Month: July 2019

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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Four Democratic congresswomen issued a brief statement on Monday urging President Donald Trump to go back to Russia and improve the dire conditions of that country.

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In the tersely worded statement, the four lawmakers—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York; Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota; Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts; and Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan—indicated that Russia was “broken and crime-infested” and required Trump’s immediate attention.

The statement went on to suggest that, once Trump had fixed the problems plaguing Russia, he could return to the United States and “show us how.”

In a tweet, Trump mocked the congresswomen, contrasting them with the “real revolutionaries” honored over the weekend on Bastille Day. “In 1789, these brave people stormed Louis XVI’s airports,” he wrote.

“Citizen Kane” offers us only a glimpse or two of Charles Foster Kane’s ill-fated run for governor of New York. The most memorable is the boisterous speech that Kane, by this point a famous and well-connected newspaper publisher with an ego as large as his fortune, delivers to his supporters outlining the vaguely populist themes of his campaign. “The working man and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests,” he bellows. “The decent, ordinary citizens know that I’ll do everything in my power to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed!”

After Kane’s loss, he’s confronted by an old friend, who drunkenly assesses the contradictions of his public career and his self-image as a champion of the working class. “You used to write an awful lot about the working man,” he sneers. “He’s turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your working man expects something as his right, not as your gift.”

Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics. Two of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed inequality to the center of the Party’s political discourse, levelling indictments at the millionaires and billionaires who have absorbed much of the gains that the economy has made over the past few decades and particularly post-recession. The chief villain of this narrative is now Donald Trump—the self-proclaimed populist billionaire President who got to the White House with the help of a press that both burnished and indulged his reputation as a savvy businessman worth hearing out and taking seriously. Much of the free publicity his campaign was granted can be tallied among the many complimentary perks that the wealthy are habitually offered in this country.

This week, Tom Steyer—who is not only a billionaire but one of the largest political donors in the country, having spent an estimated hundred and twenty-three million dollars on last year’s midterms—joined Sanders and Warren in the progressive lane of the Democratic primaries. Both candidates greeted his entrance coldly. “I like Tom personally,” Sanders said in an MSNBC interview, “but I do have to say—as somebody who, in this campaign, has received two million campaign contributions, averaging, I believe, nineteen dollars a person—I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that’s powered by a grassroots movement.”

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To his credit, Steyer has already built a movement of sorts. His campaign to impeach Trump, publicized in ubiquitous social-media and cable-news ads, claims to have collected 8.2 million e-mail addresses. His nonprofit and political-action committee, NextGen America, registered about a quarter million young voters for the midterms last year and helped rally activists behind environmental campaigns like the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the effort to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In his campaign-launch video, however, Steyer focusses on an all-encompassing fight against inequality. “We have a society that’s very unequal,” he says to the camera, “and it’s really important for people to understand that this society is connected. If this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”

Sanders and Warren rail against the upper class as a whole—both individual millionaires and billionaires and the corporate world for unbalancing politics and the economy. In Steyer’s narrative, the villains are not the wealthy as a class but a malevolent set of corporations that have bought a disproportionate share of influence within our political system. “If you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything, because they only care about profits,” he says in the launch video. “I think eighty-two thousand people died last year of drug overdoses. If you think about the drug companies, the banks screwing people on their mortgages—it’s thousands of people doing what they’re paid to do. Almost every single major intractable problem, at the back of it you see a big-money interest for whom stopping progress, stopping justice, is really important to their bottom line.”

Steyer himself is a big-money interest, of course. But his campaign seems to hinge on the argument that his own wealth has bought him both political independence and courage. “I’m an outsider,” he said in a CBS interview, on Thursday. “I’ve been doing this—successfully beating the oil companies, the tobacco companies, closing tax loopholes—from the outside for ten years. I don’t believe that this failed government is going to be reformed from the inside.” This is part of the case Trump made for his own candidacy in 2016—that only he, an outsider with the privilege to jump into the political system—could drain Washington’s swamp. “Remember, I am self-funding my campaign, the only one in either party,” he tweeted in January of 2016. “I'm not controlled by lobbyists or special interests-only the U.S.A.!”

On the whole, the experience of the Trump Presidency does not inspire much confidence that wealth is a political insulator or purifier of motives. For starters, Trump only self-financed a small portion of his campaign, and ultimately took in millions from donors large and small, while also benefitting from contributions made by mega-donors like Robert Mercer and Sheldon Adelson to Trump-supporting super PACs. Trump’s wealth has not prevented his Administration from developing shady ties to some of those big donors and other special interests; his extensive business holdings, including his hotels, have, in fact, facilitated bribery in plain sight. And his populist rhetoric has been belied by a policy agenda, including a tax-cut package in 2017, that has been well in keeping with the inequality-exacerbating orthodoxy of conservative economics.

All of this has reinforced the sense that the wealthy embrace many of the policies that they do not only because some are beholden to or own this or that particular company but because the wealthy, as a class, share certain common interests. This is the locus of the distrust toward the rich that has built within the Democratic Party post-recession, the underlying suspicion behind the rise of millennial socialism and its superstars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. One of her chief policy advisers, Dan Riffle, uses the Twitter handle “Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.” When the New York Times asked the 2020 candidates whether anyone could truly deserve to have a billion dollars, Beto O’Rourke and Kirsten Gillibrand said no. (Sanders and Warren, a bit more cautiously, emphasized the need for the wealthy to pay their “fair share” in taxes. “My guess is when you have that, you’re not going to have too many billionaires left,” Sanders said.) As of last year, according to Gallup, a majority of Democrats do not believe that America benefits from having a class of rich people. These are the currents Steyer will be swimming against. Buying name recognition with ad dollars won’t necessarily bring him buy-in from progressives.

