Over the last several years, on Mt. Everest, veteran alpine guides have reported seeing an increasing number of human skeletons and frozen corpses. One guide named Gelje Sherpa told the Times that when he first summited, in 2008, he found three bodies, and during a recent season he found six. “They often haunt me,” he said. The bones and preserved bodies of climbers who didn’t make it to the summit, revealed as the peak’s glaciers recede, are, for some, more than enough evidence that warming temperatures are melting the Himalayan glaciers at an increasingly quick clip. A new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, added a significant layer of proof, finding that, over the past forty years, the average rate that the Himalayas have lost ice has doubled. While the paper’s findings have dire consequences for the millions of people who live just below Himalayan glaciers, they are also vitally important in aiding officials and engineers tasked with planning for the region’s entire population of 1.6 billion people, all of whom rely on the rivers that these glaciers feed.

The study’s lead author, Joshua Maurer, a doctoral student in earth sciences at Columbia University, used recently declassified spy-satellite images from the nineteen-seventies to observe how the volume of the region’s largest glaciers has changed. Scientists had already documented the rate at which the Himalayas had lost ice mass in the course of the twenty-first century using more sophisticated satellite imagery. Maurer developed computer software that created three-dimensional images from the overlapping pictures, allowing him and his colleagues to digitally “walk” across the glaciers’ surfaces as they appeared in 1975. In the end, they found that the six hundred and fifty largest glaciers across India, China, Nepal, and Bhutan, which together represent fifty-five per cent of the region’s total ice volume, have lost the equivalent of a vertical foot and a half of ice each year this century. That’s roughly twice as much as what they lost from 1975 to 2000, when temperatures were, on average, 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. Previous studies that looked at melt since the seventies, like Maurer’s, found similar results, but with much less precision and over a smaller area. “The correlation we observed between rising air temperatures and acceleration of glacial melt really highlights how vulnerable these glaciers are to climate change,” Maurer told me by phone on Monday. “As temperatures continue to rise, ice loss is going to continue to accelerate.”

Other factors can affect the rate of glaciers’ retreat, such as black carbon, from nearby power plants, or changes in precipitation. But Maurer’s analysis found that warming temperatures seemed to be the factor that overwhelmed others. “With such a homogeneous pattern of ice loss over such a large region that’s also climatically complex, really the only climate driver that makes any sense is atmospheric warming,” he told me. To further test that interpretation, they compiled temperature data for the same timespan from weather stations all over the Himalayas, and ran the data through computer simulations. “We show that the amount of ice loss that we see falls right in the range of what we would expect if these measured air temperatures were the primary drivers of the ice loss. It’s just very good agreement.” If the emission of black carbon, or a decrease in precipitation, were the primary drivers of ice loss, he said, there would be a much more variable spatial pattern of ice loss, because those factors are much more localized.

Maurer’s study builds on an extensive body of research on Himalayan glaciers—sometimes called the Third Pole, for the amount of ice the mountains hold, a quarter of which has already disappeared as temperatures have become hotter in the last century. Scientists who study glaciers and climate change have generally approached the subject at much longer timescales, relying on excavated ice cores from ancient glaciers, which, in their frozen layers of ice and air bubbles, contain evidence of earth’s climate going back tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years. “Usually we’re using the geologic record globally to see how the cryosphere responded to the changing climate in the past,” Joerg Schaefer, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and one of Maurer’s co-authors, said. “It always bothered me that, if you look at the geological record, glaciers look like they respond very coherently, as an army, to climate change. But then, if you look into the field of glaciology, where people look at daily, weekly, monthly changes, it really gets complicated, everything seems to be out of phase.”

Based on many other studies, the suspicion already had been that temperature is the main climate driver melting glaciers. “Of course, if it gets warmer, ice melts, we knew that,” Schaefer said. But he would have been happy if the study showed that melting is much more variable, and more strongly impacted by other factors. “We were obviously hoping that for the environment, and the livelihood of society, that it would be a more local pattern,” he said. “Instead, this means that just everywhere these glaciers will follow the temperature curve.” Schaefer added, “Of all the possibilities, that’s the worst result.”

A major report on the state of the Himalayas—“Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment: Climate Change, Sustainability and People”—was published last February and projected that, even in the best-case scenario, if the world rapidly decarbonized and was carbon neutral by 2050, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Himalayas are very likely to lose a third of their total ice, partly because the peaks are warming at a faster rate than the global average. If things continue as they are now, they are likely to lose two-thirds of their total ice. For a region already plagued by poverty, inequality, and discrimination, that eventuality is catastrophic, and much of the report was an attempt to thoroughly examine all the effects that the glaciers’ retreat will have on agriculture, ecology, and energy, especially hydropower. Densely populated and quickly developing downstream areas in China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are likely to face even more severe water crises than what they’ve already seen. The report also provides some solutions, including necessary coöperation between China, Nepal, and India on early-warning disaster systems for expected glacial-lake-outburst floods—a type of risk to which Maurer’s new study provides helpful clarifications.

