interested in an Austrian philosopher from the early twentieth century—why not choose someone closer to her own culture?”

The proceedings are observed, from the gallery, by the tall and stately figure of Rama (Kayije Kagame). For the first fifteen minutes of the movie, we are given the deliberate impression that she is destined to be the heroine. We see her at work—she is a writer and lecturer—and with her loved ones, before she packs a bag and sets off to attend Laurence’s trial. Most viewers will be asking themselves: what is Rama doing here, and what is her connection with Laurence? Well, there is no sign that they are acquainted with each other, and what binds them is empathy, as opposed to plot. Both women are Black, with a Senegalese background; both have (or had) a white partner, in France; both have tricky rapports with their mothers; and both seem simultaneously proud and bowed down by the weight of the world. One last link: Rama is pregnant, and understandably harrowed by the fate of little Élise.

In short, although Rama is not called to testify in court, she is there to bear moral and emotional witness to the saga of Laurence, as Diop was to that of Fabienne Kabou. Thus, when the philosophy professor takes her seat after giving evidence, Rama stares at her with silent and sizzling contempt. (If they were in a Marvel movie, the professor would burst into flames.) More ambiguous is the sight of Laurence turning to gaze, with half a smile, at Rama, who is thoroughly freaked out; is there solidarity in that smile, or a disturbing complicity?

How much we need Rama is another matter. Our reaction to events in court is bound to be nudged and shaped by hers, but one could argue that Laurence’s story is so dramatically strong that it doesn’t require such backup. It’s as though Diop didn’t entirely trust us to read the narrative as we should. That’s why she shows Rama, at the start, teaching students about the French women who were paraded through the streets, with shaved heads, after the Second World War, for alleged collaboration with the Germans; as a bonus, we are then treated to clips from Pasolini’s “Medea” (1969), with Maria Callas in the title role. Public shame, such as that of Laurence, is thereby invested with a certain nobility; infanticide is raised to the level of myth. In a closing speech, delivered directly to the camera, the defending counsel (Aurélia Petit) proclaims that all women are monsters—“terribly human monsters.” All of them?

The most instructive thing about “Saint Omer” is what it omits. Fabienne Kabou was sentenced to twenty years in prison for killing her daughter, reduced on appeal to fifteen. The court was in no doubt as to the severity of the crime. Diop, however, chooses not to reveal either the verdict or the sentence; if you are unfamiliar with the original case, therefore, you might well believe that Laurence has been acquitted and set free. And that is pretty much what Diop, in this finely controlled and subtly controlling film, wants you to believe. (If you already regard the French judicial system as constitutionally racist, so much the better.) Her parable has its desired effect. Laurence, somehow liberated by the telling of her tale, is granted the dignity of a martyr, whose actions were driven by the forces of Western society, not sorcery. And, strange to say, you almost end up forgetting that there was a crime, and that a child, on a cold night, was left to die on a beach.

For reasons that elude me, book editors have never enjoyed the cinematic popularity of zombies, drug lords, and psychopaths. Why not? Could it be a lack of community spirit? Maybe sensitive viewers would be traumatized by the brutal slashing of a paragraph. Nonetheless, the imbalance needs to be redressed, and the best place to start is a new documentary, “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb.” It details the professional alliance between Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, and Gottlieb, who has edited Caro’s writing for half a century, and who now provides a crisp summation of their method: “He does the work. I do the cleanup. Then we fight.”

The movie is directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, who was forbidden, by her two subjects, to film them in scribente delicto, as they toil over a manuscript. “They said the work between a writer and an editor is too private,” she tells us. (I sniff an opportunity here for an underground trade: basement peepshows, where you feed a nickel into a slot and watch one guy remove another guy’s dangling participles.) Surprisingly, by the end of “Turn Every Page,” the interdict is relaxed, and we get to watch this pair of noble gentlemen—whose combined age is a hundred and seventy-eight—stroll around the offices of Alfred A. Knopf, politely asking for a pencil, like elderly knights who have mislaid their lances. Even then, as they sit side by side and attack the typewritten pages of Caro’s text, their conversation is elided, and overlaid with Chet Baker singing “Do It the Hard Way.”

The way is still hard because Caro has yet to complete the fifth and final volume of the Johnson project. So all-consuming has this been that he and his wife, Ina, once spent three years in the Texas Hill Country, where he could root himself in the background of his subject. (“Can’t you write a biography of Napoleon?” Ina asked.) Gottlieb, for his part, though aware of “heading faster and faster towards not being at all,” waits and waits. His daughter’s movie, ripe with charm, is all the better for its flecks of personal pain—tares among the wheat. What becomes apparent, for example, is that Johnson, Caro, and Gottlieb suffered deeply from the chiding of their furious fathers, who reckoned that their sons would come to naught, and who have since been proved magnificently wrong.

The audience for “Turn Every Page,” I’d guess, will be a medley of Freudians, students of political muscle, and New Yorkers—each bearing a copy of “The Power Broker,” Caro’s 1974 book on Robert Moses, whittled down by Gottlieb to the size of a mere warehouse. Joseph Heller fans, too, will be left agape by the revelation that “Catch-22” was supposed to be “Catch-18” until Gottlieb upped the number. It is punctuators, though, who will be brought to the edge of their seats, roused by the single combat between the movie’s heroes, both of whom, as Gottlieb says, “think a semicolon is worth fighting a civil war about.” Only civil? Why not nuclear? ♦

An earlier version of this article misquoted a line in “Saint Omer”.

Published in the print edition of the January 16, 2023, issue, with the headline “Collusion.”

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”