By odd coincidence, Steyer announced his candidacy the day that Ross Perot, a wealthy populist of a different stripe, died. A consensus has emerged among political historians and journalists that Perot’s outsider campaigns likely did not tip the outcomes of the 1992 and 1996 Presidential campaigns. But he did, through his fortune and reputation, help promote a particular set of ideas, particularly a rough-hewn brand of free-trade skepticism that survives to this day. Steyer might similarly influence discourse during the primary—but any wealthy politician advances, too, in their own person, another set of ideas. Steyer’s candidacy and career rest on an argument that the benevolent rich can truly be relied upon as the benefactors of the working class. Fewer and fewer Democrats agree.

On Sunday afternoon, the Guatemalan government issued a statement cancelling a highly anticipated meeting, scheduled for Monday, in Washington, between Jimmy Morales, the President of Guatemala, and Donald Trump. The subject of the meeting was a deal between the two countries that would allow the U.S. government to begin sending asylum seekers to Guatemala under the terms of a so-called safe-third-country agreement. The idea was to outsource part of the American asylum system to Guatemala, despite the fact that many of the Central-American asylum seekers arriving at the U.S. border are Guatemalans fleeing poverty, hunger, and violence in their home country. “Opposition to the deal was widespread in Guatemala,” Lucrecia Hernández Mack, a newly elected member of the Guatemalan congress, told me. “Morales was acting alone.” Over the weekend, the country’s Constitutional Court was considering three separate petitions filed in an attempt to block the deal; on Sunday night, a few hours after Morales cancelled his plans for Washington, citing the pending legal case, the judges issued their ruling: Morales was forbidden from negotiating the deal on his own, without consulting the Guatemalan congress. According to a member of the Trump Administration, “if the injunctions didn’t happen in Guatemala, then the deal would have been signed on Monday.”

Reports about a possible agreement between the two countries have been circulating for more than a month, but some of the concrete details of what the arrangement would actually look like emerged late last week. The New Yorker obtained a draft of the agreement, which stated that the U.S. would be able to send asylum seekers from any country to Guatemala, including, in theory, those who never even travelled through Guatemala in the first place. As such, the over-all agreement seemed to go even further than a traditional safe-third-country agreement. According to a person with knowledge of the deal, there were additional stipulations in a second document, called the “implementation plan,” which made clear that the Trump Administration intended the agreement to apply primarily to asylum seekers from Honduras and El Salvador. Still, at an earlier stage of deliberations over the policy, there had been a discussion inside the Trump Administration about taking advantage of the agreement’s broad language to send more people to Guatemala. Ultimately, that position was considered too extreme, though the language of the agreement itself, which allowed for that possibility, remained intact.

“The Guatemalans did not know what they were getting into,” the Trump Administration official told me. “To this day, Morales believes this agreement is not a safe-third. They don’t want anyone to call it that.” One reason for Morales’s confusion seems to be that there were no real examples of an analogous deal for him to use as a point of reference. The U.S. does have a safe-third-country agreement with Canada—if asylum seekers arrive at a Canadian port of entry, immigration authorities will send them back to the U.S., on the grounds that they could receive a fair hearing in the American system, and vice versa—but it’s different from anything under consideration at the southern border. For one thing, the number of asylum seekers from Central America is significantly higher there, and has been on the rise. There are also serious concerns about whether Guatemala could provide a safe and stable environment in which Hondurans, Salvadorans, or anyone else travelling through the country could actually seek asylum. Manfredo Marroquín, a Guatemalan human-rights advocate and recent Presidential contender, who filed one of the three petitions to the Constitutional Court, told me, “Signing this agreement would be putting at risk the constitutional rights of Guatemalans, because the government would be forced to give to others what it hasn’t given to Guatemalans—safety, employment, health care, and education.”

Part of Morales’s considerations related to Mexico, Guatemala’s northern neighbor, which is also in the midst of tense negotiations with the Trump Administration over a safe-third-country deal, according to the person with knowledge of the negotiations. Although the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has publicly opposed such an agreement, it conceded last month, under pressure from Trump, that the option was on the table. “The Guatemalans likely thought that partnering with the U.S. on this would help them highlight how Mexico isn’t doing enough,” the Administration official told me. “Mexico has been against signing this kind of agreement, which the Guatemalan government knows. The Guatemalans wanted to not be seen as the problem.”

A Presidential runoff in Guatemala will be held in August, and Morales has six months left in office; pursuing the deal, Jordán Rodas, Guatemala’s human-rights ombudsman, told me, “was yet another way he was trying to ingratiate himself with the Trump Administration” before the end of his term. Sunday’s court ruling in Guatemala has effectively ended speculation about the viability of a deal between the two countries. Because Morales lacks support in congress to pursue the agreement, and the Constitutional Court has barred him from acting alone, it isn’t clear what the President could do to revive the talks with Washington. “Morales wanted to end his time as close as he could to the U.S.,” the person familiar with the negotiations told me. Rodas, who also filed one of the court petitions, told me, “We cannot trust that this government won’t try this again, but it’ll be very hard now. It was very important that, once again, the Constitutional Court has asserted the rule of law.” (On Twitter, Francisco Villagran de Leon, a former Guatemalan Ambassador to the U.S. who is a visiting scholar at George Washington University, said, “It wasn’t Jimmy Morales who canceled the meeting. It was Trump. Jimmy didn’t want to miss an opportunity to go to the White House, but they told him not to go. They didn’t want to expose Trump to the fiasco of signing something that the Constitutional Court in Guatemala could have disallowed.”)