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Scientists have long known about the trouble that rapidly increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases would bring. But they have, in the past, stumbled to properly communicate that trouble to the public—especially in complex climates like the world’s highest mountain range. In the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth climate assessment, some scientists made a bad error, predicting that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. That has haunted the field ever since. Tobias Bolch, a glaciologist at the University of St. Andrews and one of the lead authors of February’s Hindu Kush Himalayan Assessment, was slightly unnerved by the new paper’s bold message. “I would have liked that the authors would have been more cautious with the main message—‘Glacier ice loss rates across the Himalayas have doubled over the past four decades’—as we do not want other false messages,” he said, recalling the I.P.C.C. error. Bolch noted that, although the evidence is clear that, over all, ice loss has accelerated significantly, there is some degree of uncertainty in the data as to whether this acceleration has fully doubled in speed.

Schaefer told me that people often ask him when the Himalayas are going to be ice-free. “It’s a little bit like asking, When are the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets gonna be gone?” he said. (Greenland’s summer heat is already weeks ahead of average, breaking the record for such extensive melting of its ice sheet at an early date.) “They are interesting questions, but they are not that relevant for us. If the ice sheets are gone, we are toast anyway. We will be gone way before.” The relevant question, he continued, “is what is the societal impact of the doubling in speed of these Himalayan glaciers’ retreats. We know, of course, that it’s really bad, but at least now we have a study that gives us a decently robust point of view of what’s actually going to happen as the temperature rapidly increases.”

In 1984, an economics professor named William Lazonick joined the faculty at the Harvard Business School, just in time to witness a shift in economic thought. Lazonick, who is seventy-four, had grown up in Toronto and earned a Ph.D. in economics, at Harvard, in 1975. He specialized in economic development, focussing on the ways that companies make innovations in order to attain global dominance of their industries. When he started teaching, the prevailing view in business schools was that companies should take their earnings and reinvest them in their operations, in part by investing in the well-being of their workers. But the business school had recently hired a professor named Michael Jensen, who believed in a theory of corporate management holding that companies exist solely to deliver profits to their shareholders, and that managers should make decisions to maximize those profits at all times. The theory was gaining ground quickly. In 1984, Lazonick said, “no one was talking about ‘shareholder value.’ ” But, by 1986, “everyone was talking about it.”

Jensen and his ideas proved to be hugely influential. Through the rest of the decade, as President Ronald Reagan pushed for tax cuts and eliminated business regulations, the shareholder-value philosophy became the norm. Companies began giving much of their extra capital back to investors in the form of dividends rather than investing it in areas that could have strengthened the business in the longer term, such as new facilities, new products, worker training, and employee raises. In fact, layoffs were often greeted with enthusiasm because they cut costs and caused stock prices to rise. Corporations also found more creative ways of funnelling money to their shareholders. In 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission passed a rule allowing companies to buy back their own stock (without being charged with stock manipulation), which reduced the number of shares in the market, causing their price to go up. In the late eighties, Lazonick noticed a sharp increase in stock buybacks. It made sense: buybacks, like dividends, enriched investors, including company executives, who received much of their compensation in company stock.

Lazonick felt that maximizing shareholder value rewarded the wrong people. “The idea that public shareholders are ‘investors’ is really nonsense—shareholders don’t actually take much risk at all” when they buy stock in companies, Lazonick told me. “It’s actually workers and taxpayers who invest in companies.” He also felt the practice was having a destructive effect on society more generally. “It was an explanation for concentration of wealth at the top and the erosion of middle-class jobs,” he said. “A lot of this was caused by decisions within corporations, which had become enamored by this ideology.”

He watched as the shareholder-value philosophy helped create the conditions that led to the Great Recession. Between 2003 and 2007, Lazonick noted that the number of stock buybacks among companies in the S. & P. 500 quadrupled. Then, when the financial crisis began, some of these same banks required billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to avoid collapse. In September, 2008, just after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy (after spending more than five billion dollars on buybacks in 2006 and 2007), Lazonick wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times titled “Everyone Is Paying Price for Share Buy-Backs.” He described how buybacks had left financial institutions in a vulnerable state, which made the crisis more severe when it arrived. “In the 1980s, executives learnt that greed is good,” he wrote. “Now, their mantra could be ‘in buy-backs we trust.’ ”

He also felt that the practice was slowing corporate innovation. Lazonick found that between 2008 and 2017, the largest pharmaceutical companies spent three hundred billion dollars on buybacks and another two hundred and ninety billion paying dividends, which was equivalent to a little more than a hundred per cent of their combined profits. He noted that both Merck and Pfizer, two of the largest pharmaceutical companies, had been spending heavily on buybacks, but had struggled to develop successful new drugs. The same was true in the tech sector. In the nineteen-nineties, the computer-networking-equipment manufacturer Cisco Systems was one of the fastest growing companies in the world. But between 2002 and 2019, it spent a hundred and twenty-nine billion dollars on stock buybacks—more than it spent on research and development, which Lazonick felt compromised its competitive position. He is currently co-writing a paper comparing Cisco unfavorably with Huawei, the giant Chinese company that is building a global 5G network, the next generation of Internet technology. “Huawei is one of the most innovative companies in the world, because it retains and invests its profits,” Lazonick told me. Today, he argues that Apple is falling prey to the same phenomenon as Cisco. Since the death of its founder, Steve Jobs, in 2011, the company has distributed three hundred and twenty-five billion dollars to its shareholders, while spending only fifty-eight billion on research and development. Lazonick believes that the company has fallen behind in creating revolutionary new products, like the iPhone, and has instead been relying on updates to existing ones.