On Monday morning, the Trump Administration revealed that it had also, simultaneously, been planning a sweeping new regulation to limit asylum at the southern border. Announced by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, the regulation, which will almost certainly be challenged in U.S. federal court, states that a person cannot qualify for asylum in the U.S. if she failed to apply for asylum in a third country through which she travelled on her way to the U.S. “In one line, it’s really ending the ability of Central Americans to apply for asylum at the southern border,” Sarah Pierce, a lawyer with the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “As a result of this move, we would be deporting people who qualify for asylum in the U.S. back to the countries from which they fled.”

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15th Jul 2019

Documentary filmmaking is in the midst of a golden age. Once relegated to late-night TV, non-fiction releases accounted for just two per cent of films shown in British cinemas in 2001. By 2013, they made up almost 21 per cent of projects being produced. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have invested in the genre and are bringing it to larger audiences, but cinema attendance is also up. In 2018, four documentaries surpassed $10 million at the box office: Fred Rogers’ retrospective Won’t You Be My Neighbor, adoption saga Three Identical Strangers, Ruth Bader Ginsburg tribute RBG and the Oscar-winning Free Solo, which chronicles Alex Honnold’s ascent of El Capitan. Ambitious in scale and willing to court controversy, they were far removed from documentaries of the past which had become synonymous with archival footage, talking heads and staid topics. Increasingly, objectivity is falling by the wayside in favour of sheer spectacle, and viewers are hungry for more.

2019’s biggest releases weren’t afraid of taking sides
The year began with Sundance, where Knock Down the House, Rachel Lears’s documentary following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, premiered to critical acclaim. It even broke the festival’s documentary sales record after being bought by Netflix for a reported $10 million. HBO’s The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley charted the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, while Amazon’s One Child Nation interrogated China’s one-child policy. There was also Lorena, a series about Lorena Bobbitt who became a tabloid sensation in 1993 after cutting off her husband’s penis. Joshua Rofé’s re-examination of the case sought to vindicate her, uncovering the years of abuse Bobbitt claimed to have endured at the hands of her partner.

A still of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Knock Down the House. Image credit: Netflix

Despite the broad range of subjects explored, the documentaries at Sundance were united in their desire to effect change. All raised crucial talking points—the impact of domestic violence, the excesses of Silicon Valley power players, the need for activism in the age of Trump—and became catalysts for movements that resonated far beyond the festival itself. This was most true of Leaving Neverland, Dan Reed’s four-hour exposé outlining allegations of child sexual abuse against Michael Jackson. Comprised of interviews with two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, as well as their families, it accused the singer of decades of grooming and molestation.

Reed’s goal was to challenge the public’s assumptions about the case. “The allegations had been dismissed for so long that they’d become part of people’s comedy routines,” the director tells Vogue. “I’m glad we’ve been able to reset attitudes to that story.” Many disagreed, accusing Reed of bias due to the documentary’s unwillingness to present the other side of the argument. Although he had recorded interviews with the police investigators involved, the footage was not used. “These are accounts we’ve heard before and they’ve never been decisive,” he explains. “If we found anyone else with direct knowledge of the abuse, I would’ve included them in the film.”

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The power of documentaries to effect change
Leaving Neverland arrived in the UK and US in early March and was promptly sold to channels in 130 territories including Australia, Latin America and Russia. A social media storm ensued, after which several radio stations banned Jackson’s music. The Simpsons episode “Stark Raving Dad”, guest-starring Jackson, was cut from future box sets of the show, Jackson memorabilia was removed from the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and plans to dress Brussels’s Manneken Pis in a Jackson costume to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his death were abandoned. At Louis Vuitton, all the Jackson-inspired items from Virgil Abloh’s autumn/winter ’19/’20 menswear collection were pulled.

The backlash was equally swift. Jackson’s estate condemned the production and a $100 million lawsuit was filed against its US broadcaster HBO. According to Billboard, the documentary led to a spike in sales of Jackson’s music. Three of his albums re-entered the UK charts, streams increased by six per cent, and his videos were viewed 22.1 million times, a 1.2 million rise from the previous week. In France, three Jackson fan clubs have since sued Robson and Safechuck, as the country’s defamation laws, unlike the UK and US, extend libel beyond death. Michael Jackson: Chase the Truth, a rival documentary seeking to exonerate the star, is expected to be released this August.

Although Robson and Safechuck had filed lawsuits against Jackson in 2013 and 2014 respectively, their cases received little publicity until their meeting with Reed. In a crowded media landscape where stories blow up and blow over at a rapid rate, documentaries can turn the spotlight back onto a topic and hold it there until it produces results. Surviving R Kelly, the Lifetime documentary detailing allegations of sexual abuse against the R&B star, certainly did. Despite long-standing accusations of misconduct and the #MuteRKelly movement, it was only after the series aired that Kelly was dropped by his record label and indicted on 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse.