In 2014, Lazonick wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called “Profits Without Prosperity,” which helped his ideas break into the mainstream. In the article, he argued that the “allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks” deserves most of the blame for the stagnation of wage growth for the majority of Americans, the fact that well-paid jobs are increasingly scarce, and the dramatic rise in income inequality. He placed responsibility at the feet of executives, who were prioritizing their own paychecks over investments in their businesses. Proponents of stock buybacks often argue that they are an efficient way to take excess cash that a company can’t use and redeploy it into the economy. But Lazonick felt that, given how little companies were investing in their workers and infrastructure, this argument had little merit. “The very people we rely on to make investments in the productive capabilities that will increase our shared prosperity are instead devoting most of their companies’ profits to uses that will increase their own prosperity—with unsurprising results,” he wrote. “If the U.S. is to achieve growth that distributes income equitably and provides stable employment, government and business leaders must take steps to bring both stock buybacks and executive pay under control. The nation’s economic health depends on it.”

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Lawmakers took note. Lazonick told me that, in 2015, he was consulted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign—which cited his Harvard Business Review article in its economic platform—as well as by Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Some Republicans have even started pointing to buybacks as the cause of America’s political and economic ills. A year ago, one of Senator Marco Rubio’s policy advisers contacted Lazonick to express interest in his research. Rubio later published a report called “American Investment In the 21st Century,” in which he expressed concern that economic growth was driven more by finance than by actual productivity, and mentioned the buyback phenomenon several times. Senator Elizabeth Warren has made the idea a theme of her campaign. She “picked up the correct message right away,” Lazonick told me. “She said, the reason we don’t have prosperity for workers any more is that companies aren’t sharing it. That is the critical point.” The issue looks set to become a central part of the economic platform of several Democratic Presidential candidates.

Around ten years ago, Lazonick started a nonprofit organization called the Academic-Industry Research Network, which now has around a dozen academics around the world, and explores ways of fostering equitable, long-term economic growth. He told me that it was gratifying to finally have enough credibility that his ideas are taken seriously. “The world’s finally waking up to the reasons why income inequality has gotten so bad and why jobs have disappeared,” he said. Last March, Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, reintroduced the Reward Work Act, which is intended to curb buybacks and to give workers greater influence over decision-making at their companies. Lazonick was invited to testify at the hearing, and he arrived wearing a dark suit and royal blue tie, his silver hair combed neatly back. He sat at a long table with several experts, workers, and organizers. “I think it’s great that people are finally raising the issue,” he said. “But it’s been thirty-six years.”

The pace of buybacks continues to increase. Last year, the Trump Administration passed one and a half trillion dollars in tax cuts, the largest share of which benefitted corporations; companies spent much of the money they saved buying back their stock. In 2018, S. & P. 500 companies spent a record eight hundred billion dollars on buybacks; in 2019, they are set to spend more than a trillion. Once one starts paying attention, it begins to seem as if buybacks are responsible for all sorts of corporate disasters. On May 31st, Lazonick co-authored an article in The American Prospect noting that, between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent more than seventeen billion dollars on dividends (forty-two per cent of its profits) and an additional forty-three billion dollars on buybacks (a hundred and four per cent of its profits) rather than spending resources to address design flaws in some of its popular jet models, or even to develop new planes. Two of the company’s 737 Max jets had high-profile crashes within the last year, and the Federal Aviation Administration recently grounded the plane over safety concerns.

Some experts worry that the rate of buybacks poses an existential threat to the economy. “I think there’s a real danger of stock buybacks topping out the market, and then the bubble bursting,” Lenore Palladino, an economist with the Roosevelt Institute, told me. “We know who gets hurt when the bubble bursts. It’s the majority of us.”

Alabama’s Republican Party has a ticker on its home page announcing the number of “Days until Doug Jones”—the state’s Democratic junior senator, who defeated the Republican nominee, Roy Moore, in 2017—“is unseated by Alabama voters.” On Thursday, the ticker read “502.” Still to be decided is who will get the chance to unseat the narrowly elected Democrat in one of the country’s most conservative states. On Thursday afternoon, Moore announced his intention to run again, saying, during a press conference in Montgomery, with a yellow notepad in hand, “I fought for our country in Vietnam. I fought for our country and its laws as Chief Justice. I fought for morality, to serve our moral institutions. And I’m ready to do it again. Yes, I will run for the United States Senate in 2020.” He added, “Can I win? Yes, I can win. Not only can I—they know I can. That’s why there’s such opposition to me.” Moore also referred to the “false tactics” used by “Democratic operatives” to disrupt his last campaign. He was alluding to a report, published by the Times last December, that “a group of Democratic tech experts” had carried out an experimental cyber misinformation effort. The Times concluded that the project was unlikely to have affected the election’s outcome. In his announcement, Moore called the 2017 Alabama Senate election “fraudulent,” and predicted that Senate Republicans would run “a smear campaign” against him.

Michael Bullington recently became chair of the Greater Birmingham Young Republicans. The group vocally opposed Moore’s previous candidacy for the Senate seat, which became available, last time around, when Jeff Sessions was appointed to be U.S. Attorney General. Like many other Republicans unsettled by allegations against Moore of sexual misconduct, Bullington wrote in the name of another candidate—though Bullington told me, on Thursday, that he couldn’t quite remember which one he’d settled on. “Probably Del Marsh,” he said, referring to the Republican president pro tempore of the Alabama Senate. “I honestly didn’t expect to be reliving this drama eighteen months later,” Bullington added, noting that he would have kept tabs on Moore’s potential candidacy via Moore’s Twitter page, but Moore blocked Bullington during the last campaign.