A still from Fyre, the Fyre Festival documentary. Image credit: Netflix

For other documentaries, the impact has been harder to assess. Netflix’s Fyre and Hulu’s Fyre Fraud, chronicling the fallout over the fraudulent festival, sparked a resurgent interest in the story two years after it took place. Discussions around the responsibilities of social media influencers followed, but the films had little effect on the case itself. Similarly, Amy Berg’s The Case Against Adnan Syed delved back into the murder investigation discussed on the podcast Serial in 2014. Her four-part series contained new evidence (forensic tests that found no traces of Syed’s DNA on the samples taken from the victim’s body), but the defendant remains in prison. “The search for justice drives people to unpick cases like this,” the director says. “We need to discover the truth.”

In the era of fake news, documentaries cater to an increased appetite for authentic information
“Whether it’s the R Kelly series or Fyre, these are substantial pieces of work that people feel like they can trust,” says Reed. More are on their way: Netflix will drop The Great Hack, an examination of the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, later this month and Hulu is expected to follow with Untouchable, which tracks the allegations against Harvey Weinstein.

Could these documentaries influence the cases of those implicated, by securing either their release or conviction? Perhaps not, but that is rarely their intention. “Leaving Neverland was never about taking Michael Jackson off his pedestal,” says Reed. “It was about telling a story that would resonate with other survivors of abuse. You need to understand the issue in order to recognise it in your own life and to be able to stop it happening to someone you know.”

Berg agrees that her work was about more than just a single case. “People need to feel like they can trust the criminal justice system and stories like this can shake that trust,” she explains. Ultimately, the power of these films lies in their ability to change our perceptions of the world, for better or worse. “I hope more people see our work,” adds Reed. “And then if they can look at Wade and James speaking about their own experiences without shame, maybe they’ll feel like they can do that too. That’s how we can have a real long-term impact.”

Megan Rapinoe, the co-captain of the champion U.S. women’s soccer team, is confidently and casually everyone’s current favorite athlete, leader, and lesbian. As I watched her take the podium at the ticker-tape parade in New York on Wednesday, her gestures and posture unapologetically what some of us watching would classify as dykey (others may say, politely, that her presentation was not traditionally feminine), I wondered what this moment felt like for another woman, the first American professional athlete to come out. So I called the tennis player Martina Navratilova, who is currently at Wimbledon, working as a commentator but also playing—in a legends doubles match—and asked.

Navratilova’s own coming-out, in 1981, was conflicted and mangled. Six years earlier, at the age of eighteen, Navratilova, who grew up in Czechoslovakia, had defected to the United States. At the same time that she made the decision not to return to Czechoslovakia, she also realized that she was gay. Navratilova was then one of the world’s top two female tennis players—the other was Chris Evert. She had to talk to the press a lot, and the press was becoming increasingly interested in the subject of female athletes’ sexuality.

Navratilova had a policy of deflecting the question. “I never said no, I wasn’t gay,” she recalled. “I just said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, it’s private’—which I really feel it is, private. But they would never ask that question of a male athlete.” Sports was a manly business: “Of course they are straight, unless they are figure skaters or something. Female athletes had to prove that they were straight. It’s not a girl activity.” There were, of course, lesbians on the women’s tennis tour, but Navratilova said that the proportion was, “percentage-wise, not that much higher than the general population. There were a lot more lesbians on the golf tour, but they were more closeted.”

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In 1979, Navratilova fell in love with the writer Rita Mae Brown, whose 1973 novel, “Rubyfruit Jungle,” remains the only American lesbian-themed massive best-seller. (It was published by a feminist collective and picked up by Bantam, a few years later, when it had sold seventy thousand copies.) Brown introduced Navratilova to the world of politically active lesbians, in which she was a celebrity, and Navratilova began thinking of coming out publicly. The problem was, her application for U.S. citizenship was still pending and could be denied on the grounds of her homosexuality. (This provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act was dropped in 1990, when it was redrafted by Representative Barney Frank, of Massachusetts, who is gay.) Navratilova developed a new way of deflecting the sexuality question: she would now say, “I can’t talk about it now.” Privately, she told some journalists that she couldn’t talk about it until she became a citizen. She also told some of the other tennis players that, once she had her passport, “If anybody asks me about it, I’m just going to say, ‘Yes, I am gay.’ ”

In April, 1981, a woman named Marilyn Barnett sued Billie Jean King, one of the great female players and the founder of the Women’s Tennis Association. Barnett, who had been King’s lover for seven years, claimed that King had promised to support her for life, and was demanding compensation. Navratilova knew Barnett, who was a hairdresser and had travelled with King for several years. “She did my hair, too,” Navratilova told me. King acknowledged the relationship but said that it was an affair she regretted, and affirmed her commitment to her marriage. “She was trying to pretend that she was still straight,” Navratilova remembered. “She wasn’t, but she didn’t come out until the late nineties.”

The lawsuit caused journalists to ask ever more questions about tennis players’ sexuality. Navratilova knew that she was about to be granted citizenship, which would have freed her to come out—except for one thing: “The sponsors had said to the people in charge that if there was another scandal that they would pull their sponsorship from the tour. So first I was protecting my citizenship, and then I was protecting the people I was with at the W.T.A. I felt I was responsible for sixty to a hundred women.” Their livelihoods depended in large part on the sponsorship money that came from Avon, the cosmetics company then behind the W.T.A.

In the summer of 1981, Navratilova got her passport. “And two days later this journalist calls me, in Monte Carlo. Now I can’t come out because I’m protecting the tour. So I said, ‘You are not going to write about it, are you?’ He said, ‘Not if you don’t want me to.’ I said, ‘Of course I don’t want you to.’ He said, “O.K., I won’t, then.” And two days later it was in the Daily News.” The headline was “Martina Fears Avon’s Call if She Talks.”