Bullington said that he’d be happy to vote for any of the other notable Republicans who have entered the race so far, or are expected to do so—including Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach; the congressman Bradley Byrne, the state representative Arnold Mooney; and the Alabama secretary of state, John Merrill. He would also vote for Sessions, were he to run for his old seat—not Moore, though, even against a Democrat. “He was credibly accused of sexual assault by several women,” Bullington said. “He’s currently engaged in multiple lawsuits and seems to be losing. His name identification has largely a negative connotation. He has trouble fixing his taxes right,” Bullington added, referring to [the reported failure] (https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/charitys-promised-back-pay-to-roy-moore-was-not-reported-to-irs-as-income/2017/10/19/fa31ab9c-b042-11e7-99c6-46bdf7f6f8ba_story.html?utm_term=.c4689639184e) of Moore’s former charity, the Foundation for Moral Law, to disclose half a million dollars of compensation to him. “His lawyer was arrested on drug charges,” Bullington went on. (The lawyer in question, Trenton Garmon, has denied any wrongdoing.) “He has lost three statewide campaigns. And he was removed from the bench multiple times.”

A Republican pollster told the Washington Post this week that, despite all of this, Moore could win twenty per cent or more of the vote in a Republican primary, positioning him to earn the Party’s nomination for the Senate a second time. “If the Alabama G.O.P. puts him on the ballot,” Bullington said, “then we deserve to lose.”

Cam Ward, a member of the Alabama State Senate, was more forgiving. “He marches to the beat of his own drummer,” Ward said of Moore on Thursday morning. “He has a sizeable base that will support him regardless of the election. Now, the circumstances of this election, as opposed to the one two years ago, have changed dramatically,” Ward continued. “Luther Strange”—the Trump-backed incumbent whom Moore beat in the 2017 primary—“was viewed as the country-club establishment at that time. This time, the field is full of non-incumbents, outsiders,” like Moore. “I don’t think this new dynamic will favor him. It’s harder for him to draw a contrast with this broader, robust, more outsider-filled field.”

“I want to beat Doug Jones,” Ward went on. “I don’t want a rematch of two years ago. Any Republican nominee is always gonna have a chance in Alabama, but I agree with President Trump on this one. I don’t think Judge Moore is in the best position to win.”

Trump weighed in on the race well before Moore’s announcement: in late May, he preëmptively opposed Moore’s potential candidacy—after strongly supporting Moore in the 2017 race. “Republicans cannot allow themselves to again lose the Senate seat in the Great State of Alabama,” Trump tweeted late last month. “This time it will be for Six Years, not just Two. I have NOTHING against Roy Moore, and unlike many other Republican leaders, wanted him to win. But he didn’t, and probably won’t.”

Elizabeth BeShears, a political-communications consultant and Republican based in Birmingham, said, before Moore’s announcement, “Roy Moore’s ego knows no bounds.” His nomination, in 2017, was a “perfect storm,” she said, which she didn’t expect to see repeated. After Moore entered the race on Thursday, BeShears added, “Even if he’s completely innocent of the accusations that came to light in 2017, this move is indicative of a person whose judgment Alabamians should never trust, who is willing to turn yet another election cycle into a self-centered circus.” Though she has not yet made a decision, BeShears likes a handful of the Republicans who’ve already entered the race and is inclined to support most of them in a general election. “I hope Moore is relegated to the sidelines,” she added.

Many people expect the secretary of state, Merrill, to announce his own candidacy soon, and he is believed to be a strong contender for the nomination. Merrill told me, “Obviously, if Judge Moore wants to pursue another campaign, he’s qualified to do so: he meets the standard for age and citizenship. But,” Merrill went on, “there are a number of people who have already made up their minds about his candidacy, because of what we went through in 2017. He’d have a difficult time overcoming some of those things that were presented and would be raised again.” Merrill added, “The people of Alabama decided they’d rather have Senator Jones than Judge Moore, and it’s very important that we elect a proven, conservative reformer who is recognized as a winner.”

Mary Grimm reads her story from the June 24, 2019, issue of the magazine. Grimm, a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of the novel “Left to Themselves” and is currently at work on a historical novel.

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Many of the best independent filmmakers (most often, women and people of color) have been all but erased from orthodox film history, in part because of a critical prejudice that favors traces of artistry in mainstream Hollywood movies. Fortunately, bold and discerning programmers at today’s repertory houses are attempting to fill in the gaps, and one such crucial rediscovery will take place this Saturday and Sunday at Metrograph, where the first two features by Juleen Compton, “Stranded” (1965) and “The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean” (1966), will be screened.

Compton, born in 1933, was a trained and experienced actress with little career success to show for it. She became active in New York real estate, became wealthy, founded a theatre company, and self-financed these two movies. (Maya Montañez Smukler’s essential new book, “Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema,” from Rutgers University Press, is a crucial source of information about Compton.) Dividing her time between New York and Europe, Compton made her first film, “Stranded,” in Europe—mainly in Greece, a bit in France—and, in the process, caught the aesthetic currents of the time, which carried her to rarefied artistic heights.