Avon did not in fact drop its sponsorship of the W.T.A. Nor did Navratilova lose the endorsements she had—the racquets and shoes stayed in place. “But I couldn’t get any deals outside of that in the U.S., because I was out,” she said. Even as her career soared, as did the popularity of women’s tennis, advertising agencies stayed away. “They would call my agent about a commercial or something, and she would say, ‘How about Martina?’ and they would say no and then Chris [Evert] would get the deal, or somebody else. It was the kiss of death. Advertisers wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”

I asked how long that lasted, and Navratilova had to think a moment. The only exceptions were Olivia Cruises, a company offering cruises for lesbians, and, in the late nineties, Subaru, the car company that ingeniously decided to advertise specifically to lesbians. Audiences, though, were more accepting than the advertisers. Two months after the article, Navratilova lost to Tracy Austin, and the crowd clapped its support for the one who lost. “So I felt accepted by the general public,” Navratilova said. “They didn’t care.”

Even after the Daily News article, Navratilova couldn’t speak openly about her sexuality. She had left Brown for Nancy Lieberman, a professional basketball player who was in the closet. “Now I was protecting her. We were ‘friends.’ Everybody knew, but I never owned up to [our relationship] because she was still trying to get endorsements and play basketball.” In theory, Navratilova believes, the question of one’s sexuality should be separate from the question of one’s relationship: “I will own my sexuality, but I don’t want people in my private life. It’s private; that’s why it’s called that.” In practice, however, she felt she couldn’t be fully out until her relationship with Lieberman ended, in 1984. Her next girlfriend, the beauty queen Judy Nelson, had no objections to being open about their relationship. A media frenzy ensued. “The first year we were together, the paparazzi followed us everywhere,” Navratilova said. “It was pretty nasty. And the stories were all about ‘her lesbian den.’ And when we split up, they were calling it our ‘love shack’ or something. We’d been together for seven years, and they were calling it a ‘love shack.’ ”

So what did it feel like now, to see the adulation of Rapinoe, the celebration of the soccer team’s victory accompanied by photographs of players kissing their same-sex partners, the ESPN photoshoot of Rapinoe and her partner, the basketball player Sue Bird? “It’s just fantastic,” Navratilova said. “It took a long time. This was thirty years ago that this was going on. It seems like it happened so quickly, gay marriage and all that, but if you are living in the middle of it, it happened very slowly. I am just thrilled that it’s not only O.K.—it’s becoming less and less of a thing. When people come out, it doesn’t make headlines anymore. It’s a non-issue, which I’ve always said—that I hope one day it will be a non-issue. That’s exactly what I’ve been marching for for decades. I’m thrilled. I’m just so thrilled.”

Well, look who just showed up at the metaphysical-supply store. Give a shout if you need help finding anything—this must all be pretty new to you. You know, I’m usually happy to see someone take an interest in the occult, but I can’t help but question your motives here.

It just seems kind of convenient that you’re suddenly into all this now that you’ve been possessed by Satan.

Back in middle school, you always made fun of me for having my tarot deck out on the lunch table. So you can imagine how surprised I was to see this new side of you. It’s almost like doing Lucifer’s bidding has turned you into a totally different person.

You said that I was going to Hell for bringing a Ouija board to your twelfth-birthday party, and now you’re dressed in all black and bleeding out of your orifices. I know one’s interests can change over time, but, when I heard that you were embracing the dark arts all of a sudden, you weren’t the only one with his eyes rolled back.

At first, I worried that I might be coming down too hard on you, so I read your tarot to gain some perspective. First, I drew Judgement reversed, which I think speaks to a lack of self-awareness and a general feeling of insecurity on your part. The next four cards I drew were the Devil, which checks out. The very last card, though? The Tower, which represents a chaotic change in your life—one that you might want to reconsider.

Look, you’re not the only former normie who’s waltzed in here calling herself a witch just because she’s draped in black satin and hovering above the ground on a whisker broom. And you definitely won’t be the last guy to buy a deck of tarot cards just to have it collect dust while he’s busy jet-setting around another plane of existence.

From where I’m standing, it looks like you’re here only so that you and your friends can post yet another video where they’re huddled around a pentagram, pleading for the demon to leave your body. It’s like, look, we get it—you’re the anointed cherub now. You don’t have to wave it in our faces.

If I were you, I’d stop spinning my head around in circles and focus on getting it on straight. Do you really want to go down this road? Take a moment to ask yourself if you’re really into the occult or if you just crave the attention from all the exorcists and priests.

If this is only a passing phase, then I seriously suggest that you move on to the next trend already. I’ll still be here with everyone who’s sincerely into smudging, trying to piece together why the devil chose the most self-possessed person on Earth to be his human vessel.

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Aziz Ansari has been evasive. The celebrity figure invokes the right to avoid reality in times of personal crisis. Early reviews of “Working Out New Material,” Ansari’s recent standup tour, picked at the comedian’s seemingly spooked circumventions of what everyone in the audience already knew. Ansari’s comedy had never been one of lacerating introspection, but it had been one of bro-y complicity; he situated himself as a callow, slick-suited jester, a co-conspirator of the millennial life-style cult that praises interracial mixing, feminist dating, social-media optimism, and bleeding-heart politicking. With a sociologist, he’d co-written a courtship digest called “Modern Romance.” On “Master of None,” he fell in love in Italy in black-and-white. The allegation against him, published by the now defunct Web site babe.net, in January of 2018—that he had pressured a young woman, pseudonymously referred to as Grace, to have sex after a date—made Ansari’s expertise seem fraudulent. Not acknowledging as much smelled like creative cowardice.

In “Right Now,” his new Netflix special, Ansari finally musters some honesty. At the outset of the hour, he breezes through an old-faithful setup: an anecdote about a well-meaning New Yorker confusing Ansari for a fellow Netflix mainstay, the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who is also Indian-American. The man, in Ansari’s telling, quickly notices the gaucheness of his blunder, and course-corrects by frantically listing Ansari’s C.V.—the romantic “Master of None,” the antic “Parks and Recreation,” and “You had that whole thing last year, sexual misconduct.” Ansari eyes widen, and his arms violently flail as he pantomimes his own response: “That was Hasan!”

Then Ansari dials down his loud and nasal drawl to sotto voce. Nominally, he has just told a joke, but the audience is making a sound that rings less and less like laughter. Ansari wades from comedy to crafted contrition. For Grace’s story, he has developed a shorthand—“that whole thing.” That whole thing made him feel, he tells the audience, “scared,” “humiliated,” and “embarrassed,” and, “ultimately, I just felt terrible that this person felt this way.” The speech is fine and obligatory, elevated to artful by the director of the special, Spike Jonze. Wearing an Easyrig, Jonze is onstage with Ansari, orbiting him from close range. He applies harsh police lighting to Ansari, who is not so much seated on his stool as he is condemned to it. It is so bright that it illuminates people waiting in the wings of the stage, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the special was filmed, people who might be Ansari’s managers and agents and yes-men. The shot is ugly, intriguingly framed.

Those same words could summarize the whole of “Right Now,” which reads to me as Ansari’s first authentic comedy special. I hadn’t previously thought deeply about the cultural presence of Ansari, because his body of entertainment had not invited me to do so. He specialized in increasing the banal pleasure of the crowd. On “Parks and Recreation,” as Tom, he encouraged you to “treat yourself.” He rode around in designer vehicles with Jay-Z and Kanye West in the music video for “Otis” (also directed by Jonze). He was a foodie who at the same time cannily dismissed “foodie culture.” But in “Right Now” Ansari is a fitting ambassador for a certain bourgeois ambivalence. The special bristles with shame, indecision, anger, and guilt. Ansari has feasted, and this is the hangover. Two refrains ground the material, which roves like a drone over events that, in Ansari’s telling, expose the terminal hypocrisy of modern culture. The first is that Ansari hopes that everyone, including himself, wants to be a better person. The other: “We’re all shitty people.”

I got a weird feeling, watching “Right Now,” that the #MeToo story had liberated Ansari, forcing him to kill his old persona and give his new one teeth. “That old Aziz who said, ‘Oh, treat yo’self’? He’s dead,” he says, at the special’s end. He has developed a disdain for the brand of bland likability he formerly hawked, even as he can’t quite escape its skin. He audits his old bits mercilessly, indicting his former willingness to do or say anything for a laugh. Harris, the “chubby cousin” who had been a mainstay in Ansari’s family-manners riffs, is buff now, Ansari assures us, and works out compulsively; he acknowledges that he had been “fat-shaming” Harris for a national audience. He recalls that, in his first standup special, he had described going to an R. Kelly concert. “Clap if you’re done with R. Kelly,” he asks the crowd at BAM, after wondering aloud why it took a “bingeable documentary” to get people to care about the singer’s abuse of young black girls. He similarly flays the response to the recent documentary about Michael Jackson and riskily spotlights a ten-year-old kid sitting in the front row. The point—that entertainment excuses evils, and that we don’t process truths unless they entertain us—is both banal and impossible to emphasize enough.

Ansari makes clear that it isn’t exclusively remorse that is pushing him to reëvaluate the recent past. “Gotta be careful about what you say and about what you said,” he cautions, the irritation bright in his voice. Ansari is older now, and he’s got a bone to pick with “wokeness,” the spoils of which he had previously enjoyed. Ansari mocks progressive white people—his crowd—for ultimately only caring about accruing social capital through performing escalating acts of political correctness, like a game of “progressive Candy Crush.”

“Right Now” is conscious of the manipulative powers of performance, although Ansari is not yet clear-eyed about who it is he wants to lecture. One cheap bit, which involves Ansari repeating the word “niggardly,” feels like he is brushing up against the third rail to prove that he won’t be cowed by his public reckoning. He admits that the new wokeness is not all hollow—in his thirty-six years, he’s never felt white people as attuned to the problems of minorities as they are today. The audience is his toy in a game of fluctuating self-loathing; his crowd work is frequent, casual until it quickly becomes a little cruel. At one point, he lays a trap, meandering toward a story: “A guy orders a pepperoni pizza, the pepperonis are arranged to look like a swastika, but now some people online are saying it doesn’t look like a swastika.” A man in the audience claims to have read about the incident in the Washington Post. Then Ansari reveals that he made the whole story up. “You think your opinion is so valuable, you need to chime in on shit that doesn’t even exist,” Ansari scolds. It’s cutting, and, like many moments in the show, it is impossible not to hear it as a coded personal grievance.