“Stranded,” which Smukler calls “autobiographical,” is a flamboyantly melodramatic yet playfully comedic story about an American woman named Raina—played by Compton—who is on a European spree. Glamorous aerial shots of the Acropolis are followed by Raina, in a mod dress and a dramatic hat, literally running away, in this showy setting, from an actory-looking man named Jeff (Ken Gaherity) and orders him not to follow her, quoting Barbara Bel Geddes from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”: “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” She dashes, then sashays, through ancient streets, the romantic drama drolly tweaked by the presence of a fluffy dog that romps beside her. It follows her, in a series of spectacular overhead shots, to a nearby beach, where she nearly drowns but is rescued by a passing man and then complains—in keeping with the old joke—“Look, I almost lost my hat.”

From the start, Compton plays an iridescent game of shifting tones that makes “Stranded” an exemplary expression of cinematic modernism. The melodramatic mode—and the American-in-Europe subgenre—was popular with Hollywood studios in their declining years (from the late fifties through the sixties), and it also became a trope of European directors, and, in particular, of directors of the French New Wave. In effect, Compton went to Europe and made a New Wave film, a personalized and aestheticized refraction of this genre that both nods and winks at its conventions and uses them as a springboard for personal expression.

“Stranded” is the story of a woman who pursues personal and sexual freedom without restraint and without regret—and a story of the tawdry elegance of the fallen bourgeoisie living like freewheeling aristocrats in the bohemian margins of working-class Europe. Having broken up with Jeff (who stays behind to make a movie in Greece with an American crew), Raina takes up with another American actor, named Bob (Gary Collins) and with a French man named Olivier (Gian Pietro Calasso), a painter, who is gay. (Raina knows and unquestioningly accepts his sexuality; they both know that the more conventional Bob doesn’t know about it and wouldn’t accept it.) The three go on a cheap cruise in a grungy barge to the Greek islands, where Bob and Raina’s theatrical antics—climbing on and posing among ropes high on a mast, capering on deck with their music-hall shtick—evoke both their erstwhile Broadway partnership and a romantic connection. As the three travellers dash from adventure to adventure, including donkey rides in villages, night-life rambles, a farcical experience with marijuana that’s evoked with special effects, and a furtive affair that’s realized in a quietly breathless scene. Olivier goes from humiliation to humiliation, and Raina finds her own identity thrown back at her in an astounding sequence in a night club where she’s the only woman and is coaxed to dance for the men in the house.

Compton’s view of the tensions and aggression of gender is expressed in her bold aesthetic sensibility, as in that dance scene, where she distills Raina’s anxiety and defiance into a thrillingly confrontational gaze into the camera. Soon thereafter, wandering touristy streets with Bob and Olivier, Raina declares that she’s “tired of being the only girl” and, in a brazen wink at “Jules and Jim” (done with a cinematic trick of overt New Wave inspiration), she emerges dressed in a cap and trousers reminiscent of the ones made famous by Jeanne Moreau in that film. Meanwhile, Bob urges Raina to return home and “settle down” with him to the United States, where he has a good office job awaiting him (thanks to his father). It’s not much of a surprise or spoiler to suggest what she thinks of that idea—yet the sequence in which she makes it clear to him, and breaks up with him, is done with a cool and stunning swiftness that doesn’t stint on the melancholy, in a deft and dashing bit of cinematic understatement.

In “Stranded,” Compton proves herself to be a directorial stylist of the first order, blending melodrama, comedy, and a complex spectrum of emotions in starkly composed and richly textured images, with highly expressive angles and tensely isolated gestures. Her script is filled with sharp moments of aphoristic insight and powerful yet fleeting emotional spikes—and her own extraordinary performance is one of her prime inventions. She places herself boldly in a tradition of director-stars that includes Charlie Chaplin and Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles and Jacques Tati, and her blend of the imperious and the ingenuous, of the determined and the resigned, of the impetuous and the farsighted (as well, simply, of the comedic and the dramatic) places her work alongside the art of such contemporaries and near-contemporaries as Jean Seberg, Shirley MacLaine, and Judy Garland.

According to Smukler, Compton intended to launch her acting career with this performance—and it should have worked. Compton’s sense of urgency is planted in the film itself, when Olivier, planning to devote himself more assiduously to his painting, declares, “I must work now, while my generation is important; I must work now, before it is too late.” “Stranded” played at the Cannes Film Festival (albeit not in competition) and, Smukler reports, was shown in Paris, but it had little impact in the United States. (In the 1975 book “Women Who Make Movies,” Sharon Smith writes that the movie nonetheless made its money back in its European release.) Compton kept working, and made her second feature, “The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean,” in 1966. It’s a paradoxical film, one that’s also in the avant-garde of the tone of the times. Its subject is fame, which, even as it eluded Compton herself, loomed as a temptation, an aspiration, and, as she recognized, a danger.