“Right Now” isn’t very funny, and perhaps a “#MeToo comeback” shouldn’t be; I think I’d like Ansari’s special less if it were. I winced a little when, early in the show, Ansari recalled a friend saying that the controversy surrounding Ansari had prompted him to reflect on his own treatment of women in the past. “It’s made not just me but other people more thoughtful,” Ansari says. “And that’s a good thing.” This is a complicated maneuver, a claim to #MeToo allyship that is also showy self-sacrifice. It’s hard to believe that Ansari believes any part of the event was “a good thing.” In a few other moments, he seems to retreat toward crowd-pleasing fare—a joke about the lack of male birth control and his girlfriend’s IUD bruising his penis; a parody of the girlfriend, who is a Danish physicist unlearned in American racism. But the contradictions of “Right Now” are destabilizing enough to draw me back in. Ansari knows that the stakes have been raised.

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Posts

No more “likes,” “favorites,” or “hearts.” Instead, you think there should be only an “acknowledge” button. Participants in our sessions were unanimous: there is no such thing as good content. In the endless abyss of today’s digital world, we have grown numb. Pictures of avocado toast, Santorini, pugs—how many millions of these images have you seen before? Do they still move you? Do they cause joy? Going forward, all you will be able to do is recognize that you have viewed an image—that this is in fact how you have chosen to spend your finite time on this earth—and scroll on.

Community Standards

You want nipples—on men, women, cats, dogs, iguanas, whatever. We heard you loud and clear. If it has nipples, you want to see them. We’ve even included an “add nipples” feature in our Next Social-Media Platform prototype so that, if your photo does not contain any nipples, or if you find that the standard hominid two nipples simply aren’t enough, you can tack a few extra nipples on there. Add a million nipples, for all we care.

Newsfeed

We were confused here. You want content that makes you feel better about your life but also content that makes you hate yourself? So I guess we . . . alternate? Picture of attractive and unobtainable body; dog. Person who is younger than you succeeding in your professional field; another dog. Your ex moving on and seemingly doing well; two dogs.

Privacy

The New Social-Media Platform will be secure. So secure, in fact, that only two people will have access to your content: your mother (because she insists) and a Swedish man named Elias, whom you will never meet but who will dutifully check your profile each morning over espresso.

Filters

Based on your feedback, we will offer several options for photo filters, including:

Chasm: Overlays your photo with the absence of color and light that we’ve come to think of as space, invoking a feeling of utter emptiness.
Shredder: Shreds your image into unidentifiable mulch.
Kitten Ears: Adds kitten ears. Very cute.

We will also offer text-based filters. Namely, all text—jokes, political messages, announcements that you did a thing, etc.—will be converted into an image of a nipple.

Chat Features

Your account will come automatically pre-programmed to send a daily direct message to your most recent ex unless you log in, select “do not send,” verify that it’s you with a thirteen-digit code sent to your phone, list every pet you’ve ever had, and select from a series of images all of the ones containing a nipple. You must do this every day. There are no other chat features.

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On a sunny afternoon in mid-June, several hundred students and lecturers from the Lebanese University, in Beirut, gathered in a square outside the Prime Minister’s office. Some stood on top of a pickup truck loaded with loudspeakers, leading chants against proposed government budget cuts to the university. “We want to continue our year and we worry about having our lessons,” a biochemistry student named Claudia Khalil told me. Professors at the university had been on strike for weeks demanding an increase in pay. In May, retired members of the military burned tires and demonstrated in the same square against proposed cuts to their pensions and benefits. “Thieves, thieves!” they shouted at the old Ottoman building.

Lebanon’s profound economic dysfunction is coming to a head this summer, as its political leaders try to impose austerity measures on a restive public, while failing to enact anti-corruption measures that France, the World Bank, and the country’s other primary foreign donors insist on to reform a political system renowned for its graft and dysfunction. Lebanon ranks a hundred and thirty-eighth out of a hundred and eighty nations in the 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index, released by the global anti-corruption group Transparency International. Nearly thirty years after the country’s civil war ended, its people still endure rolling power blackouts owing to corruption and inefficiency in the country’s state-dominated power company.

In May, 2018, the country held its first parliamentary elections since 2009, raising public hopes of more effective governance. So far, the results have disappointed many Lebanese. It took nine months of political fighting and deadlock before a government could be formed, in January, with Saad Hariri as Prime Minister. The Sunni leader, however, was left weakened, losing a third of his party’s seats, while Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite political party and militant group, made major gains.

This week, the Lebanese parliament’s finance committee approved a draft budget that analysts dismissed as riddled with economic half-measures—some tax increases and spending cuts. The draft budget, which should have been approved six months ago, is expected to be voted on by the full parliament next week. The budget could spark further public protests as Lebanon’s four and a half million people struggle with a tepid economic growth rate of one per cent, rising cost of living, and barely functional public services. At the same time, more than a million Syrian refugees are living in the country, placing further strain on the economy.

According to the Beirut-based research consultancy firm Information International, eighty-five per cent of Lebanese citizens don’t trust their politicians. Tarek Serhan, a student activist, told me that the new tax increases will fuel further civil unrest against the country’s ruling élite. He predicted a summer of protests. “The normal people, let’s say, like, the students, the waiters, the bartenders, even the small businesses will be affected” by the taxes, he said.

Today Lebanon is the third-most indebted country in the world, with around forty per cent of its annual government revenue going toward servicing debt. At the same time, there are growing concerns that the Lebanese currency, the lira, is at risk of devaluation. In January, the ratings agency Moody’s downgraded Lebanon’s credit rating to junk status, on fears that the country could default on its debts.