Norma Jean (Sharon Henesy) is a teen-ager in rural Missouri, who joins her boyfriend, Vance (Robert Gentry), a singer-songwriter, on a bold or foolhardy project. He has purchased the plastic dome of the title, a huge tent that he’s going to erect in a desolate rock-sheltered plain and in which he plans to perform. As if seeking a good augury for his venture, Vance asks Norma Jean to get one of her “feelings” about it—she turns out to be endowed with the gift of clairvoyance, and, from atop the enormous crate containing the dome, she envisions and virtually conjures an itinerant rock trio of three young men (one is played by Sam Waterston, in his first movie role), who instantly make Vance part of a quartet. But, when the concert series fails, the men (particularly the most aggressive of the group, named Bobo, played by Marco St. John) urge her to convert her clairvoyance into an act.

Against her better judgment, she does so, and, when she offers her audience a tip on several local calamities (including, in a twist borrowed from Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” the drama of a young man trapped in a cave), her act becomes a hit. Suddenly, local politicians and businessmen are swarming around her and the male foursome with plans to make the dome—hitherto an object of derision, even of hostility—a tourist attraction. As lawyers and journalists descend upon the town and pressure Norma Jean, and as her celebrity goes nationwide, she becomes increasingly exhausted, even endangered, by her visionary exertions, and seeks to escape.

The playfulness of “Stranded” here bursts into the realm of fantasy, both in the tale’s supernatural element and in some whimsical sidebars that are nonetheless tinged with tragedy. Compton develops a similarly bold repertory of images, replete with spectacular overhead shots, crane shots, and expansive landscapes, and ranging from closely textured complexity to graphic starkness. “The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean” is the contemporary of a vaunted classic of rock-driven fame, Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” and does a better job of reflecting the eerie chill of media-centric and technologically governed modernity—and reflects all the more clearly the central place, and victimhood, of female genius in the creation of modernity.

Compton’s art endures, but her efforts to make a career were in vain. Smukler suggests that Compton’s ability to self-finance her films also made her less aggressive about promoting and releasing them (because the filmmaker felt little pressure to earn her investment back). What’s more, Smukler details the infuriating obstacles that Compton faced, after making these films, when she tried to go to Hollywood to pursue a directorial career. Encouraged to get a foot in the door as a screenwriter, she sold some scripts, but few were produced. Smith wrote that Compton was working on a documentary called “Women in Action,” “a history of women directors in Hollywood,” but there’s no trace of it. Compton made one more feature, “Buckeye and Blue,” from 1988—a Western, starring Robyn Lively in the role of a young woman who commands a crew of train robbers. But it’s not at the level of imagination or invention of her first two films. The artistic timing—of the sort that she placed in the mouth of the artist Olivier in “Stranded”—was off. The near-invisibility of Compton’s films and the truncation of her career are tragedies.

Mohamed Morsi, who served as President of the Republic of Egypt for a year and four days, before being removed from office by a military coup, died in an Egyptian courtroom on Monday. It was June 17th—the seventh anniversary of the vote that put Morsi into the Presidency. The Cairo calendar is full of political anniversaries, some of which are laid out in concrete and stone: the October 6th Bridge, which commemorates the beginning of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War; the July 26th Road, named for the day when King Farouk abdicated, in 1952. But June 17th is not sanctified in political memory, and the Egyptian state media didn’t mention the coincidence of Morsi dying on this date. Nowadays, it’s hard to believe that seven years ago the country held the only free and fair Presidential election in its history, and that a Muslim Brother won, with 51.73 per cent of the vote.

From the beginning, Morsi was an unlikely candidate. He rose to prominence in the wake of the Arab Spring, when tens of thousands of protesters flooded Tahrir Square, demanding the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. On February 11, 2011—one of the dates that Egyptians remember—the government finally acceded, with the Vice-President announcing that Mubarak had resigned, after almost thirty years in power. Two days earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood had issued a statement of its own: a promise that the organization would not seek the Presidency.

It was significant that this was one of the Brothers’ first acts in the new era. The organization was founded in 1928, during a period of anti-colonialist anger and unrest, and initially some of its members engaged in assassinations and other acts of political violence. Brotherhood leaders eventually rejected such tactics, adopting the principle of nonviolence, but their reputation remained tainted by this early history. And the organization, which was often brutally repressed by the government, also had a pattern of members occasionally becoming radicalized and leaving for more extreme groups.

With this past in mind, the Brothers sought to reassure the public. On March 18, 2012, I met with Sobhi Saleh, a leader of the Brotherhood’s majority bloc in Egypt’s new parliament. I asked if they would field a candidate for the nation’s highest office. “Never,” Saleh said, adamantly. “We want to send a message to every party to make them realize that Islamists are not seeking to dominate the power.” The following week, as rumors swirled that the Brothers had changed their minds, Rashad el-Bayoumi, a member of the organization’s Guidance Bureau, denied that there had been a shift in policy. “We haven’t said that we will nominate somebody for President,” he told me. Five days later, the Brothers announced that they would field a candidate, after all.

Their initial choice, Khairat el-Shater, was disqualified on a technicality. After that, they put forward Morsi, whom the press immediately nicknamed al-stebn, “the spare tire,” because he was rolled out like an extra wheel. He was overweight, bespectacled, and bearded, and he never seemed comfortable as a politician. He received a Ph.D., in materials science, from the University of Southern California, and taught briefly at California State University, Northridge. But, reportedly, his time in the U.S. had left him disgusted by many American values, including the casual ways in which men and women interacted.

Like other Brotherhood leaders, Morsi praised the values of democracy and freedom to members of the foreign press, but, in front of other audiences, he had a history of more troubling statements. He referred to Israel’s citizens as “killers and vampires,” and he declared that neither a woman nor a non-Muslim should be allowed to serve as Egypt’s President. As an engineer, his specialty was precision metal surfaces, but he claimed that planes alone could not have brought down the World Trade Center on 9/11. “Something must have happened from the inside,” Morsi said. For anybody attuned to Egyptian conspiracy theories, Morsi’s coded comment pointed to an obvious culprit: the Jews.

His campaign rallies could be unsettling. “Don’t pay attention to the media, it’s a false media!” a speaker shouted, at a rally in Cairo, in May, 2012. Another person read a poem dedicated to journalists: “The press are maggots in the brain of truth!” That same month, in Ismailia, a city on the Suez Canal, I watched as Safwat Hegazy, a notoriously aggressive Salafi cleric, hyped up a crowd of thousands before Morsi spoke. “As for the fears that the Brothers want to take over the government—” Hegazy said, pausing for effect. “Yes, we do want everything! We want the parliament! We want the President! We want the cabinet and the ministries! We want everything to be Islamic! We want the drainage systems to be Islamic!”

The 2012 Presidential election was the first in Egyptian history to be free from corruption and outright manipulation, but it was hardly reassuring. During the final round of voting, Morsi’s opponent was Ahmed Shafik, a former commander of the Egyptian Air Force, who had been the last Prime Minister under Mubarak. For young Egyptians who had been inspired by the Arab Spring, this was the choice: a seventy-year-old party hack, who had described Mubarak as “a role model,” or an Islamist with a Ph.D. in materials science, who denied that two Boeing 767s could have toppled the World Trade Center.

Since the founding of the Republic of Egypt, in 1952, only six men have held the office of President, not counting those who served briefly on an interim basis. But this apparent stability is deceptive. Of the six, three were removed by coup and subsequently spent time in prison or under house arrest. Two of the men who served as President have now died in shockingly public ways, essentially on stage during events of political theatre.

On October 6, 1981, Cairo held a military parade to commemorate one of its sacred dates, the start of the Arab-Israeli War. During the parade, a group of soldiers who had been radicalized by al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, a violent Islamist group that included many former Brothers, assassinated President Anwar Sadat. Eleven others who stood with Sadat on the reviewing stand also died.

For nearly four decades, this event has resonated throughout Egyptian politics. Sadat was succeeded by Mubarak, who had been wounded during the assassination, and who realized that the Army could not be fully trusted. In response, he built up the police as a bulwark of personal support. He granted cops increasing degrees of leeway, until they could essentially terrorize civilians without repercussion. It was largely in response to police abuses that the initial protesters gathered on Tahrir, in 2011.

Mubarak also cracked down on the Islamists. During his tenure, Morsi was imprisoned twice, a common fate for Brotherhood leaders. At the time of Morsi’s election, the organization’s Guidance Bureau consisted of eighteen men, fourteen of whom had spent time in jail. It was no surprise that even in a climate of unprecedented political openness the Brothers continued to behave like trauma victims. They remained paranoid and secretive, and they often seemed deceptive, as when they broke their promise about the Presidency. They never made an effort to reach out and gain new political allies.

A few months after Morsi was sworn into office, when the country was relatively quiet, I met with one of the men who had been convicted of plotting to kill Sadat. After the assassination, five men were executed, and another seventeen were sentenced to prison. One of the youngest was Salah Bayoumi, who had been only eighteen at the time of the attack. Bayoumi had fallen under the influence of radical Islamists at a Cairo mosque. He joined the Army, hoping to fight Israel in what he believed to be a jihad. But the Army assigned him to the music department, where he was taught to play the bagpipes. It was a frustrating fate for a conservative Islamist who was wary of the temptations of music. Supposedly, Bayoumi had supplied the firing pins for the weapons that shot Sadat, although he refused to confirm this to me. “I had a huge role,” he said, of the assassination. “But we cannot talk about the details.”

He was released after twenty-five years in prison. For long stretches, he had been held in solitary confinement, and he was beaten so badly that he was deaf in one ear. He had wary, furtive eyes, and he often declined to answer my questions, but he was open about his continued hatred of Sadat. In the minds of Bayoumi and his co-conspirators, Sadat deserved to die for agreeing to the Camp David Accords. “Everyone hated Sadat because after the war he sought help from the Jews,” Bayoumi said.

Since Bayoumi’s release, he had worked in a marble quarry in a settlement outside Cairo, called Sadat City. If Bayoumi recognized any irony in this situation, he didn’t mention it. He was the perfect example of how modern Egyptian politics, despite all the great names and authoritarian traditions, has had many moments when small people, and small acts, have helped change history. But changing history is not the same as escaping it, and, often, individuals—a young idealistic Islamist, a liberal protester on Tahrir—have turned out to be pawns of some larger force or trend. I asked Bayoumi whether the assassination of Sadat had accomplished any political goals, and his answer was curt. “No,” he said. “Mubarak just followed the same pattern. He did everything that Sadat did, but even worse.”

He told me that he had met Morsi in prison—Egyptian jails are famous meeting grounds for Islamists. Bayoumi liked Morsi, but he feared that enemies would find a way to overthrow the President. “I am personally convinced that the old regime is still here,” Bayoumi told me. “The revolution still hasn’t happened yet.”