Government officials told me that the passage of a budget was a reason for cautious optimism. They said it would give the country an opportunity to receive a better credit-rating assessment in August. “I think we want Lebanon and the government of Lebanon to send as positive [a] message as possible,” one senior official at the central bank, who did not wish to be named because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said. “The budget and the budget deficit—will it witness a decrease?”

Last year, France hosted a meeting of international donors designed to bolster Lebanon’s economy in the wake of the war in Syria. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and several nations pledged eleven billion dollars in soft loans, money that the country desperately needs to avoid financial collapse in the future. Donors, however, have not released the money, because Lebanon’s government has not met their conditions—including reducing the country’s vast budget deficit of eleven per cent of G.D.P. to 7.5 per cent, and enacting major economic reforms.

The proposed 2019 budget now being considered by parliament includes some spending cuts, but it primarily consists of freezes and an increase in taxes to raise government revenue, such as increasing the taxes on interest earned on bank deposits, from seven per cent to ten per cent. Analysts say the government half-measures will only exacerbate the country’s economic problems. “This will deepen the problem,” Sami Nader, a financial and political analyst and the director of the Beirut-based Levant Institute for Strategic Affairs, said. Nader said that Lebanon’s ruling élites appear to be betting that European powers do not want to see the country’s economy collapse because it could result in a new wave of Syrian migrants heading toward them. “They think that all the world will be on its knees begging us to take whatever we want but in exchange we will keep the refugees,” he said. “It’s not like that. No one is begging us.”

After the civil war, which was fought from 1975 to 1990, Lebanon’s political and religious factions agreed to a complex power-sharing agreement that divided government power along sectarian lines. Since then, political deadlock has regularly ensued, with the country’s parties and sects fighting for control of positions, policy, and lucrative government contracts. Lebanon’s political divisions have crippled the country’s economy, with graft and sectarianism working in tandem to fuel the current economic crisis. Nader, the analyst, told me that state institutions, rather than being viewed as providing important services to Lebanese citizens and the country, are divided up between powerful politicians as sources of income. “Here every single procurement contract is a way to finance political parties,” Nader said. “You have electricity that is under the control of one party, the waste management under the control of another party, the port authority under the control of a third party.”

The result of such vast corruption is that government-owned companies that should provide public services rarely do so effectively. Instead, they eat into the state budget and push the government deeper into debt. The state power company Electricité du Liban is among the worst offenders. Each year, it receives at least $1.5 billion in financial support from the government. Despite that vast expenditure, Lebanon has not regained twenty-four-hour electricity since its civil war ended. To avoid blackouts, residents pay high prices for power produced by a network of privately owned neighborhood generators. Above Beirut’s streets, a jerry-rigged, tangled mess of heavy black cables connects hundreds of thousands of apartments to generators.

In April, the parliament passed sweeping legislation designed to reform the power sector, including the building of new power plants and the provision of twenty-four-hour electricity by 2020. The measure was the type of reform demanded by the donors who gathered in Paris last year. In June, Lebanon’s constitutional court struck down a major part of the law after several members of parliament filed a lawsuit questioning the fairness of the issuing of contracts to build new power plants. The ruling stalled the power-sector-reform effort. Nader, the analyst, said that corrupt politicians were blocking reform across the economy. “Why would they privatize the electricity if they are getting their money from the electricity?” he asked. “Why would they open the sector of telecom to competition if they are financing their parties, if they are employing their people?”

Even trash disposal hasn’t escaped political payola. In 2015, Beirut’s landfill had well surpassed its capacity for garbage. Despite years of warnings, neither the government nor the state-contracted company, Sukleen, had developed an alternative site. At the same time, Sukleen’s garbage-collection contract ended. As politicians fought over who would get the next contract and how much it would be worth, piles of rotting garbage accumulated underneath bridges and in carparks. Residents of densely populated neighborhoods in Beirut burned their garbage, and tons of refuse was illegally dumped in rivers, valleys, and the Mediterranean Sea. The owners of Sukleen are close allies to Prime Minister Hariri’s family. Thousands of protesters staged angry demonstrations in Beirut, organized under the banner “You Stink,” to show their anger at politicians whom they blamed for creating the crisis. It was a rare moment of unity in a deeply divided society, showing that anger at the country’s ruling élites cut through its religious divisions.

Lebanese politicians and political parties operate vast patronage networks that provide government jobs to party loyalists. The result is a bloated civil service. There are an estimated four hundred thousand civil servants in Lebanon, so roughly a tenth of the population receives a government salary. The state-owned railway continues to fund an office of several dozen staffers, even though it hasn’t had a functioning railway in decades. Government salaries and pensions account for thirty-five per cent of the state’s total budget. Before the 2018 parliamentary elections, the public sector was promised a pay raise—a popular move among voters, but not a financially viable one. Now those same government workers are protesting over the potential cuts to their wages that donors say are needed to stabilize the economy.

Hariri has warned that “painful” austerity will be needed if Lebanon is to avoid “catastrophe.” But persuading the international donor community that real change is finally taking place will be difficult. Getting the population to shoulder the cost of decades of economic mismanagement will be an even harder sell, after decades of postwar corruption and graft. Serhan, the student activist, told me that Lebanon’s leaders are to blame, not its people. “They are the ruling authority and they have been ruling this country for tens of years,” he said. “They put us in this trouble, not us.”