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In the end, Morsi was another small man. He was unprepared for his role and overwhelmed by its demands; he made missteps from the beginning. The country’s institutions were clearly wary of the Brotherhood, and perhaps they would have overthrown its government in any case. But the Brothers’ dysfunction and dishonesty, and the incompetence of their President, turned public opinion against them. The day before Morsi took office, he said that he would try to free Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who had been convicted of guiding a conspiracy after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. When it came to policy, Morsi’s efforts were equally ill-conceived: one evening, without any warning, he suddenly announced major tax increases on gasoline, electricity, cooking oil, cigarettes, and alcohol. There were immediate panic-runs on liquor stores and gas stations all around Cairo; then, on the same evening, Morsi abruptly cancelled the taxes. He chose to enact this policy change via a post on his Facebook page, at 2:13 A.M.

In November, 2012, Morsi issued a Presidential decree to temporarily give himself powers beyond the reach of any court or judge, in order to make sure that an Islamist-dominated committee could complete a new constitution. When peaceful protesters gathered around the Presidential palace, a number of Brothers and their supporters attacked the crowd violently, in what turned out to be the final straw for many Egyptians. Morsi hung on for another six months, but, at the end of his first year in office, millions of Egyptians gathered to protest his rule, and a coup seemed inevitable. On July 3, 2013, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who had been appointed as minister of defense by Morsi himself, led the military takeover.

Under Sisi, the crackdown on Islamists and other political opponents has been far more severe than anything that had happened during the days of Mubarak. On August 14, 2013, security forces in Cairo massacred as many as a thousand Morsi supporters, the vast majority of whom were unarmed. The country now has tens of thousands of political prisoners, and Morsi and other prominent Islamists have been marched regularly into courtrooms, where they’ve been tried on trumped-up charges.

I attended Morsi’s first day in court, on November 4, 2013. Journalists weren’t allowed to bring cell phones, cameras, or audio recorders, but I still recall the sound of the deposed President’s voice. He had refused to wear the traditional white garb of a prisoner, and he held his head high and repeatedly interrupted the proceedings. Over and over, he bellowed, “Ana rayis al-gomhoriyya! Ana rayis al-gomhoriyya!” (“I am the President of the Republic! I am the President of the Republic!”) He was contained in a metal cage, and Egyptian journalists taunted him by shouting through the bars, “E‘dam, e‘dam!” (“Death penalty, death penalty!”)

For Morsi’s second appearance in court, in January, 2014, the authorities had sound-proofed the cage. He was forced to wear white, and he was joined by other Brothers whom I had interviewed during the Presidential election. Inside the cage was Sobhi Saleh, the parliamentarian who had told me that the Brothers would not field a candidate, and he was accompanied by Rashad el-Bayoumi, who had said much the same thing. Near the back of the cage sat Safwat Hegazy, whom I had seen rant about the Islamists taking every form of power, including the drainage systems. Now Hegazy sat in silence; even if he had tried to speak, nobody would have heard him through the cage. He looked old and tired.

On Monday, Morsi died during another of these stressful and humiliating rituals. According to official reports, he spoke heatedly to the judge and then fainted. Morsi suffered from diabetes and other medical issues, and human-rights organizations had said that he wasn’t receiving proper care in prison.

The former President has been described as a martyr, but the term isn’t exactly appropriate. A martyr dies for a larger cause; a victim dies because of larger forces. There’s a tendency for some Americans to view the Muslim Brotherhood as a kind of negative essence of Islam, as if all of the flaws of the organization can be attributed to the faith that its followers espouse. But the group is a product of its history: it was founded during a period of colonial occupation, and then it was shaped by decades of government repression. The issue isn’t just that the institutions of the state were always opposed to the Brothers but that the group itself has internalized the brutality and dysfunction of its environment.

And it’s unlikely that Morsi will provide the inspiration of a martyr, because the legacy of political Islam in Egypt is so damaged. The violence of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, ranging from the assassination of Sadat to a massacre of innocent tourists in Luxor, in 1997, turned the vast majority of Egyptians against groups like al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya. Even when I met former practicitioners of terrorism, like Salah Bayoumi, they often said the same thing: that the violence turned out to be politically useless. It’s striking that, despite the government-led massacres in Cairo and the subsequent crackdown, relatively few survivors and relatives have responded with acts of terror. And most incidents of terrorism have occurred in the remote Sinai peninsula, rather than in the heavily populated Upper Egypt, which was a cradle of radical Islam during earlier generations. The Egyptian government has banned the Brotherhood as a terrorist group, but there’s no evidence that the Brothers have adopted tactics of violent resistance. Given the repressive climate, and given all the suffering of Morsi and other Brothers, it would be absurd for the Trump Administration to follow through on threats it has made to designate the group a terrorist organization.

In the end, the Brotherhood has already suffered its worst possible punishment. Most Egyptians, even those who voted for Morsi, seem to have concluded that the organization had its chance at power and failed. The Brotherhood’s long history means that it will survive in some way, but if it ever reëmerges with legal status in Egypt, it will probably take the form of a religious and social group, rather than a political force. And Morsi represents a cautionary tale for any Egyptian President. In a nation of splintered institutions, frustrated idealism, and dysfunctional governance, even the highest seat of power can turn into a trap—a caged man shouting, “I am the President of the Republic!”